Barbell Shrugged - [Sleep] Stress, Psychedelics, and Brain Health w/ Dr. Kirk Parsley, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #763

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Kirk Parsley served as an Undersea Medical Officer at Naval Special Warfare Group One from June 2009 to January 2013. While there, he led the development and supervised the group’s first Sports Medicine Rehabilitation center. He is a former SEAL, and received his Medical Degree from Bethesda, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in 2004. He interned in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Balboa Naval Hospital San Diego in 2005 and subsequently completed a Navy residency in Hyperbarics and Diving Medicine in 2006. Dr. Parsley has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006 and served as Naval Special Warfare’s expert on Sleep Medicine. In addition he is certified in hormonal modulation (Age-Management Medicine). After leaving the Navy he went into concierge medicine and consulting. He continues to consult for multiple corporations, and professional athletes/teams. Doctor Parsley lectures worldwide on sleep, wellness, and hormonal optimization and is currently completing a book on sleep and health optimization. His philosophy for wellness is simple; in order to optimize our health and get the most out of our bodies and minds, we must live more closely to the way we evolved as a species. He believes that many diseases and disorders that we accept as “inevitable” in modern society are unnecessary complications of poor sleeping habits, living in a toxic environment, eating foods we were not designed to digest, and allowing stress to overwhelm us. His passion is to help his patients and clients achieve the highest quality of life possible, and realize their health, performance, and longevity goals. Dr. Parsley spends as much of his spare time as possible with his wife Cindy, and his three beautiful children (Hayden, Cole, and Harper). He has been a competitive athlete his entire life, and enjoys nearly all outdoor activities and sports. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Work with Kirk Parsley Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Kirk Parsley is coming back to the show. For those of you guys that have been listening to Shrug for many, many, many years now, Kirk's been on the show a ton, especially back in the early days when all of these scientists in the human performance world were tucked away and it was really, really hard to find them. We found Kirk Parsley being in the sleep world, working with tons of Navy SEALs and their brain health. It turns out he's still in the game. He's still leading the charge. And it was phenomenal. It was the first time I had met him, even though he'd been on the show many times, which is always an honor for some of these long-term or long-time guests that we've had for me to actually be able to get in here and meet

these people. But a wealth of knowledge today. We talked about all things sleep and human performance, a lot of his history, how he got into this working with Navy SEALs. And a lot of the stuff I didn't know that they were using kind of on the medical side of treatments. A lot of things that maybe you wouldn't expect to be medical, but Kirk is a medical doctor, which allows him to go and implement some of these things, working with a lot of the Navy SEAL organizations that he's working with and helping people kind of transition out of that world. So very cool interview. And as always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com forward slash results. That is where one of our awesome clients, the owner of Precision Nutrition,

Timothy Jones, you can read the case study on him cutting his cholesterol in half and getting completely ripped. And you can access that free case study over at rapidhealthreport.com forward slash results. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner, Doug Larson, Dr. Kirk Parsley. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Look at that. That was the quick thank you. Today on Barbell Shrug, we're going to be talking about how Dr. Parsley gets all of the Navy SEALs back to health and a lot of the origin story here, starting with getting them sleeping better.

I'd love to kind of hear from you how you were put in charge of regenerating the craziest people on this earth the the biggest trained killers that get to go and do the the craziest exercises uh and missions and um really bringing them back to health after this probably what decade-long service that they they typically have yeah the the a lot of them a lot of them are a couple of decades now you know um so how do they actually go past the age of 32 as a Navy SEAL? Once the testosterone comes down, your prefrontal cortex is like a real, fully solid. You start understanding risk and all that.

How do you do this? I don't even want to go on a roller coaster anymore. Just in case I end up on the news later. I don't want that anymore. Much less the insanity that they have to do. And the sad thing is that it takes 10 years to like be valuable as a SEAL. To like really learn how to be a SEAL takes 10 years. And then your body's pretty much shot by this. But like we really need you now.

So now it's like you got to go. Now you got to go now you got to go operate for 10 years and then we need you to train other people you know so yeah yeah so um so i i joined i actually dropped out of high school to join the navy as i hated school i was a terrible student i had no interest in any of that stuff and i wanted i saw a documentary about the navy seal training being the toughest training in the world i didn't even know what a seal was i just thought like you know i'm the toughest kid in the world i'm gonna training being the toughest training in the world. I didn't even know what a SEAL was. I just thought like, you know, I'm the toughest kid in the world. I'm going to go do the toughest training in the world. So, uh, total stupid, naive, ignorant. I had no idea what I was getting into. Um, I honestly didn't know what a SEAL was. I just knew it was

really tough training. I didn't even know I was going to get paid to do it. Like I was just going to do this. And so I made it through SEAL training. I did, you know, six years active duty. So a couple of those years were becoming a SEAL. So about four years as a SEAL, three deployments. But that was pre 9-11. We had the Gulf War, that little skirmish where I think like six or seven bullets got shot. So, you know know it's just kind of like a whole lot of the same training trips over and over again and i was like that

was like the only time we actually had peace in the world yeah picked a great time yeah yeah and so i was kind of like yeah maybe i'll go do something else i got i remember that gulf war like you know them just bombing for so long that when when the troops rolled in there like people were just throwing up white flags and i was like i was like is america ever gonna really get another war i mean like we're so dominant like yeah whatever i a dumb kid i didn't know anything but so i thought you know maybe i'll go do something else um i'd met a girl falling in love whatever so i got out i got married, went to college thinking maybe I'd be an athletic trainer. I mean, it was a high school dropout, right? So I'm like trying to set realistic

goals. I'm like, yeah, maybe an athletic trainer, stretch goal, maybe a physical therapist or something. So I started working at San Diego Sports Medicine Center to get volunteer hours for PT school in case I decided to go that way. They hired me on as an assistant, as an aid. And then I challenged the test later, on as an assistant, as an aid. And then I, you know, challenged the test later, worked as a PT assistant all through college, decided I didn't really want to be a PT. And some doctors there, like talked me into applying to medical school, which I thought was ridiculous, but they kind of guilted me into it pretty, pretty clever. They're like, you know, you should, you should, you know, you should go to medical school. And I'm like, Hey, pump the brakes there, Sparky. I'm high school dropout, you know, you should, you should, you know, you should go to medical school. And I'm like, Hey, pump the brakes. They're sparky. I'm high school dropout. You

know, let's be realistic. And, uh, and this one doctor comes out, owns a clinic. He goes, he's like, Kirk, the question is, and could you get in? The question is, would you go if you got in? And I said, of course I'd go if I got in. He said, well, then you got to really try. Don't you? Yeah. And I was like, all right. So, uh, so I, you know, I was already married, already had kids by the time I was applying to medical school. Um, you know, I'll date myself here. We didn't really have the internet in any real sense. So we had to go to the bookstore and you look through the Kaplan review book to see what schools you're competitive for. And I found out that the military had their own medical school. And I was like, Oh, I didn't know that. And I didn't

really want to be back in the military. Like I never really wanted to be in the military. I wanted to be a seal, which is like a different thing. Like, you know, I don't like, I'm not a super rule rule following guy. Um, but they were going to pay me to go to medical school versus the other way around. And, uh, like I said, already married, already had kids. So I said, I'll do that. Figuring I would get to go back to the SEAL teams and give back a little to the community that, you know, shaped me as a man and probably kept me out of prison and all sorts of other bad paths I could have gone down. And so I did that, uh, went through, uh, you know, medical school, uh, internship, uh, did a residency in undersea hyperbaric medicine, you know, uh, to be able

to work with divers, went back to the SEAL teams as their physician. And I got there right at the right time when they just funded, uh, to build the very first sports medicine facility, the SEAL teams had ever had. And since I was the doctor, they're like, we're going to put you in charge of building this out. And I'm like, well, that's perfect. Because like, that's what I did for six years in college. And I know exactly how to do all this. And so built out that facility was able to be there, you know, really opportune time, you know, to hire like all, like we got great people, you know, we got people from professional sports teams, the Olympic training center, D one colleges,

like, you know, um, and, uh, you know, then once we hired everybody to run the clinic, you know, we had PTs and ATCs and PTAs, and we had ortho rounds coming through and pain rounds coming through and chiropractor coming through and acupuncture coming through. So then I was the dumbest guy around. And when you're in the military and you're the dumbest guy around, they put you in charge. And so they say, you're the leader now and you go supervise all these people who know more than you. And I'm like, okay, great.

Yeah, I'll do that. And so I kind of didn't really have a job, but my, my, my, uh, office was in this sports medicine clinic and, you know, the guys, there was a gym attached to one side of PT facility on the other side. And so the guys would come by and kind of, you know, jabber with me. And, uh, you know, seals are a lot like professional athletes and that the worst thing you can do to them is put them on the bench. So, uh, they usually don't tell their doctor anything because the doctor is the guy who can put them on the bench. So when they get forced to do their physical every three years, they just go in there and lie and go, everything's great. I feel fantastic.

No stress fractures from running thousands of miles. Like, Hey, is that a bullet hole? No, no. Yeah. Like they'll like, like they, they just hide everything. But because I had been a SEAL and I've been a SEAL recently enough to where there are a lot of guys there that I trained and deployed with and people trusted me. And so they came in and they just kind of one by one, shut the door behind him and said, Hey, well, let me tell you what's really going on with me, man. And I proceeded to kind of list out this litany of symptoms, you know, uh, you know, like my motivation sucks. And I knew, all right. So all this with relative, like, you know, a grain of salt, like relative to the general population. Okay. They're, they're still doing great. But to

them, like my motivation sucks. My body composition is shifting. You know, like I'm getting fatter, I'm getting losing muscle, I'm getting weaker, I'm getting slower. Uh, everything hurts, you know, uh, they didn't really complain about sleep. Um, you know, but it was a lot of cognitive stuff, a lot of attention span, memory, short-term memory, uh, you know, emotional control, like snapping, flipping out on their kids and their wives and their families, you know, at work or like whatever, not being able to control their emotions really well. Um, and really didn't have any clue what was going on with them. And I didn't either, cause I was a Western trained MD man. And I knew

how to recognize and treat diseases and nothing. were saying sounded like a disease to me it just didn't sound like you know things were going well and so uh i remember just having no idea and saying well i don't know but you know we'll figure it out and so i literally just tested everything i knew how to interpret and i just said go to the lab go to the hospital and get these 98 labs drawn uh 17 vials of blood and uh gotten a lot of trouble for that because i guess that was like 3 500 bucks worth of labs for every guy and i sent like 400 dudes over there so they didn't really dig that um and i and i just just looking for patterns it's like i don't i don't know what i'm looking for. Let's just see. No big surprise now. I mean, I think the average guy is probably educated enough to know what I saw then, but nobody really knew it then. So this is back in 2009.

And, you know, every kind of every anabolic marker was low, right? DHA was low. Testosterone was low. Free T was low. You know, DHT was low. IGF-1 was low. Everything anabolic marker was low, right? DHA, DHA was low. Testosterone was low. Free T was low. You know, DHT was low. IGF-1 was low. Like everything anabolic low, everything catabolic high, right? High cortisol, like high metabolites, epinephrine, norepinephrine, high inflammatory markers, high oxidative markers. And so they really just kind of look like 60 year old men who are, you know, 30 pounds

overweight, you know, pre-diabetic metabolic syndrome kind of thing. But they weren't. They were like young athletic jacked guys, right? Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to RapidHealthReport.com. When you get to RapidHehealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work.

Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover

everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidehealthreport.com.

You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. And so I was just like, I don't know, but we'll, we'll figure it out. So I pretty quickly

decided nothing I learned in medical school was going to help me. So I just started, you know, reaching out and to whatever the functional medicine, alternative medicine, and, you know, you know, integrative medicine, complementary alternative, like all of those kind of different fields, started reading books, podcasts were just kind of coming up as a thing there was listening to Rob Wolf's podcast and all those kind of that era solution right paleo solution yep and um and so i uh i started treating for adrenal fatigue first i thought well you know this is eight years into combat and like you know you've heard about other other wars combat fatigue shell shock shock. It's like, well, maybe it's that, like whatever that is.

And then you go do some research, like, well, nobody knows what that is either. So, like, well, that doesn't really help. So, but maybe it's still that. So, you know, I started learning about adrenal fatigue. I thought, well, maybe like that kind of sounds like it. So, I'm doing what I can to help with that. You know, maybe doesn't like that either. I'm getting in trouble for that.

Apparently, I'm not qualified to give IV vitamins and minerals and stuff. And then like, I mean, I'm in shame to say how long it took me. I don't know exactly, but seems like a lot of guys said that. So I kind of remember I'm making a note in the margin. And then I, after, you know, we finished, I go back and I looked through all my shadow files. I wasn't putting anything in their files. I kept all my own files. And that was, you know, kind of part of the way they would let me help them. And every single guy who had been in my office was taking Ambien. And I said, okay, that's probably not a coincidence. Let's start looking into that. Now, like I said, not a single one of these guys had complained about their sleep. And that's because we come from a culture that does not value sleep whatsoever.

And sleep is for weak people, right? Like we go for a week without sleep during training just to prove that you can be a SEAL, right? So sleep's kind of an optional luxury thing. So no one said a thing about it. And I was like, okay, let me start questioning. Like, why are you on Ambien? You know, because, you know, it's a sleep drug.

So, and, you know, and I had taken, you know, pharmacology at medical school. I knew that Ambien was a GABA analog. So it acted like GABA. Hell, if I knew what GABA did, it had anything to do with sleep or nor did I know what happens during sleep because I didn't learn any of that in medical school. And I was like, well, I don't really know. So let's figure out if this could matter. So sure enough, the guys tell me, well, you know, I, I've been taking this for years.

I used to take one, you know, kind of quit working and then started taking two. Now I'm taking three and I, you know, drinking four or five beers or a couple of cocktails before I go to bed. And I'm waking up at four o'clock in the morning and just wired awake and can't go back to sleep. So like, I just say, well, I'll get up, I'll go to the gym. I'll work out really hard. I'll push through the whole day. I won't take any naps. And then when I come home tonight, I'll be tired and I'll get a good night's sleep. Um, I'd say like, how long you been doing that? Like, you know, four years. I'm like, tonight's the night. Keep going. Right. It's going to work eventually. Right. Just keep going. Yeah. And so I was like, all right,

well, maybe there's something to the sleep. So, you know, when pharmaceutical, when pharmaceutical industry, um, applies for a drug patent with the FDA, uh, or drug approval with the FDA, I should say, uh, they own the research. The pharmaceutical company does the research. They own it. They give the FDA what they want to give them and they don't give them what they don't want to give them when they get sued. They have to show all the research. So all sleep drugs hit all the z drugs as they're called had just uh been hit in lawsuits because people were taking these drugs completely dissociating their neocortex from their lizard brain and then they were going to you know they lived in vegas and they're going and gambling away their entire life savings, uh, you know, picking up prostitutes, eating, you know, whatever,

10,000 calories at a buffet, coming home, going back to sleep, waking up and having no memory whatsoever of that. And then like, you know, getting notifications in the mail that, Hey, like before closing on your house, cause you, you gambled it away. And they're like, what are you talking about? And, uh uh so these are true stories like this stuff those things literally happen people uh just completely dissociated and i've seen that my in my personal life and with private clients i've seen that um and so i was like okay that sounds bad let's see what else is going on and so then you start reading through the research. Well, it turns out that the Z drugs help you fall asleep on average, 13 minutes faster.

You sleep on average 37 minutes longer, but it reduces REM sleep by 80% and it reduces deep sleep by 20%. So it's a net loss. You'd be better off just dealing with your insomnia and getting quality sleep for the time you did sleep. And then alcohol does the opposite. Alcohol, 80% of deep sleep and 20% of REM. So when I did sleep studies on the seals, 99.999% stage two sleep. No REM, no deep sleep. So I was like, like check that's bad i know that's bad i don't know much about and then when i learn about sleep well of course that's when all your hormones are being regulated right deep sleep most anabolic time in any 24-hour period of your life is during

deep sleep lowest stress hormones you'll ever have is while you're in stage four sleep. So, can I jump in here real quick? This is straight from you. For listeners that haven't been listening to the show for many, many years, you've been on the show multiple times, but not for a couple of years here. And one of the main points that's related to what you just said that I've always remembered from probably 2015 or so you you were mentioning like people get blackout drunk you eventually pass out sleep through the night wake up the next day and the distinction there is that you're not asleep you're unconscious right which is not the same thing which is like the layman's term for more or less what you just said it's like the you're not normal night's sleep you're just you're just not awake which is not i used to always say that on my lectures. It's like, Hey, you know, if somebody comes up here

and I hit him in the head with a baseball bat and they fall down, who would say that guy fell asleep? Right? Like, no, he's unconscious. And that's what Z drugs do. They make you unconscious. So you don't get any of the benefits of being asleep. Well, the whole reason of going to sleep tonight is I have to repair from today. Like I'm damaging, like all three of us, we're damaging ourselves right now. We're catabolic right now. We're eating ourselves to get through this podcast, right? So we're building up waste products. We're draining our resources. We work out, we damage ourselves, right? You don't get, if you go to the gym, you don't get stronger, right? You get weaker, right? If you do anything worth doing,

you leave the gym weaker than you went into the gym. When you sleep and recover and anabolic activity recreates that muscle cell into some, whatever type of exercise you're doing in an adaptive state to where you can do tomorrow, what you did today easier. That's when you get stronger or faster or better, whatever. So the whole point of sleeping tonight is to repair from everything I've damaged myself and then prepare for tomorrow, like restock all the shelves and like get all the nutrients in there and be ready for tomorrow. And if I don't get enough sleep or if I don't get any quality sleep, like my sleep architecture looks like a straight line.

It's all stage two sleep. I'm not getting deep sleep. I'm not getting REM sleep. Well, then tomorrow still comes at exactly the same time. I still have to do exactly the same thing tomorrow that I would have had to do if I slept well. So how do I do it? My body compensates by releasing stress hormones and stress hormones, right? Enough stress hormones are fight or flight. You fight or flight, you feel pretty amazing, right? You're stronger, you're faster, you have more endurance. You can see better, your lungs dilate, your blood pressure

is higher, blood glucose is higher, pain thresholds, higher reflexes are faster. You're super you, but you're also eating yourself. So like, you know, 48 hours of that and you'd be dead, right? So we compensate by stress hormones and they're stress hormones, like I said, they're catabolic. Well, anabolic is repairing us. Catabolic is breaking us down. Right? So if I could go to sleep tonight and I could repair a hundred percent and I could readjust all my hormones and I could have like perfect the hormones of a 25 year old athlete and get rid of all the waste products and restock all the

nutrients. And I could completely repair every night. I would wake up exactly the same every day, maybe a little better, right? I would never age. The extent that we age is the extent that we can't recover 100%. And the older we get, the harder it is to recover from a night, right? So when you don't get enough sleep, when you don't recover 100%, your body compensates by doing stress hormones. So when you need eight hours of sleep and you sleep six hours, you just chose to age 25% faster, right? You just chose to recover 25% slower. You just chose to, you know, decrease your cognitive functioning by 25%. Decrease your insulin sensitivity by 25%.

Decrease your testosterone by 25%. What's that again, Doug? Could you have effectively scared me more into sleep or just now I actually had the response of like, Oh shit, I think he's right. I mean, all of our wives when they had kids aged themselves by, uh, 20, 20, 25%. Uh, yeah. So the it's, it's 25% is the average so when you have

a baby we have a newborn the first two years of a newborn's life both parents on average lose six months of sleep in that first two years so 25% yeah good stuff man

so anyway the good news was So it's 25%. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff, man. Good stuff. So anyway, the good news was I got guys off of Ambien. I couldn't just take it away and say, suck it up, Buttercup. Like I had to give them something. So I came up with the help of the SEALs, honestly. Like, you know, this is a group effort. I went to like really traditional, like Cochrane database, PubMed kind of stuff, nothing kind of fancy out there. Like what helps with sleep and why once you learn a little bit about, you know, what happens when you sleep. And, you know, it took me a while, obviously,

to educate myself. Fortunately, being the doctor for the West Coast SEAL teams, I could call just about anybody and say, Hey, man, I read your book. I heard your Ted talk, blah, blah, blah. I'm the doctor for the West Coast SEAL teams. Could I come train with you? Could I consult with you? And like, so I got to learn a lot really quickly. I got to work with some really, really great, amazing people who just like, you know, made me 10 times smarter than I could have ever gotten by myself. And, you know, we, with, you know, with a combination of supplements, got got guys sleeping got guys off of ambien and then lo and behold their freaking testosterone tripled their free testosterone quadrupled their their markers for inflammation and oxidation went down you know to unmeasurable from like you know scary high to unmeasurable uh growth hormone went up like whatever and then

their performance improved you know a lot of their cognitive stuff, uh, that cognitive emotional stuff, their body composition, their strength, their endurance, kind of all the stuff they're complaining about, everything improved. Um, it wasn't a hundred percent for a hundred percent of the people. I'd say it's 80% for 80% of the guys. Um, and then probably my last 18 months there. So I, I, uh, I caught on to the significance of traumatic brain injury. Um, when I went to medical school, um, what we learned in medical school was that you had to be physically hit in the head and knocked unconscious to have a brain injury. Like that was the only thing that qualified for a tbi perfect example true story one of my best friends from the seal teams i went through i went through uh buds with him he's my

roommate and buds 27 combat deployments with with seal team six he got blown up uh he was like shooting comes i released a grenade at his feet literally at his feet blows him back like this all the shrapnel goes up through here through the palate and he has grenade shrapnel he goes up through the palate of his mouth through his optic nerve of his left eye so he's blind and then into his brain he didn't qualify for a brain injury because he never lost consciousness and i'm like i got i don't know like i'm no doctor but it seems like boring material in your brain is kind of the definition of um a brain injury i don't know like i've been stabbed in the brain who am i who am i to say you know um and but you know i'd i'd uh

i'd gone to an event uh you know i did my best to just like keep up with kind of that i don't know if we're going to call them cutting edge but just like the guys that that aren't algorithm followers you know the docs that are kind of coaching each other trying to figure out how to do better things and um and i went to one where a guy was doing a tbi and i did knew i knew i had one tbi patient for sure as a guy a rocket launcher had hit, you know, an RPG had hit like within two or three feet of his head, hit a wall right behind him. And I was like, oh, I have a TBI guy.

Let me go see what it says. It was this guy named Mark Gordon. You might've heard of him. He's a doctor out of LA. He works with Andrew Marr and his nonprofit organization. And he did a lot with hormones. And he was presenting, he'd been working with pugilists um to all all types of striking fighters and nfl guys and um he had been talking about how much hormonal dysregulation they have because of brain

injuries and then he was putting up all of his lab sets from his case reports. Identical, looked identical to my guys. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. So then I start going to research on traumatic brain injury. It turns out it takes 1.09 G's of force to get a very minor brain injury. This was documented in JAMA in 2009, like 40 000 people really really solid study um 1.09 g's they got that from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster so i'm like okay well how many brain injuries do my seals have right yeah all about every pilot all the brains it's like all of them uh 11 i just watched the the navy seal or not the navy seal the the blue angel yeah documentary that

came out and they show that like g simulator yeah that's freaky yeah they start putting people at five six seven g's or whatever it is and then they just so over so what we found out um and so i started i started doing what i could to treat brain injury my my primary solution at that time was was hyperbarics and we can get into that in a minute i'll just finish this off um real quick uh and so it was um what you know what we what what i thought was okay you know all of these you know fast but like all of these fast boats that transit, they're pulling 60 knots in the ocean. Every time they hit a wave, it's 60 Gs, peaking over 100 Gs.

Hard parachute opening, three or four Gs. Lots of guys hit their heads, fast roping, all kinds of things, combatives, falling off roofs. I'm like, oh, I've got to have a lot of these brain injuries. And then probably about a year and a half after I got out, unfortunately, a guy that I'd served with, his son had become a SEAL and his son suicided. And he knew something was wrong with his brain.

And he'd been trying to get the medical community to help him for four or five years. And he couldn't he couldn't get the help he needed. And so he did what the NFL guys did. He shot himself through the heart. And he said he left a note, said, I want I want my brain autopsied to see what's going on with it. And so they autopsy his brain and his entire brain is covered with beta amyloid plaques. And you, that's, that doesn't happen, right? That doesn't happen in any disease that doesn't happen. It's very localized for disease.

And when you look at pugilists and, and football players, they have, you know, areas in the front areas in the back, what we call coup counter coup areas that are localized where they take most of the brunt um and this guy from virginia beach recently uh this this was a while back this was uh 2011 yeah yeah 2011 11 or 12 he suicided and i think around 13 is when we had all this data uh it's been it's happened many times since then unfortunately we do have an epidemic of suicide in the SEAL teams um post SEAL well that's not true we've had active duty guy suicide as well um so we we do have that epidemic we do have a big

problem with that and so uh what they figured out there are a response to physical trauma your your brain smashes up against your skull on the inside and then and then the plaques form as a result of the the physical damage i'm about to tell you what this is this is what they figured out uh we got some really smart people involved you know um a lot a lot of research interest from that one brain autopsy everybody was like like every neurologist in the world was like what in the hell is this like it has to be a one-of-one right and then another one happened another one happened and they're like okay what's going on here so somebody got the idea of like well maybe this is just blast injuries maybe it's not actually hitting their head right maybe it's just the blast force and so they built a completely transparent skull out of a polymer that had a density approximating bone.

And then they built a brain layer by layer. Dura vessels, gray matter, white matter, vesicles, midbrain, like all of that. And then with high speed photography, threw a blast in the room and watched the blast wave go through. It's completely intuitive once you see it because, like, we've all seen blast waves before, and you watch everything go, right, suck that wave and suck back. But everything moves at a different rate because it depends on the density, right? The car doesn't go as far as the leaves and the dirt and the dust,

and the tree doesn't sway as much, right? And like everything moves at a different rate and that's what happens in the brain so the skull vibrates the durasect the dural lining underneath that vibrates that vibrates at a different rate than the blood vessels underneath it so it shears off those blood vessels shear off of the brain the gray matter shears off of the white matter the white matter shears off near the vesicles the midbrain shears off from the neocortex and so everywhere there's an interface between two different densities covered with plaque because it's just it's a marker for injury and so that was like the aha moment right so that turned out, that blast force turned out to be a little over a G. M4 is inside of a concrete room,

which is what everybody does for CQC. 35 Gs for every round. So how many brain injuries do you have? If you're in the back of a Humvee with a 50 cal, 50 cal going in a Humvee, everybody inside is getting 65 Gs every round. Our anti-tank weapons like carl gustav 824 200 g's for the guy shooting it 300 g's for the guy spotting it so how many brain injuries again all of them so now you know i left this i left the seal teams

did what i could got in a lot of trouble. Bureaucracy, you know, bureaucracy did not like what I was doing. The SEALs, like I, obviously the SEALs were huge fans and wanted my work. Big Navy, big medicine, you know, not so much. So I left, you know, just kind of created a vacuum. They were just going to replace me with some geoblow doctor who's going to, you know, give out Motrin and, you know, inject knees and stuff. And, uh, so, you know, the guys kept saying, well, what do we do? What do we do? And I'm like, I don't know. I'll just keep treating you.

You just have to buy your own stuff. Right. So you have to buy your own supplements, buy your own meds. I can't prescribe within the system. And so that's what we did. Um, and I've been doing that since I got out in 2013. Um, and it just grows, uh, you know, grows by word of mouth. And then about three years ago, so I'm, I'm on the advisory board for, uh, for, for nonprofits that, uh, help former seals specifically to seals. They help former, former seals, uh, when they transition, um, now that kind of transitions when they transition. Now, that kind of transition when they get out of the military and go into the civilian sector.

Although we have those two. They. They these these organizations help them specifically. And though and several of those organizations are now paying for all the treatments that I need these guys to get. So we were always limited by whatever the SEAL could afford. Like I've never charged them a dime for my time. I never will. But, you know, everything costs money.

Like even supplements cost money. So supplements and pharmaceuticals and, you know, God forbid we do stem cells or exosomes or hyperbarics or you know things like that even psychedelics are you know eight grand seven eight grand like that so um so we're always limited by that now there's lots of organizations that are paying for that and so that's like 70 of my time i do that yeah um and then i have i have enough private clients that i charge an exorbitant amount of money so that and i tell them i'm like hey dude i'm charging so much because you're paying for me to treat seals for free uh and uh and so i i keep some private enough private clients you know to kind of pay the bills and make make financially comfortable and then i i spend all the rest of the

time helping the seals perform and that's that's how I phrase it the best. It really is performance. Cause they, even though I know, like we can recognize from the story, I just told they all have brain injury, but none of them would qualify for brain injury, right? Like you can't, they can't go see a neurologist, do some kind of scan and go, oh, you have a brain injury. I know they have a brain injury because I know what they've been doing for the past 20 years.

And like, and there's no possible way they don't have brain injuries. So I just assume every seal who comes to see me has some level of neuroinflammation. And it just a little bit of neuroinflammation leads to a dysregulation of hormones. If you think about it, the skull doesn't move, doesn't stretch. The brain fills the skull. And so when you get a little bit of inflammation in the brain, where's it going? It doesn't have anywhere to go. So it just creates pressure. And then that pressure decreases blood flow. And then that decrease of blood flow makes it impossible to get rid of the inflammation. And then you get, you know, beta amyloid tau protein formations to protect for the chronic inflammation,

and you start losing cognitive functioning. Your hormones get dysregulated because that's the organ that's regulating your hormones, this damaged organ that has too much pressure on it. And go and figure when you have brain injuries, you have a hard time sleeping. When you have low hormones, like we documented that in the SEAL team, it's almost a one-to-one correlation between total testosterone and total time of sleep. If I take away your sleep, your testosterone goes down. If your testosterone's down, you won't sleep well. Like that's just the way it is. And so I just treat everybody as though they have these brain injuries. We do what we can and we can get into all those modalities if you

want to, but we do what we can to we can we can get into all those modalities if you want to but we do what we can to decrease brain inflammation yeah optimize their hormones i optimize every like again every kind of nutritional micronutrient vitamin inflammatory marker oxidative marker anabolic markers like i did i do everything i can to where if i handed their paper to a colleague of mine say who do you think this is they'd say a 25 year old athletic man, right? That's what I want their labs to look like. It doesn't make them 25, but it gives them a chance to recover. Right. And then we, and then from there we add hyperbarics and psychedelics and stem cells and exosomes and whatever the hell they need, depending on what their goals are and what their deficits are. Yeah. You mentioned psychedelics a couple of times.

We could also talk about hyperbaric chambers, but drugs are cooler. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to. Well, interestingly, there's a hell of a lot of crossover. Yeah. And this is one of my biggest frustrations

is how easy this is to treat and how nobody is treating it. And when I say nobody, I mean, nobody, I mean, I know one other doctor who does what I do and she lives with me. Yeah. It's my wife. Like, I don't know anybody else who does what I do. I know a lot of doctors that do these types of things, but I don't know anybody else who approaches it like this. Like I know doctors who are giving hormones to guys with brain injuries and I know guys doing some hyperbarics. I don't know anybody who's doing it all. I know guys doing psychedelics. They don't understand why they're doing psychedelics, right? They they're doing

psychedelics because the guys feel better. Well, psychedelics are great anti-inflammatory. They, they decrease inflammation in the brain like mad. If you've ever seen anybody come off of Ibogaine, they do an Ibogaine treatment. The next morning you see them, they have like these glowing white sclera, like the white part of their eyes, their eyes seem really big. It's like all gone. Well, there's no blood vessels in there. All the inflammation is gone, right?

And so what we know is that psychedelics, they increase neurotropic growth factors. Right. So things like BDNF, people hear that brain derived neurotropic factors, also glial cell derived neurotropic factor. You can decrease the inflammatory markers, you know, TNF alpha and interleukin six and all those things that are markers for inflammation in the brain. Increase all the things that promote brain growth, decrease the brain inflammation, gives guys a shot. But the biggest thing that psychedelics do that hyperbarics doesn't. So hyperbarics does very similar things with the benefit of increasing stem cells in the brain, 800%.

And then there are peptides that do very similar things to the psychedelics. But where the psychedelics stand out is like like you guys have probably heard of the limbic system, right? So that's our hedonistic highway. It drives us towards pleasure, takes us away from fear and pain. And a big player in that is those little almonds they call the amygdala, right? On the other side of your brain, the amygdala we call the alarm center. It's a region of your brain

that tells you what to pay attention to because it might be dangerous, it might be a threat, or it just might be something that you need to pay attention to. And that's directly linked to the autonomic nervous system. So sympathetic nervous system, right?

That's the fight or flight. When you max out sympathetic tone, that's fight or flight. Maximum stress hormones, maximum epinephrine, which is adrenaline, maximum norepinephrine, that's the fight or flight when you max out sympathetic tone that's fight or flight maximum stress hormones maximum epinephrine which is adrenaline maximum norepinephrine which is adrenaline for the brain again we come superhuman we're we're meant to get away from that whatever that threat is get away from that and we're willing to sacrifice everything about us to get away from that right so nothing else is working right we aren't, we aren't digesting food.

We are kidneys aren't working. Our livers aren't working. Our brains really aren't working. It's like, we're get away from this threat. That's it. Everything is meant to get away from this threat. So that's sympathetic tone. Well, the amygdala is what controls that. And I have a personal theory that I think will eventually be validated and documented. A lot of what I've said has been validated and documented since I started doing this with peer-reviewed research, but I don't do peer-reviewed research. I do clinical work.

So people are catching up on it. But I think we reversed the autonomics on SEALs. So what you'll hear from a SEAL who comes back from his 13th, 14th deployment is the maximum amount of anxiety he's ever felt is sitting on his couch on a Sunday afternoon with the television off and having nothing to do. And he's crawling out of his skin, his heart's racing. There's no stimulus. There's no noise. There's no bangs that's calling him PTSD. They're just stressed out of their mind. Conversely, guns start shooting, and they run towards the gunfire,

and they're joking with each other, talking about, oh, you know, you step on your stomach, whatever. And almost no stress. They're in a gunfight, and there's almost no stress, right? So I think we've reversed it on our guys. And so that's one of the things we have to recover from. And psychedelics reduce. So this is, it's a preprint. This hasn't been printed yet in peer reviewed journals, but it will be. It was done at major medical centers and it's a very good study. Through functional. Um, they've proven that psychedelics can reduce the amygdala tone

by 90%. You haven't had that low of stress since you were like four or five years old. Okay. So you take these guys who have these enlarged amygdalas because they're using it a lot, uh, used to combat hypervigilance, paying attention to everything, being alert for any kind of stressor, the wrong look on somebody's face, a wire sticking out of something, piece of metal being propped up that shouldn't be there, like hypervigilant. That leads to a heightened anxiety level. So you give these guys the psychedelic dissociative experience and they get to go look at themselves from a third party perspective and analyze whether or not what they're doing is stupid or not like things they've been doing their whole lives you know we lose neuroplasticity the older we get which means it's

harder for us to change our behavior it's harder for us to change how we think about something the older we get because we get these ruts you know that we do like this is how we think about this is how we think about that thing and and that's why we become grumpy old men, because like, we don't, we don't, it's not possible to think about it that way. We think about it this way, and that's the right way to do it, right? So you get these really durable pathways. Well, psychedelics increase neuroplasticity. It makes it easier for you to change your mind and change about how you think, how you think about things, but it decreases the anxiety by 90%. And the hardest thing about changing behavior is changing the anxiety that

comes from getting rid of the anxiety that comes from changing behavior. Like even getting somebody to work out, like they're overcoming anxiety to do that. Getting somebody to sleep, they're overcoming anxiety to do that. Getting people to change their nutrition. Like it's stressful to us to change behaviors and so if you can reduce that by 90 and increase the brain's ability to change well man you got a magic recipe right there right and so that's and it's a great anti-inflammatory so we do that on guys who are like you're really you know there's urgent cases right there's guys who are like

they're ready to suck start their pistol right now and like we get those guys in treatment like today well like that guy calls today we'll have them treated tomorrow uh and then there's you know people that aren't struggling that much that maybe we do something a little later on uh but the ibogaine is kind of like the nuclear option. That's the really harsh teacher, but it's really profound. And the results are super, super durable. So the difference between psilocybin and ayahuasca and Ibogaine, they all have very similar properties. And I'm speaking in a grand sense. This is a 30,000-foot level.

There's all sorts of tiny little chemicals in these different that are having all sorts of other effects that we don't know. And we, we probably won't know for 50 years. Um, but in a grand sense, they all work very similar. They have very similar effects when you look at somebody's functional MRI. And, and when you talk to people who've experienced all of these drugs, and I've done every one of the, I've done all three of those myself to see what they're like. And they're very similar. To me, they're very similar.

My experience was very similar. But that decrease, that increase in neuroplasticity and that decrease of amygdala tone and Ibogaine can last up to a year, right? It's like nine months to a year. That's a long window to change. Ayahuasca is like four to six months. Psilocybin is like two or three months ketamine is like a week two weeks maybe a month tops right so it's like the gradation of the drug is really like how durable that changes they all seem to do it um they all seem to do very similar things as far as changing that limbic system. And then the benefit, you know, the

counter benefit that nobody, I hardly ever hear anybody talk about it on, you know, out in mainstream when people present on it. But the other side of that limbic system, the other side of that anxiety system is the dopaminergic pleasure pathway, right? So dopamine drives us towards doing more behaviors that our body you know releasing serotonin as well there's other there's other things being involved but you know we we simplify it say the dopamine pathway right it's the i want more of that because i consider that pleasurable or good um so it in it it senses it hypersensitizes that per that process as well and so a lot of people who have addictions their addiction is meant to calm down the anxiety it's it's meant to calm

down the amygdala yeah the guys come out of a treatment of ibogaine or psilocybin or iwasa or something and they they don't they quit drinking or they quit smoking they They quit dipping, like whatever. And it's like, they, they didn't even go there for that. Wasn't even like, wasn't even part of their plan. And just all of a sudden it's like, I, I can't tell you the number of guys I've talked to that did Ibogaine. I talked to him two years later, like I haven't had a drink in two years, just cause I don't want to, like, I just don't have any desire to do it. You know? And I don't have it. They didn't have a drinking problem.

They just quit doing it. And of course, you know, there's health benefits to that. If, if, especially if guys are drinking excessively and then when you calm down that anxiety, well, the number one reason people don't sleep well is because of excess stress, excess stress hormones. That's 90% of all insomnia is caused by excess stress. So guys are sleeping better. Yeah. Gives them a chance to correct their hormones, great anti-inflammatory, you know, neuroplasticity, decreased anxiety, ability to make some changes, get their hormones in order, get their nutrition in order. And all of a sudden they can exercise

again without everything killing them. They can actually get stronger. Uh, and I mean, it's night and day. I mean, it's night and day. You, you take guys, you know, a guy who comes out of 25 years of the seal teams usually looks like he's 65 or 70 years old. Right. And he's 40, 40, 45 years old. There's also some sort of like reconciliation. I feel like that goes into that, um, into that process. Like, um, there's something about, and I can only speak to the psilocybin side of it, but, um, you, you almost like become okay with the past in a way. I don't, I don't have like tons of, um, PTSD or things like that, that I,

that I struggle with, but, um, any, any of those friction points in life that do cause stress that like low level friction, um, as you, as you go through, uh, an experience on psilocybin, I do know, like, I do feel all of those little things. It's like the big breath of fresh air is able to happen that you've just like, you've almost been like holding all this like low level stuff in. And I would imagine war and those big stressors also live in there in those people or in those groups. But there is something that is almost this just like full body exhale that happens over a four hour period. And I would imagine, I mean, I've been in, in some of them, where I will sit there and cry for two, three straight hours. Um, and then you come out of it

and it's like the storm has passed and there's something about, um, it just feels like a massive exhale. Like I've, I've never left left it worse i've never come out of that experience worse i always come out significantly better um and in many ways what are the primary benefits of psychedelics um and again everything i'm saying is my opinion there's not there's not great consensus on any science on this stuff yet. You know, and to dip my toe in the woo-woo, you know, all of us as children, when you're a child and you're really helpful, you're very helpless, right? Just by definition, you don't have a lot of resources. You aren't big.

You aren't strong. You don't know a lot of things. So the world's a really dangerous place. And you don't understand the scale of things. Right. And so like being locked outside of your house for 30 minutes feels like you might die. Right. Like it would be equivalent now to like, you know, falling out of an airplane or something, you know? Uh, and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to die. And so when, when we're little kids and, you know, and this is in the, in the psychological literature, this isn't just like me making things up, but when we're little kids and you know and this is in this in the psychological literature this isn't just like me making things up but when you're a little kid you do you develop

a technique or two it's usually one that you really stick with it's like this is how i deal with stress this is how i deal with unpleasant scary things and then that becomes like your personality type and it becomes what, how you deal with things. And then you do that your entire life. So you start doing that as a little kid. And then by the time you get 40 years old, though, you have this five-year-old kid protecting you, right? You have the, right. This, this little ego, that's really what the ego is. It's this little self, this little sense of protection. It's like, Hey, it's been taking care of me for 35 years. Ever since that that time my dad accidentally locked me outside the house for an hour parents forgot me

in school right right and so so now it's like this is a life or death thing and so we think of this as life or death and then and and that same system we're using as an adult to navigate uh you know an argument with our spouse or something or something at work, which is a really stupid thing to do because you have a five-year-old in charge of your cognitive processing at that point. And I can't remember who explained it to me this way, but it really just resonated with me. It's like, hey, the whole idea of this psychedelic thing is to get rid of that ego. Like tell that little kid, hey, man, I got this from now on. Like you go over there and play and let me look at this from an adult perspective.

And like I was talking about, we have those durable pathways in our brain that like it's a wagon, an old school wagon going down a dirt trail for 40 years. Like how easy is it to get the wagon off that trail? Like it's going down that trail, man. Like that's how you're getting there. But, you know, when you get this experience and you can let that ego go and you go, okay, I don't have to do it the way I've always done it.

And you can look at it from another perspective and go, is that, you don't have a choice. It's like, yeah. And it's like, is what I'm doing a smart thing or not like the the first seal i the first seal whoever did i began i took him down to mexico to to do it i took him personally because he was so suicidal there was no talking him out of it it wasn't like a momentary thing this was a long thought process and i'm like let's go do this and he came out i mean he he went in this brooding angry literally everybody was afraid of him the number one thing i heard about him from everybody who ever met him was like he's the scariest guy

i've ever met in my life and uh but i'd known him since i was 18 and we were kids together and he looked that's who he looked like to me you know like, like I, that's all the 18 year old. So, and one night he did Ibogaine and the next day, like he was that 18 year old kid again. I heard that's the hardest one. Like 30 years earlier, I'd met this and he's smiling and he's joking. And he he's remembering things from our childhood that I didn't remember. He relived them that day.

And I was just like, oh my God, just in one treatment. So it's a super powerful drug. I have good friends. You guys might even know Dan Engel. Y'all familiar with him? Dr. Dan Engel. So he's a neurologist and a psychiatrist. So he's double board certified.

And he went down in the Amazon and lived with a shaman for six years and learned how to really do really facilitate psychedelic medicines and he's the smartest smartest guy i know in this world and uh and and yeah he'll tell you it's like psychiatry and neurology combined if you take all of their resources and put them in one basket it wouldn't be as power it wouldn't be as power. It wouldn't be one 10th as powerful as one night of psychedelics. He's like, yeah, there's no comparison in this stuff. And that's, that's profound coming from somebody who's board certified in both of those, right? This isn't just like some hippie, you know, I used to think that all that psychedelic stuff,

man, that's just a different way of getting high. And it's an excuse for getting high with your buddies. And, but it's, it's amazing. It is truly amazing medicine. I think one of the most important parts about it is that you can't hide from it. Like you eat the mushroom and it's going down. Grab in baby. You don't have a choice. You're 20 minutes in and all of a sudden here it comes. And you really don't have a choice. You're going to stare at the tree in a very different way. And it's going to work its magic on you. And maybe the hardest thing for many people is letting it happen. But over time, it's just going to win.

And you really can't escape it once you commit to the experience. Yeah. And, and especially when you're doing things like psilocybin and ayahuasca, right. It's like, yeah, they're not making that, that stuff's not coming out of a Tylenol factory. It's not like precision. So like, I, I remember the first, the first thing I ever did like i i i just went to evaluate this program for for my guys like like i need to go see what it's like before i'm not going to send

some guy to it if it's like too crazy right and so the ayahuasca place i went to it was not the right environment at all like you know i had the chicken bones and the gongs and the like you know yeah rattle shaking i'm like i these i'm like that dude to be taped up in the corner in like five minutes if i send seals over here and so uh so anyway i i go and i do that you know and i watch you they just like you know they look at you and they kind of like there's about six spirits telling me you need about that much right and uh you know i think because i'm a bigger guy they thought probably i needed a lot. And I turned out I'm super, super, super sensitive to all these things. And, uh, like, you know, you had to go up front to get your serving and then you go crawl back on your yoga mat, which is,

you know, 20 feet away or something. And then they tell you, Hey, in about 45 minutes, you should really start feeling it. And like 45 minutes to an hour, we'll ask you if you want seconds, you know, because not everybody's going to feel it. Right. And so I do it by the time I get back on my mat and lay down, I'm gone. Like I'm just, I'm like, I've, I figured out the first, my very first thought is like, Oh, that's where all these black light posters come from that all the hippies did in high school, man. Cause like, I see those structures. Okay. All right.

Check. I know where that is. And then I'm just laying there going too much too much like it's too much man like too much i am like i am so dissociated i can't feel my body like i don't know what's going on like too much too much yeah and the first time i ever did it brought brought by the second dose like 45 minutes in like you were saying and i was like get that shit away from me like well funny yeah i'm good yeah so so i'm laying there and it's just like way too much i can't move i'm not sure if i'm breathing anymore i don't know and i'm just like i don't know maybe i'm dead and i'm like too much too much and it goes on and on and on and on and on finally i'm like well maybe this is maybe it's coming to an end like maybe this will start wearing off soon. And right about the time I had that thought, I hear him go, anybody want seconds? I'm like, oh man. And then the girl next to me is like 105 pounds. And she's like, I do.

And like, I hear her bouncing up there and I'm like, I'm like, this ain't gonna be good, man. Yeah. It was, it was rough. It was rough. Yeah. rough yeah um you know i thought that was really interesting how you laid out kind of timelines where um where behavior change is more possible for a period of time following uh ibogaine for many months or mushrooms for a period of two months i think you said something similar ketamine maybe or whatever what have you um that's very similar i haven't done ibogaine but i've done all the other ones and those timelines sounded fairly accurate um mdma is not a true psychedelic but it has gotten a lot of traction especially related to uh military and ptsd and the fda's

yeah hopefully gonna push that through soon um to what degree is behavior change a function of post mdma life and and uh how does that just fit into the mix here? So, so the MDA has, uh, they're all stimulants, uh, but the MDA, uh, is more stimulatory, uh, to the brain. Um, but it does have that same effects. Like if you've done MDA, like you, you realize all this love everybody everybody loves each other and like there's no fear not and right uh so what what's been proven obviously so what you know what you just said uh you know is what i was alluding to is that um the integration period post treatment is like that's where all the magic is right and so depending on the drug you you take

you know that that depends on how long your window is to like you know really get in there and get your uncomfortable work done and right uh and so mda short acting uh but the benefit of mda of course is that it's not really dissociative so you can have normal conversations while you're doing MDMA. So like the, the counselor facilitated MDMA or MDMA facilitated counseling, I should say, um, allows people to be a lot more truthful. Like that's really, that's the biggest benefit really is that with that decreased anxiety in the sense of everything's loving and everything's okay. Well, now I'll say things in front of my spouse that I wouldn't necessarily say, or I'll say something to my counselor that maybe I'm ashamed of. And like, I, I've been holding this back for years. Cause I don't like, I don't really want to

talk about that. Like maybe I can get better without talking about that. Right. And like, people do that kind of stuff all the time. Um, or done that both MDA and MDMA, both those are similar in the sense that you can can you can be honest to a degree that you have never been honest before in your life and kind of on the other side of it you can hear honesty from other people yeah to a degree that that you have never been able to just absorb the thoughts of another person like um i have a very interesting story from a friend of mine who was having a conversation with his wife where there there was cheating in the relationship and they needed to talk about it. So they both did MDMA together and he was the one that did the cheating.

And he went into this conversation, like going to try to explain this to his wife and save his relationship. And they got into the conversation and she started the whole thing by going, you know what? Like, I was trying to get you to cheat. Like I was, I was, I know you're like a, you're like this attractive guy. And, and I felt like I wasn't good enough and I was trying to get you to cheat. So I wasn't giving you attention on purpose. So you would cheat that way. That way I could get out of this relationship, but I could blame you for the whole thing. And like, it was like, not what he expected at all, but like 100% honesty came out of that conversation that just would not have happened with mdma i'm

not saying like pardon this he fucking totally did but like but that level of honesty is totally possible on mdma in a way that is just not present in a regular conversation where you'd end up fighting and defensive almost immediately yeah and the only caution i have about that is uh it's really good to have a counselor facilitate that because all that honesty isn't necessarily going to be as appreciated tomorrow it's really good to have a counselor facilitate that because all the, all that honesty isn't necessarily going to be as appreciated tomorrow. So like everything needs to be framed and talked about the right way at that time to be ready to be digested once the MDMA is gone. Uh, and I, I've lived through that experience myself. So,

um, kind of pulling, pulling away from psychedelics. So I'd love to hear just, um, you talked about the, the hyperbaric chambers a little bit, um, and then any, any other kind of methodologies that you've, you've brought into this. Yeah. So, um, again, like I, I, I concentrate heavily on the brain, which I didn't always do. I mean, I was in a roundabout way when I was working with sleep because sleep is where all of the regeneration and restoration comes from and all the balancing of the hormones and, you know, cleaning, cleaning out waste products in the brain and all that stuff. So it, it, sleep is great for the brain. But you know, the reason I've, I focus so heavily on it right now, you know, you know, we, we learn systems in medical school. Everybody does this, right. And when we live in a very complex world that we don't,

we don't understand very well at all, right? We, we kid ourselves that we understand things, but we, we don't, I mean, we're, we're the world's way too complex for us to understand. And the body's no different. And so like we learn, oh, the digestive system and the musculoskeletal system and the neural, you know, the nervous system. And like, well, the body doesn't have any systems. Like the body doesn't know that we learned it that way. Like everything's affecting everything at all times. Right. And so, um, kind of the master regulator of everything is the brain, right? So the brain is, you know, signaling every part of your body, right? Like the movement our when we move our limbs that's coming from our brain right when we when we see when we talk when we smell like everything

like all of that's being processed in the brain it's all being interpreted in the brain it's being sensed by the brain processed by the brain made meaning of in the brain our movements our reactions like our motions all that stuff's happening in the brain and all of our hormones and our regulation of our appetite and whether or not we're inflamed the next day and whether or not we feel energetic the next day and whether or not our body partitions off what we ate to be stored as fat or to be used as fuel like that fuel partitioning of the macronutrients changes day to day depending on how well you sleep and how well your brain's operating and so um i don't think i think i don't think it's appreciated by hardly anyone like how important it is to focus on brain health like you tell me you want to run faster i'm gonna

work on your brain you tell me you want to lift more weights i'm gonna work on your brain like that's what that's what i'm gonna go to first and so uh you know the psychedelics again like that's that's a big heavy mover right that's that's uh and you know, the psychedelics again, like that's a, that's a big heavy mover, right? That's, uh, uh, and you know, not necessarily something that's out of the realm of, of the, of the average Joe, but you know, something like Ibogaine, that's like, that's pretty harsh. Like that, you know, that's definitely the 12 pounds, 12 pounds sledgehammer. Um, but you know, even microdosing increases neuroplasticity, decreases anxiety, right? So like there's all sorts of things you can do in that world.

And we talked about the benefits of that. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. So again, I talked about the brain swells, right? And lots of people have this. I'm talking about seals. But man, if you played football in high school, if you've been a boxer, kickboxer, any type of striking sport, you know, whatever, race motorcycles, like, you know, you probably have brain injuries.

You probably have brain inflammation. And again, once the brain swells, it's hard to get rid of the swelling in the brain. And when you have swelling, you're increasing the pressure in the brain, making it harder for blood to get in, made it harder to get nutrients in, harder to get waste products out. Okay. So, um, working on the brain is super important. Hyperbarics has great benefits, right? Hyperbarics decreases brain inflammation just because it, whatever the pressure is doing and the oxygen itself, I believe, um, we don't know the exact mechanism, but whatever it's doing is decreasing all the inflammation, like every marker that we know of for inflammation

in the body and in the brain. So muscle damage, just generalized inflammation, brain things that we know are markers for inflammation in the brain, they all decrease when you do hyperbaric treatment. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy allows you to dissolve oxygen into your plasma. So as we're sitting here right now, 98, 99% of our hemoglobin is saturated with oxygen. We can't get oxygen in our bloodstream any other way, right? That's it. Once we get 100%, that's it. Every heme molecule in your body has four oxygens attached to it.

That's it. You can't get any more oxygen. You can breathe 100% oxygen. It's not going to do anything. So right now, if all three of us put on a mask and breathed 100% oxygen for an hour, we would go from 99% to 100%. So we'd change oxygen saturation by one percent which probably wouldn't do anything it probably wouldn't lead to one extra oxygen molecule going anywhere because we don't ever

desaturate 100 so hyperbarics is not anywhere close to that same thing when you go into hyperbarics and you go down what we call two atmospheres two ata atmospheres total so we're under one right that We have the atmosphere, the column of air on the earth weighing down on us at all times. It's 14.7 PSI essentially, right? So that column of air is pushing on us all the time. Another atmosphere worth of pressure is 33 feet of seawater, right? So when you go scuba diving, you go under 33 feet, you're at two atmosphere. 66 feet, you're at two atmosphere. 66 feet, you're at three atmosphere because you have the one above the water and then the water.

So when we get in a chamber, we call it atmospheres total. So you get in a chamber, you go down 33 feet worth of seawater pressure, right? So we're not putting water in there. We're just putting enough air pressure in there to simulate another atmosphere on top of you. When we do that, we can dissolve because of the gas fluid principles, we can dissolve oxygen into your plasma. So now you have these micro bubbles of oxygen and you can put 2000% more oxygen into your bloodstream than you can carry at as we're sitting here on the surface right when when you have oxygen on a red blood cell the only time that oxygen can leave that red blood cell and go to your tissue is when it's going through a capillary capillaries are so small that red blood cells go through single file. And as they go through single file, that lining of that capillary is permeable enough to where you can get CO2 on and oxygen off.

Okay. That's what, that's how it does it in our lungs. That's how it does it in all of our tissues. Well, as we get older, we get less vasculature, right? We get fewer capillary beds. They atrophy, especially if you have something like diabetes, some sort of metabolic disease, whatever. So you have less area, less places to exchange gas. Well, what do you think's happening in your brain?

Your brain, your brain's not super vascular compared to the rest of your body, considering how much, you know, how much energy it's using and how important it is. Like it's, it doesn't have nearly as many blood vessels as you think and many as capillaries as you think. So when these oxygen bubbles are in your plasma, they can diffuse out anywhere. It doesn't have to go through a capillary. So anywhere you have, they can leave an artery. They can leave a vein.

They can leave anywhere in the system they want to. And so you can get oxygen to places you don't have blood supply to. So when you have brain inflammation and you have an area of the brain just being squeezed off and it has a ton of pressure in it, and maybe it's getting the random oxygen molecule here and there, you do hyperbaric treatments every day, five days a week for two months. And all of a sudden you saturate that area of the brain with oxygen. And now that oxygen can go through the electron transport chain and you can use it in your mitochondria to produce ATP. And now those neurons get healthier. The first thing they do is start signaling out

that, hey, we don't get very much blood supply. And they start releasing things like VEGF, which causes new blood vessels to grow to them. And so you will actually increase the blood supply to every place in your body. But for my purposes, the most important is like, I'm probably over the court and we would have to like dissect people's brains to know this, but I'm probably increasing the blood supply to your brain four to 500% by doing one of these treatment tables. And so that gives you the opportunity to get new blood vessels there. Now get rid of some of the inflammation. It also increases neurotropic growth factors, again, helping you grow new neurons, new connections of old neurons, just repair neurons. Anytime you get more oxygen into a cell, eventually you'll increase the

mitochondria. You increase mitochondria density. That increases how much ATP the cell can produce, how much ATP, how active the cell can be. And now you start repairing the brain just by this hyperbaric oxygen. And then it's also been shown to increase the number of stem cells in the brain by 800%. So now, again, this is neuroplasticity. We have neurotropic growth factors. We have new blood supply. We have decreased inflammation, and we have stem cells that can become anything. It can become a glia cell. It can become a neuron. It can be whatever we want it to be, and we can start repairing the brain. You can also do peptides

that do very similar things, right? So there's a peptide called cerebroliacin, which is actually from a pig's brain. So it's a bioidentical thing. It's been, you know, microfiltered and all this other stuff. And it has all the growth factors that we get from psychedelics and from hyperbarics and from having our hormones in order and all that other stuff. And then there's peptides that will decrease inflammation in the brain,

like Selenic and C- that will decrease inflammation in the brain, like Solank and C-Max both decrease inflammation in the brain. And then when we get hormones in order, hormones also cause neovascularization. They cause new blood supply, right? So you get blood supply. Your brain has a ton of hormone receptors that, you know, affect the resting potential, action potential of all all of your neurons affect your cognition significantly uh one you know probably the most classic symptom of low testosterone in a man is word finding problems so they're talking they know the word they want to say they can't can't get to it and they talk around it yeah

they do it 30 times a day 40 times a. And when you start talking to them and say, Hey, your testosterone is really low. You ever have this 100% of them? Yes. Like, you know, I ask them, Hey, do you feel weaker? Do you feel slower? Do you have a hard time sleeping? Is your sex drive down? Maybe, maybe like it's not everybody is probably the majority, but it's not everybody, but the word finding 100% of the time. And then, uh, another, another great thing about getting hormones in order. And I, I mean, I talk about testosterone to be simple to you, to be simplistic, but you know, there's, uh, there's a dozen anabolic hormones we need to manage, but to be simple, testosterone makes difficult things seem easier, period. Like that, like that is the biggest benefit of it. So you think of, you think

of like a masculine brain, like what do masculine brains like to do? They just sit down and tinker and like figure out some, like this thing right here in front of me for 12 hours, I can figure out like, get that stupid little, get that to stick under that. That's a masculine brain. We call that mental vigor, right? And that could be writing. That could be solving math problems,

but it's whatever. It's mental vigorous. Your ability to like, for no apparent reason, you can't even defend it. Like you can't even explain to anybody why you're doing it, but I'm going to spend 12 hours doing this. I guess I'm going to get it done

because I said I'm going to do it because I want it, right? That's a male brain. You lose that. When your testosterone goes away, you lose that. I'm looking around currently for the Rubik's Cube that I've been trying to throw through a window for the past four weeks of my life. Right. Because your life's going to be so much better when you solve a Rubik's Cube, right? Why can't I get the white ones? Yeah. It's like, finally. You know, when my life started making sense, when you saw the white ones yeah it's like finally you know when my life started making sense when i saw the rubik's cube right it's like stupid like it's not going to help you at all but you can't stop yourself from doing it like i get it i get it i get it all right i was like can you put that thing down i'm like no no i can't i could but I'm not going to. Not until I solve it. Yeah, right. I'm solving world hunger over here right now.

Right, right. So, Dr. Farsley, this has been fantastic, man. I really appreciate your time. Great meeting you. Where can people find you and start working with you? Well, you probably can't work with me, but unless you're, unless you're a former sale or, or you got a lot of money,

I charged a lot of money, but I do train people. So I can, I can refer people out. You can go doc, doc, parsley. So doc short for Dr.

DSC, partially like the herb, doc, parsley. So doc short for Dr. DSE, partially like the herb, doc, parsley.com, uh, on there, like I've, you know, typical stuff, lots of, uh, information, eBooks. Yeah. Tell me about the supplements. I've been to your site. I'd love to hear a little bit about the sleep supplements. Yeah. So when, when I went to, uh, when, when I went to get the guys off of Ambien, like I said, I had to, I with something. I had no idea. I didn't learn anything about supplements in medical schools. I just started doing research. Like I said, I just learned a lot about sleep. Once I learned about the physiology of sleep, and then you start looking for what supplements

help with sleep. Now, we're really excited that the new gemini who's that generally available i thought it was my wife my wife's my wife's airpods are connecting to my laptop and i'm trying to kick her out and i'm texting her telling her to put her fucking airpods away please um yeah that's great too many too many bluetooths yeah um yeah so so uh you know i just learned a little bit about sleep and physiology of sleep and then i started looking at what supplements work and it's like okay well that duh obviously like that makes sense so there's you know there's no pharmacological tricks in there you know like uh the. The way all the sleep drugs and sleep aids work is

they take advantage of some sort of biochemical reaction in your body and they say, well, just going to make that way more powerful. So like benzos, like Valium, Xanax and stuff, or Z drugs, those are GABA analogs, which means they act like GABA, but they bind to GABA receptor and they have like a hundred times the action of GABA or a thousand times they act like GABA, but they bind a GABA receptor and they have like a hundred times the action of GABA or a thousand times the action of GABA. And so they like, Oh, this will help you sleep better. Well, no, it'll have a thousand times a GABA effect. You'll screw everything else up. But so, uh, so there's nothing like that in there. So, um, you've all heard of the tryptophan coma around Thanksgiving, right? So you, uh, and,

and so tryptophan is just an amino acid that's in meat and it's in, it's in all meat. The turkey doesn't have any special amount of it. It's just, it's the day we, we overeat on purpose. Right. And so, uh, you know, and the excess carbs are playing a part too, but, uh, basically what happens is tryptophan becomes five hydroxy tryptophan and then five hydroxy tryptophan with the with the cofactors of vitamin d3 which is actually a hormone not a vitamin and magnesium five hydroxy tryptophan will become serotonin serotonin then becomes melatonin melatonin then gets released and starts the initial cascades of all of the things that happen the thousands of things that happen that change your brain while you sleep. And one of the first things that happen is the release of a

neuropeptide called GABA, which I've talked about a lot of times, gamma-aminobutyric acid, for those who care. And what that does is it slows down the neocortex. So it makes it harder for our brains to function. And that's really what being asleep is, right? So being asleep just means that by choice, our brain, our neocortex, the part of our brain that the wrinkly part with all the cracks in it that we think of when we think of the human brain, that part of our brain is how we process and interact with the world. That part of our, that's part of, that's the part of our brain that really kind of goes to sleep. It quits paying attention to our external environment. You can still see, hear, smell,

taste, and all that other stuff, right? So somebody can turn on a light and wake you up. Somebody can make a sound and wake you up, a smell of smoke can wake you up. So everything's still working. Just we've, we've lowered the resting potential and made it harder for those neurons to fire so that your brain can do other things while you're while you're sleeping and that's what gaba does and so my supplement is tryptophan five hydroxy tryptophan vitamin d3 my magnesium a tiny bit of melatonin because i don't want it's a hormone i don't want to shut down your own production so i just give you enough to start the cascade and then GABA to do that thing. And then L-theanine is an amino acid that helps GABA, uh, potentiate. It makes GABA more effective. Um, again, just normal amino acid that's in your bloodstream. And then about two years. So that's

what I gave the seals. Um, I actually gave them a work, a handout and they had to go buy it. And then they harangued me into making a product out of it to make it simple on them. Um, and then about two years ago, uh, there's, uh, there's some research that, um, it came from across the world actually, uh, doing hit, uh, there's, uh, research that shows, uh, phosphatidylcholine, uh, phosphatidylserine i'm sorry uh decreases cortisol production and so most people have too much cortisol when like like like i said 90 of insomnia is from excess stress and cortisol is one of the primary stress hormones so there's a little bit of phosphatidylserine in there to decrease cortisol uh it's not going to do it like if you're stressed out of your mind you need more than what's in there that's just meant to be kind of like a daily dose

of it and so that's it like everything in there you know gets absorbed or wasted like it's either it's either being it's either been used or it's in your colon or it's in your urine within about three or four hours so there's nothing magic in there that like makes you go to sleep it's in your urine within about three or four hours so there's nothing magic in there that like makes you go to sleep it's just supporting everything it's like being and bringing lumber to the construction site you still have to like behave well and you know get ready for bed and all the other stuff but it does it does significantly enhance the quality of sleep a lot of people say it enhances the duration of their sleep. I can't testify that. I don't have research to back that up, but I get the reports a lot. And that's all there is to it.

And there's a kid version. Yeah, there's a kid version. You already got my 50 bucks. My wife said the kids will sleep better. Yeah. Money spent. So here's a funny story. You want to know how the kids version came better yeah the the money spent so here here's a funny story you want to how the kids version came along yeah i i was making the i was making this for the seals and so i wanted to put it in one of those foil packs uh like there's a little stick pouch so that you can just grab a handful of them and throw them in your pocket and right you got a week's

worth whatever and you know like and they can get wet and they get hot and they get dirty and like whatever. And they're, and they stay good. So that was my plan. So you have to flavor that. And, uh, magnesium tastes like burnt card tires with chicken grease on them or something like it's a, it's a nasty, nasty flavor. So you gotta, you gotta be careful how you're covering that flavor. Right. Um, and so, um, we had a bunch of samples and, um, like, we didn't know what we were going to do. Like, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I'm a doctor. Like, I don't know how to make a supplement. So I'm just like, I'm just slinging stuff. Like people are giving me advice. And so they send me five or six different flavors. Uh, and I just, the people I had around me was my wife and my kids and a

couple of my buddies. And so we just all tasted them and the kids just loved the berry. They're like, oh my God, this is so good. And my daughter's like six or six years old or something at the time. And she goes, can you call this berry bedtime? And I was like, okay, maybe we'll make a kid's formulation. And then, you know, years later, Shayla decided to make a kid's formula out of it. And so we'd made the berry bedtime flavor um yeah awesome yeah doug larson right on very cool you can find me on instagram

doug c larson uh kirk brother good to see you man uh been too many you too uh stoked to have you back on here um i think i think you were i think you were one of the first podcasts i did so you know we used to have the as a seal teams used to have those events where we brought in speakers to kind of prepare guys pre and post deployment and we'd bring in new york times bestsellers like rob wolf and you know whatever and uh we'd bring in guests and so uh i became friends with rob and uh and robin rob was at my house one time and we were doing one of those lectures. And he's like, oh my God, we're supposed to be doing a podcast.

You want to come be on my podcast? I'm like, what's podcast? And so we went and did a podcast. And then I think Bledsoe heard it and like Paleo FX was not too long down the road. And he's like, oh, youo effects was not too long down the road. And he's like, Oh, you got to come by and do a parties. And so I think it is probably either the second or third podcast ever did

was barbell shrugged. Yeah. The first time I did it, which I don't know how many times you've done it. And I was just, he's either third or fourth time, I think. Yeah.

And easily. Yeah. I mean, your first one was probably a decade ago and this probably number four is my guess. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

cool, man. It's great. Great seeing you. Great meeting you. Anders. You as anders you as well yep yeah i'm anders varner at anders varner and we are barbell shrugged to barbell underscore shrugged to make sure you get over to rapid health report.com that is where dr andy galpin is doing a free video on how you can optimize your true physiological potential three steps we use to make the best in the world better. You can access that free video over at rapidhealthreport.com.

Friends, we'll see you guys next week.