This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we had a lot of fun. We've talked to a retired Navy Seal, Dr. Kirk Parsley. He's an expert on sleep, expert on longevity, hormone therapy. He wrote a book. It's an incredible book called Sleep to Win, How Navy Seals and Other High Performers Stay On Top. By the way, you can find them on Instagram at Kirk Parsley, so it's at K-I-R-K-P-A-R-S-L-E-Y. You'll find it on Instagram. Alright, today's giveaway here on YouTube is Maps Anabolic Advanced. You say you can win that. Leave a comment below this video, the first 24 hours that we drop it. Make sure to subscribe to our channel and turn on notifications. Do all those things and that'll enter you to win Maps Anabolic Advanced. Also, we're running a sale this month. It's January, so a lot of people are just getting started or getting remotivated or ready to turn up the intensity. Check this out. We put together four workout program bundles and we discounted them. Ready for this? Between 300 to $350 off. Massive discounts. Check them out. New to weightlifting bundle, the body transformation bundle, the new year extreme intensity bundle and the body transformation bundle 2.0. You can find all of those by clicking on the link at the top of the description below. Alright, here comes the show. Dr. Kirk Parsley. Great to meet you. We have a lot of common friends that speak so highly of you. Rob Wolfe. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, so it's awesome to have you on. I bribe him. We're threatening him. I don't realize you were as big as you were. You walked in and like, what's going on? A mean handshake. So tell our audience a little bit about your background and, you know, kind of take us up to speed to what you do now. Yeah, okay. Well, I was raised in sort of rural Texas. Hated school, but I loved athletics and I loved fighting. Maybe not the best thing, but I competed in a lot of sports and I was a pretty good athlete, a terrible student. So after four years of high school, I was a sophomore and I always knew I was going to go into military anyway. So I just like, you know, when all my friends graduated, I just left the military. Again, as a really naive kid, didn't read a lot and like, didn't understand a lot. And so I didn't even know what a seal was, but there's this documentary that came out in December, December of 87. It's like 48 hours, you remember that? Yeah. Like 60 minutes. But so they covered the first 48 hours of hell week and seal training. They kept saying, oh, this is the toughest training in the world, the toughest training in the world. And I was like, well, I want to go do the toughest training in the world. I didn't even know what a seal was, but I wanted to go do that training, right? Was this the first like big exposure to seal training? Because I know before that, if you saw anything in a movie, they would talk about green berets. Yeah. And nobody knew what a seal was. In fact, when I came back and saw my friends after I'd been to Navy for a while and I'd say, as a seal and they're so confused, they're like, you work at SeaWorld? Make the noise, make the noise. Yeah. So I watched that VHS, remember those days, the big Rewound that thing, watched that thing about 20 times in a couple of weeks. And I was just like, I was only 17 at the time, but it said, told my mom I wanted to go do it. And I was always going to go in the military, like I always knew that. And so went and joined it to be a seal. So naive, I didn't even know I was going to get paid to be in the military, which- You are just a bonus. Some dive motivator and boot camp figured out that I didn't know that and like took me around to every office and like made me tell them the story.  I'm going to live in the barracks, like what do I need money for? Like I never occurred to me they were going to pay me. And so anyway- They loved you because of that, I'm sure. Yeah. Promote this guy. So then I ended up, you know, there were some academics and boot camp and then you go to what we call a school or apprenticeship school in the Navy, because you have to have some sort of job, because 90% of people fail, still training to have to have a place to send you when you don't make it. So that was about nine months and that was all academic. And then I went to Bud's and there was a lot of academics in there and I actually did really well academically. I was like top one or two guys and everything I did.  What do you attribute that to? Like the fact that you were so anti-schooled? Well, like I don't know if it's technically dyslexia, but I have a really hard time reading. Like it's, and I always have. To this day, it'll take me three weeks to read a book that my wife could read in two days. I mean, I'm just, I'm just a slow reader.  Like my mom had remarried. I had a really abusive stepfather. Their cops were at the house all the time. We were always fleeing town and going to live with her sister or something. You know, like it's kind of like just a crappy home life, not a lot of sleep, no one nourishing me, nobody making sure I did my homework, all that stuff. And so I started doing bad in school really early. And once you get behind, it's way harder to catch up. And then you build this narrative about yourself.  Yeah.   Like in third grade, I had a teacher say, you're the dumbest student I've ever taught. Wow. It's a whole classroom. Wow. It's like, all right. Teachers were a hard core in the second grade. I was like, well, I guess I'm dumb. So like, I better be tough. If you're going to be dumb, you better be tough, right? And so I just drove everything towards the physical. And anyway, I graduated through SEAL training, went to the SEAL teams. That was like the Clinton and then Bush era. So we had like, we had the Gulf War, but that was super limited. And before that, it kind of seemed like under Clinton, we were just kind of like the world's police force. We didn't really go to war. And the Gulf War was such a joke. It was just kind of like, are we ever really going to get a war again? I mean, like, am I just training over and over again, doing the same trip with the different guys? And it's like, kind of like I've been there, done that I'm going to go do something else. And I didn't know what I was going to do, but I got out, you know, with the, with the encouragement of having done well academically in the military, thought, well, you know, maybe I can, I got to go to junior college because I have a GED. I can't even get into college and started doing that. And I did really well in college. And you know, you have to have 2000 volunteer hours to even apply for PT school. And I thought I might want to be a physical therapist. So I started volunteering at San Diego Sports Medicine Center. And then they hired me as a PTA. I became a PT assistant eventually. And I was really doing a PT's job and just decided what I really wanted to do. But I became friends with the doctors there and they were like, hey, you should go to medical school. Pump the brakes.   And I'm like, I failed every grade since third grade, essentially got pushed ahead. I got good football coaches that got me, you know, got me through the years. And anyway, so I said, and so this doctor actually, this is a great story. The guy who owns Dr. Lee Rice, he's still down in San Diego and he hears the conversation with me and these younger doctors and comes out and he says, Kirk, the question isn't, can you get into medical school? The question is, would you go if you could get in? I was like, hell yeah, I'd go. And he's like, kind of got to do it then, don't you? And I was like, oh yeah. So he kind of like shamed me into it. And so I said, all right, I'm going to go to medical school. And then when I was applying for medical schools, you know, it's an impossible thing to get into medical school. I mean, there's so many really smart, talented kids that don't get in. So they usually recommend you apply to about 20 schools and hoping that you get into two and you have a choice. So, you know, pre-internet, you had to go to the bookstore and look through the Kaplan books and figure out your GPA and MCAT and how competitive you were. So I did all that. And I found out while I was doing that that the military had their own medical school. And they would pay me to go to medical school sort of the other way around. And I was already married, I already had a kid, had another kid on the way. I was like, it's kind of a no-brainer.  My wife didn't have to work. And then, you know, the way the military works, they'll train you to do anything, but it's about a two to one.  It's like your payback for them. Oh, I see how that works. And so, you know, that's what I did. And I figured I'd get back to the SEAL teams as their doctor, and I did. Now, was this as general practitioner? Well, so the way the Navy works is you do your first year of residency, and then they send you out on what they call a fleet tour.  So that's kind of their game. And you're out for like two to three years, and then you come back to residency. And like my whole career was building Georgia Orthopedic Surgeon. And like that, you know, obviously I did sports medicine the whole time I was in college. I had six years of experience in that. And then like I just loved, I mean, I've always been mechanical and like good with tools and carpentry and stuff like that. And orthopedic surgeons are carpenters.  It's cutting and putting screws in and plates like whatever. So they're also the most fit doctors. I'm like, I'm designed for it. Well, you know, you think about like orthopedic surgeons, people like me, who they're only exposure to doctors or injuries. Yep. The only time I've ever seen a doctor is when I was hurt. And it's like, do you get surgery? That's kind of like all the doctors ever told me. Throughout my career, I've told this before, I've probably trained as a personal trainer, maybe 30 doctors. And I could always pick out the orthopedic surgeon. And why? They work out. Almost every time they work out. Yeah. And they're usually athletes. And that's usually their exposure. So I, you know, I did my first year of residency and then they send you out to the fleet.  So you can go to dive school and go work with divers and or seals. So I went to dive school, which had a hyperbaric, hyperbaric residency associated with that. And then went back to the SEAL teams as their doctor, thinking, here I am, I'm going to do all this sports medicine, orthopedic stuff, right? Not orthopedic. So that wasn't a surgeon yet. But, and I got there, you know, the long funding cycles in the military, right? Big bureaucracy. So it takes about 10 years to get the money for anything that you decide you want to do. And the money had just arrived to build the very first sports medicine facility that the West Coast SEALs had ever had. Like we, people think we'd have all kinds of stuff. We had nothing. Like, so we hired our first nutritionist and our first strength and conditioning coach and our first athletic trainer and our first PT and our first PT assistant. And they put me in charge of this build out because I had a ton of experience with rehab facilities already. And I got, you know, I was in charge of the build out. And then I was one of the people hiring all these people. And we got great people, you know, because the SEALs had this kind of celebrity status at that point. Like this is not that long after Bin Laden. And so we were getting, you know, Olympic Training Center people and professional sports teams and, you know, D1 college trainers, strength and conditioning, nutritionist, all that stuff.  And then we had all these world-class people and doing it there. And when you're the dumbest guy in the room in the military, they make you the leader, right? So they're like, so like, all right, now you're in charge of supervising all these people. I'm like, all right, I don't know how I'm going to supervise people that know all kinds of stuff. I don't know. But okay. And so my office was in the rehab facility and SEALs are, SEALs are a lot like, and I'm sure you guys know a lot of SEALs, but SEALs are a lot like professional athletes. And that the worst thing you can do to them is put them on the bench. Like they would cut their toe off in that easy exchange. Like they don't care. And so they don't trust doctors. They don't trust the healthcare professionals because that's the most likely person to put them on the bench. So they don't tell, they lie to their doctors all the time. It's normal. They go in for the routine physical, everything great. Like they'll dope themselves up on whatever they need to do to be able to be good for that one hour visit. And then they'll go out into town, pay out of the pocket and get treatment so that they aren't getting put on the bench. And they don't make a lot of money. Like it's a big financial strain for them. But because I had been a SEAL and because I'd been a SEAL recently enough to where there were still a ton of SEALs at the teams on the West Coast that I'd trained with and deployed with, people trusted me. They came in and closed the door and say, Hey, let me tell you, it's really going on with me. And it's something that I dubbed the, or is it dubbed deemed whatever? I called it the SEAL syndrome.  And now they've renamed it the operator syndrome. And there's actually a book coming out on it. But it's basically, it's all performance issues, right?  But I didn't even pay attention to that, you know, and come from a community that selects for people who who can function with no sleep, do well with no sleep. I mean, you go through a week, a whole week without no sleep for a week. And no one in the community thought much about it.  So this was like a cluster of symptoms you started to identify. It's white common. And I had no idea. I mean, zero idea. I was like, you know, I'm a Western trained physician, I know how to recognize and treat diseases, they don't have any diseases, they just aren't performing as well. What do I do with that? I don't know. So I literally, every lab I knew how to interpret, I sent them to get. And so they're going over the hospital pulling like 17 vials of drug of blood, 98 lab markers, these tests were costing about $3,500, which was one of the first things I got in trouble for. Because I'd spent like, you know, I'd sent 100 guys to your $3,500 and couldn't say exactly what I was looking for. But it came back and like the operator syndrome, the objective component of that is like really low anabolic markers, high catabolic markers, high inflammation, low insulin sensitivity. Like they look, their labs look like a 50 year old, 30 pound overweight prediabetic. So you're looking at testosterone, free testosterone, you're looking at, I'm assuming growth hormone, cortisol, you know, insulin sensitivity, right? And then the inflammatory markers. Yeah.  And then you saw some patterns. And I saw, I see these patterns. And they had already known that the testosterone was seemed to be low in seals after they made the seal seems well. And then the leadership just dismissed it. So those are guys that just abused steroids and now they have this problem. And I was like, that doesn't make, that doesn't even make any sense. Like they abused steroids 10 years ago. Like I can have any problems right now, right? And they were young, if they were doing it, but plus these guys trusted me 100%. And they told me if they took steroids, very, very few of them had. And if they did, they took them for two months here and there, like three or four times over their career. So like, they didn't shut down their HPTA axis.   So like, you go back and read through it, it's just like the cluster of symptoms that nobody ever figured out what caused them. I'm like, all right, well, that doesn't help a whole lot. Adrenal fatigue was kind of like this new buzzword that was coming up. And I was like, well, that kind of sounds like it. Like, let me check out this adrenal fatigue. And the benefit I had is that I was, I was the doctor for the West Coast seal teams. And I could call up anybody and say, hey, I saw your TED talk or read your book or I'm the doctor for the West Coast seal teams. Can I come train with you? Can I consult with you? And lots of doctors are like, bring me into their clinic for a week and like, let me see patients with them and show me. That's cool. I just want to comment on just how great this is because adrenal fatigue, highly, the term adrenal fatigue, highly criticized by Western medicine for a long time, mainly because the explanation wellness practitioners had was that your adrenals are fatigued and they're like, that's not what's happening. So the whole thing doesn't exist. Now we call it, what do we call it, HPTA axis dysfunction. So the symptoms are there though and they're real and they're related to the hormones. Right. Yeah. It was just misnamed, misnamed. Yeah. So I went down that for a while. I was doing Myers cocktails and adaptogens and doing cortisol tapers, quartuff tapers on people to like try to improve that. I was having some success, not a lot. That was also kind of the big boom days 2008, 2009 of vitamin D3. It was like the magic thing that everybody was missing and that affects sleep. And anyway, back up a bit. Probably 40 or 50 guys into it. I don't know exactly, but I'm embarrassed to say it was a long time after guys had been coming to my office and talking to me that somebody said something about taking Ambien. And I just remember, like, I can remember so clear. It's one of those moments where you can just like picture yourself and not exactly where you're sitting. And I was like, huh, and I make a note in the margin. And it was like, seems like a lot of guys have said that. And then when he left, I went through my files and every single guy in my office had been on Ambien. And I was like, huh, I wonder. So now I went to Western medical school. I didn't have a single class on sleep. I didn't know any more about sleep than the seals knew about sleep or my gardener knew about sleep. I feel like the typical doctor would look at that and think that the association was that the Ambien was causing the issues, but you thought it was more about why they use the Ambien? Or do you think you didn't know? Let me see. I didn't know because I didn't really know what happened when you slept, right?  And like, there's all sorts of stuff. I didn't, I didn't know anything about sleep. And so I didn't know, I mean, I'd taken pharmacology in medical school. So I knew that Ambien was a GABA analog, but I was like, I don't really know how GABA sleeps. So that is an helpful whole lot. But, you know, the big problem and one of the biggest problems in healthcare, probably the biggest problem in healthcare is that the pharmaceutical industry owns the data. Right. So when they do the research, they give the FDA what they want to give them. They hold on to what they don't want to give them to present the best case for them to get their, their drug approved. But if they get sued, they have to lift up the kimono and show everything. So they had just been sued successfully multiple times because Ambien dissociates your brain. So it's like dissociates the neocortex from the lizard brain underneath it. And now you're just running around on the lizard brain, which is the four refs, right? Feeding, fighting, fleeing and fornicating, I'll say.  So you aren't getting any memory storage.   And then come down the next day and be like yelling at their kids. Well, you literally amnesia from those events. No memory whatsoever.  So there's no control. You're acting primal. And so while you're unlocking something for me that I had a client for the longest time that I couldn't get to the bottom of why he couldn't control that. We got to the point where we talked about locking the refrigerator and he was all on ambient. I didn't even really, didn't even dawn on me back then. Wow. That's so interesting.  The drug doesn't even work. You fall asleep on average 13 minutes faster, sleep 37 minutes longer, but it decreases REM sleep by 80% and deep sleep by 20%. And if you take it with alcohol, like most seals did alcohol does the opposite decreases deep sleep by 80% and REM sleep. So you do a sleep study on those guys is 99.9% stage two sleep. So they aren't getting any sleep. Wow. Just enough to survive. Right. And they're just surviving. And so you know, the whole, the whole idea of being asleep is that the neocortex has slowed down like everything still works, right? All your, I mean, you can still move your eyes to work your ears to work like everything's still working. Just you aren't paying attention to it. You're not processing it. And that's what GABA does. It slows down the neocortex. Well, ambient binds a GABA receptor and has 1000 times that effective GABA.  And then that just leaves you with the lizard brain, which is what, you know, not to get political, but we're just what the Hamas guys were, like, they're all out on drugs and they were over there, just acting crazy doing what like that's, that's what animals do, right? Like that's animal behavior. And that's what the lizard brain was. And so anyway, they had been sued. And so I started learning a lot about sleep, because I could talk to all these smart docs about it and train with people. And then after I learned enough about that and what ambient did, I thought, well, Jesus, this could literally explain every single symptom that they've complained of. Now, I didn't think it would like that, you know, that'd be naive to think that would, but it could. So I didn't know how big that would affect would be. But I'm like, first thing we're going to do is get everybody off of ambient, see what happens from there. Expecting a marginal increase. And it was a profound increase, right? So I came up with like, with the help of the seals, like, you know, I went through and did literature research on like, like, and I don't know about herbs and, you know, there's other things I think that help. But as far as just like nutritional, truly nutritional supplements, things that are usually in your body that are already in there, they're in your food. I just made a list of all the things that are associated with sleep. And so when you said increase going off ambient, do you mean increase in the anabolic hormones changing the profile? Yeah, I guess that's okay. So so I got, so I came up with a concoction of like seven different supplements. This is a pre-Amazon day. So I was just giving guys handouts and they were going around to the health food stores and buying all these magnesium, vitamin D stuff. And so the whole, the whole melatonin production pathway from from tryptothane to melatonin and vitamin D, three magnesium and, and GABA.  Tell you exactly what's going on. So we ramped up really quick came up with a concoction that worked and got all these dudes off of ambient because I couldn't just say quit taking ambient. Yeah, because I had to come up with, they weren't sleeping that right.  And so they started doing that within, you know, it varied, but let's say four to eight weeks. Total testosterone would double or triple, free testosterone would triple quadruple. HSCRP would go from like 3.8 down to unmeasurable, homocysteine would come crashing down, fasting or AM cortisol would be way down, insulin sensitivity be way up, they'd go from a fasting insulin of 12 down to a five or six or something. They weren't doing anything differently. I had 45 year old guys PRing in their CrossFit and their Jiu Jitsu and their running and their triathlons, like whatever they did. And it was all happening, you know, off of their own accord, like their body was doing everything. Now it wasn't just that I was giving them DHEA as a supplement for production of, you know, production pathway and I was giving them a zinc citrate and occasionally I'd give them a Remidex to block the estrogen conversion. And, you know, just had these amazing results. And it was, you know, it was probably the 80% solution for 80% of the guys. But they loved it.  The piece that I didn't figure out until like maybe the last year I was there was the TBI component, which is definitely the other 20%. And some people, that's like 40% of it because TBI affects your hormone production as well. That traumatic brain injury.  And if you don't meet those two criteria, you don't have a TBI. Well, research was done through Harvard and Oxford that showed through what's called DTIs, these imaging studies. They can see a single neuronal tract breaking. And they could consistently get a neuronal tract to break at 1.09 Gs, which they were getting from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster. So then you can imagine like how much more people get. Now that would be an insignificant, but, and then we started studying these over, over pressurization from blast injuries, which just kind of rock your world.  Like, I mean, you're getting blast injuries.  And the blood vessels vibrated at a different rate than the dura. And that vibrates at a different rate than the gray matter. And that vibrates at a different weight than the white matter. And it shears across all the spaces. And it causes brain damage.  And brain inflammation interferes with hormone production and interferes with sleep and cognition and all sorts of other stuff. So I didn't figure that part out till the, till the end. But as we were talking about earlier, we had these pre and post retreats where we would take the whole teams and kind of prepare them and their families for their deployment and then help them reintegrate when they came back. And we'd bring in speakers. And I, and they started letting me speak to the seals about, and I just use the buzz terms they cared about, right?  And I started shifting the culture. The leadership bought on and we started changing like the sleeping environment at training facilities and all that other stuff and put scheduling naps in the middle of long training days and things like that.  But then when I got out of the Navy, I kind of left a vacuum right there, right? Because they were just going to replace me. And I didn't mention that I was fought by the bureaucracy the entire time. I mean, I was like, my medical credentials were suspended almost half the time I was there because I was always under investigation for practicing outside of my scope, like giving Myers cocktails is beyond my scope. As a doctor, I'm not allowed to give vitamin IVs, I guess. So what's in a Myers cocktail again? Magnesium, a lot of B vitamins, vitamin C, like it, they call this like the hangover IVs that was out there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's really good for adrenal support and kind of calming, calming things down because it has a ton of magnesium in it.  So I just started seeing all these guys for free because they can't afford anything. And I was, I had a brick and mortar private practice with that Dr. Lee Rice who, who guilted me into trying, he had a concierge practice that I joined, it was supposed to be his successor. And then I just got heranged so often in there, like, can you just make a product out of all these supplements?  And so I was like, All right. And then I had good friends with Peter at the time, we were talking about doing a consulting business together. And I said, Hey, I'll catch up with you in a year. I'm going to step out of brick and mortar, I'm going to make this supplement so that I can sell it to the SEAL teams and just make it like a super durable thing. I'll get that out for them. And then I'll just live off of my consulting. And when I took consulting clients, I said, Hey, I charge a lot of money, but primarily I charge a lot of money because you're paying for SEALs because I'm spending half my time with paid clients and half my time with people who can't afford me. And so that was my career. And because guys like Rob Wolf had brought me on his podcast and I'd gone to lots of symposiums invited by all these kinds of guys that we shared, I shared the stage with at those pre and post retreats. I already had like a flood of people who wanted to work with me. And I forget what I was calling it back then. It's bounced around holistic medicine, integrated functional medicine, all this. I call it performance medicine. Now I don't deal with the disease at all. Like all my clients now have a concierge doctor who handles all their medical stuff. I help you perform better. And whether that's cognitive, emotional, physical, strength, endurance, I don't care, whatever you want to be better at, that's what I do. Now you're talking about largely high performance, like 1% SEALs. And so someone listening right now, average person might be like, well, I don't know if that applies to me. How big of an issue is poor sleep with the average person? And what are those impacts having on the average person? Well, so I think probably kind of the best sales pitch I have is that SEALs are arguably the most performant group of men in the world, one of the top couple for sure. And so if chaotic and poor sleep can break these guys, it can break you. And if I can help them perform at their level, I can help you perform at your level. And my private clients aren't elite athletes. I mean, some of them are rarely, they're mainly 45 to 55 year old men who traded their health for wealth for 20 or 30 years.  And now they just like money's not an issue. Like I want to be a D1 athlete again in a year. Let's set some expectations, you know, like pump the brakes there. But, you know, that's my private clientele. And then most most of the SEALs I see are retiring SEALs are guys getting out. And TBI is a much bigger component of it than I was treating back then. I do a lot with that now. I want to ask you about that specifically, especially with athletes and maybe especially high contact athletes and football and all like, what are you seeing in terms of like the severity of that? Like what's the treatment look like with that? Well, so all of those things that I described that I called the SEAL syndrome not called the operator syndrome, all of that can easily be attributed to TBI as well. So, you know, a lot of people, I mean, I've heard you guys stalk your producer, I'm sure you all know this, but a lot of people don't know that like 100% of your hormone regulation happens while you're asleep. And then the first two sleep cycles primarily because it's happening during deep sleep, your neuroregulation of appetite, balance of all your anabolic, catabolic, your immune system, right? Like the only time you're getting better at anything is while you're sleeping. That's when you're improving. So, if you aren't sleeping well, you aren't like the whole reason I sleep tonight is to repair from today and to prepare for tomorrow, right? So, I'm exhausting resources and I'm damaging myself. I have to fix the damage and replenish the resources. And if I could do that 100%, I'd wake up the same every day and I'd never age. I'd be exactly the same every day, right? And when you're young, it's even better than that. Like you wake up better and then you like 25 to 35, you may be plateau and then after that, you kind of waking up a little bit worse every day. Like it might be a thousandth of a percent worse, but right.   So, there's lots of self-licking ice cream cones in these cycles, man. You know, like a simple example that I talk about all the time. You don't really have testosterone receptors in your brain, right? You have very few. Hypothalamus has almost none, and that's what's measuring how much testosterone you have.  And so, if you're... By the way, this is how selective estrogen receptor modulators raise testosterone. They block the estrogen receptor.  Right. And so, the place where we men have the aromatase enzyme to convert testosterone to estrogen is in our subcutaneous fat, not no mental fat, not brown fat. But like in the fat we don't like to see in the mirror, that's the fat on us that aromatase enzyme. And so, the fatter we get, the more estrogen we convert, the more estrogen that goes through our brain, the more our brain says, oh, we don't need testosterone. The luteinizing hormone goes down, then you produce less testosterone. Get fatter. Now you get fatter. I've never heard someone explain it that way. That's really cool. There's half a dozen systems like that. You know, like another one. The number one reason that people can't sleep, we call psychophysiologic insomnia. That means you can't sleep because you're worried about not being able to sleep. So it's just a stress issue. When you, like I said, I go to sleep tonight to repair and prepare for tomorrow.  I'm going to, you know, start rebuilding all the neurotransmitter, neuropeptide densities. I'm going to start rebuilding ATP in my brain, getting rid of adenosine, right, all that stuff I'm going to do. Neuroregulation of appetite, my testosterone growth hormone, thyroid hormone, like even insulin, glucosamine are being rebalanced, leptin sensitivity, ghrelin sensitivity, all that's happening during deep sleep, REM sleep, I'm rehearsing every single thing that I've heard today. Whether you remember it or not, everything I heard, I'm going to go over three or four times and I'm going to determine if I think it's important or not. If I don't think it's important, I'm going to prune it and I'm not going to remember it anymore. If I think it's important, I'm going to start connecting it to other information. Once I connect it to enough pieces of information, I can come at it from multiple ways, I've formed durable pathways, now I actually know that and now I can work with it and I can come up with creative ideas of like how that might impact something else that I know about. All that's going on during sleep. If you have anything wrong with your brain, if you have any, if you just don't sleep well, and one of the major reasons is stress hormones, stress hormone, the lowest stress hormone you'll have it, like we all know the highest stress hormones, right, fight or flight. That's the highest maximum stress hormones you can produce. The absolute minimum is delta sleep, like slow wave sleep cycle, the lowest stress hormone you have in any 24-hour period. Fight or flight is 100% catabolic. You're superhuman in fight or flight.  You will eat yourself in 24 hours. It's like nitrous on your car all the time.  Deep sleep is the most anabolic time, almost 100% anabolic.  If you go to the gym, you do anything worth doing, you're weaker when you leave. When do you get stronger? You're stronger when you sleep. When you sleep, your brain uses today as the template to say, okay, this is what we need to be better at tomorrow. You're bringing your body or the template for tomorrow to say, if I try to lift more bench press than I could do today, my brain and body are going to try to make me more able to do that tomorrow. I'm going to try to repair as much as I can and make those muscles, those muscle fibers stronger, thicker. Endurance, I'm going to increase mitochondrial density or mitochondrial efficiency or something like that. That's all happening when I'm asleep. If you put 20%, 30% more stress hormones in there, you do 20% to 30% less of that anabolic behavior. If you put somebody in a cave with artificial lighting, they had no cues whatsoever to know what time of day it was, and they're just turning on the light when they think they should be awake, your circadian rhythm is, and men are slightly longer than 24 hours and women are slightly shorter. So you'll be in a week, you'll be seven or eight hours off, right? But if you're well sleep adapted, you'll still sleep about eight hours. You'll fall asleep and you'll wake up. No lights are waking up, no sounds are waking you up. They've done these studies many times by the way. There's hundreds of these studies done. And what wakes you up?  So the contract you're born into, it takes eight hours to recover from being awake for 16 hours.  It still takes eight hours. There's nothing you can do about that. Can't get away from that. If you choose to sleep six hours, you've shortened it 25%. 25% means you're aging 25% faster, but it also means you're 25% less prepared. Tomorrow still comes at exactly the same time. Exactly the same time, you still have to do everything the next day that you were going to do if you slept eight hours. So how do you compensate? Stimulants. Increase stress hormones, right? Increase stress hormones, get closer to fight or flight. Now you have higher stress hormones throughout the day. I already said stress hormones are catabolic, so you're beating yourself down. A lot of people who go work out really hard in the morning, like after they didn't get enough sleep and increase stress hormones more and like hurt themselves even more. Now they're trying to go to sleep and their stress hormones are too high to go to sleep. But if they're exhausted enough, they have enough adenosine they can pass out. They go through one or two sleep cycles. All the adenosines flushed out, neurotransmitters have replenished cortisol still there, they wake up, can't go back to sleep.  With inflammation, the brain's inside of the skull. It compresses everything, puts pressures on things. And inflammatory products in the brain are kind of like oxidative and damaging. Are there specific things people with these types of TBI, anything they can do to help reduce brain inflammation? Yeah. Yeah. So there's tons of things. I do this all the time. This is one of the primary things I do with the seals now.  M4 fire inside of a concrete room is 35 Gs, right? And you have four guys doing it 10,000 times in a day. Our fast boats transit at 60 Gs, peak over 100 Gs, our anti-tank, anti-armor, Carl Gustav, 200 Gs when you fire it. The spotter gets 300 Gs. If you're in the back of a Humvee with a 50 cal going 65 Gs for every round, every seal has 1,000 brain injuries. And every military guy, really the biggest difference in special forces is like to hire your climb up that ladder, the more money you have, the more bullets you get to shoot and the more equipment you have, the more training trips you have. So there's just way more brain injuries the higher you get up that echelon. And so we work on things to decrease brain inflammation. So the first thing you have to do is get the hormones right. And a lot of the times if people are young, I try to improve their hormones without giving them hormones. But if you have enough brain damage, that might not be possible. So I might have to actually give you hormones with the conservative pathway where I'm supporting your production, encouraging your own production.  But if you're- So they go with testosterone, you say conservative pathway, encourage their own. So you do enclomaphen? Yeah, I do. Enclomaphen, seven keto DHEA because that can't aromatize. Got it. Pregnant alone, aromatase inhibitor, aromatase inhibitor. If their second one, binding globulin is really high, I'll use a synthetic testosterone for like six weeks to drive that down really low. A secretogog for IGF-1 for growth hormone, if that's one of their issues. Is there a way to screen for this like an fMRI or like how do you know other than feedback? You can't really study.  Actually one of the best treatments for- And this is the reason this is so popular. It's obviously a touchy subject. But psychedelics are probably like the best one-time treatment if you're just gonna- If I just had one day to do something with you, that's what I would do. They're huge, hugely anti-inflammatory to the brain. They also regenerate a ton of neurotransmitters and clean a lot of receptors, increase receptor density. We can get amazing results. See, I don't really believe that PTF, like anything with syndrome on it isn't real. Just means we- There's a bunch of symptoms that we're seeing together all the time, like my seal syndrome or the operator syndrome. That follow along with each other. Like these are the typical things, but we can't explain them. That's why we're calling it a syndrome. So PTSD, I don't believe it. And I think PTSD is a conglomeration of symptoms that are caused by damaged brains.  The harder it is to sleep, the more brain damage you'll have, the more brain inflammation. We documented in the Navy almost a one-to-one correlation between total testosterone and sleep. So it ended up being a 0.87 correlation, which nobody had published this before, shocking to me because it seems pretty obvious. But if somebody has low testosterone, I guarantee you they don't sleep well. If somebody doesn't sleep well, I guarantee you they don't have testosterone levels. If you sleep poorly and have low testosterone and I increase your testosterone, you'll sleep better. If you just sleep better on your own, your testosterone will go up on its own. So all of these things are completely intertwined and every hormone affects every other hormone. You mentioned the psychedelics for the anti-inflammatory effects because the studies on that now is quite fascinating. But are these the natural like tryptamine-based molecule like psilocybin? Yeah. Okay. So they've done functional MRIs with a group. So ketamine isn't really DMT, but it's very similar. The molecule looks very similar. 5MD or MDMA is a completely different compound, but it has some similar effects.  They all work off of DMT, dimethyl tryptamine is the pathway. They all have their plants, so there's thousands of effects. But one of their primary components is that what I talked about earlier about using stress hormones to compensate for not getting enough sleep. Now I can't sleep well because my stress hormones are too high. So when I don't get enough sleep, my next day, my stress hormones would be even higher. So now my stress hormones are high because I can't sleep well and I can't sleep well because my stress hormones are high and I get that same self-reoperating downward spiral. So what did you say? Yeah. So stress hormones are activating the amygdala and the amygdala is activating stress hormones.  So right now, sitting here, our amygdala tone should be really calm. There's nothing threatening to us. There's not a lot of stuff moving around. We should be really calm. We aren't. Almost certainly we aren't just because of the world we've developed into, but people who have brain damage and people who have high stress hormones are even worse. What functional MRIs have shown with all those psychedelics is that they decrease amygdala tone by about 90%. And depending on which drug you're talking about, or plant medicine you're talking about, entheogen, depending on which one you're talking about, the durability is different. So Ibogaine, that decrease in tone can last nine months, maybe up to a year. Ayahuasca is about six, three to six months, psilocybin is like one to three months, ketamine is like a couple of weeks to a month, MDMA is like just when you're taking it. And I don't know about the cactus derivatives. I don't think that was in the study. So if you think about it, what you guys do, what I do, and what all these guys need is lifestyle modification, right? They need to change their life. They need to change how they think about things. The reason I'm a grumpy old man isn't because I'm 53 years old, it's because my brain is set in its pathways, right?  And I have this idea that says, this is the way you do things. That's the way, this is the way you interpret that. That's the way you interpret this. This is what this means. That's what that means. It's a lifetime of experience. My neuroplasticity is very low. It's really hard for me to change anything about myself. My ego gets stronger as I get older because I'm more sure of who I am. We call it confidence when we get older. It's like, I know who I am, and I know what I do, and I don't do this, and I do this.  So these things decrease the stress hormones, decrease catabolic activity. And one of the biggest effects of stress hormones is it impairs the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is, you know, the executive functioning. It's our simulator. It allows us to go, hey, there's five different pathways. Let me imagine what would happen to each one of those five if I chose this. That's why there's anxiety disorders. Your body kicks into anxiety before you can even process how to stop it. And then you fail yourself, right? If you're chronically sleep deprived, or if you have brain trauma, brain inflammation, your prefrontal cortex doesn't work that well. This is what we call ADHD. ADHD and sleep deprivation are completely unextricable. Like you look at the symptoms of those two in the DSM4, you cannot tell those apart. So it's the prefrontal cortex isn't functioning well. And that's because lack of sleep is a stressor because the only time any animal on this planet will sleep deprive itself as if it's starving or being preyed upon, like being stalked. So it's very reasonable to think that our brains evolve the same way. And so when we aren't sleeping well, that's another reason that our stress hormones are higher. And our prefrontal cortex is then going to be focused on stress. It's looking for things that are threatening to us. And our functioning isn't nearly as well. And so if I can decrease amygdala tone, now I have executive functioning to analyze my behavior and figure out if I want to do something different. But then the psychedelics have greatly increased my neuroplasticity because they increase BDNF and glial cell neurotropic factors. They increase, you know, like HIF, they VEGF.  The way that I've heard it explain to me was like tracks in the snow. And if you keep going down the same pathway, then you've got like this deep groove in the snow and it's there. And to get to develop a new track is going to be very difficult. A great metaphor I've heard. I used to use like rabbit trails to a super highway. But a great one I've heard, I think is really aproposely. You picture like an old, you know, 17th, 18th century wagon with those tall wheels with the steel on them. They go down dirt roads and they form these ruts, right? And then if you've seen one of those, you know, it's like the hump in the middle is like only inches under the middle of the wagon because the wheels are so deep in the rut. Like now try to get out of that rut. Now try to go left or right. You're not getting out of that rut. So that's a good way to visualize it. But yeah, we, as we get older, you know, our hormones tend to decrease, diminish anyway. We don't, like most people aren't as active. They aren't, you know, they aren't as healthy. They aren't treating themselves as well metabolically. They aren't sleeping as well. They have a lot more stresses, a lot more responsibilities in the world.  Psychedelics offer you an opportunity to that. There's peptides that do very similar things to psychedelics. Hyperbarics is an amazing tool. Does a lot of the same things. You can increase almost almost everything I just said there. What are those peptides just to find out? Well, there's lots of, there's lots of peptides that help. Cerebral ison is probably the most powerful one. Cerebral ison is a, it's a synthetic hormone or it's a synthetic peptide, but it has a bunch of growth factors and neurotropic factors from porcine, from a pig's brain. That has a, that has about 90% of the same effect as psychedelics, but it's more durable. You do one, you do one 10 day treatment of that and that can last for up to two years. It can improve your cognition, decrease anxiety, all that stuff. Epithelon can do the same thing. C-max, C-lank, C-lank and C-max are nasal sprays or injections. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things. Ever that BPC 1.5-cent can reduce inflammation over all the brain. Yeah, BPC 1.3-7 decreases inflammation and it can have, that can have some neurotropic effects because of inflammation affecting the brain. You know what's interesting too about what you're saying about the psychedelics is that, because people, we have a lot of studies now that are, I mean, what you're talking about is all backed by data. The reason why we did those studies is very sad. It's because, first off, there's no profits. You can't profit off Psilocybin because it's not patented or DMT or whatever, right? They'll figure out a way to do that. Well, they'll try, right? But this is one of the reasons why there wasn't a lot of studies on it. Ketamine, very inexpensive, most compound pharmacies can make it, but it was returning soldiers. Suicide is now the top cause of death. And so military is really the reason they pushed us. We got to fund and figure out how the hell to deal with some of the stuff. That's why they started studying these. Yeah. So in 2010, I got approached by Martin Polanco and his partner who owned Crossroads down in Mexico, which was an Ibogaine facility. Yeah, that's right. And it was called Crossroads because that's where Eric Clapton went after his son, Suicided. And he donated his guitar collection to fund them to keep them going because he had such a profound result. But the primary research at that time around Ibogaine was opiate addiction. Harrowing. Yeah. And so they came to me assuming my job with SEALs, I'd have a lot of people in opiates. We don't do opiates in the SEAL team. So like the other problem, like the other reason that I was so limited in what I could do with the SEAL teams is like, I can't put a SEAL on a prescription medication because if I do, it disqualifies him because he can't be out in the field and not get his medication and be impaired. So if you need a medication, you can't be in the field. So I was having to do all of this without that. But they wanted to talk to me about opiate addiction. I'm like, I don't really have that problem. We had a nice lunch anyway. I talked to them about their research and they said, well, you know, there's actually some research coming out that it helps with PTSD as well. And I said, okay, well, I might be interested in that. And so after my meeting, I went home, I looked at the sites, I looked at some of the research, the same two guys I was having lunch with were supervising a session, two different sessions where two guys had died under Ibogaine. And I was like, well, that's not super encouraging. I'm not, I'm not sure I'm too interested in that. So I just kind of put it off in the back burner. And there's a, I don't want to take up your whole day, but there was a CEO before who I had treated who had been med boarded out. It was on 13 different psychotropic medications, med boarded out through all his medication and the trash, got on a plane, flew to Peru, lived in the jungle with a shaman for 30 days, nude for reasons I don't understand, living off the land, doing Kundalini yoga every day in Ayahuasca every third day. And he came back a completely transformed person. And so that made me, that's the only reason I even consider the psychedelics. But anyway, that was on the back burner. A few months later, my very best friend in the world who I went through SEAL training with were roommates all through buds. His wife calls me and said, he's suicidal. He's kicked me and the kids out of the house. He's writing a suicide note. And I'm like, all right, so I go over to his house.  And so anyway, we hashed this out over hours. And I'm like, and like, he's not emotional. He's not drunk. He's on drugs. He's like, he's just got, he's got this thing written out. Very matter of fact, this is why it's better for my wife. This is why it's better for my kids. This is why it's better for these people. And I'm just going to do it. And like, I'm ready. I'm ready to go. I was like, yeah, but none of us wants you to die, dude. You know, it's like, that, that should be in there. Like underneath every one of those, just be like, we don't want you dead.  So what do you say we go give this thing a try. And to Martin's credit, I rented out the entire clinic. He, six bed facility. We just, we went by ourselves. We brought the guy who had, who had done the, the ayahuasca with us because he was the only person I knew. I knew anything about it. And he had this amazingly transformative experience.  Then he had some friends who were really suffering and we got his friends treated and you know, we got five or six guys treated probably in like the next nine months. And one of those guys that we treated was Marcus Capone, who then started Vets, which is the, you know, the veteran seeking solution, or veteran seeking solutions, whatever. And they have like that big organization now partnered with Stanford studying Ibogaine. And, and it's, it's just been exploding from there. And then there is, I can't remember his last name, Nicholas, which is a green beret. And he, he had, I want to say he had a big experience with ayahuasca and he kind of started a non-profit around that as well. So, you know, it's primarily been the special forces guys that have decided like we're not ready to go. We're not like, don't get me wrong.  Like I see it all the time. Oh, I feel spot guests.  It would take me an hour to tell it well, but basically this young kid, a Navy pilot ejected at the speed of sound while pulling four and a half Gs, two and a half seconds before impact to the ocean and survived it. Uh, I mean died a couple of times, but was revived, survived it.  If he's not, he's definitely not walking. Two years later, he was flying jets again. But once he started flying jets again, all of his head injuries stuff manifested. And then he started having psychotic issues. And he had med boarded out and had one point. He was awarded the state and a psychiatric facility against his will, couldn't get out of it. But anyway, long, long convoluted story, but the most fascinating story I've ever heard in my life. And, uh, one of his friends said, Hey man, you should try a psilocybin thing. I did it. He went and did psilocybin. He's never been on another psychiatric medication the rest of his life. He now does ultra, like ultra marathon mountain bike races, whatever that is. You see the dude without a shirt on. The first, the first study I read on, on psilocybin was something like that was with cluster headaches. People severe cluster headaches will do one dose and then not get one for like, not get a cluster for like a year. And this is like an almost untreatable condition. People rip their hair out because it's so bad.  It's still demonized. It's still, it's, unless you're in the know, so many people have no idea. Yeah. I mean, it's super frustrating.  But like my passion would be if I could treat every seal that's alive, that's what, that's what I would do. And the fact that I can help that community, you know, I can't help everybody, but if I can be impactful in that community, that community will expand and help a lot of other communities.  Like obviously some of those are dead, but 10,000 people total, whatever's left of that, if you could optimize that group of people and keep them connected. I mean, it's just like that, that's what gives me hope and ambition, you know, and motivation every day. And, and I, and I try to educate other doctors, but doctors are kind of resilient or resistant, that's what I wanted, kind of resistant to being told something by another doctor. Yeah, of course. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, I'm not trying to insult your intelligence. I, nothing, nothing I do, I learned in medical school, zero. I mean, it's a language school is all it is. Like I, there's not a single thing that I do from day to day that has anything to do with medical. That's so great. At what, how far back did you get introduced to peptides first? And what, tell me about that journey, because this is something that we've been recently talking more about on our show last year or two. I mean, as far as like really understanding the breadth of them, like I think I've been, I was using Pentasand for probably 15 years, but that, that's been around for a long time. I heard about the first secretagogues. I didn't really use them by study them. And I knew some guys who used them, some colleagues, I talked to them about it. They weren't super impressive. And that was maybe 10 years ago, but I'd say about probably six or seven years ago, I really, I really got into studying them, because I found out there were so many more than I, than I realized. And I was like, Jesus Christ. And then, and then I started talking to people who are really educated in it and found out, well, you know, Russia has been doing this since the 80s. And you know, there's thousands of research papers on all these things that we consider novel. You know, in my approach to medicine is like, you know, you guys know this as well as anybody's like, what, what's the best way to eat, right?  I shouldn't allow it. You know, so, you know, and, and you can, you can stack up convincing research on both sides of any issue, right?  Think, thankfully, you know, thankfully, sleep's not like that. Sleep's interesting, because the best argument I've ever heard or maybe explanation of its importance I ever heard was that if sleep, if evolution could have gotten rid of it, it would have right now. That's how important it is.  You're super vulnerable. You're not making shelter. You're not hunting. You're not getting resources. So if evolution could have figured out a way for us to like, eventually not sleep, it would have, I think you heard that from me. Maybe I started saying that in 2008. I was like, if you think about it, it's the most vulnerable time for a human being. And you go back to evolutionarily when we didn't have houses and brick walls and guns and stuff like that. It's like, we were super, super vulnerable at night. If we could have evolved to sleep four hours, that would have, it would have favored those people would have procreated. What we ended up with is night owls and, and owls and larks, right? It's like, you have people who want to go to bed really late and get up a little later and you have people who want to go to bed really early and get up early. Well, that cuts down. Like if it's a two hour shift, that cuts down four hours of the watch, right? So you have people, you have people awake two hours earlier and two hours and so that's how we handle it. So, but it's still, it's only four hours of like everybody being asleep. And then you get two hours on each side where you have like an alarm bell, right? So, yeah. So anyway, my, like my whole approach is like, we evolved to be on this planet. We evolved to eat a certain way, move a certain way, you know, think a certain way, like deal with a certain amount of stress. And so, when you have conflicting research, I just go for like, how do we evolve? Like what, like that's probably the best way, right? Millions of years of evolution has led us like still on the same planet. You would think we would use the resources that are on this planet and try to try to mimic that as much as we can. So, everything I do, I would, I would much rather just try to re-approximate youth, right? So, you peak around 25 to 35. What do your hormones look like? What do your inflammatory cascades look like? Like, like, which your profile to use is like, I'm just going to use this.  If I handed your labs to somebody, they'd thank you for 25. What peak fertility looks like essentially? Right. And so we, and so we just, I move everything towards that and peptides are already in your body, right? We're just like hyper-concentrating things that are already there, you know? It's just like, well, you know, growth hormone breaks up into like seven different molecules and we can, well, this one really improves fatty acid oxidation. So, we just need that one if we want to increase, just put that part in there. And so, you know, it's a little bit of trickery there, but I totally believe in just like eating the way we evolved to eat and moving and exercising the way that we evolved and sleeping the way we evolved to sleep and, you know, controlling our stress the best we can in this non-ideal world. The big problem is that we, our environment has changed far faster than we can evolve. Yeah, we can't evolve to keep up with it. No, no, because the search for shelter, the search for making life easy, that's all, was all evolutionary beneficial up until we really figured things out and learned how to make things change really quick.  Like, and that was it, like that was your life and like, there were male roles and female roles and everybody had to do their job and your goal was to make it till tomorrow. And then at some point we, we got to this point where it's like, well, no, I'm going to live to be to 80 and not only have a 2000 square foot house and my buddy's got a 5000 square foot house and I'd love to have a jacuzzi in my kitchen and like whatever.  I remember talking to my grandfather, my, my, my, my, the production of immigrants. So my, my family's very poor where they came from. Remember talking to my grandfather and he had, he's like, so you go to the gym, I said, yeah, and he goes, so you just lift things and put them down. He goes, for what? What are you building?  He goes, you guys complain of the stuff because you don't do anything. It's a totally different, totally different game now. It's not because of overuse. It's, it's all because of underuse. You know, I want to ask you about hormones when you were talking about just kind of these, these, uh, positive feedback loops. And you mentioned the stress hormones, insulin resistance is a real thing. And essentially it's your, your body's not responding to the insulin that you have. So your body has to produce more insulin to cause the same effect in it. Eventually it turns into something really bad. I know with testosterone with a high level, you know, athletes that use performance enhancing drugs at some point, you use so much testosterone receptors, maybe down, regulate or whatever. Does that happen with stress hormones? In other words, can you develop something like cortisol resistance where your body makes more cortisol to keep you up more alert, but then that cortisol becomes less effective. So you got to make more cortisol to the point where you start to crash. Cause I know really, really bad, uh, forms of HP, a axis dysfunction look like extreme fatigue, can't move or whatever. You test their cortisol and it's like, well, is that a thing? Can that happen? So every hormone in your body is that way. Most hormones, anything comes from cholesterol, which cortisol is one of those. Most hormones can diffuse into cells. They don't need a, they don't need a cell, cellular membrane receptor. They just diffuse into the cell and then there's, there's a receptor within the cytosol of the cell that brings them to the nucleus for the most part and affects epigenetic expression. So any hormone that, any hormone that I give you is going to down regulate your own production. And then over time, if I'm super physiologic with it, I'm going to decrease my receptors. So if I, like if, let's say if I, and this wouldn't be possible, but let's say if I, if I gave you melatonin and I gave you the ideal amount, which is what your brain was used to seeing all the time.   But that's not, that's not how hormones work because hormones are super pulsatile and they're happening in tiny little fractions. Like, like, like a male's testicles produce like 20 to 25 milligrams of testosterone per night. Right. Like, you don't, you're not getting these big boluses. So you take an injection of 200 milligrams.  They've seen 20, like at the peak, right? So now you get this super high level, that super high level of course leads to a huge flush over to estrogen, which is a zone problem, but it also leads to a down regulating of receptors because your, your body's a super smart machine. If there's, if there's a thousand testosterone molecules, and I only need two or three, how many receptors do I need? Not that many, but if there's only two testosterone molecules around, I'm going to have as many receptors as I can possibly make because like I won't like each cell is its own thing. It's all trying to survive. In fact, they find, they find this in men as they get older. If they're healthy and they get older, you'll see some dips in testosterone, but you'll see an increase in androgen receptor density, almost like it's making up for it. Yeah. And you, and you can compensate for that. So you have two, you have two problems. If you go super physiologic, you're definitely wiping out, decreasing androgen receptors. Now you think about, let's say if I, if I give you a 200 milligram injection, that's 10 times more than your body would ordinarily see in that 24 hour period. So let's say I cut your, I cut your, your testosterone receptors down, make the math easier. Cut them in half. Right. So now if you had a high normal testosterone level of a thousand nanograms per deciliter, you only have half the receptors.  Effectively. Right. Effectively. That's all you have.  When you get to a thousand, you're deficient over time, right?  So from 1000 to 500, you're like you're under toast, right? And so, and that's because of receptor density right there. Now there's other things that androgens are doing in your body. And so you're, you're definitely causing yourself harm because those things, like those, those androgens can go, like that testosterone can go into make DHT and that DHT can enlarge your prostate or cause you to go bald or like, you know, it affects cognition. There's all sorts of things you can do. So you don't want to like, you know, what bodybuilders and stuff like they go super physiologic and they take all kinds of stuff because they're trying to get this maximum amount of muscle growth in this very short period of time.   And so everything I do, like I said, if I could get, if I could get somebody to do a testosterone injection every day, I was just going to ask, so what do you recommend? I do it every other day. Do you do propionate? Sipionate. So, so you still just sip in it. Small doses then. It's super small. So it's 40 milligrams a day or 40 milligrams every other day. And it was a sub-Q or still on troubleshooting? Sub-Q. Wow. Yes. Oh, that's oil.  Now, if you use nangelone, which I sometimes use nangelone, people have a lot of joint pains because it helps a lot with joint pain. If you just use nangelone by itself, that does, that doesn't do sub-Q very well. That does cause some problems. But if you mix it and do 50-50 testosterone. Does it thins it out a little bit? I don't know. It has something to do with the molecule itself being irritating, I think. So it's sipionate sub-Q every other day. Every other day. And it has a long half-life, but still. Yeah. So what I'm trying to do is maintain, and when I test people's blood levels, when I'm testing people's blood levels, they're only changing about two or 300 milligrams a day, which is normal. Two or 300 nanograms per deciliter per day, which is what you ordinarily would change. That's why you do it in the morning because you're about 300 points lower before you go to bed than you are in the morning.  I was just going to ask you, like, how the hell... And you can put it anywhere. Because I'm on testosterone replacement therapy. Yeah. You can put it in your fat. You can put it anywhere you can pinch some scale. Does that take you 15 minutes to push through a 26-gauge? No. No problem. It takes probably... So I've read that that also lowers by doing a small dose. This is relatively new. If we brought this up 10 years ago, people would say, why? Why would you do that? Yeah.  If anything, you get less of it. It didn't turn out that way. But less sex-binding globulin... Sex hormone-binding globulin. Yeah, hormone globulin. You get less of a conversion to estrogen. This is what I'm reading so far, so... I haven't seen that. I control sex hormone-binding globulin pretty fanatically because that's the primary driver of what's free.  Albumin is the most common one and albumin escorts almost everything. Albumin will bind things irreversibly, or reversibly, though. So it goes by a cell that needs that testosterone molecule. Albumin will let it go. Sex hormone-binding globulin doesn't let it go. Once it binds, it's useless. It goes through the liver, gets chopped up, made into completely different compounds. So you want that to be low. The lower that is, the higher your free percentages. Free is not bound to albumin or sex hormone-binding globulin. That's just what's floating around your bloodstream. If it's free and bound to albumin that we call that bioavailable, I don't trust that. It's not. It's not something that I can say definitively how well you're diffusing from that. So I go off of free.  And that gives you about a 3% free. So if I can do that, I don't have to get your testosterone super high. So when I'm doing conservative treatment and I'm giving you enclomaphen, and I'm giving DHEA and pregnant alone and aromatase inhibitor, and I'm doing like that, I don't have to get you to 1,000. I'd still like to if I can, but if I get you to 700, better give you a 3% free. Well, now you have a free of 21, which is like the upper quintile of the range. Wow. What lowers this? So is it the enclomaphen? Like what would you take to lower that? Well, long-term, if you keep estrogen low, and again, I don't let estrogen go above 20. Oh, really? I keep it somewhere between 10 and 20 because that's what the Framingham data showed was normal for 20-year-olds or 25-year-olds. Like all the lab normal values change over the years. Every 10,000 tests, they reset their intervals, right? So if you go back to Framingham data, normal testosterone was 250 to 1,100, sexual and non-bonding globulin, and a young man was 15 to 20, estradiol was 10, 20, and that's what I go re-approximate. So if you keep estradiol, the primary driver of sexual and non-bonding globulin is estradiol.  It still can. By and large, it doesn't. And I can crush that with a synthetic testosterone. So something like stonazolol or oxangeloin. I don't give you enough to have any physiologic effect. You're not going to get faster or lean or anything. Just to lower that.  So they don't have any free. Like, it doesn't matter what their total is because they don't have any free period. And I see this a lot with people who are getting treated out and docking the box clinics. They come see me and they're like, Hey, I've been on testosterone therapy for three years.  And so keeping estradiol low in the long term, and then the synthetics, you do that for six to eight weeks. I can take a sexual and non-bonding globulin from like six year 80 down to target range of 10 to 20. Well, what do you, what do you think? Because, you know, we talked about sleep and how that affects testosterone and what do you think's happening? Because over the last, what, six decades or so, we've just seen this nice consistent drop into testosterone and man, to where it's significant. Wow. Like a 20-something-year-old male today is like comparable to testosterone to like a 60-something-year-old in 1980, whatever. So do you think it's just lifestyle, just lack of sleep? Just, do you think there's a lot of... I think it's everything. So something we were talking about for the podcast started, you know, decreasing weak men in the world. Do you mean increasing weak men? Decreasing strong. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do is decreasing. Yeah. Yeah. Increasing the number of weak men in the... So I just find it, and this sounds conspiratorial, I have no evidence to back this up, but I find it really, really strange that every chemical toxin acts like estrogen. They're all zero estrogens, right? So BPAs from plastic, pesticides, weed-killing products, like all these chemical compounds in our environment that are causing us probably cleaning products, they all act like estrogen in the body. That's definitely a component. The fact that nobody works out hard anymore, like when you think about, like, if you just work hard all the time, you don't have to work out. Plenty of my clients, they don't have any athletic ambitions.  So I think life was way harder, and we know that the only other time you're making testosterone is during HIIT. If you do HIIT, you can convert some of your DHEA, intramuscularity to testosterone. It's a very, it's a small amount. So intensity, basically. But also the more, like the more fit your muscles are, the more demanding are your muscles, the more angiogen receptors you're going to have, the more testosterone you're going to take up, which means you're going to have less in the bloodstream to signal the brain to shut it down. So, I mean, that's definitely a component too. And chronic stress and sleep deprivation.  I don't think there's anywhere, anything anywhere close to being as well as sleep. Well, there's nothing that'll negatively impact your health as quickly. Nothing breaks you faster than your sleep. In fact, nothing will improve your life faster than improving your sleep.  What about, and you just mentioned how sleep, you don't think anything compares to that. Have you used peptides in order to really enhance somebody's sleep? And have you seen any profound effects of that? Yeah. So anything you do growth hormone-wise, whether you're actually giving somebody growth hormone or you're just giving me a secretog, garyllumimatic or secretog, anytime you're increasing overall growth hormone in an IGF-1, you're improving a lot of the metabolic pathways. One of the things you're drastically increasing this, your brain sensitivity to GABA, but it's also affecting some other pathways. It's increasing delta brainwave sleep or delta slow wave sleep and things like that. There's a peptide called DSIP. I've tried that. Yeah. It's either delta or deep sleep inducing peptide. I've seen it. I haven't tried that yet. It's about a 50-50 for me. It's like 50% of my clients take it and say, nothing. I don't get anything out of it. And 50% go, yeah, it works. And maybe 20% are like fanatical about it. Like, yeah, it really works. But if you use it long-term, it actually re-regulates your pituitary hormones as well. And it helps the real-life circadian rhythms. And so I use the thymulins. It'll increase melatonin production. They worked for me, but I had to take half the dose. I took a full dose and I would wake up and feel nauseous. It was really strange. I took half and it did work for me for sure.  They help with immune function and they help like repair injuries, regenerate cartilage and connective tissue and things like that. But they also work on the pineal gland. And epithetalon works more on the pineal gland. But though any time you're stimulating the pineal gland, you're overall increasing melatonin production and improving circadian rhythm alignment because you can't just get melatonin discreet at any time. Like it has to be kind of done along with the circadian rhythm. The two, the peptide, the two peptides, they use a combination. The most impactful error felt was the thymus and beta and BPC157. Combine those two. I noticed Ibutomorin. That's the ghrelin mimetic. Okay. Ibutomorin was like, I mean, I slept like a baby when I was taking it. Yeah. Made me hungry though. The growth hormone effect. It has a huge appetite. Oh, man, I had bulk on. It's too much. I saw a video of myself in my face. That one also can like double or triple cortisol too though. Oh, really? And then over a long term. So MK677, you don't want to do that. I never do it more than eight weeks. Some people say 12 weeks, but it'll drastically reduce insulin sensitivity, hugely increase cortisol levels as well. And it desensitizes really quick. Like all of the early ones desensitize really quick. So like the hex, the hexarellons and anything with this, anything with relin on it and then and then anything with a six on it, like the GH, GHRH6 or GHRP6. Those, you know, in like a matter of weeks, you're decreasing. So there's actually a neuron in the peptide and the pituitary that's being targeted, and that neuron will actually retreat into the peptide or into the pituitary as that gets too high and you can get it to do it irreversibly. Oh, interesting. Oh, that's not good. Yeah. So that's why I never use hexarellons because that's known for that. And I stick with CJC, if I'm rolling, if I'm going to disagree to go. The good old, what about Testimeral? CJC deck. Testimeral is awesome, but it's really hard to get. Yeah. And it's usually really expensive because you need two milligrams a day of that. I used to use that all the time. TaylorMade had that five or six years ago, very reasonably priced, and like that's by far. You can't, and then the MK6717 can also go super fizzy logic on it, because it's not affected by the feedback loop, whereas Testimeral and I could max people out, and never got anybody super fizzy logic, no matter how much they took. So that's really a great one.  Oh, okay. Yeah, but that one for me was like, because when I communicated that on the podcast, because people like, they like the growth hormones of gretagogs to help them get leaner, I'm like, I don't know if you, I beat a moron or MK67, that's a tough one to get lean on for me, because my appetite is.  Yeah, I'm hungry, man. And you'll gain like 30 pounds in eight weeks, and then you'll lose 10, or you'll lose 20 of it, like three days after.  So, wow, so when you're looking at somebody's, and you're working with somebody, looking at their sleep, what about sleep, like habits? Like, for example, I found for myself, like I learned this a while ago, it was a huge one, it's just going to bed at the same time, waking up the same time every day, because I had heard it communicated that, we essentially just sleep, you know, jet lag ourselves every Monday, because we go to bed late Friday night, sleep in Saturday late Saturday night, sleep in Sunday.  Right. So that was a big one.   Really? I can give it to you. I can give it to you guys to pump out to your audience or whatever. And it's the foundation of is what you're talking about, right? So we're trying to reset circadian rhythms, but the number one reason, like I said earlier, psychophysiologic, insomnia, people can't sleep because they're worried they can't sleep. So when people lay in bed and they can't sleep, they start stressing. And then they'll look at the clock and they'll try to figure out how many, how to start doing math. Like, oh, if I don't, you know, like, if I just go back to sleep and actually have a guilty, now they're, now they're waking up and they're like, well, I'll skip the shower or I'll skip the gym. And they, and right. And now you're getting a terrible night's sleep. So the circadian alignment, if somebody has sleep problems, in general, with everything I do, all the lifestyle things I do, I go for Pareto distribution, man, because that's everywhere in the world. And it's true with you too.  Don't beat yourself up about it. It's the way it goes. And the whole point of being really healthy and resilient is so that I can do that 20%, it doesn't kill me, right?  Overtrain for a bit.  You set an alarm clock to tell you when it's time to get ready to go to bed. That alarm clock is just as important as the morning alarm clock. I mean, it's identical. You have to get up and go to work. You have to go to sleep. The psychology component, sort of the CBT component of this, is the most important part though. And that takes four to six weeks to kind of click in. But the gist of it is the most capable you ever are in any 24-hour period.  So if you have important stuff to handle in your life, things that are stressing you out, for instance, that's the time to handle it. That's PQ. That's the best you are. If you're going to fight Mike Tyson, do you want to be your best? Or do you want to be a mediocre?  But maybe I'll survive if I can be my best, right? And so the alarm clock says it's time to get ready for bed. Nobody gets ready for bed anymore. Evolutionarily, the sun went down. We didn't go to sleep for three hours, right? Because it takes time for all the physiologic changes in our brain. Sleep hygiene is three things. Decrease blue light, decrease activity, your interaction with the world, right?   World gets colder, you get colder. That's what we evolved to. That's what makes us feel sleepy. Adenosine, sleep pressure, it's slightly different. But so nobody's going to spend three hours getting ready for bed, but maybe an hour. So you're going to go to bed at 10, nine o'clock, no more blue light, no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, no working on work products, no work, you know, work projects, no working out, you know, no karate in the garage, any of that stuff. Like you do... What about sex? Depends on how you do it. Okay. I'm like, come on, man. See what you... You have an hour to get ready to go to bed. Once that hour happens, you get into bed, back up. You start with the list. You do this during the day when you're not going to be stressed. So maybe 5 p.m., your brain's working fine. You take a line right down the middle of a piece of notebook paper on one side is the to-do list. The other side is the to worry list. The difference being to do, you actually know what to do. There's some action to be taken to worry. You don't know what you're going to do about it, but you know you're going to worry about it.  So you're just going to like give no control over it, but put it on the list and you'll understand why in a second. So, and then the to-do, it goes out as far as you will stress. If you're somebody who will stress over something six months away, that needs to be on your to-do list. Oh, I see. If you're somebody like me who doesn't think more than a day ahead, it's like, what do I do tomorrow? Like that's all in my list, right? And then that's handwritten. You put it next to your bed with a pencil. So if you forget anything, you can get up and put that on your list.  Those three things, getting bed at 9 o'clock. Your goal is to be in bed until that morning alarm clock goes off. And I don't care if you need an alarm clock or not, but you're, because that's something you can worry about. Oh, what if, what if I oversleep if I don't know? So you're going to have an alarm clock. That's going to be eight hours after you get in bed. From the time you get in the bed until the time that alarm clock goes off, you have one job to relax as much as possible.  I don't care. And if you do that for eight hours, get up the next day and go to work, okay? That won't happen. You start, you start doing that. You're going to fall asleep. If you wake up, there's no, there's no cues to tell you what time it is, right? You're in a blacked out room. There's no, no, there's no reason for you to know what time it is. You're not going to look at a clock. If you gotta go to the bathroom, get up, go to the bathroom, get back in bed. You don't know if your alarm clock is going off four hours from now or 15 minutes from now. Don't check it. Don't look.  If your alarm clock's not going to go for four hours, you're going to fall back asleep. If it goes off 15 minutes later, you got seven hours and 45 minutes of sleep and 15 minutes of box breathing, now you're at your best. Get up and go. Once you realize that the best you can possibly be for tomorrow is if that's all you've done. If anything pops up in your head that's on that list, you go, that's on my list. I do that in the morning. I'm not, why am I going to handle it now? Why am I going to worry about something? I can't physically take any action on. It's on my list. I'm going to do it in the morning. Like once you can get yourself to believe that, then you can truly relax. And as soon as people can truly relax and just lay there, they don't have any idea how much they slept, right? Because all they did was meditate and sleep. And maybe they slept eight hours. Maybe they slept four hours. Maybe they slept six hours. They don't know. They know they meditated for a while and they know they slept for a while. And then over time, you'll just sleep the whole night. Something I just started doing, which I mean, now talking about it's obvious, but a lot of us when we're in bed, we'll go on our phones, right? Terrible idea, right? This is, we'll read articles, social media, whatever. For a long time, people read paper books in bed. And so for myself, if I have issues with sleep, what can happen with me is I'll start thinking about something and then my mind will start to spin around that. And then it becomes very difficult. But if I read a fiction book, not nonfiction, nonfiction will get me spinning. I start to read about something, biography or something interesting, I can stay up. But if I read fiction on paper with a little dim light or whatever, it puts me up in a dreamland very quickly. So that's a new thing that I started. So that's the same technique, right? So we're just replacing the book with box breathing, progressive house relaxation, meditation, prayer, like whatever it is that you do to relax yourself. Just find like three or four ways to reduce your stress, figure out what works for you and you do that. And we're just replacing that because the book can get interesting, right? And that can push you off in those 30 minutes. Yeah, you're right. You're right.  You could wear blue blocking glasses, but it just makes more sense to say, Yeah, you're right. Hey, I have 16 hours to do everything I can get done in a day. I have eight hours to repair and prepare for tomorrow. And if I want to be prepared tomorrow, because obviously my goal tomorrow is to be the best I can. There's no way I can be my best if I don't get eight hours of sleep, right? What do you do about when you travel? We just went through like a month and a half of five time zones in 30 days. I mean, it was crazy.  Are there any ways you could help, I guess, accelerate the acclimation to a new time zone or maybe mitigate some negatives? So that can get super complex and convoluted and people forget when I try to get too technical with it. The easiest thing I can say is that if you stimulate your brain and body early in the morning, you will go to sleep earlier that night.  If you want to go to bed later, you put that stuff later in the day. All right. So if you put bright lights in your eyes at 7 p.m., you do 30 minutes of bright light therapy and you don't need a high-lux box or whatever, but you don't stare in the light. It's like 30 degrees above this.   I don't recommend tanning beds, but you know the idea. So you get a lot of light. That will make it harder to go to sleep, because that's revving up your cortisol levels again.  And then exercise. Exercise raises your heart rate, raises your metabolic rate, all the stuff, and it makes it harder to go to sleep. So if you fly somewhere, it's like, hey man, bedtime. I want to go to bed right now. I need to stay up for four more hours.  At the opposite, it's true. Here I am waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and I'm not going to be sleepy when 10 o'clock comes around tonight. Get your bright light therapy. Get your exercise in the morning. And then of course, you can use stimulants to kind of push things out. But I don't recommend that. The half-life of caffeine is ridiculously variable. It's anywhere from like four hours to 30 hours. So you need to know where you lay on that continuum. Then it's like genetic, right? Like how your liver breaks it down. Yeah, it's a hugely genetic thing.  And then, you know, if you aren't getting good sleep when you're traveling, I highly recommend naps. I mean, there's a lot of controversy around that. There's a great book by Sarah Mednick out of UCSD called Take an App, and it has this little wheel on it. And you can put in what time you woke up and what you're trying to optimize. You're trying to optimize creativity, cognitive functioning, or overall health. She'll tell you what time of day to take an app and for how long. Yeah, if you take a really short nap, it increases creativity. If you take a medium nap, creativity and cognitive functioning, executive functioning.   You get all the metabolic hormonal repair and improvement and all that stuff. So we've asked a lot of questions that I think will add tremendous value to the audience. So I have some selfish stuff that I want to ask you. Like seal stuff. Badest seal you've ever met, why? Well, I mean, there's a caveat to that because like I didn't operate with a lot of these, it was a lot of guys I know, right? So as far as the guys that like I've trained with and I know really well, my buddy that I talked about taking down to Mexico for the Ibogaine, hardest man I've ever known in my life. Like can't even imagine him dying.   And he was serious. I mean, like we all know of grizzly bear, but he's a super hard man.  And I mean, he, one of my all time favorite books. Just surviving that. Like you've got to be one of the hardest men on the planet to live through what he's lived through and for it not to cognitively destroy you too. To live with all of that too. What's the spectrum look like? I mean, obviously anyone who makes it has got to be kind of a heart.  Is there a spectrum within that spectrum? Like is there, I mean, you've got these 10 or 12 guys in this group and there's- For sure. Okay. I mean, there's, you know, it's a community and it takes all kinds of guys. Like, you know, when I went through SEAL training, like SEALs are bigger now. Like once they started getting some kind of celebrity status then it got super competitive to get into SEAL training. Like I couldn't even get into SEAL training now. Really? It's changed that life. Like you have people with PhDs going in and listed just because it's so hard to get in, you know? I mean, it's a super competitive. And I don't know about now, but, you know, during the war it definitely was that crazy. But, you know, when I went through SEAL training, everybody was a little Enduro machine, man. Because that's all we did. We just ran, swam, calisthenics, calisthenics, run, swam.  And everybody there was like five foot eight. And that was 150 pounds. That was one of the first thing that surprised me was the size of your SEAL.   I'm like, you kidding me, dude? Just like, you know, actually, I mean, towards the end of Bud's I could keep up, but I lost a ton of weight in Bud's. Like, I lost 40 pounds in six months. Whoa. Yeah. Oh. And I wasn't fat at all. I mean, I was very lean when I started, but I just lost all my muscle. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What are the characteristics that make, like, the baddest SEAL? I mean, what is it? You have to have a little bit of crazy to you. Are you just hard as nails? Resilient?  Two player, yeah. I think a clear set of principles, you know, that's always a good guidance tool for anything in the world, you know, because there's always going to be confusing situations. And so when you have a really clear why and clear set of principles, why you do the things you do and why you're there, that helps a lot. You obviously have to be, I don't know if athletic is the right term, but, you know, very physically adaptable and strong and resilient. But, you know, to make it through training, like most of my friends and I, the consensus amongst all of us has always been that the guys who make it are the guys who are literally, legitimately, willing to die to make it through training. Yeah, because I saw.  But I remember half a dozen times and Bud's thinking, I'm about to die. Like I can't keep doing this. This is going to kill me. But I'm quitting. So here we go.   Right. It's the mental part that fucks in. It's what you just explained right there. Are you willing to just keep doing this? Yeah. And, you know, the SEAL teams forever have been trying to predict success. Because 85% of the people fail, which means 85 cents of every dollar that goes into training is wasted. So it's a huge financial gain if they can predict success. And one of my good friends is a sports psychologist and they hired him. He spent like two years trying to figure out a success pathway. Like some markers, like what can we do? And he finally came to a conclusion and said, I can't predict success, but I can predict failure. And he said, the amount of adversity that you've had in your life is the best predictor of whether or not you'll make it. And if the worst things ever happened to you as your parents got divorced, you shouldn't be coming here. I was going to ask you that. I had a similar childhood as you did. And I think that's part of what has always made me very interested in SEALs and stuff like that. I would, is most the guy at 18 years old, if you have that switch of I'm willing to go till I die, I would imagine most all of them that make it come from a kind of a rough background. I doubt you get the... We were the dirty dozen back then.   I knew four of those guys. And like in one platoon, I had four of those guys in my platoon. Like, it's legitimate.  Like, you guys need to up the stuff. I like 18 years old and I know exactly what you're doing and this isn't tricking me at all. Do you remember when that's, so it took me till I was about my mid to late 20s before I shifted my mindset from the victim mentality of feeling sorry for the way I grew up to realizing like, oh, shit, this is my superpower was I went through a lot more than the average kid had to go through. And so it made, do you remember at what point in your life that you kind of, because I'm sure as a young 17, 18 year old, you probably hated your stepdad and maybe even had some resentment towards your mom because she married him some more to like me. At what point did that switch? Well, so I think for me, my mom didn't get remarried till I was eight. And so I had been the man of the house for my mom, her sister, my sister, and my grandmother. I was the only male there. They sent me out in the living room with my red rider BB gun when they thought they heard something at two in the morning. Like that, you know, so I thought like I was the man in the family.   And I really thought I could step in and protect, right? And then of course, I couldn't. I was eight and, you know, and so that screwed with my mindset for a while. But he knew, he knew my real father. And my real father was bigger, stronger, smarter. You're better looking like whatever. And so he really hated me because I was like the potential of that. And his biggest fear was that I was going to grow up to be a better man than he was or something. And because I knew that about my father, I just thought, well, I'm going to be like my father and then I'm going to kick his ass, right? It was like, and so like, I started lifting weights like immediately, like the first Christmas we were married. I, or they were married. I told my mom, I want to wait set. I didn't know how to do anything, but I just like did overhead press with that hollow bar with this red concrete. Yeah, we all worked out. And I just, I just lifted weights all day. And then I, you know, I did martial arts and I boxed and I played football on a rain track and field. And just like, I was just going to be so big and strong that, you know, and that was kind of my mindset the whole time. So I had two brothers and two sisters though that all ended up shattered lives, alcoholic drug addicts and all that other stuff. Like none of them adopted that mindset that I had.    And fortunately the cops showed up and I didn't end up in prison for the rest of my life, but that was the end of any animosity between he and I. And then, okay, did you still like, I was out by 17. So I left. They got divorced when I was 16. Oh, so. And then he broke into our house. Oh, so it was after. Tour the house, all the pieces. I came home, blood everywhere, furniture broken.  We were in my mom's car, my sister's driving.    Yeah. Real quick. Wow. Man, that's crazy. Yeah, later on when you were, you know, doing, have you done the psychedelic therapy and all that stuff? I've done all, pretty much all of it. When you do that, did that help? Because obviously it turned you into who you were, but then there's also side effects of that, right? Did you ever try to integrate all that? Yeah, I mean, I definitely repress a lot of stuff. Of course. I don't have any, I have very, very few memories from my childhood. It's like almost none. Most of what I know, it's because my brothers and sisters have talked about it 50 times and now I remember it, but had, if they didn't talk about it, I would have, I think I have none other than maybe the story I just told you. That's probably the one I would remember. And the first psychedelic I did was ayahuasca. Oh, you went big right out of the game. And it was three nights, three nights in a row. And I kept trying to reflect on my childhood and I couldn't.  I don't know because I was so gone. Like I'm so sensitive psychedelic, just a joke. This is years and years ago. I had a girlfriend at the time and she was 110 pounds. She took twice as much as I did. Like I took it, they said, hey, we're going to give you this 45 minutes later, to an hour later, we'll ask you if anybody wants more.   I was just like, and I just remember, I'm just laying there going, too much, too much.  It felt like 300 different images per second, just like everything was flipping so fast. And I was just overwhelmed going, whoa. And I'm like, I don't know how I'm going to get anything out of this because I can't think, like I can't even concentrate on any of this. It's going so fast. And then after a long time of laying there, I'm like, geez, maybe this is almost over. Like maybe even second. And then I hear them go, anybody want seconds? And I was like, oh man, my heart just sank. And then my girlfriend's like, I do. I'm like, oh, it's so emasculating. And then she goes up there and gets it and still like, and then the next night I tried to do it, the next night I tried to do it. I did five in me ODMT, which is just like a super universal one, this kind of meeting God thing, ego death kind of. But that's super fast. Almost never is there negative things in that. I did psilocybin, I did psilocybin retreat. And I fought, I fought Satan through it. Like that's all I could figure it was. Like I fought Satan for like six hours. And I still couldn't think of my stepdad. I did Ibogaine. Have you tried ketamine therapy? I've never, I've never tried ketamine. I just did that. Eight weeks of ketamine therapy. That was really interesting. So that one. I've done the ketamine nasal spray. I've never done the ketamine injections or IB. So you know the research better than I do, but from what I've read on this, because I got really into it, for certain types of PTSD, those cluster of symptoms or whatever, it seems to be really good because it's such a strong disassociative. So literally, because the theory is the reason why people don't remember these memories or why they're repressed is you can't, your brain doesn't, it's safe. It's not safe. Sorry. And I can't let you remember this. Right. And so the disassociative makes literally because you can disassociate, you feel safe enough to have. Yeah. And that was experience I had. My wife did the same thing, huge one. So. Yeah.  Right. So it's like, there's no solutions there.  It's like, oh, see that, see that, see that. A lot of people do Ibogaine and say, you know, that they watch themselves, watch themselves, you know. And that's one of the ways you get the ego out of it because if it's not you doing it. There's a term for that, it's like super something, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of brilliant.  And the idea of that, but you know, and it's probably had a lot to do with the amygdala tone going away, being less stressed, opening up your prefrontal cortex and all that. But yeah, we protect ourselves all the time.  Like everything's like, they're, and 90% of it's subconscious, but you get rid of that. And then you can go back and reconsider things. And that's where neuroplasticity comes from. Neuroplasticity is that I don't think about the same thing the same way all the time, right? So I get to see it and go, well, that's kind of a dumb idea. Like I always do that. Like here's 20 examples in my life of me doing that thing. Now I didn't solve it. I still have to figure out how I don't do it in the future. And the longer that neuroplasticity- You gotta go see it first. Yeah, but you have to see it first. And so, you get the answers and then you start going through, hey, well, I gotta do, I gotta do the work. I gotta keep on this. I gotta figure out how I'm gonna not do that anymore. And then the longer the higher the durability of whatever you're using, the more chances you had to do that, right?  If you don't do anything, you just go right back to where you were. Well, some people just do these easy to sit almost like it's a high. It's gonna be popular. Yeah, the therapy that I did was with a therapist. So it was all legit compound. I mean, that's the only way to do it now. And we didn't start doing it that way in the special warfare community, but we're doing it that way now.  Here you go. And it's not. It doesn't feel, maybe it wasn't safe. It can actually make things worse. Some of those people come out with like really terrible experiences. Right. You have kids? I do have three. You have three? What are the ages? 25, 23, and 19.   You're 25-year-old. What was that like?  The way I used my childhood experience and my stepfather was, I'm not doing this to sound like a victim, I'm gonna be hyperbolic, but he's genuinely the worst person I know. Like in every metric of how I'd measure somebody, he's the worst person I know. So anytime I came to a crossroads, I'd go, what would he do? I'd go, just do the opposite. Just do the opposite. I feel, don't you feel like- I've never raised a hand on my kids.  It's like, you know, taking away your phone or whatever, something like that. But yeah, I mean, I think it, you know, at the end of the day, it probably made me a much more compassionate father because I just realized- What not to do? I feel like you- Like how dysfunctional it was. You're one of the other in that situation. Yeah, you have to repeat the cycle.  The only people I've ever met in my life who are like, I never touch alcohol, never touch whatever, drugs, whatever, it's because they- The parents are alcohol. Yes. And they're just like, no, I'm no interest whatsoever, you know? Well, I grew up similarly.  Like the Jerry Springer show, people were, and that was popular. I was like, why do people watch this? And it's like- This is my neighbor's side. I was like, my family does this, like all this stuff. I know, like every kind of criminal you could imagine I had in my family. Like I had 27 cousins, I think 25 of the 27 are in prison or in prison. And they were all into drugs, you know? And they were all into criminal activity. And I was just like, I'm not going to be that person, man.  I'm like, dude, that's just like heroin to me. Like you're putting a needle in yourself and you're taking a drug like, oh no, I'm not doing any of that. And I drank beer, but I wouldn't let myself get drunk.  I just never wanted to relinquish that control and maybe get to where I was going to do something really stupid. Yeah. So I kind of had that same response, even though it wasn't like my parents, but just growing up in an environment like that where you see the holes that everybody are digging for themselves every day. Yeah, yeah. And it was like, I can't go down that path. I mean, now that you have kids that are that grown and you look back now, what do you think are some of the best things that you did raising them as a father and then maybe what are some things you might have done differently or maybe mistakes that you did? Well, if I'm honest, I raised my boys and my daughter completely different. So I have two sons and a daughter. My boys, I was probably a little insufficient in my empathy and compassion for them. He was a little harder on them. I was a little harder on them just because I'm traditional.  Like that's kind of part of it for me and not necessarily right. So that would be my regret, but I think the benefit for them is that I showed them a way to be masculine and strong and definitive and a provider and a protector and not be a prick. Maybe they've seen me angry once.  That's why I get there four hours early. That's a big joke going around here. And then my daughter's a little bit the other way.  I got two and two. You know what's funny is that you're talking to a lot of parents and I see this with my wife too.   And I think it's because we get, like I get what's going on with my boy. You know what I mean? So it's like now, I might- Well, we know what it's like to be a boy. We know what they're trying to pull and like- Yeah, and the same thing with moms and daughters. And we don't think that about, like we don't think women do the things they do. Yeah, especially with an interesting daughter, right? Like you get really close to women, she starts telling you how women are like, what? Women do that? Are you kidding me? I would have never thought that. I would have never thought that. Just planned? Yeah. I remember my daughter, she, we, I had my kids like 50, 50, we got divorced with their mom. And so they had two weeks of my house, two weeks of their house. And there was an overlap for Halloween. They were doing two different Halloweens. And so they did Halloween in my neighborhood first. And they got, I mean buckets of candy, like just huge. And I'm like, hey, y'all just leave that candy here and you're going to your mom's to do that there. And when you come back here, you'll have your candy here. And then I went in my daughter's bedroom to tuck her in later on and her candy wasn't up on the counter. And I was like, where's your candy baby? And she's like, I don't know. It's a little sketchy. And I'm like, what do you mean you don't know? She's like, I don't know. I left it up there. And I kind of move some things. And I'm like, is it in your backpack? And she's like, no. And I'm like, I'm going to open this backpack. Are you sure it's not in there? And she's crying, no, it's not in there. And I opened, of course, this in there. And I did this thing where like, I didn't pay my kids real money, but I paid them, I went to like the dollar store and I get those like fake bills. And I paid them for their chores and for their work. And they get money for grades and for good manners and whatever. And I would take money away. We had this chart on the wall, all these things they wanted.  And so my daughter was saving to go to Paris. And I'm like, I forgot. Taking a hundred dollars away or something like that. And it was like, she literally had to save like $10,000 because like it's big bills I'm giving them. And I take that away and she's just screaming and crying. She's like, I'm never going to get to Paris. And she just bawling her eyes out.  I'm like, honey, you knew the rules. Like, you know, everybody tries to do these things. It's not right. And you lied to me and like, you know, I'm just super calm. And I went in my room, I nearly threw up. I nearly threw up. And I sat in my room and cried for like five minutes. And I was like, oh, wow, like my new nervous system was shaking like crazy. Yeah. She's always had that power of me.  I'm like, walk it off. You'll be fine. You'll be testing on it. Which one, which one? Where's your daughter fall? She's the youngest? She's the youngest. Oh, okay. So she's 19. Yeah. So what happened? She's at UC Irvine. Okay.   Yeah, no, no, no. I don't know. I don't know.  She's at UC Irvine. So like she could have whatever going on. But like every time I see her or see her on social media, whatever, randomly there's a guy in the picture. But she's kind of like a goody t-shirt girl, which is great, great for me. Good for you. Yeah. That's great. I'm happy for that. Yeah.  That has to be the biggest fear of every father right now, right? Like you're like, yeah, when I was a kid, it's like your job as a dad is to keep your daughter off the pole, right? If she's on the pole, you failed. There's no way around that, you know. And now it's like, if she's an Instagram model. Have you seen that meme where the guy in a girl at the bar and he's like, what do you do? She said, Instagram model. He said, what do you do? Yeah, what do you do? I'm a soldier, call the duty. I haven't seen that. I'm a soldier for call of duty. Well, good deal, man. This has been great. We've been having a great conversation. Glad we finally leaked up. We got two mutual friends. So we'll make sure that people check out your book. It's the title we have it up there, Sleep to Win, How Navy Seals and Other High Performers. Stay on top, great stuff. You have incredible insight. And I really love meeting people with a medical background who also walk the walk. You just, the great combination of experience and book knowledge and application application. Yeah, I think the medical community has been in a bad place for a long time, but it totally emulated during COVID. I don't think anybody's going to, I'm kind of embarrassed to say I'm a doctor. And I'm really not. I mean, I'm really a health coach that can prescribe, because I do lifestyle modification is really what I do. And it takes about a year to do that. So I do annual programs. But yeah, it's a shame that doctors have been so much led the way they have. But you think about who becomes a doctor. It's like people who are really good at following the rules. Right? Like people who are great students and do all the things they're supposed to be doing. And that's what gets them into medical school. And then it's really hard to convince them they've been duped. And the pharmaceutical industry, I used to think this was such a big conspiracy, boarded COVID changed my mind about a lot of stuff. But you think about it. I don't think it was really intentional. Nobody thought this through. But all of the research dollars to the big universities come from the pharmaceutical industry. And then who's doing the research? The guys who are the medical school professors and what are they teaching what they're doing research on. And then when you become a doctor and they get a panel of all these guys who've been doing researches at the top levels and then they set what the standard of care is. It's based off their research and what they've taught their medical students. And now you come out of there and all you know how to do is prescribe pills and procedures. And that's not health. I mean, that's disease care, right? And so like the biggest, well, the seals, the seal teams are the best thing in my life twice. I mean, the first time as a seal probably kept me out of prison. And then the second time made me realize there's a huge difference between health and disease free, right? And like this is just performance. Like guys, there's plenty of really healthy people that can't perform the way they want to perform. Because I know things and I have the expertise to help them do that. And it has nothing to do with them having a disease or even being close to a disease. It's not pathology. It prevents disease, right? So what you do with it? That prevents disease. Absolutely. You're keeping them out of the systems. Great. Well, again, thanks again, Dr. Parsons. This has been awesome. And hopefully we'll have it back on.  We'll give that thing to your guys. Absolutely. That sheet, that worksheet. Oh, for sure. 100%. That's the easiest. I was going to ask anyway, because once you said that, I know our listeners are going to want to check out that worksheet. Yeah. And it's just forewarning. It seems ridiculously easy, but it is the most powerful thing I do. That's part of the whole of that. That way makes things powerful. It's good timing, too. We actually just wrote a program for 40 plus. And it's the first time we wrote a program where we actually put a ton of emphasis on lifestyle. And a lot of it is the stuff that you talked about. Yeah, yeah. It'll align perfect. Excellent. I love it. Yeah. Thanks again. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.