Barbell Shrugged - 158- The 1 Thing That Will Make You Better at Everything

Episode Date: January 7, 2015

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Dr. Kirk Parsley, and we talk about the one thing that will make you better at everything. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellsug. I'm Mike Bloods here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore. And we're standing here with Dr. Doc. I always call you Doc Parsley. I was going to say Dr. Doc Parsley. Dr. Kirk Parsley. Apropos.

Yes. He is an actual medical doctor. One of the few that will actually come on this show. And we appreciate it. All the other medical doctors hate us. I'm saying. We had you on back at Paleo FX in April-ish. And I don't know when the show actually posted.

But we got real deep into sleep and hormones and you freaked everybody out. Yes. People listening to the show and they were like, holy shit, I'm like, I'm going to die. I'm all blown out.

Like everyone was convinced that they were all screwed up and hopefully, you know. And a lot of those people have emailed me. Oh yeah, yeah,

I'm sure. I heard you on Barbell Shrug. Yeah. Can you fix me? Can you fix my life? Doc, I can't sleep. Help me out.

Either you ruined my life or can you fix me? I live in Canada. Can we talk over the phone and fix this? Probably not. Might need a little more interaction than that.

One of the things you're trying to do is just educate people on this. Because most of the problems that people have are self-induced. They just choose to not do this or that.

Before we go any further make sure you go to barbell shrug.com sign up for the newsletter no it's good all right the one plug all right we can move on uh so what have you been you've been digging into some new stuff or or uh getting deeper on some things since april what what are those things yeah well i i don't know that there's a category for for the type of things I geek out on. I just kind of go wherever my brain takes me. So I just got back from doing a gig with Reno PD. Rob Wolf and I did it, brought in a psychologist friend of mine from NSW who does a lot with the resiliency.

What's NSW for everybody? Oh, Naval Special Warfare. So he's been working with us. That sounds serious. He's been working with the SEALs for most of his career. He's developed some good programs to help people maintain mental resiliency during times of fatigue or times of stress and so forth. And obviously a lot of what I'm talking about is physical resiliency and, you know, um,

not even if it's not for the, you know, kind of, uh, better judgment and fewer errors during stressful times. It's, you know, to increase your performance or to help you meet your goals or whatever.

And then obviously nutrition fits in a hugely. So Rob and I, and, uh, and this, and this guy, Eric, we're,

you know, all kind of doing that. DOJ is looking at that project. Department of Justice? Yeah. Ah, that's good. There you go. You got a good one. I've actually had to deal with those people in the past. Oh, we won't ask you why. No. We don't have time. We don't have time to get into that story.

And you are a doctor and you were a Navy SEAL as well, so that's a really good fit for you. You understand what those guys are going through. Yeah, so the law enforcement guys and agency guys in DOJ, they have very similar day-to-day issues as SEALs. And overall, by and large, they have kind of the same long-term health issues. And a lot of that has to do with excess stress and you know the way those types of communities are even been in one, you could imagine how those guys behave

around each other and kind of the social pressure to perform even when you can't and so forth. And limited control over their diet, limited control over when they sleep and they end up fucked up.

Yeah, they end up with a lot of health problems. They end up dying about 10 to 15 years earlier than the average American. So did doctors, by the way. Big surprise. So no control over their health and a highly competitive performance-driven environment. Exactly. Yeah. And so since I've been out of the military, I've, you know,

obviously I still work with any of the team guys. How long have you been out? January 13, coming up on two years. Have you fixed yourself yet? Everybody here is kind of, are we all fucked up? We can all agree on that a little bit on some level. I am fixing myself. I'm in the process, and I'm, you know, the meter, the meters move in the right direction.

We'll, we'll leave that. There's no done. No, it's like saying you're fit enough or you're strong enough or it's like, yeah, yeah. It's like eating. It's like eating once and for all, or, you know, brushing your teeth once. I finally, I did that. I finally flossed. It's it right now.

So, you know, it's an ongoing process. Um, but you know, one, one of the things the things that I ran into in the corporate culture that I didn't really have to deal with with the SEALs, and by and large, you don't really have to deal with law enforcement officers or paramilitary or anything like that. You know, those guys, they come to me because they trust me. They want my opinion. I tell them what to do and they do it and usually they build some huge geeky spreadsheet and track like 500 metrics and report to me on a regular basis and they're really sort of hands-off like you know go forth conquer and do great things with this little bit of information i gave you and and they go crazy

uh the corporate sector is much different. It's like, well, I hear what you're saying, but that doesn't really work for me. I don't really have time to do that. You don't get it. My story is completely different than everybody else's story. I'm a unique snowflake

and I own a $500 billion business. So things are different for me. I can't sleep eight hours. That's not realistic. So what else you got for me kind of thing? And I'm like, I can't help you. I'm like, well, you know, two plus two is always four. Like you're never going to be able to change that, that equation for you.

I'm never, never going to be able to optimize your health if you aren't willing to eat right and sleep right and reduce your stress and get in some reasonable amount of activity. And of course, again, with law enforcement enforcement they're a lot like military uh the big trick on them is pulling them back from doing too much activity especially when they're not metabolically fit to be doing any activity and they still want to go do fight gun bad and see if they can hit their record or you know something like that um so anyways that's a very long digression into kind of what i've been geeking out on is how do you actually change people's behavior? Because, you know, I keep going further down the rabbit hole on to, you know, how this changes this neurotransmitter and how that changes this and what it does to this region of the brain or what it does to your insulin sensitivity and how that affects mitochondrial density or, you know, what's going on in your cells or fuel partitioning, the metabolic energetics of when you're working out,

like how that changes when you're sleep deprived, when you're stressed, when you have excess sympathetic. I could go forever down there. It's a profoundly deep issue. That's all physiology. Psychology didn't play into the equation yet. And then I can explain that to my patients. First of all all half the corporate

world doesn't want to doesn't even want to know they don't care they're like just doc just tell me what time it is i don't care how the clock works just tell me what time it is i'm like all right it's this time go to it and then they i can't do that i don't have time all right all right bro uh let me so that'll be a thousand dollars yeah it's gonna be the same price either way do it don't do it i don't really care pay the secretary anyway um so uh so i really started just kind of getting down into that uh and then i'm by no means an expert on it but now i'm i'm really intrigued uh you know basically by the concept the general concept that most of us would call willpower right and so uh you know how can i make a change in my life that i want to do how can i um take a motivated client who's at least

willing to dabble around in this and give him present it in a way give him action actionable steps in a way that gives him the highest probability of some good returns really quickly so that he'll be motivated to continue. And then what you find is like, okay, there's the psychology. Psychologists have dug into this forever, and they have all sorts of tricks to tell you here are the action steps. And they can talk about all the physiology that's going on, what, you know, dopamine is this huge urge can, you know, urge controlling thing. But then when you start looking at the fact, well, if you have wild fluctuations in your blood glucose, then all of this regions of your brain changes. And that's the region that you're using for willpower. That's the region that you need for willpower to actually work. So the little

trick I gave you, isn't going to actually work so the little trick i gave you isn't going to work if you're sleep deprived and it's not going to work if you're just you know bombed your gut with a bunch of carbs and you're a pre-diabetic or it's not hardware is not functional right so so now it's like how do i intertwine those two things how do i get people to understand to some degree how they're breaking themselves and how to fix themselves. But also give them an actionable plan and make them realize that when they can't follow these simple actions, it's not because they're weak people or they're unmotivated or because they took the red eye or whatever their damn excuse is. It's because you're metabolically broken right now. And hence the reason we're trying to metabolically fix you. So now I go into kind of,

I kind of split off on going too deep down than my original rabbit hole. And now I have to like present them with this other information and say, so by the way, if you just say you're going to fix your sleep, for instance, and you're not going to do a damn thing about your diet, you're going to fail. And here's why.

And then you go through the physiology of how their nutrition is going to affect their ability to make change. And then you do the same thing. If you're only going to fix your diet and you're not going to, and you tell me you have to be up at 3am in order to talk to the markets in London, all of that stuff you always hear, if you're not going to do this and you're not going to do that, then here's going to be the consequences. And so I kind of break it down into four pillars, right? There's nutrition. There's sleep. I call it activity because some of these guys are just not fit enough to do anything

that we call exercise, right? It's like just walk. Like walk around your block once or something. Right. Keep going. And then some sort of stress modulation, whether you're into an esoter stress modulation whether that's you know whether you're into an esoteric form of that and you want to go you know crazy with that or if you're just

a super scientific guy and you want like a heart rate variability training device and that's just more masturbation doc works like a charm it does that releases some neuro neurotransmitters that are very good for relaxation you know and it's actually supposed to induce sleep where you know one of the things i used to put in my lecture ox relaxation. It's actually supposed to induce sleep. One of the things I used to put in my lecture, oxytocin release is actually supposed to improve sleep. And it's supposed to do it for both sexes. Mike's like, that works every night, totally. I want to take a nap.

No matter how awake or tired I am, that's... Yeah, that works. But it seems that somewhere along the way somewhere along the last several hundred years there's been some sort of evolutionary twist in female DNA where it makes them

talk and ask questions and yeah that is a problem yeah like damn it it would be so much

better if you weren't in the room right now I don't mean that the way it sounds your wife isn't going to watch this show and you know it

it's not that I want you gone. She would never watch your show. You can't be here anymore. Don't go away mad. Just go away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sounds idealistic. Sounds like solo's the way to go.

Yeah, solo's the way to go. You are the master of yourself in so many ways. And there's so many puns I could pull off. Yeah, so just did that. you're the master of yourself in so many ways and there's so many puns I could pull off. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. So just did that. And then obviously the, the week before, or a few days before that, um, I was doing the Silphid gig and it was really kind of some very similar stuff about that. So the unbeatable mind. Uh, yeah, yeah. That's actually, it was the unbeatable mind retreat is the name of it. Mind. Yeah, yeah. That's actually what it was. What was the name of the event? It was the Unbeatable Mind Retreat is the name of it, yeah.

Which is just a great program. I was really impressed by that. I think he's doing a great job. That thing's grown a lot. Let's go there next year. Is that a thing we can go to? I really want to go, but we were flying back while it was going. From the airport when it was going.

Well, last year we did it, and they basically just put up one of those catering tents in his courtyard of his event. There was probably about a 20 to 30 knot wind blowing and it was raining. All they had to lecture with was one of those flip charts and some markers. I show up with my notebook computer and a PowerPoint and they're like, oh, we never thought of that. I never thought you wouldn we never thought of that. And I said, oh, I never thought of that. I never thought you wouldn't have thought of that. We are at an impasse here. We have to figure something out, man.

And I was like, I don't think I can do my lecture without a PowerPoint just because of the way I build it and how complex it is. You have to have a lot of sort of graphics. But all my transitions won't appear. My points will be lost. I did some really cool things uh um so yeah they they moved me inside and put me on like a television screen like a 60 inch television and it was okay but this year like they didn't legit they rented out a big conference room and it went all the way had had the biggest

resort went actually went the opposite i think they went to the way. Had the biggest... The Omni Resort. Actually, it went the opposite. I think they went to the largest projection screen I had ever lectured in front of. Oh, sweet. It's kind of like that general patent thing where he's walking in front of that huge flag. It was this enormous PowerPoint. I'm like, jeez, please. Like the letters of my name

was actually the same height as me. Yeah, that was a great event and they had some great speakers. like the letters of my name was actually the same height as me. So yeah, that was a great event and had some great speakers. And yeah, that's about it. You know, still trying to get this sleep supplement out and you know, talking about building a sleep supplement where you're going to try to actually market that involves a lot of the same thing,

right? Like how do you, how do you explain to people why they need this? And you want to tell everyone about the sleep actually hear about what's in the supplement i heard that you were doing it but didn't hear well there's a provisional patent on the supplement so my lawyers will not allow me to tell you what's okay first of all proprietary blend plus these things that you probably talk about so actually it would it would not take a budding genius to figure out what's in the sleep formulation basically if you go into a textbook and you look at you look up the physiology of what changes in your brain

uh when and your body um what when you're going to sleep um and what changes when you wake up um and what things people tend to be deficient on there you have it like this is usually here this this turns into that that turns into that and people are usually deficient on there you have it like this is usually here this this turns into that that turns into that and people are usually deficient in this and this and this and you add those things together but it's all just the the normal physiological pathway to shutting down your adrenal function at night which is uh over simplification but basically by the way a lot of a lot of your people like write me these, well, what you said wasn't exactly correct because of that. I'm like, yeah, I know. Thanks, bud.

I didn't have 40 hours. I had one hour. So this is an oversimplification. Yeah, there's a time to oversimplify. Wikipedia says that's not true, doc. So really, by and large, your adrenals are what keep you awake. It's a little more complicated than that. There's some other weight promoting neurotransmitters,

which are essentially just hormones in the brain. There's no active mechanism to make you go to sleep. There's not a switch that just goes... I wish there were. Now already I'm going to get 500 emails because there's going to be somebody who says, yeah, they found a sleep center switch and they just released an article two months ago. I read the article. I got it. Okay.

But was it a single piece of, uh, was it a single study or, or it was, it was a quality study. Um, but what, but it's not something you can capitalize on just because they say, well, okay, this, this little nucleus in the brain, this little area of neurons is highly specific to reacting to this neurotransmitter, which has a lot to do with the cascade of falling asleep. It's interesting, but we need a little more work. It's like, okay, great, but I can't go put a toggle switch on that neuron. It doesn't really help the fact that, by and large, you have a lot of chemicals, neurochemicals. We'll just call them all hormones i call them all hormones because they all do the same thing and in fact if they're in your blood

they're called hormones the same thing in your brain is called a neurotransmitter although it's exactly the same substance so um you have a bunch of hormones in your body that promote wakefulness and you have a bunch of hormones in your brain that promote wakefulness so being able to sleep just is actually the absence of being awake it's the absence of all those weight promoting neurons or and neurotransmitters and hormones so you get those hormones to go low and you go to sleep and then they actually go lower while you're asleep and that would that's what allows you to go into deeper sleep and then when you start coming back up in the lighter levels of sleep those weight promoting neuron or neurotransmitters and hormones are actually higher so i guess like stress uh hectic family life work up into the

late pm hours busy mind all that is just stoking the adrenal yeah exactly because the the adrenals you know when when you when you just try to take it down to the essence and say all right let's just talk about one little aspect of right by and, the adrenals are the easiest thing and the most sort of comprehensive thing to talk about. There's always downstream effects of any hormone. You can't just affect one hormone in the body. It's not possible, right? Like, you just move one. We're all kind of interconnected.

And if you change one, you have really no idea how that's going to affect the others. Right, right, right. Which is why there's so many problems with pharmaceuticals because they just try to, well, I'm just going to fix this one little thing. There, got it.

That one symptom is going to go away. And then three months later, you got this other problem. Five billion other changes are going to occur that we don't know what those things are going to be in each individual.

Speaking of pharmaceuticals, last time you were here, you said that a lot of people are taking sleeping pills and they're going to sleep, but you pointed out they're not actually going to sleep. They're just unconscious, right? Which isn't the same thing at all. Right. How does that differ hormonally? So, um, so, you know, what we're just talking about with you, let's just, let's just equate adrenal, adrenal levels with being awake. and which is which is a pretty pretty solid comparison so right now we're sitting in a pretty cool environment and our adrenals

aren't doing a whole lot but they're keeping us alert to what's around us right so if a guy you know climbs in that door and starts shooting a gun like our adrenal our adrenal functions are going to go my mind actually went up yeah they're going to go way higher, right? If we're going through bankruptcy, our adrenal functions are going to be high all the time. If we're constantly trying to do things for work, even though it's time to be slowing down to go to sleep, our adrenal functions are going to be higher.

If we get home and our wife's pissed off at us because we've been working all day and our kids need X, Y, and Z, and we've got to do all this and that. Then that's going to raise our adrenals. So demanding. Baby, my adrenals are fried. Get off my ass. I can't wait to hear the next excuse.

By the way, this is not towards my actual wife. This is a joke for the show. Jania didn't really stop. The hole's dug. Just climb in it. Just climb in it. I'm going to nestle it down in this hole now so if you take a drug like if you do some sort of

pharmacological trick that removes consciousness all the hormones are still there so the normal sleep architecture doesn't happen like that going really deep and coming back up into REM and going really deep again. There's different things that happen at each stage of sleep. It doesn't matter if you're taking Ambien or Benadryl or Valium or drinking alcohol or whatever you're doing that's sedating you into going to sleep. You're messing with your brain's awareness essentially. whatever you're doing that's sedating you into going to sleep, you are just,

you're messing with your brain's awareness essentially. Right. And once you get rid of a lot of the awareness, then you don't think about all the stressors and you can kind of drift off. But all of those stress hormones are still up in your body. This is like the most slippery of slopes at that point, right? Cause now you can't even perceive what's going on in your life and now you can't really fix it.

And yeah. And what happens with the sleep drugs is that they just remove your awareness of the environment. And you can actually have a conversation with somebody under the influence of some of these drugs. And it's not everybody, but a substantial amount of people can take these drugs and get up and do all kinds of stuff. I heard that if you take Ambien

and you stay awake, you can trip your balls off. Doctor, is that true? Sure. I don't know that to be true, but there was a movie bit. I saw that. There was some kind of movie bit

that that reminds me of. Is that the lewds from Wolf of Wall Street? No, no. There's this guy who said he was going to take three Ambien and try to stay awake

and then have sex or something and then they both fell asleep. Man, give weed a try before you go that route. Make sure you exhaust all the other drugs before you try this shit. That sounds crazy.

She wasn't a patient of mine, but she was a friend of mine who her doctor gave her Ambien because she couldn't sleep. Completely true story. And she's a nurse, so she's educated about all this stuff to some degree as much as any other healthcare practitioner. And she goes to bed, she takes this Ambien, she falls asleep.

And then the next morning she comes downstairs and somebody has broken into her house and ransacked all sorts of stuff. The first night she took Ambien. Yeah. How lucky. Unlucky. She's like this little 90 pound chick and she's home alone

and she freaked, right? So she runs back upstairs and locks herself in the bedroom and calls the cops and the cops show up and turns out that was her who had ransacked her entire house and she'd gone through

and like, Ma'am, we got to throw you in jail. She'd like gone and eaten all of her kids' cupcakes and ramen noodles and like ma'am we gotta fill you in jail she's like gone and eating all of her kids cupcakes and ramen noodles and like it's just like the subconscious mind going fucking crazy uninhibited and just doing whatever it wants there's no filter right because you're because your your social filter that we think of like the social veneer that keeps us from saying

the things we shouldn't say that's all the thin layer on the outside of the brain that's helping keep the shit together primarily that prefrontal cortex that that's a that's a social filter to make you do not only uh the socially acceptable thing but it makes you that's what allows you to do the harder thing when you want to do the easier thing right um and so if you're if you strip away consciousness that's what you're stripping away essentially right because now you're just a monkey man just raving through your house. Yeah, exactly. Now all you have is the lizard brain, right?

And all the lizard brain does is the four F's, right? That's right. You fight, you flee, you freeze, or you... Yeah, yeah. Like, do you mean fuck? Well, you know.

Why the hell do they allow doctors to prescribe it? If it's obviously that this is not actually a sleep drug, I'm like, do you mean fuck? Well, you know. No, but you know, why the hell do they allow doctors to prescribe it? If it's obviously that this is not actually a sleep drug, why is it allowed to be prescribed to people when all it's doing is knocking out your ability to control your fucking body? Well, that's a very deep physiological... I know there's a little pressure, but it seems like fundamentally,

if it's a sleep medication that doesn't actually allow you to sleep, somebody would say, I got a question. As physicians, why do we allow this shit to happen? Well, because you get enough research that says, well, look, this kind of looks like sleep, right? Like, you know, we did this, that, and the other thing. And these people.

His eyes are clearly closed. That looks fairly close to sleep architecture. And this guy wasn't sleeping at all. And now he got an extra. This guy's getting like a thousand bucks a week. He got an extra 13 minutes of sleep you know kind of so you know he publishes that research oh funded by right so philosophically you know like my um you could go into all sorts of tangents about that but basically you know the reason i would say that

most of this exists is the is the same reason that all pharmaceuticals exist. Actually, you can't even get doctors to agree on what the definition of sleep is. Until you get there, you can't truly have a sleep drug. If you can't even define what sleep is, is it a sleep drug or not? It's actually an unconsciousness drug, but depending on your definition, it can fall into sleep. We're going to call this a sleep drug. But, you know, if you think about it, there's a continual pressure in medicine with the reimbursement system to see your patients for shorter and shorter periods of time. In fact, while I was in medical school, they taught us

like this script that we said to people, if they came in with multiple complaints, you said, I'm sorry, I'd really like to help you with all that, and I'm more than willing to help you with all these problems. But unfortunately, today we have limited time, so if you could just tell me what your number one and two complaint is, and we'll handle this first, and if we have time, we'll get to the rest of them. Due to insurance purposes, you can't treat someone for five symptoms. And if you look at the payback system for a physician's private practice, I think I've read something recently.

I think it's only like 28 bucks profit for your average patient visit or something. Right. So if you spend, and that's with a six minute visit, which is the average physician's visit six minutes of visit and then about the same amount of time to chart. And then maybe a little bit of scut work in between there and like you're at this 15 minute window, which is about all you have for a patient for it to be profitable.

Do you think adding a lot of bureaucracy and laws is going to fix this problem? Oh, I think, I think the government run healthcare. This time they got it. I mean, adding, adding another level of bureaucracy is obviously the solution to this problem.

That's going to help. So this is going to help. This is going to affect people on, I guess, in a really profoundly huge way. Because if you're somebody who's struggling with, hey, doc, I feel confused. I don't feel good. I'm struggling with joint pain, this, that, and the other.

And he pulls up your blood panel and in five minutes goes, well, nothing crazy going on here. Well, actually, he can't even order that blood panel until he can justify it, right? So he has to say, okay, well, what's the symptom here that I can justify ordering a blood panel that your insurance company will actually pay the lab company for? So, you know, there's a lot of games there. But then the other aspect is that medical school, you know, one of the things I talk about in my lectures is that throughout my entire education, you know, I got to the SEAL teams

and they all had these sleep issues. And it was actually really performance issues that I discovered was coming from the sleep issues. Right. And that was through a lot of weeding around and figuring stuff out for myself and going into a lot of sort of alternative and esoteric, uh, experts to try to piece all this together. When you say sleep issues, is that just, they just don't get enough sleep or they can't fall asleep or what? I know being sleep deprived is almost like a way of life for those guys. Right.

So, I mean, they're like law enforcement and other agencies in that a lot of times they don't have control of their sleep. But even when they come home from deployment and they have some downtime, but they've had this really chaotic sleep cycle. Because in the SEAL teams, like, hey, we're going to – you could wake up at 9 o'clock in the morning and say, hey, we're going out tonight. We're going to be gone for three days. If you want any sleep, you better get it before 6 p.m.

I just woke up. How am I going to get any more sleep? I can take some Ambien and I'll go back to sleep. We're going to do this big, long, three-day terrible thing. Get some rest now. Imagine on a three-day mission it's basically expected that you are not sleeping. Yeah. So, and any kind of sleep you get wouldn't be, you know, it wouldn't be deep sleep, obviously.

You'd be like, it'd be semi-alert sleep the whole time. Sure. If you did have an opportunity to sleep in the field. So, you know, the problem with medicine is that they don't teach anything about health. The things you don't learn anything about in medical school is nutrition, sleep, exercise, or stress reduction, other than to give Xanax. That's stress reduction. Those are the pillars for health.

Medicine has kind of gotten boxed into an area where people are trying to use them for health promotion and health optimization, and they're not well equipped for it. Your average gym owner is probably better equipped at optimizing your health than your doctor because all your doctor's ever learned about is disease. And all we know about diseases is how to manage them with medications because we didn't learn any nutritional fixes for the disease. I heard a doc who's based out of Vegas call it sick care. Sick care. Doctors are trained in sick care, not health care.

Yeah, it's disease care. And when everybody says, oh, America's so advanced in medicine and all this, it's true in a few areas. If you're going to get hit by a car, this is the country you want to be in when you get hit by a car. Your chances of survival are the best. Your recovery from that's going to be hit by a car, this is the country you want to be in when you get hit by a car. Your chances of survival are the best. Your recovery from that's going to be the best. That had to hurt.

Look at the mental resilience on him to hold that camera straight as he stumped his toe. CTP. You slam your shin. Yeah, you made me lose my chin. And we're back. Okay.

What you don't know that happened is CTP ran into a table and then Chris's fat foot turned off. Turned off the power to all of our stuff. That's why you got a break. An impromptu commercial break. So now we'll be much fresher and this will be way more interesting in the last second half.

We're talking about, this is a great place to have a traumatic injury. Yeah, yeah. So, American medicine is great at trauma and we're great at infectious disease. And then, you know, we're one of the best places to deal with cancer as well. We're definitely not the top there. Like, we're in the upper echelon there. But if you look at overall health, obviously Americans have gotten progressively less healthy

as our medical technology has been increasing exponentially with computing power and technology. It's not helping the fundamentals very much. And there used to be, I always laugh at, and this is going to piss off half your audience, but I always laugh at the biohackers is going to piss off half your audience, but I always laugh at the biohackers and the, you know, I'm going to hack my body. I'm like, well, the original biohackers were doctors or it was the pharmaceutical industry,

right? And like, how has that worked out? Right. That's exactly what they did. They said, well, there's all sorts of crazy shit going on, but this is the one thing that's bothering us. So let's figure out a way to make a pill that stops that one thing that's bothering us from happening.

Sometimes people call something biohacking and it's like get nine hours of sleep yeah block out the light from coming in your room yeah that's a hack i'm like i don't know that's a hack i mean that's a good idea yeah it's like people like start calling everything a hack i'm like i don't know live a really healthy lifestyle and you'll be healthier there's there's a hack for you i've given advice before they go man that's a really good hack i you'll be healthier. There's a hack for you. I've given advice before and they go, man, that's a really good hack. I'm like, or just something you do.

I don't know. Or just a behavior. Or a thing. Eat whole food. Yeah, that's a cool hack. But a hack is a good buzzword to get people to do things. Exactly. So the rest of this episode is nothing but full of hacks.

Yes. So everything I do, you can relabel a hack, including me. It seems like the modern medical world does a really good job of treating short-term acute injuries. You break your leg. They fix you up. You're out of there in a week or a month or whatever. Or like you're back on your way to being better. But chronic diseases need a chronic solution.

Is that kind of the model here? Well, like diabetes is a great example, right? Like diabetes is by far the most expensive disease we have. Like you're going to die from something. Every one of us is going to die. Says you. Right, so I don't got a plan. I'm going to upload my brain to a cloud.

I don't want to shock your audience, but we are actually all going to die someday. Fuck, everybody's freaking out. This is the worst episode ever. Everyone's so depressed now. You're probably going to die of one in five things. And you can look at the stats, and those things haven't really changed.

And there's not a whole hell of a lot you can do about most of those things. But you take something like diabetes is the most expensive thing because people get it really young and then we have to manage it for decades before they die of a heart attack or something else right and by manage it i mean you know give you some pharmaceuticals to where you can survive uh for the rest of your life and so you can pay longer yeah and so and so something that i you know actually a term that i use with my patients and clients is like, well, you know, we, we work on your health span, not your lifespan. Right. I don't promise you I'm going to make you live a day longer and you might live less working with me. I can't promise you anything. I don't, I don't know for sure. But what I can tell you is I know how to make you healthy and how to make you feel good and how to optimize your performance and how you look, feel, and perform every day.

And that's your health span. And in an ideal world, like our entire civilization, we could increase the health span, but then you would just fricking die, right? Instead, quality of life starts here. When you're younger, as you get older, it's like dwindling, dwindling, dwindling, dwindling.

And then you just keep, like your life is just not nearly as enjoyable, but you make it an extra 15 years. And we go, yeah, life, you know, we've extended life. I won. You were miserable the whole time. What was the point of all that crap, right? And so diabetes is a great example.

We can give you all sorts of medications for this to reduce your average blood glucose throughout the day. And when things get really bad, we just start giving you hormones, right? We start giving you the insulin that your body's lacking or that your body's not responding to enough. And then you can survive even a little bit longer from that. That's a decent enough fix. Yeah, but there's going to be complications from this, right? Because even though we're helping with your diabetic symptoms,

you're still damaging your blood vessels. You're still damaging your blood vessels. You're still damaging your nerves. And the reason you have to introduce insulin in this scenario is because the glucose, excess of glucose is going to be toxic. It destroys things. Yeah, because to get really geeky on that, there's an enzyme called the glycosylase enzyme that turns blood glucose into essentially like little sugar spheres or spears like uh like insulation if you ever had like yeah you know insulation on it's a little stabbing cell membrane so so that ages so so your so your nerves have that

in it um especially your alpha nerve fibers which do a lot of your sensory so people lose sensation because their nerves get glycosylated and then then red blood cells actually glycosylate. And when they go through capillaries, they go through one at a time. So if you can think of sending what used to be like this smooth little jello shot through this smooth tissue tube, now has these little sharp things on it. Calcified tube and sharp little jello shot. Yeah, and so now they're stabbing this and then they're clotting off that area and then they have this high blood glucose

and low blood flow and they can't feel it. That's just this nidus for bacteria, right? So now you have this huge bacteria growth and now you lose your toe and then you lose your other toe. Then you lose half your foot. Once this gets going,

it's almost over immediately. And so, yes, we've managed your diabetes, but you've lost your foot over there. Is that why you go blind as well? Yeah. Yeah. It's damage to the vessels in the back of the eye and the nerves in the back of the eye.

So that it's all the same thing. But instead we could say, well, let's really educate people on nutrition and lifestyle and guess what if you go if you do 30 minutes or two an hour of activity three to four times a week and you go on a lower end carbohydrate diet and you get rid of all refined carbohydrates you probably won't have diabetes anymore period and you don't need any sort of medication to do it and there's something something I've actually heard people, they'll walk into the gym and say, well, I've got diabetes. I'm like, well, and I was nervous to say this in the beginning,

but I'm much more confident. I was like, that's reversible. They go, well, my doc said it's not reversible. Right. Well, you got an MD right here saying it's reversible, folks. Yeah, and so the Medical Board of California can jump on my throat now because you can never say

that somebody's cured of diabetes, right? It's like you can't say that an alcoholic is ever cured of his alcohol, even if he never drinks again. But what we can say is that, well, we've completely normalized all of his metabolic parameters without pharmaceuticals for the rest of his life. If you still want to say he has diabetes, okay, fine. Like, I don't have a dog in that fight. But, you know, that's sort of the medical model that we have. But again, if you go back to what we talked about earlier, how do I do that in six minutes?

How do I convince my patient in six minutes everything that he needs to do or she needs to do to rectify her diabetic situation? I guess you don't. Is that our problem? Don't do that. You can't do that. You say, here, take this pill, and that will lower your blood glucose. That's going to lower how much?

I got to go. Especially if you end up in the conversation about, I'm special. That won't work for me. And then all of a sudden, by the time they've said their piece, you're like, well, the meeting's over. I got to go. Yeah, I mean, you think about it. Don't you feel better, champ? Going to see a doctor is a pain in the ass for anybody, right?

Even the concierge's practices are getting really full now, full now too and you know they're always waiting as a discomforted disrupted day and it's like you know you better give me a freaking solution because i've done i've spent so much of my time i've spent my money i've been paying ridiculous amount for health insurance that i never used and i want a freaking solution right now so okay here take this pill that's going to reduce your pain go on like i didn't do anything about what's causing your pain but i i solved your problem and that's unfortunately just the way the system has been built and then actually a really interesting uh coup that the pharmaceutical industry pulled off is um you know when they're doing their books all the time they spend with doctors is now called education so it's not it's not marketing dollars so now they're involved in

educating uh health care practitioners the pharmaceutical education and so a lot of the a lot of the schools are actually medical schools are funded by from school company i mean to a degree like most medicine most medical research has some something to do the pharmaceutical, big pharma money is usually involved in there somewhere. Um, I don't think that's an evil thing. That's just like,

that's just the way it works. Yeah. I don't, now you end up with like a, yeah, I'm not saying like anyone's evil or anything. I'm just like, their incentives baked in.

Yeah. That's just a, the system just doesn't work in your bed. I don't think anyone was clever enough and pharma to sit back like 200 years and go, here's how we're going to do this thing. You've got a good evil voice, by the way. Yeah, I sound like a good evil dog right now. But I think what ends up happening is when you get into being a professor or PhD,

you're driven to publish. You have to do research. You have to publish. You have to do research. You have to publish. You're part of a medical institution. You want to have a higher reputation as a physician, even you should be publishing, right? So everybody's driven to do research and you have to get that funding from somewhere. And there has to be a question that

needs to be answered. And so I was like, dude, I don't have any novel ideas. I'm a doctor. I want to advance and like, Hey, we have a need to test this. Okay, well, I'll test, dude, I don't have any novel ideas. I'm a doctor. I went advanced and like, hey, we have a need to test this. Okay, well, I'll test that. And I don't think there's anything nefarious or malicious going on. But what happens is this is now what they know, right? I've spent six years figuring out how this drug affects this disease. And now I've taught all the medical students under my tutelage what I know about this. And so they're going to do that.

And then they're going to teach the next generations of doctors that because that's what they know. But if we had, for instance, the same doctor who was involved in nutritional research for six years on how to handle nutrition for diabetes, and he promulgated that he'd get fired. The celery industry just isn't paying very much. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So, so I think that's kind of how we got into that mess and how we're going to get out of that mess. I don't know, other than just the fact that we aren't going to be able to afford to keep

doing it the way we do. And so, you know, what I encourage everybody to do is just take charge of your own health. Consider health insurance. Quit calling it health care. Call it health insurance. Just like you have automobile insurance. My automobile insurance doesn't replace my tires when they're worn down. It's for catastrophe, which is what medicine should be.

So then you're really good with infectious disease. You're really good with trauma and you're really good if you have cancer. Okay, that's what the insurance is for. All that other stuff could probably be handled

by a personal trainer. A personal trainer, like really well-educated people in the health sphere, people who do podcasts and people who... He's saying to listen to us. Yeah.

Whoa. Like those barbell shrug guys. Those geniuses. What percentage of people will rip six-packs to spontaneously develop type 2 diabetes? Yeah. I'd say that's a very, very low percentage. If that's you,

contact us. You'd be much more likely to develop type 1 diabetes if it's some sort of genetic issue. Or there's some thought that it might be viral, but we won't go down that rabbit hole too far. So I don't remember how we got on to the whole topic. But that's basically the idea of separating what we call health care now. We'll call that disease care.

And health care is something you do on your own. That's you educating yourself on improving your diet educating yourself on improving your sleep and you know reducing your stress and doing some smart exercise uh the big problem is there's a lot of noise in that field right that's just growing and growing and growing how do you know you know how do you know who to listen to now right you know you have these uh you know pseudo experts who've read a lot or maybe even had some impressive credentials and uh they've come up with this biohack to where you don't need to sleep as much or you don't need to exercise much i've seen these guys yeah i only need four hours of sleep when i do these things i'm like yeah i how is that good like i'm really confused here like yeah nothing replaces

sleep and you can put e-Stem on your abs instead of extra sizing, right? Mike Menzer, remember that guy and his brother, the bodybuilders? They used to take product. We train all day. We don't sleep at night. We just take amphetamines

or whatever the hell they're doing. They stay up all night reading and shit. We don't waste time sleeping. And then both fucking guys drop dead. Is there an emerging industry right now of people that are kind of more like yourself where they're medical doctors but they're more involved in wellness and health than disease prevention?

So there's a couple of sort of big academic movements towards that. One's called the Functional Institute of Medicine where they really focus on the physiology of making people healthy. Of course, you guys have heard of Andrew Weil, right? Yeah. So he has his own similar thing. And that industry is usually referred to most commonly now as probably functional medicine. We started with, you know, it's been called so many different names.

And actually, you know, what I always say I do is evolutionary health because I just say, hey, let's try to approximate the way your your body this machine that's been developed for millennia let's try to do with it do with it what it was designed to do and then see how things shake out before we start away a little bit yeah before we start implementing tricks and procedures and all this stuff well let's just do what we know we should be doing first it's like your buddy comes over with his car, and he's got three wheels on it, and he tells you,

hey, I think the timing's off on my ignition, and it doesn't seem to be firing quite right. We really need to fix the timing on my engine. You're like, well, you should probably put the wheel back on and have four wheels first, right? And it's really, I mean, it's that stupid, and it's really hard to get people convinced that you're in charge of optimizing these four things in life, And it's really, I mean, it's that stupid, and it's really hard to get people convinced that, you know,

you're in charge of optimizing these four things in life, and there's plenty of people who will help you, right? Like, if you say, I want to learn about nutrition, you know, go to one of the interwebs, and there's a million, you can read for the rest of your freaking life. The question is, how do you decipher that? Like, how do you say who's got good ideas and who's got bad ideas? I think most people out there

that are giving nutrition advice, I mean, there's some exceptions out there, but 95% of the people out there are agreeing on 95% of the stuff. People get caught up in the small percentage that they're disagreeing about. I would say 95% of people like us

agree with that. Maybe my circle is not as big as I think it is. You might have a skewed sample. All my friends agree with me. It's weird. It's crazy how it works. If you go to the ADA, they by and large do not agree.

Never mind. I forgot about that. They are the largest nutritional organization. I haven't read that since college. And they're going to tell you to eat grain, grain, grain, grain, grain, and a little bit of fat. If you eat a piece of bacon, you're going to die at the breakfast table for sure. So don't try that.

Are they coming along at all or are they just like rigid in their former stance? I guess not their former stance, an old stance I'll say. I think there's a big sort of ego battle going on there. I don't know if you've heard of Peter Attia. I haven't. Gary Taubes, you've heard of him for sure, right? Yeah, gary tobs you've heard of for sure right so gary

gary tobs and peter attia co-founded this organization called nuci uh nutritional scientific institute and what they're doing is this is a non-for-profit organization that they are you know they're funding nutritional research that asks the question basically is everything we've taught we've been taught in nutrition wrong right because if you read uh gary todd's good calories bad calories he's basically like this was all a master plot of ansel keys all of this was wrong and we should be eating this way um and so they said okay well let's let's see if that's true and so they're you know they're doing it they're spending tens of millions of dollars a year to do that. But the ADA is not budging.

They've got their heels dug in. And now to satisfy the naysayers, they'll do research where they'll say, well, we had these people on low carb and we had these people on a high carb diet. And we measured all these parameters and they didn't seem to do any better. Well, their low-carb diet was 65% carb and their high-carb was 75%. So it's like, okay, well, by any of our standards, they're both a high-carb diet. We're the 30% guys.

And the other big problem with these decades of data embedded in this, I mean, it's no different than medical doctors, right? Like I, I talked to medical doctors about the influence of sleep and nutrition and exercise and they're like,

quack, you know, whatever. What is this douchebag talking about? Like, whatever, I'm going to get away from this dude. Like,

uh, you know, I'm late for something. And, uh, uh, and the nutritional industry is the same way. It's like,

it's, this is decades of research that they're entrenched in. They have all sorts of textbooks. They have educational programs. There's degrees. There's policies. There's government policies. There's all sorts of stuff

that you're going to have to say. You know what? It turns out we were wrong. We need to flip all of this exactly upside down. Is that like the doctors are looking at you like, well, that might be true, but good luck making money with that.

See you later. Or do they really not believe you? Well, what happens is we talk about having your six-minute patient visits. And that's in an optimal world, which you rarely hit

that six minutes, right? So you're always behind on charting. So now you're doing your charting when you're supposed to go pick up your kid from school. And so you're staying late and you're cranking and cranking and cranking you're

working 12 15 hours a day to make a living and to do what you've already been taught to do now when am i going to educate myself when when am i going to go consider whether or not somebody has this new idea i'm going to wait for the peer-reviewed journals to tell me and guess what i don't even have time to read those so i'm going to wait until the peer-reviewed journals to tell me. And guess what? I don't even have time to read those. So I'm going to wait until I go to a conference. And somebody from the conference who's actually read these and has consolidated that into a palatable lecture is going to tell me what all these journals say.

Probably 15 years from now when that all happens. He's also now a sleep-deprived, adrenally fatigued guy. Now he can't learn it. Doctors have all the same problems this is like the is the other overstressed c-level executives and law enforcement and all those other things so it you know it's a quagmire i don't know how we're gonna get out of it but you know the the nutritional guys are pretty dug in right now um i mean there's some great research it by and large it doesn't come from america unless it's coming NUSI. Lots of people around the world are kind of slapping the ADA in the face.

It's like, look, this really works. This really works. This really works. A project that Rob Wolf is involved with in the city of Reno, they took these guys with really bad health markers. They have like 12 years of data on these guys, really bad health markers. A couple of them had heart attacks, whatever. And they said, well, we're going to be really strict. We're going to put them exactly in the ADA diet. We're going to do everything just right with them

because we want them on the, you know, we want to keep them on the police force and blah, blah, blah. And every single one of those guys got worse on the ADA diet, like 100% of them. So then they said, well, maybe that's not the right diet then so let's try something totally crazy um and they started doing a low carb diet and a real low carb yeah and then they and then they found rob wolf's book and then they were like oh this guy's had all this stuff put together forever and of course you know rob didn't even come up with that you know there's been other you know he studied in lauren cordain who had that figured out for years and atkins had it figured out for years and if you look at his own diet by and large

it's kind of the same idea they just don't address uh the gut inflammation and and uh in the refined carbohydrates as much as that but that was a while ago that was a good stepping stone to where we are now yeah and and uh know, Atkins lost his license multiple times for promulgating his diet. Uh, Sears lost his license multiple times for promulgating his diet. Um, so that's like, that's like the next step for you, right? I gotta get you to lose your license at some point. If I want to hit any sort of, uh, notoriety or fame, I'm going to have to lose my license. So, uh, you guys are listening come at me bro come get it so maybe a professional supplement yeah yeah so uh so you know both of those guys though had a lot more right

than they had wrong right and you look at both of their diets is like that's pretty much where where it seems like everything's heading and that's where people are really getting results and one of the great things about shows like this and just general access of the information on the internet is that people are now just trying stuff on their own and going, hey, I got great results. I got great results. I got great results. And you really can't argue with that

because most of the nutritional research was done off of surveys as well. Just something called the NHANES, which has been statistically know statistically tested to be useless uh and it was completely debunked like decades ago that this is a useless useless uh questionnaire that we give people but that's what we're still basing our nutritional studies off of or you know those guys are meaning that people are not actually reporting accurately it's what they feel like they're eating not actually what they're eating yeah they're not i mean there's

there's some level of shame involved obviously because you're going to give this to a health care professional um and i'm going to report to you what i've eaten and then if i ask you hey what did you have for dinner last thursday do you how do you remember exactly what it was i don't have any idea what i ate last thursday i don't have any idea what i ate probably two days ago i'd have a hard time remembering what I ate past this breakfast. Maybe I could remember last night's dinner if I really thought about it. You might remember those P.F. Chang chili poppers. Maybe.

Maybe, maybe not. Depending on how bad my diarrhea is, I'd probably remember it. I don't remember what I ate, coach, but I do remember explosive diarrhea after P.F. Chang's visit. I think that the tail is going to kind of wag the dog now you're gonna have you're gonna have so many people out there going bullshit like right how long for these organizations pack themselves in the corner yeah i eat all of this stuff that

you tell me not to eat and i don't eat any of the stuff you're telling me i should eat and i'm healthier than everybody under your care you know bacon we're not gonna listen to you now eating bacon and people are doing just fucking fine. Thank you very much. Rob had a great quote at this last lecture. He said, bacon is the duct tape of food. Oh, God.

It holds everything together. There's nothing that, nothing bacon doesn't improve. Normally, I wouldn't eat broccoli, but, you know, you put some bacon in there, do it. Jim Gaffigan had a great video

he said I wouldn't even know what a water chestnut was if it wasn't wrapped in bacon you've never even heard of it let's take a break real quick when we come back

we'll talk about how to find out if you're sleep deprived or you have a traumatic brain injury that's the same thing actually but yeah we'll talk about it

cool teased this is Andrea Ager and you're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com. Barbell Shrug is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrug.com and sign up for the newsletter.

Whatever. Yeah, I got a feeling like we could do a four or five hour show. Yeah. Do I got a booger hanging on my nose? Is that what you're going for? And we're back. Oh, epic transition. Oh, geez.

Yeah, we want to talk about like how is it that people are listening to this and they go, I think a lot of people are like, oh shit, I'm sleep deprived. I'm eating too much carbs,

whatever. I've got kids. I think like, you know, if someone wants to follow a diet that's good, there's a lot of stuff out there. You have the Whole30. You have Rob Wolf. You can go do those things and do an elimination diet

where you knock everything out for a month and then you add things in and find out what you're sensitive to and what's throwing you off. But when it comes to sleep, you're kind of the guy. So I want to find out from you, a lot of us would go, oh, I got a little extra around here.

I should probably cut some carbs out of my diet. Right. But when it comes to sleep, people are like, six hours is plenty. That's all I've ever needed. And would you disagree with that? Yeah, absolutely I would.

Oh! Of course I would. Someone get the sugar and caffeine out of our kids' hands. Yeah, that's a nice pure way, by the way. You know, this is an argument that I really get into with, again, like the corporate, the C-level guys don't want to hear this. Efficiency monsters. They don't want to hear this. And then the other thing that I constantly hear is what you say is, well feel fine after six hours right like i i feel fine i feel fine i feel

fine i'm like okay well there's great research on this that i can tell you exactly why you feel fine um and it's exactly the same thing that happens when you go to a bar you go to a bar and you have a drink and you're like oh great you're like i better not have another drink because i got to drive home in an hour so i I'm not going to have another. And then all your buddies are like, oh, you're a pussy. You can drink.

And you're like, all right, I'll have one more beer. And then you're like, ah, it's two beers. I'm going to have to wait around a while. And then next thing you know, you're having another beer

and you're like, I don't know. Next thing you know, your pants are all wet. I better get a cab. And then like the fourth beer, you're like, I can drive.

I feel totally fine. I don't know what I was skitzing about before. I feel great fine. I don't know what I was skitzing about before. I feel great, right? It's like you know me. You lose that self-awareness, right? So what the research has shown over and over again, this has been done so many times,

I won't even bother quoting one, but if you test people, and sleep will fuck with your performance on anything. It doesn't matter. I don't care what your goals are. Sleep's important for achieving that goal. And if you want to be super strong, super fast,

super enduring, super smart, super anything, and you don't get enough sleep, you're never going to reach your goals. Sorry. Or if you do reach your goals, you could have done it much faster,

much easier. Your goal was not set high enough. You didn't set the bar right enough. Right. So what the research shows is that if you sleep acclimatize people first, so that's the big problem, right? So now to compare that with your diet nutrition, right? With your diet examples, like, okay, well, I'm not going to do an elimination diet.

What I'm going to do is a sleep saturation diet, right? So I'm going to saturate myself with sleep until I know I don't need any more. And then I'm going to test how much sleep I actually need. That would be the way to do it. The problem is most people can't do that with their lives. I'll agree with you. You probably don't have the time to do that. I actually did that once.

I had a month period where I could get nine hours a night. And I wouldn't let myself get out of bed until I hit like that nine hour mark. Uh-huh. And then I knew what it was like to sleep well and my performance started going really well

and then I, yeah. So, exactly what you're saying. If it's working too well, I better stop. Yeah. So,

this sleep acclimatization studies have been done over and over again and they've done them in like old bunkers so they can keep it to like totally dark they've converted old military uh barracks and just like walled off

the windows where it's completely pitch black by and large this is done on college students because they're the only ones who have the time to do this like during their summer break whatever the college students like i don't have time for shit i'm like you have no idea you're in for a rude awakening my friend you've got a ton of time And they're the only ones who are willing to do it for the paltry amount of money that they can give them to be part of this. $100. But what happens, you put somebody,

you take the average American, and people say, how do I know if I'm sleep deprived? I'm like, well, do you live in America? Do your friends think you're weird because you sleep too much? Then you're probably sleep deprived, right? Because-

We call it an asshole for taking a nap. Yeah, just about every American is sleep deprived. The average American sleeps about 6.2 hours a night right now, right? So what we find, we completely sleep acclimatize these guys. And the way we do that is we say, we're going to put you in a completely dark room

that has nothing but a bed and a toilet in it. Nothing else. Literally nothing else. It's going to be a nice cool room because we sleep better when it's cool. And you're going to be in complete darkness for 14 hours a day. And then we're going to let you out for 10 hours a day.

That's a long time, man. And then you're coming back in for 14 more hours and we're going to stretch this out as long as we need to. What happens is about 90% of the people come in and will sleep about 12 and a half hours when they first start sleeping because they've lost all the sensory input they don't know that the world's going on and they're not aware there's nothing for them to be aware of so they're in complete isolation by the way i've heard this is a great way to set up your bedroom period absolutely it's just like part of the sleep hygiene is definitely making

your room dark, cold, getting rid of all the electronics, getting rid of anything. But also like making it a place to sleep and nothing else. Well, sleep and sex are the only two things you can do in your bed. Right. And I always clarify that I'm not saying you can't have sex elsewhere, but you only sleep and sex in your bed.

And you right now, as a trained medical professional, I would not tell you not to have sex other places. I'm just saying, uh, um, don't sleep on the kitchen counter counter but you can do other things in the kitchen we won't get into people's own ideas um but anyway so so they sleep about 12 and a half hours a day and then it slowly they start sleeping less and less and less even though they're in 14 hours of darkness right and it takes about three to four weeks before they'll start sleeping seven and a half hours to eight hours a night,

which is what always turns out to be the average, no matter how much. So they're catching up in the beginning and then they level out around seven and a half, eight. Yes, yes. So if you think about this the other way around, that means that these people are sitting in a completely cool, dark room in a bed for six and a half hours a day and staying awake.

Pretty damn hard to do, right? Right. So if you can't do that, you're probably sleep deprived, right? And I don't think most of us could do that. And then what we do is we pull those people out and say, all right, you're completely sleep acclimatized now. We know you're optimized in the sleep field.'re going to start testing you and you choose the test i don't care it's been done within this is the fourth wheel going back on stage yeah yeah uh so we've put the fourth wheel back on and now we're going to test your performance and so we

start testing your performance every morning but some of you aren't going to get to sleep eight hours anymore you're only you're only going to get six and some of you are't going to get to sleep eight hours anymore. You're only going to get six. And some of you are only going to get four. And then we're still going to test you the next day. And the next morning, we'll test them. And it'll say, how do you think you did? And you get to rate yourself. And they say, well, I did shitty. I'm tired.

I didn't get enough sleep. The guys who didn't get to eight hours. And then the next day, they say the same thing. thing and then the third day they might say the same thing but by the fourth day they're like i feel fine i've totally adapted and i'm sure i did just as well as i ever did and you go no look at the data like your error rate was three times what it was just two days ago and they go oh you got that wrong i know i did well i felt it i knew i did well and you can do the same thing with strength you can do the same thing with the difference that's the fourth beer look at the damn stopwatch dude you were slower and then no i wasn't i i felt i was moving i could tell that would felt good and so you know really when you

it's scary yeah so really if you wanted to like completely sleep acclimatized that's the way to do it but how many people can truly do that like i i grant you that most people can't swing something like that people would have to like burn up all their vacation days in order to make that happen what i tell people is that if you've set your if you can set yourself up if you can set your life up in a way to where you can go to sleep and wake up feeling good feeling refreshed without an alarm clock every day you're probably sleep acclimatized and you can do things. You're probably getting the right amount of sleep, right? And we know that there's something called a sleep debt, just like credit card debt. If you go years living off of credit cards,

you're paying that back for years and years and years. We don't know how quickly you can pay back sleep debt. Let's say if you just sleep, like I need eight hours of sleep, but if I were sleep optimized, I would need eight hours every night to say, right. But I'm sleep deprived. So I need at least, you know, eight and a half. I'm like, I'm trying to pay that debt back. I'm going to pay a little bit more. We don't know how quickly you can pay it back that way. Right. But all I say is get as much sleep as you possibly can get the best sleep you possibly can. And then if you can get to a point where you're waking up, going to sleep roughly about the same time every night,

waking up about the same time every morning, you don't need an alarm clock and you feel good when you get up, you know, call, call that good enough, right? Like you could go, you could take further steps to see if you truly optimize,

but, um, any of you heard of the computer program Lumosity? Yeah. Yeah. So it's like brain brain games kind of things but it helps maintain cognitive function and even advance in some cases um a program out of stanford i've been doing it for years and something they've just recently

added is a little sleep uh questionnaire in there so every day before you start your training they say how do you feel and how many hours did you sleep? And then over a period of time, they'll show you the correlation with, seems like you perform best after this much sleep. Right. And if you, if we look at the trend where every time you've slept six hours, you sucked. And every time you've slept nine hours, you've done your best, right. Or, or whatever it is, but you have to have adequate data to get that. So you have to do it for a while to get that out. But by and large, if somebody says, how much do I need to sleep?

You know, 99% of us need seven and a half hours plus or minus half an hour. That's going to be most of us, right? One thing I find is if I'm training hard, and Doug says this, is like for every hour you're training you probably need to add another hour yeah well i i'm i'm not sure if there would be a rule of thumb for that i don't know i don't know that there there could be but definitely i always tell people gives you something to shoot for averaging over the course

of a year if yes if you've had an extraordinarily difficult time you yeah yeah you've worked out really hard you've really stressed your body or your brain you're training at like the competitive athlete level where you know you've got a four four hours of intense training right day spread out over two or three sessions right you're probably need more like 10 yeah you're gonna need more you're probably more like a nine hour kind of person at that point if you were average before yeah and i've had i've had athletes or you know just just clients just trying to lose weight or something like they show me the dialogue everything's just right and i keep asking them what about the sleep like five hours five hours i'm like that's the that's the one variable that's

keeping me from everything and i've actually uh my mom actually works like with sleep a little bit and the cAP stuff. Right. A lot of times I get someone a CPAP machine and they get high quality sleep for the first time and the weight starts

dropping off of them. Absolutely. Because they haven't slept and you know they haven't had high quality sleep in forever. They don't even change the diet. They change the sleep

and all of a sudden they start getting leaner. Yeah. Yeah. Well if you sleep restrict yourself one hour a night so you don't change anything else in your life

save today we're going to say go. All of us are going to keep doing what we always do but we're going to sleep Well, if you sleep restrict yourself one hour a night, so you don't change anything else in your life. Today, we're going to say go. All of us are going to keep doing what we always do, but we're going to sleep one hour less. On average, you will all gain 14.5 pounds of fat over the course of a year. And that's primarily driven by the insulin sensitivity and the leptin sensitivity, which I think we talked a little bit about in the last, in the last show is that if you, if you short sleep yourself and that's defined as two hours less sleep than you need,

we know if you short sleep yourself, your insulin sensitivity goes down by about 30%. So if you're, if you're the, if you're the average American, you literally wake up a diabetic. Okay. Like you,

you're functioning as a diabetic throughout the day. You might recover some of that and be a little more insulin sensitive depending on what you eat and how, and if you exercise and other things like that. Um, but you know, you'll drop your testosterone 30%, you'll drop your insulin sensitivity 30% and you'll drop your leptin sensitivity 30%, which basically then means your body's not going to use fat as a fuel source. So now you're hungry. Your blood glucose is disturbed.

You're going to eat 25% more calories, and that's probably going to be highly refined carbohydrates. That's what you're going to crave. And because of your lack of insulin sensitivity and your lack of leptin sensitivity, you are going to store all of that as fat, and it's not going to your muscles, insulin sensitivity and your lack of leptin sensitivity, you are going to store all of that as fat and it's not going to your muscles to fuel your muscles. Even if you exercise, it's not going to go fuel your muscles anymore. To condense that down, you kind of just said,

if you don't get enough sleep, you're going to crave more sugar and it's going to make you fat. Absolutely. And there's other reasons that it's going to make you fat, but it's a very obvious one. And that's why we have coffee and donuts, right? Because you're going to make you fat, but it's a very obvious one. That's why we have coffee and donuts. Because you're going to create fat because your leptin sensitivity is going to be... They do go together really well. It's a complimentary pairing for sure. Don't argue with it, doctor. They're delicious.

It's hyper-palatable. If you mix fat with the right refined carbohydrate, that's shit. Toss some caffeine on top to make you feel like you... That stuff's delicious. I used to do that when I was... Yeah, during times of sleep deprivation, I really did enjoy the coffee and donuts. This all makes sense now.

Yeah, you absolutely crave it. And that's why we have this social joke about coughs and donuts, right? Because they work these ridiculous shifts, right? And a lot of them, they're working night shifts or they're alternating shifts back and forth or chronically sleep deprived.

Their insulin sensitivity sucks. Their brain blood glucose is crashing. They can feel their brain shutting down. Like I suck. My performance is going down. What do I feel like I need? My brain's telling me I need sugar and I need fat. And I know because of social reasons that I need caffeine too, because that's going to help it. And so what am I going to do? I'm

going to go get coffee and donuts. I'm going to get coffee in a Cinnabon. Be the first guy to go on record with a scientific hypothesis for why cops eat so many damn donuts. It sounds like you should write this up, spit it in nature. Yeah, I could get published for this one. Note to self. Somebody write that down. So earlier today you were saying that sleep deprivation and traumatic brain injury were almost like identical as far as symptoms go. Yeah.

Or they are identical. Yeah, from the types of things I measure, they are identical. And some of the things I don't measure, like one of the things we know is that if you actually want to repeat that, just cause like, I'm not sure everyone's going to catch that. Cause I know you're going to start using it. I'm going to say it again. So, uh, uh, one of the things that happens with sleep deprivation is you lose brain mass, right? So even after a single night of sleep deprivation- It's all terrifying, by the way. With high enough resolution imaging that we have now,

we found that after a single night of sleep deprivation, we can measure brain loss, right? Like you've actually lost myelinization. Oh, you're scaring the shit out of me. I never sleep eight hours. I can't. So what is TBI? You have a very big head, though, so. is kids what is tbi very big head though so

but my brain is tiny within it it's like that homer simpson x-ray it's a walnut i'm like a fucking t-rex yeah that i love that cartoon i get that it's a little homer simpson brain that that is awesome um so if you you're what what is tbi right traumatic brain injury just means that we've broken some neuronal tracks that need to be there right um so we've damaged some neurons we've probably lost some myelin which is like the coating around there that helps with the conduction um that happens by getting hit the head a lot boxers football players the scary thing is um you know uh i you know i hate to bash research and then refer to it but you know jama jama published a research article where they did something called

the dti which is a super super high resolution imaging of the brain so it's journal american medical association yeah yeah and which is considered the you know the go-to premier journal if it comes out of there it's truth it's gospel um and what they found is that the acceleration changes on a roller coaster were enough to break a neuronal track and define you know get a technically a tbi would that be a noticeable tbi probably not right but right statistically significant but but not necessarily significant but what we what disney world's about to come after your ass yeah so what what actually what got me thinking along those tracks is um as we talked about in my life and in the last show like all these seals came and presented this litany of really complex and seemingly unrelated symptoms

that i just had no idea where to start um and i eventually sort of narrowed in on the fact that a ton of a ton of them are using sleep aids and some are drinking to go to sleep kind of settle themselves down um and that's something we didn't totally geek out on but you know that's really the balance of the autonomics parasympathetics and sympathetics which you can imagine be screwed up in anyone with a really stressful lifestyle which probably getting shot at and shooting people it would fit in the box you probably check that yeah Yeah, it's crazy. And then- It's up there with having way too many emails in my inbox.

Yeah, it's right underneath. That's a close second right there. And so I go to this lecture just out of curiosity. I'm at this symposium and it was primarily about hormones was what the lecture was about. And I see this one on tbi and uh the military has opened this organization called nico which is essentially a research center for brain injury and this lecture i hear this lecture talking about all the effects and he's working with boxers and he's working with nfl guys who everybody knows you know more likely a brain

injury so and so that's a big time news story now yeah and then it but he had also done some work with the marines and he and he talked a little bit about that data but he starts throwing up his case reports of like you know here's my patient here's his hormones levels of his thyroid this is what his testosterone look like this is what this look like and this is what his magnesium is vitamin d3 all this stuff and i'm like oh my god that looks exactly like every patient that i'm treating and i had sent i had already sent one patient to uh nico um for the you know for research on tbi but this is a guy who like had an rpg blow up like right here right and was knocked unconscious

and couldn't sleep anymore and was confused and had like all sorts of weird things going on with them. Big time brain injury. Yeah. So we're like, okay, that's a no brainer. Probably there's TBI. You should go here. But then I start looking through that and I'm like, wow, I'm going to do some more research. And then I start researching.

I find this jam article and I'm like, well, 1.2 G's causes, you know, very, very minor TBI. But you look at at all of the equipment that special forces use or even law enforcement use or anything like that, you're talking about way more than G, right? Like the fast-moving transit, like 60 Gs or something,

parachutes open in the 30 G range. I think the Carl Gustav anti-tank weapon, I think that's somewhere between like 200 and 300 Gs to fire that thing once, right? What? So I'm like, all right, what? I've got a buddy who had an explosive go off so close to him,

something that he put the laser on target, the bomb's so big that it makes him throw up. Yeah. Like physically, the percussion makes him throw up. I'm like, that is not safe. Right. And when you're breaching doors and and currently you know one of the things that always is going through my head when i was trying

to unravel this thing with the seals is what you know what are seals doing today that they weren't doing when i was a seal besides obviously you know they're doing way more combat right yeah um but like my genre seals had like very minimal combat, okay, you can add that in as a stressor and maybe that's a big component, but like, is there anything else? And then that's kind of when the sleep thing occurred to me. Not that the culture hasn't always kind of sleep deprived themselves, but much worse now. But then I started thinking about TBI and I'm like, wow,

that's kind of concerning. And then I started looking at the symptoms of TBIs. And then you start looking at the metrics of TBIs. You start looking at what does somebody's metabolic and hormonal profile look like if they have a traumatic brain injury? And it looks exactly like somebody who's sleep deprived. Wow.

It's a hand-in-hand condition. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Like I could put the two next to it and you could say, which one of these? I have no idea. Like they look exactly the same. And we know that you can dig through the journals more and it's known, it's a known fact that having a traumatic brain injury affects your hormone productions. And like I said, you can't affect

just one hormone. So all your hormones start going off and then your neurotransmitters start changing. Now your mood's changing and all sorts of other things are happening. And now you develop PTSD, right? Or PTSD like symptoms, you're getting depressed or you're getting anxious, now your mood's changing and all sorts of other things are happening and now you develop ptsd right or ptsd like symptoms you're getting depressed or you're getting anxious or you're you know you're hyper arousal and all these other things are going on it's like oh which one drove this and then right then you really you know if you really want to piss yourself off a little bit more you you twist that up on his head and you say what what does sleep do to TBI and what does TBI do to sleep?

They accelerate each other. Right. So yeah, you sleep deprive yourself. You're more susceptible to TBI. You're more susceptible to PTSD. You have PTSD. You have TBI. You almost certainly have sleep deprivation along with it because that's one of the major

symptoms of TBI and PTSD disturbed disturbances in sleep and then the medical disease prevention or disease management organization gives you pills to cover up those symptoms that are keeping you from sleeping well which is just basically hypnotics which are just suppressing everything and but hypnotics not like a fun drug yeah it doesn't mean the same thing in medical world. So what happens with these guys? You get a boxer comes to you, he's got three kids and a corporate job and he's a boxer and he's got traumatic brain injury because he's been punched in the head for

10 years and he's not sleeping. Where do you start with that guy? What do you do? I start with that guy the same way I start with every other guy. Can you start with me now? Because that's what my life was for a long time. So, you know, I've managed some professional football players.

Their labs look exactly the same. Unfortunately, these guys you can't even correct because everything's banned on them. Like, you know, they can't even take simple vitamins or, you know, like there's all sorts of limitations to what you can do to these guys. So they just suffer.

Like from the NFL or what? Yeah. Yeah. Because you're a cheater if you take fucking anything. You can't give them supplements and whatnot. You're a cheater if you eat too much protein in one sitting. It's just gotten ridiculous to where they're banning everything. And the average NFL athlete only lives to be like 56 years old now.

Yeah. That's pretty shockingly low. That's something that should be publicized. They're probably burying the fuck out of that statistic. And then. That's fucking that should be publicized. They're probably burying the fuck out of that statistic. That's fucking what? 25, 30 years off of what it should be?

It's about 20 years below. 56? Yeah, it's like 56 years old. Some people are just getting started in life at that point. This is something that fucking actually

honestly terrifies me because I'm somebody I worked a stressful corporate job for a long time. I've got kids that don't sleep but it's my physical culture history. I know at least five incidents playing Division I football and high school football, mostly on crackback play.

So when I would run across the field in pursuit of a guy with a ball, then suddenly I'd have waves of blocking where I got completely, Doug, you probably had a couple of these, completely fucking, like things you would see on YouTube where I got hit. Blindsided. I lost consciousness completely. I woke up. One time I got hit so hard that everything went brilliant white light. And I woke up with my hands on my knees. I had hit. Blindsided. I lost consciousness completely. I woke up. One time I got hit so hard that everything went brilliant white light.

And I woke up with my hands on my knees. I had gone off the ground. I was standing on my own. And I rose up. And it was like my brain coming back online. I went,. And all of a sudden, my body remembered, oh, breathing shit. That happened at least four or five times.

And then there's no fucking telling how many daily just smack, smack, smack, my head full speed up against a 300 pound guy how many times did that happen yeah and i i left that sport and pouting was not as it was kinder in many ways but still tough road then working corporate job and having kids so this is a terribly close-hitting topic for me because i'm also my my blood plant panels two years ago were disastrous yeah vitamin d dhea uh fucking testosterone everything just thyroid everything probably your insulin sensitivity all that stuff I don't think I have a problem with that at the time but everything else that

was clear was like just flatlining yeah and I thought I was just like this the thing that makes me upset is that there's a lot of athletes out there who like at the time I was like I just not feeling like I'm into my sport anymore. I can't recover my joints or fucking, God, I guess it's time I hang up my cleats. There's a thing, he's been drug free his whole life. So it's not like, a lot of these athletes are on drugs, so they're not experiencing that same thing. You're drug free and all of a sudden your hormones.

No, I look back on it and I go, wow, I thought that I was just, it'd run its course and it was time to move on but I realized that this was the manifestation of these symptoms slowly but surely.

Exactly. And the SEALs were reporting the exact same thing, right? When they were coming and closing the door and saying, hey, let me tell you

what's really going on, they're talking about the same type of things that you are. It's like, dude, my career's not over but I feel like,

I feel like I'm over. It's like, like i don't want to do this i'm going to do it every day they're going to get they're going to do what they're supposed to do they're going to do the job but they're not feeling like doing it um and little things you know like walking into a room be like shit what did i come in here for man and my wife was like whatever you walk out oh yes and then uh you know this one guy um this one SEAL who openly talked about his TBI, he's one of the first guys to go to NICO. And he actually worked with that lecturer that I heard on the TBI. His name is Mark Gordon.

He has a clinic up out of LA. He's been on the Rogan podcast. He was on the Rogan podcast. You can hear his discussions. Yeah. rogan podcast yeah um and uh you know one of the seals uh that that i was treating who had had you know known tbi had been to nico and he and he worked with the um he worked with mark gordon for a while too uh but you know one of the things that he started going and presenting like to all the cells of different teams and saying hey you know if you're noticing these symptoms like you

should probably go get checked out for tbi and everybody's kind of like you know but uh because there's a sign of weakness or whatever yeah i mean it's a sign of weakness like dude you're just not hard enough you know whatever go suck your thumb go do something else like you know we're we're hard asses and uh in and a lot of these guys got ostracized like you know some absolute legends legendary seals go to nico and they're kind of like we're not so sure about that guy anymore right and that and that's coming around like there's more and more acceptance of it um you know the va and the the east coast seal foundation foundation just recently came together in an effort to start figuring out a little bit more about tbi doing some research on it um but you know the point is that these guys had all

these symptoms and they were just explaining in a way with the fact, well, I'm getting old, right? Like, oh, I'm just old, right? It's like, dude, you are 36. Like, that's not old by anybody's standard. But in the SEAL teams, that is old. And in the NFL, that is old. And as a boxer, that's really

old. And why? Because you've damaged the hell out of yourself, right? And you've done it for, you know, the SEALs, they've done it through trauma. And they've done out of yourself right right um and you've done it for you know the seals they've done it through trauma and they've done it through sleep deprivation and they've done it through overtraining and they've done it through excess stress and so they're probably like the worst cohort that's out there right so it's the most severe population but you you know you can take 10 off of that and maybe even ratchet some of those things up like you know boxers probably have more tbis um and the nfl of course is studying the hell out of this and we have the sad stories of like

you know junior seo um you know that we know going on an autopsy had significant brain put a knife or a gun in his chest no he shot himself through the chest and you know there's theories that there are a couple of guys have done this so that people would research their brain and like kind of say to the nfl look dude here's proof right because if you shoot yourself through the head then you know but they can say look there's significant brain matter loss here here and here which we know is associated with repeated head injury so how do we get better from that nobody knows right nobody knows like will your brain repair itself? Yes. How quickly? I don't know. Like a spinal cord will repair itself for about 3000 years, right? So you don't live that long. So that's not going to happen. But like, how quickly can you remyelinate

your brain? How quickly can you learn alternative ways of thinking or behaving that will allow you to function normally, even though that track's gone or whatever, right? So like, you know, the, the 15 gets shut down, you can go on the 805, you can go on the 163, you can get to the same place, but that, you know, that's gone, right? So, you know, and it could be really bad. Like you might have to go, you know,

to San Francisco via Dallas or something, you know, like the track's really long. But in the terms of how fast the brain is, these will be kind of minimal, you know, minimally observable changes in your brain. But again, it all comes back to the four pillars, right? You have to do all of that other stuff first before you have any chance

that your brain is going to repair itself. Right. And, you know, when I say you optimize your nutrition and your sleep and your activity and your stress um that's your behavioral modification but there you should be working with somebody who's measuring what are

actually the metabolic effects of that are we hitting our target goals right and then the pharmaceutical should be the absolute last resort but you know we can try modifying modifying nutrition we can try adding in some supplements we We can try some pro-hormones. We can just give you hormones back. We know if you get one brain injury, the odds are you're what we call the HPTA axis. So your hormone production axis for your brain communicating with your body about how much sex hormone you have and thyroid hormone you have and all that. We know that about 83, let's say 85 percent of people are going to have some significant disturbances in that for probably up to about two years so one incident and you know we're talking about like car crashes or motorcycle crashes one incident okay maybe if

you've replaced that guy's hormones for two years and then slowly titrate him off and like boost his own production and optimize the rest of his life. Maybe he reproduces them and it's done, right? And then he lives a normal life. However, what if you have 500 of these things, right?

And they've all been spaced over who knows how long. That's me. That's probably you too, Doug. Nobody knows. Like, you know what? There's no way to know. We can't look inside your brain

every day and go, oh yeah, that's getting a little thicker. It's looking better. You know, there's no, there's no way to know. We can't look inside your brain every day and go, Oh yeah, that, you know, that's getting a little thicker. It's looking better. You know, go sample your brain, your brain chemistry every day. We can't do that. So we can do it through performance markers. We can do a, how you feel. We can do it through hormone markers, blood, you know, we can do it through blood. And you know,

it's really more about performance, performance, performance, performance, and whatever that performance is. I don't care if it's being a great father, playing with your kids, or running a Fortune 500 company, or lifting the most weight in the world over your head, or whatever your goals are, you should be able to monitor that. And one of the great markers for TBI, I believe, is the balance of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetics versus the sympathetics. When we're stressed, sympathetics dominate, and we have a very, very low variability in our heart rate, which means the difference between one heart rate and

the next is very, very, very consistent. There's low variability. As you're balanced, it's like sometimes there's some parasympathetic there. Sometimes there's some sympathetic there. And the beat to beat is variable. And that's called heart rate variability. And surprisingly, when you have high heart rate variability, you have very high concentration levels. You have very good awareness. You have maximum willpower.

You're usually in a much better mood. You can handle stress way better. And guess what? You shoot more accurately and you lift more weight and you run farther and you run faster in your distance competition

or in your sprint or whatever it is you do. You perform better when your heart rate variability is good. And there's actually little devices to train on heart rate variability, but you don't want to get too far ahead of yourself and say, okay, well I'm going to put this app on my iPhone.

And as soon as I optimize this, I'm set. Don't let the tail wag the dog as a tool. So this is a training tool to add to all of the other stuff that you know, damn well you need to do. And you would think that it'd be really easy to sell people on sleep, right? Like sleep feels good. Like it's an enjoyable experience. And it's like, you know, beds are comfortable. They're a nice place to be. But you know, it's like I'm telling them, you know, to choose which kid to sacrifice, you know, it's like, I'm like, dude, you just need

to sleep more, but you know, sleep as much as you should and eat the food you're supposed to and be active and find ways to reduce your stress. And the heart rate variability trainer is one way to do that. There's other things to do. Meditation does that, right? Simple breathing, like there's breathing exercises that do that. There's biofeedback that does that. There's neurofeedback that does that.

There's all sorts of ways. And once you get the lifestyle optimized, you're not thinking of this as an intervention. It's not a diet. It's not like a 12-week program. This you are going to do for the rest of your life. Start a new habit forever. So we're going to change my behavior around sleep. I'm going to change my behavior around food.

I'm going to change my behavior around activity. I'm going to change how I deal with stress. And I'm going to keep getting better at this stuff for the rest of my life. So even if you had, you're a guy who has the brain trauma, the sleep habits, all this is true. Just like the doctor prescribing the Adderall to fix, I guess if you dumped a bunch of hormones exogenously onto this without first, again, hitting the fundamental four and seeing what that does first, I guess it's also a mistake. Well, it's a mistake because now you're masking the problem with your quasi solution. You might feel better, but still. And you're going to feel better, right?

So if somebody is chronically sleep deprived and I give them Adderall every day, they'll feel more alert every day. If I give them cocaine every day, they're going to feel more alert all day. Hey, all right. It's like, hey, I feel great. I have so many clients. I feel great. I'm strange how that works. Drugs like, hey, I feel great. I have so many clients. I feel great. I'm strange how that works.

Drugs work, folks. Drugs work. That's true. I'm covering up the symptom with my treatment. So now they still have all these things wrong. Now,

replenishing hormones, I'm all for it, right? Because that's something that's naturally in your body. That's not a pharmacological trick. It's not like I'm saying- If you are down, you're not cheating because you're restoring what should be there.

Yeah, and I don't think ISIS is going to complain that somebody's cheating. Like, hey, that guy shot me first. Let's have them tested. I feel like in war, you should be cheating. You should be cheating as much as you can. I'm trying to kill you. I guess the rules like an ethicist don't apply, do they?

I'm not going to shoot you in the face with a gun here. There's no second place. There's only two options, right? Yeah, there's no second place. Like you have always won. You're undefeated or you're dead. Those are your two options. Everybody needs to be undefeated

and whatever it takes to get there. But I'm all for let's replenish the hormones, but I'm also for let's make sure that your body can't do it with all of this stuff first. Right. Right. And let's make sure that we can't do it with less invasive things. So, you know, let's do the minimum effective dose of anything that we're going to use. Right.

And you see the exact opposite of that happening in the general medical treatment. So you come in and you complain of all these symptoms and they say, well, you probably have ADD. So I'm going to start you on this. And then the reason you can't sleep is because of an Ambien deficiency. And the reason you can't concentrate is because of an Adderall deficiency. And then you're depressed because you have a Prozac deficiency. Oh, here's some Lipitor because you like bacon too so yeah and so you just keep adding on all these things and you know that's definitely a mistake now how quickly do you start throwing things in there you're like you know i say

it's really hard to recover without hormones being where they should um so and a young guy you know you do things you know you do things like what bodybuilders call the post-cycle therapy recovery stuff like you do things to stimulate testosterone production hoping this guy will keep his body will keep going with it afterwards like that's that should be the first intervention right because you start giving anybody an exogenous hormone and especially in relatively high doses of it you know because he's way low you're gonna have to give him a pretty good swag to get him up to where he should be you keep you keep doing that for a few years and guess what he's not going to do anymore like his body's like your body is a smart organism is like hey i'm getting the shit for free i'm going to use all this energy to do

something else i'm not making any more of this right so what bodybuilders are doing is way more extreme than what hormone replacement therapy is. It's not the same thing. The idea of hormone replacement therapy is getting you back to ideal, like where you should be for somebody your age who does the type of things that you do. And we know where that is. We act like we don't. We say a normal range is anywhere from 250 to 1,100. For testosterone.

Let's put you at 1,100. And it's like, you're 280. You're fine. I think mine may have been like a hundred or something or lower. Do you know what you're doing? Like four 50. It's not very high. I mean,

my, my hit rock bottom there for a while. Yeah. So, uh, I mean, the, the,

so now you, you get into this really confusing area. It's like, okay, this guy has a ton of TBI, right? Right. You have multiple,

multiple, multiple, multiple. Yeah. You don't sleep enough as well your diet isn't where it should be as well all these things affect your hormones right so it's like well where do i start start with the lifestyle stuff right so and i think you know my my prejudice of course why why i'm the sleep guy is because i think sleep is the most important

thing i can break you faster by sleep depri the most important thing. I can break you faster by sleep depriving you than anything else. I can starve you for a month and you keep going, nah, I'm not doing what you say. Right. I sleep deprive you

for two or three days. You've been through hell where you're pumping on a swing. I'm going to do whatever I want you to do at that point. Put you in Guantanamo and play Bon Jovi loud

for fucking two weeks in a row. Oh, don't. The horror. The horror. Please. Don't mistreat work row. Oh, don't. The horror. The horror. Please. Don't mistreat work criminals. I'll tell you whatever you want. Just turn that shit off.

Yeah. So, I mean, treating guys to get them back where they should be, but starting with the pillars that we know should be there. And my preference is just is sleep like we know every person who becomes depressed if you track them back far enough they usually had sleep deprivation leading up to the depression even people who have psychotic breaks and bipolar you know like really started exhibiting the bipolar they almost always have a pre-phase of sleep disruption and we know that if you're susceptible to any kind of mood disorder or cognitive disorder, sleep deprivation makes that worse.

We also know that sleep changes your physiology. I have this great graph on incident of injuries, your injury risk. And it's this, I mean, the slope is like this. It's crazy from the difference between six hours of sleep a night, nine hours of sleep a night is like a 45% injury risk just day to day. Right. Um, on top of every other huge margin of detriment that you face on top of the metabolic level and the brain function level. So let's say, let's say for instance, you have TBI, like you, youBI. Like you've had this type of lifestyle. And let's face it, like most kind of alpha male kind of guys, when we were young, we did a ton of stupid stuff.

And we've all injured ourselves, right? We're all like, yep. And so how quickly can we repair from that? I don't know. But I can tell you, you have a TBI. You probably have hormone disruption, right? But I know that one night of short sleep is going to make your testosterone 30% lower, right? I can give you a week of great meals.

Am I going to increase your testosterone 30%, right? No freaking way. I can give you a week of HCG and I'm not going to increase your testosterone 30%, right? So that's a huge thing. Your insulin sensitivity is changing 30% in a single night. That's a huge factor. Get the sleep in line. If you told people that you could increase your Fran time by 30% if you take this pill before you work out,

they'd fucking jump over themselves and pay you $1,000 a month for that shit. Exactly. Exactly. And it's the same thing in the corporate world. When you look at things like mental mapping, when you look at executive functioning, like you're running a company or deciding whether or not you should shoot a guy or, you know, playing football and figuring out, you know, should I take a left here or right here? Like, what should I do? What's the most likely thing that's going to happen from this point on? That ability to do that drops dramatically after missing two hours of sleep. Yeah. Your ability to remember like a procedure, like how to play the piano

or how to take a weapon apart and put it back together or how to type or anything like that. Procedural memory. That's reinforced during sleep. If you're sleep deprived, you get worse at it the next day, right? So we can make it all about crazy stuff,

but we could also make it about, you know, like stream stuff, I say, but we could also say, well, I'm starting a transcription company, right? And I want the most accurate typist in the world. What's the one intervention I can do to make sure that they're all at their best?

Sleep. Like, that is the number one thing I can do. So, you had suggested, we were talking a while back, and you had suggested that schools should start school just one hour later and they would see huge benefits in performance. I saw a study that teenagers,

the number one cause of disruptive behavior or malbehavior in teenagers was sleep deprivation. Yeah, and there's some great organizations lobbying this and I posted a lot of petitions for people to sign

from this organization that I follow. And they have a pretty good lobbying group. What's the organization so people can go? Don't ask me that because if I would have known, I would have said it. Now you're making it obvious that I've forgotten the name. I think it's called Start School Later, actually. We'll get it and then we'll put it in the show notes. So go to the website and then you look at this uh the entry we'll have it in there so so these people um there's a lot of

researchers involved in it but there's also you know people with um obviously political pool to try to lobby through this um and and they are successfully doing this to lots of public schools like well i wouldn't say lots but they they're pushing, they're moving the needle. But the reason they're moving the needle is because people have done the research. And a great story is that around 1905, we

led the nation in education. And there was a study done just to figure out why. And there's this brilliant guy, I think it's a Nobel laureate, who had the final sort of say of the conclusions, all of this. And he said, you know,

the reason we are better than all the rest of the Western world is because we start school two hours later. And as long as we keep doing that, we're going to be fine. And then like 30 years later, we changed the school time back. But you got to keep up with those guys who are more progressive. Exactly.

So, so we get, Europe's doing it right all the time. Europe's been doing this for 30 years. We're way behind. So we get- Europe's doing it right all the time. Europe's been doing this for 30 years. We're way behind. So what they've done is they've taken the school time back. And you guys have heard of circadian rhythms, right? Let's say like you have this natural drive to be awake

and a natural drive to be asleep. And this rhythm is built in. And at some level, it's coordinated to the sun. But when you're an adolescent, which is kind of around 12 these days because of shifts in nutrition and so forth. So remember about 12- All the milk hormones and all that. Yeah. And for men, it can be kind of up to around 25 before your prefrontal cortex is all the way formed and fully solidified.

It's not totally formed yet. So you have this really long period of development where kids have this huge circadian shift, right? And if you're a night owl, it gets worse. But all adolescents shift. And what we've done is, the cultures, we've said, well, we need to get to work at 9 o'clock. So that means I've got to get rid of the kid by 7.30 so that I can get to work at 9. We screwed the kids, not ourselves, right? We blame it on the unions.

Yeah. So what would have happened? Demanding eight hour days and whatnot. What I tell them about kids is like, hey, this is exactly as if I told you, I'm going to hire you for this job. You have to be really mentally productive. I need you to come in and concentrate. You're going to have to learn a lot of new stuff every day. And then I'm going to test you on this stuff. And this is going to be years and years of your life to do this but I need you to start this at 3 a.m. and you would go why would I start that at 3 a.m. like I'm like I'm not going to start learning until seven right like you're just going to waste all those hours in between them and that's what we do in education and they did this with private schools because they had you know they could

have more pools and so they tested it I think they did it to 11 or 12 private schools because they had, you know, they could have more pools. And so they tested it. I think they did it to 11 or 12 private schools, push their start time back about an hour, which is probably suboptimal. It'd be better to push it. That makes it like still like eight 30. Yeah. I think it was eight 30. I want to point out is like the suggestions you're making are not that crazy.

No, it's not school back one hour. Yes. That's it. Not take less school. Wait, it'd stay a little longer, right?

Yeah. So they did it to 11 or 12 private schools and what they found was that behavior problems decreased dramatically. I don't have the data memorized

but their behavioral problems went down dramatically. Routine illness went down dramatically. Absenteeism went down dramatically. Academic performance increased across the board. GPAs went up. And the one thing that was really surprising to the researchers, which wasn't surprising to me at all, is that all 11 of these schools had the best sports

record they had ever had that year. Oh, cool. Yeah. So, you know, that's one one hour what if we did that two hours right it's just mind-boggling that in so much effect and and what research suggests and and the annoying thing is that we know this right this data has been around for decades this is new stuff like that somebody's all of a sudden going hey people who sleep better learn better like magic like who would have ever thought of that we've known this for a really really long time right and if we could make that simple implementation we know that because of the efficiency gains with a well-slept brain you could start school at 9 30 and you could still end it at the same time and still be smart and they would learn more yeah right uh you know it's cool to me man what's crazy is if you saw-

Sounds cool to the kids, too. Damn, where were you when I was a kid? If you saw a newspaper article that says, one hour of sleep more per night found to cure cancer or eliminate heart disease or whatever, you'd be like, whoa. Actually, it does. Yeah, but if you- You could print that article. But if you just put it on the headline, people would not- I guess they didn't want to accept

that it's such an important thing. Well, that'll be the title of the show. Yeah, but there's so many objections around sleep. I mean, it's more than exercise. It's more than nutrition, right? When you tell somebody to exercise, what do they say? I don't have time. When you tell somebody to eat right,

they're like, okay, I'll try that, but I don't have time. I have this really tight lunch break. I travel a lot. I can't get it. I don't have time. They say the same thing around sleep, right? I feel like the unspoken thing about sleep, too, is if you say, well, I can't get up. I don't have time. They say the same thing around sleep, right? I feel like the unspoken thing about sleep, too, is if you say, well, I can't do that. I got to get more sleep.

They're like, you're being a fucking pussy. That's the kind of being weak in America. It's like, well, you're supposed to be stoic and hard and just push through that. Dude, not sleeping gives you bragging rights almost. Right, exactly.

And the more stressed we become, the more tight our schedules become, the first thing we give up is our biological needs, sleep and nutrition and exercise. Those are the first things that go, right? Yep. And so we can get a little bit more time to be a little more productive at work because we all just magically, coincidentally, happen to have exactly eight hours of work to do every day when we go to the office. Like, you know, bullshit.

Like, there's always more to be done. There's always going to be more to be done. I've never had a to-do list that I had all the boxes checked off. Right. Or ever. I mean, it's just not going to happen. It's like my to-do list is 43,862 things today,

which will be, you know, 20 items longer tomorrow. This is why when you email me, I say if you get an auto-responder, it says it might be a week. Yeah. Before you get a response. Yeah. Yeah. And you would, email me, I say, if you get an auto responder says it might be a week. Yeah. Yeah. Before you get a response. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and, and you would, again, like I said, it should be like as easy as selling sex. Like, Hey, sleep more. Hey, that should be great. Like people should want to do this, but people don't, you know, like, um, you know, I have that TEDx talk that's 17 minutes long. Right. And people don't want, they don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear it they don't want to

hear that message man it's like they like and that's that's not that's not the message i wanted to hear was america's biggest problem i wanted to hear something else i need to change the title that's all yeah we need to trick them yeah and the problem doesn't sound big enough yeah yeah america's biggest problem i'm not sure if that sounds important enough but you know and and to put it in a relative perspective, there's a similar link video that usually pops up when mine pops up over on the side that has six million hits.

And I have like 45,000, right? Six million views on this one. And it's how to fold a piece of notebook paper into a Chinese throwing star. Oh, no. And I'm like, I lost, right? How can I compete with Chinese, right? How can I compete with Chinese throwing stars?

How can I compete with folding chairs? man, I got nailed to a throwing star origami shit. Exactly. It's like,

hey man, if I can't produce a good throwing star, what good is sleep going to do me then? How am I going to get laid without being able to do this awesome

throwing star maneuver? Exactly. More sleep will get you laid more. You heard it here. It makes you super at everything it does actually

short sleep lowers libido right that's your ability to have sex and your desire to have sex that drops off

about the same as testosterone and insulin about 30% with just one night of decreased sleep I think this is the perfect place

to end it thanks for joining us where should people go to check out your stuff well you know I'm really trying to produce some stuff

go to my site Doc's trying not to do nothing don't email him he's got I'm trying to sleep leave me alone so but you're doing lectures

my site right what's that you're doing lectures yeah so I do lecture primarily the biggest group kind of after me these days seems to be law enforcement and municipalities and dod and doj those kind of gigs um but i mean

i do corporate lectures i do lectures at schools if they wanted me to like i i'll do anything to get the word out but my site has some information on it i'm trying to build that more i usually i'll link any uh anybody's show that i'm on I'll link that into my site as well. It's got a lot of shows, so you should watch all that other stuff too. In the notes, again, we'll link to all your stuff. If people miss it here, you'll be able to find links to all your stuff. Yeah, cool. Dan Pardee is another interesting guy to check out.

He is a sleep researcher, a PhD in neurophysiology. He's got all the appetite stuff around sleep like nailed down tight he does he's done some pretty cool shows uh my site has a link to his site as well on there too but um he he's another uh another good source for the for the sleep component stuff that i check out yeah cool all right man thanks for joining us thanks for having me there's always a good time thanks for scaring the shit out of us