Jocko Podcast - 367: Wake Up And Get Some Some Sleep. Doc Kirk Parsley

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Doc Parsley's Sleep Remedy: http://www.docparsley.com/jockoAfter serving with the SEALs, Doc entered medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda. Doc graduated in 2004, 1 year after the birth of his third child. 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.From 2009 to 2013, Doc served as an Undersea Medical Officer at Naval Special Warfare Group One. While there, he led the development of and supervised the group’s first Sports Medicine Rehabilitation center. Doc saw firsthand the effect that low sleep and high stress had on the young SEALs who were under his care, men who he realized looked a whole lot like himself just a few years before. It was during this time that he began to develop the all-natural Sleep Remedy that is now the supplement of choice for Navy SEALs, pro athletes, C-level executives, and thousands of others. Henry, now Sleep Remedy's CFO, was one of the first to experience the life altering impact of Sleep Remedy.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 367 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willie. Good evening Echo. I don't like going to the doctor. Okay. Just FYI. I don't like hospitals, actually. I always think that things are, they're just going to heal up, right? The body's just going to wolverine and just heal up.

And they do most of the time. Occasionally, they don't. One time I woke up in the morning, I couldn't move my right arm, but didn't move. Which is not a good feeling. I was like okay, well it'll get better. It didn't Had to go to the doctor went to the doctor got you know neck surgery So unless something is really bad I'm not going to the doctor. I don't know if that's left over from basic seal training where they you're avoiding medical at all costs because you don't want to get rolled or anything But it stuck with me. Don't like the doctor a little while after I had neck surgery I

I would start randomly getting dizzy like like dizzy like I just spun around in circles sometimes I would get really dizzy sometimes I would be trying to walk and I would be bouncing into walls so I'm talking legitimately busy I was nauseous a lot almost almost like a continual almost all the time nauseous and man, sometimes jujitsu, I would be doing jiu jitzu and I'd like roll or spin or something like that and it would just be the whole gym would just start spinning. Sometimes I would roll over in bed at night and the room would start spinning. It was then you know, you're feeling sick and I kind of learned to avoid some things. You know, in jiu jitsu, I'd try not to go inverted and stuff like this and in bed.

I learned to roll. If I wanted to roll over in bed or even to roll to get out of bed, I would learn to do it very, very slowly and avoid head movement. And I thought it would go away. I'm waiting for going to wait for Wolverine blood to flow and for the problem to stop. And it didn't stop. So again, went to the hospital and went to the doctor and they did all kinds of tests on the MRI tests and blood tests. And they ear, nose and throat spine. They just did.

They looked at everything. and they didn't have an answer for me. And so I'm just dealing with it. Just BTF and just dealing with it. And it definitely sucked. And then like, so fast forward a year or something like that. I'm actually starting my retirement processing. And I'm starting my retirement physical.

You got to get a physical before you retire. And I'm talking to the dock for the West Coast SEALs. And what's cool about this particular doc is he was a seal himself who had, gone to the military medical school and become a doctor so you know we knew each other and he's get you know we're hanging out and then he's given me sort of this the standard retirement physical questions about my health and i'm giving him the standard retirement answers which is fine yep fine yep that's fine and you know we're just kind of shooting shooting the breeze a little bit he goes anything else you know did i mess anything and i said well you know no one's been able to have

Help me, but I'll throw it out there. I said yeah man for the last like year year and a half I've randomly gotten just really dizzy sometimes and sometimes it lasts for a long time and it kind of never goes away I'm always in like a constant state of that And he's like kind of tilt his head a little bit looked at me and Kind of thumbing through my record he's seen now that he's looking at he's seen a bunch of tests that I've been through and everything like this And he says you know I think I might know what this might be and and he literally like turns to his computer then this is 2010 but or maybe it was 2009 something like that because I retired in 2010 but it was some it was like around that time but he turns his computer and he Googles some stuff and he's like here here look at this and he says benign positional vertigo he goes we got to do these little exercises and I'm like okay I mean I don't know what he's talking about right? benign positional vertigo I don't know what this means and then he like says okay lay down

put your head over here turn it backwards turn over sit back up again and he goes does like three or four times does these exercise and then like says all right stand up and he looks at me and he goes how's that and I'm like doing a self-assessment and I'm like dude it's gone I'm good like literally in two minutes more than a year of dizziness and constant tests and exams and this thing is gone in two minutes that sealed dock gave me my balance back and it was pretty freaking awesome and this particular dock has helped countless other seals overcome countless health challenges of all kinds his name is Kirk Parsley and And it's an honor to have him with us here today to talk about what he learned in his life, in the teams, and taking care of team guys.

So, Doc, thanks for coming by, man. Hey, man. Thanks for having. Do you remember that? I mean, I know you see like 8 million people. So I remember very clearly. Yeah. Did you, the eplead maneuver.

Yeah. Yeah, but you, you weren't like sure about it when you said it to me. You were sort of like looking, you kind of, it was like. it seemed as if you had heard a rumor about something that it could have been and you kind of like halfway remembered it and then you kind of Google it. I could remember I could remember the name of the test that you do to test people for that. Right. And I was like, and I'm blanking on now, it's like Pikes Hall or something or like this. And I was like, hmm.

And you look for the nistagmas, right, the shaking of the eyes and it's something you do to like hospital patients. And so I knew that part. And I was like, I know. So there's a little stone in one of your semicircular canals and it's blocking that. And so the fluid's not flowing. And it's the same as seasickness or something right at that point. And so I remember, well, there's a way to tilt.

There's a way to tilt this out. And I couldn't remember if there's like a certain pattern. You have three canals and they're all at different angles. So that's why you like turn your head at all these different angles so many times. And I was like, I know there's something to like do this. And, you know, medicine's full of what call eponyms. like, you know, the shit's just named after people. Right.

So what is Epley maneuver? It's not descriptive at all. So I don't know what the hell that means. So somebody's name and there's maneuver there, right? And I'm like, there's some kind of thing. And so that's what I googled. Like, you know, clearing odle. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's just like clearing the stones that are in the semi-circular canal. And I think I'm looking for that video. I'm like, oh, here's how we do it. So I remember like leaning the table back down and going, do, do, right? Because we knew each other. We didn't know each other super well at that point. But you had your fucking BTF, you know, reputation.

I don't know if I ever told you. Did you ever hear about the bracelets? No. At our clinic, right? So we, at the rehab clinic, you know, Jason trained all these guys. And, you know, it's hard to bounce back from surgeries a lot of time, right? people aren't all that motivated because they're just they're used to like this performance. I'm supposed to be up here and like they're barely like they're barely performing like a grade school

kid or something. And so there's always a motivation component. And so he had these test for people to like, you know, try to try to get to this level, try to get to that level. And it's like these progressive steps. And so and then there was some sort of reward involved in it. And that's how we ended up, you know, doing Sears Tower with Elliot and all that stuff. That was part of the reward kind of pathway. And one thing we, so this is heretic and I hope your audience doesn't hate me for saying this, but the WWJD, what would Jesus do bracelets? We heard like 100 of those.

And we gave them, they were what would Jock do for those? And we had like this running list on the wall of like Chuck Norris kind of thing about Jock. My contribution was Jock sleeps with a pillow under his gun. So anyways, yeah, so, you know, you had reputation under who you're. And I remember doing all that and going, I hope this works. I don't know what I'm done. And yeah, and then we, you know, as we got to know each other more of the years, I know you had to do that. Do you still have to do it?

I probably have to do it once a year. Oh. And it's just such a non-factor now. I go, oh, there it is. I'm a little dizzy, boom, but I just do it. And, man, it's, I was like that for a year and a half. And it was gnarly, gnarly. I remember I was doing, I was training a guy for a fight, an MMA fight.

And he was like ground and pound. Like we had gloves on. Like we're going at it. And all of a sudden, like I did something where I did a quick head movement. And all of a sudden I got super like more, like more dizzy than normal. And I'm standing there. I'm like laying on my back and he's in my guard. He's punching me in the head.

And I look at the clock and the clock. There's like, this was this was. This was Thomas. Remember Thomas? Drewval. Yeah. Dr. I mean, he's this freaking Polish warrior.

Yeah. And he's punching me in the head. And there's like 20 seconds left. And I'm just like, please let this stop. And I got up and I was doing a drunk walk out, you know, all unstable. And he was kind of like looking at me as if he had hit me too hard or something. Just like, no, I'm leaving now. that and when the good thing you have thick skull

from that guy for sure he's a beast yeah I had uh actually that's when that's when yawn the the champ not currently but hopefully coming back for it just part with that maniac dude that's not a good way to be healthy uh yeah and then I had the I don't know if you remember this I

I go I was training Jiu-Tit-to I didn't I did a no Dean did a a bicep slice on me and like my bicep like popped and moved and I was like God you got a partial tear I remember and he and so I go in I see Jason I see doc yeah and they're like yep hey we can get you scheduled for surgery right now you know like and I go cool like sign me up let's rock and roll and then they go okay yep we got you signed up your your surgery's gonna be in four weeks or something like this, three weeks or something like this. And they go, come in on this day for your pre-surgery check. I go, cool.

And so I go in, I'm like, Jason, you know, I'm here for my pre-check. And he goes, he starts looking at me all weird and stuff. Like, I'm not normal. And he's like, hey, Doc, can you come in me? And they come and look at me. And they're like, you're healed. And I was like, yes. Yeah.

Vax. You see? I remember that, like, they're still being like, there's still being like something. sort of defect in that. And I remember we told you, like, well, it still might rip, right, with what you do. Because if you're resisting an arm bar or something, you know, you're doing pull-ups, whatever, maybe it might still rip. And you're like, what happens if it rips?

We're like, well, then you do this surgery. Like, same surgery? It looked pretty much. You're like, well, to see if it rips. There you go. You just went on about your life and I guess it never ripped. Never ripped. I was going to ask you about that.

Yeah. Now Echo over here, he's had one on each arm. He's done that. He's needed that surgery twice. Did I call you when that happened to me? Was I like, hey, what's up? Yeah. So, that's funny.

You don't remember because I was, I'm glad you're here to kind of confirm that. Because I didn't believe. I was like, Brad, it wasn't ripped. It's not just going to heal like that. Like it wasn't ripped. Like the doc made a mistake or whatever. And you're like, no, no, no. I'm like, Wolverine.

Wolverine. I was like, I, that sounds good. That does sound cool, but, but I didn't rip or whatever. And he was like, whatever. It was like an argument. So do you accept now? I do accept. Yeah, thanks for confirming that.

All right. Enough about that. Let's get into you. Let's start at the beginning. So where were you born? Where were you born? Where did you grow up? I was born in sort of a sub area of Houston, Spring, Spring, Texas, or Spring Branch, actually.

So Spring Branch Hospital in Houston, outside of Houston. And then is that where you spent your youth? Yeah, pretty much. So by today's standards, definitely, because Katie, where I spent like the second half of my childhood was in Katie, that was like 45 minutes outside of Houston then. And now it's just like part of Houston. And like all the sprawl. Like you literally drove through like cow pastures and rice fields for 45 minutes. And then there was just one road.

And you took that one road for like three or four miles. And then you ran into the neighborhoods of Katie. And last time I went there, there's no break from downtown Houston to that. It's like all concrete jungle, like shopping centers. Big sprawl. I couldn't even find the house I grew up in. You think it's still there or no? It's still there.

Okay. But like all the landmarks I knew to look for and they've renamed some streets and stuff. And so, you know, when you get off the freeway now, there's streets immediately. Well, there was nothing, like except for three or four miles, there were just pastures where we rode our motorcycles and played football. and whatever, even went hunting. And that was all, you know, on whatever farmland and untouched thicket. And it was just like buildings and shopping centers and streets. And I'm like, I don't really know how far down to go.

And I was looking for the main kind of street that went through my neighborhood. And I think they've renamed that street because they've connected it and it's much longer now. And so I couldn't figure out where to turn left to like go into the neighborhoods. So small town in Texas. Yeah. How come you don't have a Texas accent? I do when I get really tired. It's kind of coming back more.

I deliberately got rid of it. How come? Just to avoid being chastised for it. You know, like being in the military, you know, people, people screw with you about because I listen to country music and I drove a truck. kid, you know, like, Redneck, you know, you know, Chris, my,

you know, my, my, the good friend of mine from the still team, he, you know, he's from essentially Detroit, right?

And, and he, like, damn, Texas, go get me some chili. Like, and everybody just rode me all the time.

So I didn't have a super thick accent, but, you know, I, I purposely got rid of it. Now that I'm back in Texas and everybody talks like I used to talk. It's coming.

back. It comes back. And if I get really tired, I think my, like, that's my real. Like, I think it's an, it's an unconscious effort now to not do that and not. I've let the cloquialisms come back. Like, now I'm fixing to do something. I wouldn't do that. And I say y'all and say you guys, and I've always thought that was more appropriate because, like, that's a contraction for you all. And guys, this is a gender word. So it doesn't make me sense. It's called a bunch of girls. Hey, you guys. there you go all right uh so yeah it it kind of comes and goes what'd your what your parents do uh well my father split that was what he did so like about i was like six weeks old or something um and so i actually met him at my wedding when it's 25 uh so what'd your mama do my mom uh so the so the

The first half of my childhood, we were poor trailer park trash, you know. And but my mom actually had to drop out of high school to raise her younger sisters because her parents ran off, you know. And so my mom had us when we were super young, like me and my sister. She had like 18, 19 years old. And so she, you know, she got married around out of high school essentially. And so she went to, she's going to college and working as like a cocktail waitress or something like when I was young. And then when she remarried, just when we moved to Katie. And she married a, who's a cop at the time, and he went on to do other things.

But she started working for Delta Airlines and was like a reservationist and then became a flight attendant. And then she retired from that and worked for Southwest as a flight attendant for a while. and now she's in her 70s and she just retired like a couple of years ago from Southwest. She's been getting after it. She's a hard, she's a hard like Irish redhead, like feisty, wiry, strappy, strong woman, you know. And so, yeah, and she divorced that stepfather when I was like 16. He's super, super abusive to everybody, but especially me. and so

so how did you react to that? Well, it was a big insult to me because I was the man of the house until that, right? So I was like eight, I was up until like eight years old. She got married when I was like eight or nine. And I grew up with all women. So it's my mom, her mom, her sisters, and my sister. And at five years old, they'd be like,

Kirk, I think I heard something. Good look, right? So, okay, get my red rider BB gun and like go and look in the living room, see if anyone was there. Literally sent me out in the front yard to kill a watermocks in with a BB gun. And thank God, like a man was driving by and saw this shit show about to happen. I'm going to go save this little boy. And so he came out and like, you know, I taught me how to, you know, I stepped on the snake's head and cut his head with his help and all that and whatever. So I was really blown away by the fact that some other dude showed up.

Some dude's going to like hurt my mother or hurt my sister, right? And so I'd always like try to get involved. And then he'd turn on me. And so that was my strategy for a while. But he's an evil. Yeah. And so he figured out, well, it's worse if I don't turn on Kirk. Right.

just let me keep trying to interject and just ignore me and keep hurting my mom or whatever so um so I grew very fucking angry very angry and uh I wanted to kill him and I fully planned on it and uh you know my mom I asked my mom for a wait set for Christmas when I was eight iron had come out. I'd seen Arnold. Yeah. I was like, I'm going to get those muscles. I'm going to crush that. And I knew my dad was a big dude and kind of a badass. And they knew each other.

I grew up kind of in the same town. And so I think I was a threat to him. I was my potential father. So his biggest fear was that I was going to grow up to be better than him. Big or better, faster, stronger, or whatever. And all of his fear is. came true. But at 16, I had, so did you get the weight set at eight? I got the weight set at eight.

He started Jack and Steel. He came into me. He came into my room. He was like, I heard you want to wait set. You want to wait a shit where he would be one of those faggots. I'm like, I'm sorry, excuse me? And he's telling me, well, bodybuilders are all gay. And that's why they like to shave their bodies and bear around other men and all this other stuff. And I'm like, um, I don't think so, whatever, I so went to wait. So I didn't know what to do with them. I got like the little bar with the concrete weights. Oh, yeah.

And I was grounded my whole life the whole time I was with them, right? So if I got a bad report card, I got grounded till the next report card. And then grounded to the next, and then the last report card of the year, I was grounded six weeks into the summer because that's when another report card would get. So I'd had like eight weeks of summer. Like that was the only time I had any kind of social life. So sat in my room a lot, got grounded in my room a lot. and I'd sit and like all I knew how to do was overhead press that's like that's what you think of

is I'd just sit there and like overhead pressed from front and back from back front and then and curl and that's all I did and I just sit in my room for hours and just lift weights and then you know every time I tried to take any kind of martial arts he did everything he could thwart that and so I'd like I'd get in something and he'd just make it impossible for me to stick with it and all that so um I was really, really angry. And the only reason I think I was good at football is because I was so damn angry.

And I was a big, fast, strong kid. And I just literally wanted to hurt everybody I could. Like it was a way for me to hurt people and not get in trouble because, like, getting in fights, you know, it's got in trouble for the fights or most of the time you get. How old are you started playing football? Actually, I started in kindergarten.

I played, we lived. lived on this island in the ship channel. That's where a trailer was. And it's Kema, Texas, is the name of it. And now it's like a kind of a ritzie tourist area. But it was just like this little blue collar crappy, did a bunch of shrimp boats and stuff. And so I lived there.

Literally my sister and I said a year old and I, we walked to school, crossed these railroad tracks. And I remember walking to football practice, walking home from a football game, like me and my pads, her and her cheerleader outfit, We're like walking, like probably two miles. So like our school going across these major roads, whatever,

like parenting was a totally different bag back then, right? But my mom was, like I said, she was surviving. She's like going to school at night and or going to school in the day, working at night. And then her sisters were just kids too, right? Like her sisters were raised in us, but they're 15. Like with a 15 year old now. And like sometimes the 15 year old gets in the car when the car runs and drives this around and whatever.

So it is a pretty sketchy scene. And then, you know, in Texas you can start playing. So I played what we call Dad's Club, Pop Born around here, right? I played that. And then in Texas, you can start playing for your school in junior high. Okay. And I had the head coach in Junior High was a former Marine. And he took a liking to me.

And so I did well in junior high football and then transferred to a really good football team. my high school there are two high schools and and uh katy the one i went to was the newer one and it had only been open a couple of years when i started it but we were going to we had a great coaching staff uh and uh and you know and in texas like these dudes are making big money and like and they they got recruited out to odessa my senior year but um but really really good coaching in that and that's what led me into powerlifting it's one of my one of my coaches was a power lifter and he and I was

I don't know if I was the strongest in like every lift but I was one of the strongest and everything and I was the strongest in several of the things and so he was he took a liking to me and he's like I'm going to teach you how to lift for real because you're like you're just doing football lifting and so he taught me like the below parallel squats right and I had to do it with a bar and I had to do 100 perfect reps before he let me put any weight on. Damn.

And it took me like a month. He would sit down next to me and just watch and go, yeah, yeah. Nope. And he'd turn around and walk away. That was it for the day. If it was on the second rep, it was on the second rep. It was on the 98th rep. It was on the 98th rep.

And they're like, nope. And then did you have the potential of playing in college? Um, I could have played. I don't think I would have, I wouldn't have excelled. I just wasn't big enough. I mean, I was, I was, uh, I actually grew a couple inches in the Navy. So when I enlisted at 17, I was 5-11.

I grew like to 6-1 somewhere in the first couple of years. I don't know. Did you, how did you hear about the Navy? And did you know about the teams? Yeah, so that's a funny story. So the recruiter, we had a recruiting office and Katie. and the Marine recruiter was a boxer. And my last year of high school, I lived alone.

I lived in an apartment with, actually with a guy who owns this gym, so I split an apartment. But I worked at a gym. I was like the assistant manager of this gym. And anyway, and I would box with this marine recruiter. And, you know, Heartbreak Ridge had already been out. So it's like, Forest Reacon, you know. And, you know, and I, you know, and I love, like, I've always loved the water.

Like, I've always been, like, I was always a lifeguard. And we were always, like, doing water sports and going to the beach whenever we could and all that stuff. Working on breath holds just because it was cool. In fact, like, I would go in a pool and just be so upset that I had to come up, right? Because I, like, I'd sit on the bottom of the pool. Like, I just want to stay here. And, you know, now sort of I knew more the physiology of, like, what I was, you know, like, settling down my nervous system honestly.

feeling really good in there. So, yeah, so anyway, then I started boxing with this marine recruiter. And this documentary came out, 48 hours. It's a news documentary show. It's like 60 minutes,

but it was called 48 hours. And they followed a Bud's class. Actually, Cremens. You remember Cremens? Yeah. So Cremins was like the star. the star of this. They're following a bunch class. Okay. And they, was he in the class. He was in the class. Like he was he was the guy, right? Like he was the one he was the guy who got all the camera

attention because he was like this sultile. Yeah for sure. Fisherman from Boston or something, right? Somewhere in New England. And, uh, and they kept saying this is the toughest training in the world. Just the toughest. And what did I grow up doing? Like with this abusive stuff out there, I wanted to be the toughest. I wanted to be the biggest badass in the world, right? That's what I wanted. And so I would I watched that thing I recorded on VHS and I watched that thing like 20 times and then I waited for the Marine recruiter to be out of town and I went over to the Navy and talked to him about being a seal. What year in high school were you? Well, it was my fourth year, but my fourth year I was only a sophomore by credits. Is that because you just were failing everything?

I started failing classes as soon as my mom got remarried and I got in that world. Right. Like when you have screaming, fighting and cops over at your house all the time, it's like, you know, and I'm grounded all the time at home and he's abusive. I'm always like hiding from it. And it was just, I wasn't going to be doing homework in that. Like my sympathetic nervous system was ramped up to hell. Like I'm in fight or flight kind of all the time being home.

And so, yeah. I, you know, I, I, I, I, I was a screwed up. I was a super screwed up kid. But anyway, so Bivens out of town. I went and talked to the Navy recruiter. And he's like, I've never put NSEO before. I don't know. I'll look into it.

And they just started the delayed entry program. So that started literally months before I, I signed up. So I told my mom what I wanted to do. And she was like, all right. So she signed off on it when I was 17. off the payroll. Yeah. And, yes.

So anyway, I, so from like third grade through four years of high school, I don't, I'd never really legitimately passed any class unless a teacher like me. And, you know,

then everybody starts telling you what a moron you are and you're afraid of people finding out. And so you're like, you know, I don't want to call any attention to my stupidity. So I'm just like being quiet and like, and so nobody, like none of my friends knew that I was behind in high school.

Like none of my, None of my friends knew that I wasn't going to graduate. I knew I wasn't going to graduate because I wasn't going to stick around for two or three more years to get through high school, obviously. And so when I joined, I was just like, you know, at some point I'm going to go get to GED. And then I took the ASVAB and actually did decent on that. And, yeah, so I joined. And I didn't tell, I still didn't tell the Marine Cruders because I was like, Afridor's going to be so pretty. off of me. And then, yeah, just like a month. We had all these street parties, you know,

like vacant streets. He'd go, we'd go park our cars, turn our lights on, have keg parties and whatever. And it was always a mix of the high schools, and there's always some friction because we're rivals, you know, in sports. And so about a month after I joined, about a month after my Marine recruiter found out that I joined. I think it was a couple months after I joined. I tried to break up a fight and this dude swung on me and like graced me. I had decent enough head movement together the other way, but he like grazed me. And I was such an angry rage ball and so arrogant.

I was maximally offended to somebody who tried to this. I'm like, who the fuck do you think? you are. So I try to look at the guy just bewildered and I guess there's something in my eyes that made him realize and he took off running and so I took off running after him and I fucking body slam him down the street

and punch him and one of his buddies come and I start beating his ass and I beat up these two guys right? And just one guy, he's curled up in the fetal position and I'm picking him up by his ears and tell him to fight and he won't now spit in his face like I was an angry, nasty dude. And anyway and so

I pull up to see my Marine recruiter, or to see the Navy recruiter, I pull up to the recruiting office a few days later, and the Marine recruiter comes out and says, so what's just I hear about you beating up on my Marines? I'm like, huh?

Yeah, so anyway, so I watched that thing over and over again, wanted to do toughest training in the world, went and joined. I didn't know what a seal was. I didn't even, I didn't know what a seal was when I was in buds. I wanted to do the toughest training in the world. and you know I gradually learned more and more but I still didn't know like when I don't know if they did it

when you went through you were a couple years after me I think right but we they used to take us around all the different seal teams and then you had to rank choice like the team and you had to rank choice to the east coast well as also without visiting any of those and I remember like when they started taking us around to the teams right before graduation I remember it kind of hitting me that I don't actually know this you do I'll hear some Here's how naive I was. So you remember the delayed entry program gave people three chances of passing the test? Okay.

Okay. So you could take the PRT and if you passed it, you were guaranteed to go to Buds first. Because remember the way it was before, you could pass the PRT, but then your gaining command had to agree to let you go to Buds instead of coming to them, which almost never happened, right? So you had to go to the fleet for a couple of years to come back. So the delayed entry program was all about if you pass the PRT, you definitely go. and it gives you three chances to pass the PRT and then you get like some sort of promotion

out of boot camp, promotion out of A school. And so I took the test and I remember his name is Petty Officer Winkler. He was the first class. He'd Vietnam Airsteel. Like all Vietnam Air Sears. They were a super cool guy. And so

they had like a morning training for people who failed the test to go in and work on their swimming. I look at whatever they weren't good at go work out. So you had to get up a couple of hours earlier, an hour earlier, and you could go and they excused you from a little bit of your time in your regular boot camp company

because we didn't have our own stuff back then, as you know. And so I just smoked the PRT, and Winkler really liked me. And he's like, hey, you should come in the mornings and you can coach guys. That's cool. Because obviously he had worked at a gym, and I was like sort of a personal trainer and stuff anyway.

So I was doing that and then got to be really good friends with him and the other seal motivator. And after I coached people in the mornings, I'd end up sitting in their office shooting the shit. They'd be drinking coffee. I didn't drink coffee. And he said something about dive pay or hazard duty pay or something. And I was like, what's that? And he starts explaining it to me. And this light bulb goes off of my head.

I'm like, I'm going to get paid? and he thought that was the funniest damn thing he'd ever heard. So he took me around to every office. Like, tell them what you just said to me. And so I, and I literally, like, I was just a dumb kid. Like, I just wanted to go do this training. I didn't, I didn't know it's going to get paid. Like, why are you going to pay me?

Because, right, I have, you're giving me a place to live. You're giving me clothes. And then there's a chow hall. Like, what do I need money for? I figure, like, I'm just going to be training to kill people or going to kill people. Like, what else am I going to do? Why do I need money? I didn't think about People having families and kids like you know you just think like oh there's guys in the military

That's what he does. That's all he does I had a similar I was in my first platoon I think it was my first Patoon or whenever I got paid per diem for the first time Like they had to explain it to me a couple times You know you're getting that was a wild concept Okay you're going to the desert and here's $1,400 and I'm like What's this for? And they're like for your food and I only make a thousand bucks a month and you give me $1,400 So you're like, wait, but I mean, what about when I'm not in the desert?

I still got to buy food there. Yeah, but when you're there, we're going to give you money to buy your food. I'm like, okay, I'll take it. It took a while to comprehend that, the whole thing. When you got to Buds, was there any challenges for you at Buds? Yeah, the runs. I was a... What did you weigh?

2.30. Yeah. And not a fast runner? I was a great sprinter. Yeah. You know, I was a fast Twitch, just like fast Twitch,

human. And, and like when we did Frog Hill, dude, I remember one time I was talking to you, you're like, I, I told you're like,

oh, what you're, wait, what, you're deadlifting that. And I was like, dude, I can like,

I deadlift. The most I've ever deadlifted is like 505 or something. And you looked at me like, I was scum. I was like, damn, that hurt, bro. So yeah,

you're all fast Twitch. Yeah. So the runs kicked. your ass. Yeah. I struggled and I knew I would because I mean I struggled in preparation. So when I first decided to join the Navy, the Marine recruiter actually talked to a seal and had the and had the guy talk to me. So I had a phone call with the guy. And he said, well, it sounds like your biggest problem is going to be running because I'd all had done it, like I ran track and field but I did like I the furthest I the furthest I ever ran was 400 yards 400 meters right like

that was the furthest I'd ever run in my life uh I'd never done a mile on the track right never and so and I hated that like in football and to be like take a lap to warm up right I'm like I'm smoked like what do you mean warm up like I'm done like they come back from a lap below what are you kidding me and unfortunately my son inherited that for me so this this seal sold me so like the biggest problem for you is going to be the run you need to be running like 10 miles a day I'm like not really okay so I'm like I don't know where I'm going to run 10 miles so I go out in the like the main street that told him one of the goes from the freeway down to my town it goes several miles the other way so I clocked it off of my car and it's five miles I'm like well I'm just going to run

down to the end of this thing and back 10 miles a day. I didn't even have any shoes. I owned like one pair of shoes that were like top siders. And so I just ran barefoot down concrete streets. I just started running 10 miles a day. And I did it. I mean, I'm sure I didn't do it every day, but I like my memory is it's like I just did it every day. And and then when I got, and I, and then I started timing myself in the mile of half because right, we had a PRT and I knew I had to hit a certain time. And then. And then I started timing myself in the mile of half because right, right? We had to hit a certain time. And that I didn't agree with. I probably, I probably only beat that qualification time, but 30 seconds, 20 seconds, something like that. Like when I, and then when,

when I went to A school, I really focused on running a lot. And I did like a couple of 10Ks. And I got to where it's running like six and a half minute miles and tennis shoes and shorts on a road on the street, right? So I think the cut off time in buds like seven and a half minutes or something and pants and boots on the sand. So it was, it was all I could do. I mean, I was always in the gun squad. Always in the good squad. Every run I was in the gun squad. But I was almost always the first guy out because it was like bear crawl races or sprints or like something like that and like, hey, that's my bag, baby. In fact, you remember Frog Hill out of the island? Yep. It's like you had to do pull-ups before in the middle or you had to do Frog Hill. I was so fast at

Frog Hill. And I, and like anybody else, I'm going through Bud's scared to death that I'm getting kicked out every day every day like every second's like they're about to figure out I'm you can be here and I'm getting tossed right and so I just like a real just keep your head down like the most humble time of my life was was buds and I wasn't going to bring any attention to myself and I don't think I really realized I did it because I think they had kind of groups or something and I I mean I just smoked everybody in my class like I think I was come I was almost all the way back down before anybody got to the top And so then there's this one instructor who decided I must be sandbagging the runs because look how good he is it running, right?

And so he just turned on me and like, you know, he was his beat down boy. And then they got to where they were dropping me for pushups when they started the class and I still had to meet the time. And then after a while, I was like you have to beat everybody or you're still going to the surf zone. So I had to, what second phase was like 40 pushups or something? I don't know. I don't remember. I think he's like 20, 40, 60 or something like that, say the phases. And so whatever it was in second base, I had to do the push-ups, and then I sprint, and I would still win.

And, like, I was really good at that, and I just sucked it at the runs. You'd barely pass the four-mile-time runs. Barely. I mean, every run was, like, five, four, three, and me diving across the finish line. Like, I mean, in fact, one of the instructors, because I was pretty good at everything else, like, some of the calisthenic stuff, like, flutter kicks forever. Like, I wouldn't, like, that's just too enduring. me like I couldn't but but I was always like a I'm pretty sure it's the biggest but I was definitely like one of the top two yeah two 30s a big dude to be going through but I

finished buds at 185 oh damn and I started buds at 174 I graduated buds at 185 holy so you and I met in the middle yeah I think they called me like the cyborg gorilla or something because like I lost all my muscle mass and my torso, but my arms didn't get smaller, so I looked like like a weird looking thing. But, you know, I could do like anybody, like, you graduate, buds, I could do like 600 pushups

in a row, right? And I remember going to the gym the first time after Buds, and I couldn't bench two plates. And I was literally, I almost cried. Like, I was sitting there like going, oh God, I was like, I had.

had tears willing up in my eyes. I could go outside. Nike. Oh my God. You know, because I mean, I wasn't super strong, but I mean,

definitely like well into the 300s in high school, right? So I expected to be stronger. And I'm like, I can't binge my body weight. Right? I'm weak.

But it all, yeah, obviously it comes back pretty fast. Yeah. Do you remember when they started talking about medium twitch muscle? Do you remember the time frame that that happened?

because I remember reading Intermediate Intermediate fibers man I guess maybe Okay I just remember I was never I wasn't like the fastest guy But I wasn't like the most endurance guy So I'm like the loser that I couldn't win a sprint And I couldn't run I couldn't win the freaking four mile time run

Right And I figured out eventually when I started hearing about like intermediate twitch muscle that there's certain people that have this thing And that was me and I was like oh yeah Because like I could put on a rucksack and just go forever in jujitsu like I have really good endurance yeah I mean that's have you seen me get tired no so I've been training with him for like 10 years never seen me get tired I remember training with you and like watching your role guys and you just have like sweat pouring off you bit yeah I'm still still

like breathing through your nose and like just calmly mashing people and I'm like that killed me in jets like I mean I'm good for like three minutes and then if I have mad ass if I haven't won and minutes I'm not gonna win like by the time but when you do like you know three minute rounds or whatever after class by the time I could tell like I mean I might so be a role with the five-year-old girl because I have nothing I have no strength whatsoever yeah yeah but I I just didn't have that that explosive you know again like max deadlift like I'd be embarrassed a bit dude I'm I'm just pathetic yeah and that's just the way it is I mean it's just a different you get you get your certain

genetic thing and that's what you're gonna you can work on it a little bit. Yeah. You can get to do a lot of pushups instead of a lot of bench, I guess, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you, I mean, nobody is like 100% of any fiber, right?

And like in different muscles of your body, you're going to have different makeups of them. And so, like, everybody, everybody couldn't train to some degree to get better, to get reasonably good at something if you really work. It's just like any, it's like your mental aptitude. But like you would have zero percent chance of being a good merit. Rathon runner. Yeah. Here's how smart I am though. When I was in medical school and residency, I knew that the smart thing to do then was to start doing triathlons. Because I was going to get good at this damn endurance thing finally, right? So when I was in college, I worked full time and I went to school. I worked part time. But it was a lot of it for part time. It's like 30 hours a week.

And then I went to school full time And, you know, for half of it I was married and had kids and whatever so like I was burn in the candle at both ends You know staying up late first get papers and whatever finals and all that and so all I really had time to do is run So I'd come home and I ran and it started like around three miles and then there's four and that's five and then six And then I said you know, I'm gonna do a marathon because, you know, whatever. Like, I've never been good at endurance. I'm going to get good endurance.

I did a marathon. Brutal. Like, I have the type of endurance where, like, if I go slow, I can go forever. But I don't, I can't go fast. Like, if I go fast and I go, if I go anaerobic once and hit, like, that black asherst threshold, like, I'm done. Like, I'm done. In fact, I did that in one of the triathlons.

So anyway, I did that, and then I started doing, well, I'm going to do triathlon. And so I started with the Super Frog. Did you, how much weight? Did you have to lose a bunch of weight? Or did you lose weight while you're doing that or did you just go Clydesdale? Yeah, it's doing Clydesdale. And something happened to me at some point my life, uh, it was after the teams. So it was during college, I think.

My body weight like settled out around 240, give or take five pounds, right? Nothing I did change that. And to this day, nothing changes that. I can starve myself. Like, I can lose weight for a lot. can lose weight for a little while, but like give me two days and I'm right back to 240. I can be like kind of doughy and soft and out of shape and I weigh 240. I can be ripped and like no body fat 240.

It's like that's just what I weigh. And so I was running marathons at that weight. And so I did the super frog and because, you know, it's the original like throwback to the teens. Like it would be cool. And so I, and they have a cutoff time, right? Like if you don't finish by certain time. And it's basically a half triathlon, right? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. It's a half iron man. So it's 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride and half marathon. Right. And so I do it. And if you don't make the cutoff time,

then you're, your DNF, right, did not finish. Same as somebody who drops out. I made it by like three minutes. I think it was like seven and a half hours. And there's dudes doing this thing.

God. This guy's doing it like two and a half hours, right? And so I finish and barely make it. Three years later, I've been doing triathlon the whole time, right? I ride my bike to work or ride my back and forth to school, the hospital, whatever, you know, running whenever I can. I never really practice a swim because I actually just did side trick because my side trick was as fast as my crawl anyway, so I just did that.

And you can do that forever, obviously. Like after buds, like you get so efficient at that movement. And I could go 20 miles today, probably. And so I do it again, three years later, I'm two minutes faster. After all that training and everything? I'm going back to powerlifting. I'm going back to what I'm good at, like this.

Like, when I was training at, when I was trading at Odinette's school, do you know him? Yeah. Yeah. So I was training in his school. And I was, it was like incorporating the jet training into my bike, right?

Like to him from there. I was back to the hospital and then leaving the hospital and stopping by there and then going. And so it added like five or six months to my commute. And I still gassed all the time. And I was like, what the hell? Like, because I didn't understand the physiology at the time. And I'm like, how can I still be gassing? Like, I'm doing all this endurance work and I'm still gassing on the mat.

I remember the first time he had us do like, he put out like whatever, the five or six black belts. And it's like, you're going to roll two minutes here. and then the last guy rolled with this him. I mean, he'd just like thump me and fall over. It thumped me and fall. Like, I couldn't do. You're like a dream for like a guy that owns a school that's a black belt. Odie, Odie probably weighs.

What do you think Odie Nettledo? 70 maybe. Yeah, maybe 170. Yeah. So he's just like, oh, I get to beat up this seal. Get to beat up the big seat. Yeah. I always try to keep it on the download that has a seal,

but it gets out eventually right now. And then as soon as you're just a jacked 240 pound dude. Yeah. Yeah. With a white belt on. They're like, oh, yeah. Jeff Glover, and I've seen this now. He, the best, the worst, I guess it's called the best, the worst,

but it's the easiest for him to go against a guy that's big and strong. Like he is, if he sees a guy that's big and strong, he's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to have fun with them. And I've watched him do it. Watch like big jack guys come in and he just is all over him. And you see like another guy that's more his size or a guy that's, you know, long and lanky or whatever. It's more trouble for him, but a big jack guy, he's like, I got this fool. Yeah, didn't he did like some sort of exhibition here or something with him and another guy. Yeah, he's a barred here or something.

He's like watching two snakes fight for. I mean, he's just like this. Glover's freaking. I mean, they're just rolled forever. Like from, you know, from position to position. Position or attempt, attempt, attempt. I'm just like, I'm like, I can't even follow that. Freaking nuts.

All right. So you get done with buds. Did you get rolled at all? No. That's good. And you're what? You're 18, 19 years old? So I technically, yeah.

So I was 19 because I graduated and technically could. We actually had Christmas break before we graduated. We should have graduated. So we were really done with buds. And I think we had like a 13 mile time to run right left or something. It wasn't timed, right? There was some time to it, but it wasn't the same as like four mile running. I think it was more like you better not, you better pass it type thing.

Yeah. But there's, I think there was a timeline. Three hours? Yeah, I think there was a time limit, but it wasn't three hours for the walk. It wasn't like the same consistent, like everything else was like whatever. That same time, I think it was seven and a half minute miles. This was like the cutoff on all that stuff. And that I think it was a little longer.

But so that's all we had to do is come back and do that. And then we were graduating. So I graduated technically in January of 90. Okay. And then you had to go to airport school. In March, I would have turned. 20. Okay.

So, yeah, it's not, end of night. Yeah. And then we went to, we were the first class that they sent us a class. Oh, really? They hadn't done it in a really long time. Man, do we get in trouble? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

We got, and we were there the first time anybody died in jump school. Really? And the dude, I mean, he was like from here probably to, probably to the mats, like that far away from me. Like, I heard that. He just hit the ground. What happened to him? We were doing combat equipment. And he, I don't know if his exit was bad or whatever,

but he ended up inverted with his leg caught in the risers. And he cigarette ruled to some degree. And he pulled his reserve, but his ruck was on top of it because it had flopped on it. So he's 19. He's from Texas. That's horrible, man. And he just, I mean, I heard that dude hit. And then it sounds like just like after you shoot a deer or something.

And you hear the, right, that, I remember that so clearly. And then anyway, we, you know, we'd go in the chow hall there. And, you know, how the, those Army kids are taking that school seriously. And we're cocky as shit, like on, you can't hurt this. Like, whatever. This is a joke for us. And so we'd sit around and smoke and joke in the towel for like an hour and, like, you know, keep going back and whatever. And so this Stars and Stripe Reporter comes around and he starts,

trying to ask everybody questions that army kids are eating like a robot and then bolting out the door right and so we were like hey I won't tell you what happened so we told him that

we told them that that the guy didn't hook up because he was going to DOR at the door and the instructor pushed him out and of course we had no idea what went on and they printed it and they said as told by any Navy personnel

And so then our whole class gets called up in front of the head of the school. It's like, if you don't tell me who did this, throwing all of you out. Of course, no one's going to say anything, right? I remember we're like, all right, throw us all out. That's better than you're getting rid of one of our guys, right? It's better than being a rat. Right. And so nobody said anything.

The school shut down for like two weeks and we just got like hammered on like all the time. Like all day, every day they're trying to break out. And they ended up printing our traction whenever. but yeah it was the first time anybody died so there's a couple of weeks it had to have been other people that died at airborne school they told us this is the first time anybody's ever burned in that seems impossible it does they put out thousands and thousands of paratroopers every week now maybe it's the first guy that died in a while or something like maybe but they did they shut us down they shut the school down we're gonna get fact checked on that one yeah we they shut the school

down and we did uh I mean just like nothing for like two weeks And then when we finally jocked up to go again, they were still super edgy. Oh, yeah. And we set, like, we set jocked up in combat equipment for like six hours waiting. 100% to get in the plane and jump out for five seconds. Yeah. It was, it wasn't a cool, wasn't a cool time. So you end up checking in it, you go to Team 5.

Yeah. And this is what, 1990 now? 1990, yeah. STT, what we could call it then. Yeah. And so that's at the team. Yeah. Every team did their own.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what I went through. Yeah, you would have known out. You were what, 177? 177. What class for you? A new guy.

What are you? 163? 164. 164. Yeah. New guy, always. So you get your first platoon? Any big deal from STT?

Pretty straightforward? No. No. Did they just hand you an M60 and say, here you go? Yeah. You're a Jack. Which was cool with me. Yeah.

Because I got, I, I, I hate, you know, I hated the M-16. I don't want to carry that little poodle weapon. Pink and ding-ding, like the spring sound. He was like a cap gun. I want a real gun, man. I loved the 60. And it was super mechanical, right? Like, I grew up, like, working on everything and, like, super mechanical.

So I was really good at clearing the jams and knowing how to, you know, worked a weapon really well. And I really enjoyed it. Hell yeah. Oh. So that's what you go, you're your first platoon? Yeah. And first lieutenant rep 60 first lieutenant rep get some.

Yeah, and actually halfway through my first platoon, I became the department lead as a new guy. Right on. And then I was like always first lieutenant for my other two platoon. Just motorhead. You're a motorhead. Yeah. So you're getting in there.

So what do you? And you're going on deployment. I mean, what's a workup like? you guys focused on what's the big mission i know when i was you know for my early platoons it was always like we were preparing for like one big mission that we would pray would happen like we wouldn't we as much as i prayed for war which i did yeah i couldn't have dreamed of like a two-decade long war like i thought if we're lucky we'll get some kind of a one mission you know there'll be something will happen and if we're in the right spot at the right time maybe we'll get to do one

thing. Yeah. That's how scarce it was. Yeah, people don't know that you're like competing, like you used car salesman for any work that comes out for special horses. Or it's like, you have to have somebody jockey in to try to get the work.

Was Gardner in your first platoon? No, he was in, uh, he's in my sister. Didn't you guys get like rolled up or something? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. My, my 21st birthday. Check. So we walk. I can't remember. I can't remember any of the names of the bars. but we walk into this one bar.

It's a really common one. And Jason was standing up on the bar when I walked in, chugged a beer and then like slammed the bottle on the ground. Why? Because I can. I'm like, I'm going to like this guy. So that wasn't my birthday yet. I'd take it back.

That's like when we first. That was just like a Tuesday night. That was like the first time I think I'd been out in town really. You know, it wasn't a big deal because I'd already, obviously, you could go drink at any age. But my 21st birthday was like, oh, so the whole platoon. Well, first, of course, yeah, they rigors tape me and throw me in shit river. So, and it was so, I was so stupid because we had like a trailer, like, divided in half and the PI. Did you guys have the same thing?

Did you ever deployed the PI? I missed it. Oh, yeah, right, because of Mount Pinned 2, but yeah. So we had the, just like a regular trailer and it was like partitioned and it was a platoon space. on each side. They had like a regular hasp padlock on the outside. And so we were walking up, we were walking up to our trailer and our sister platoon was in their,

was in their side and my LPO goes up and he like puts their hasp in like while they're, while they're in and he's locking. And so I think, he's locking them in, right? And then we have our platoon meeting and then he goes, at the end of the meeting he looks around and he says

hey whatever you guys do I don't want you to rigorous tape buck up and throw him in shit river and I look around and every single guy is holding a roll of rigors tape and I totally miss this the whole time I'm like

oh you got to be kidding me man now I realize oh that side's locked that's what that was about and it was just a shit fight, man. I mean, just like 45 minutes. And finally, gut just grabbed my balls and just started squeezing my balls. That's the fight ender.

Okay. Everyone's a tough guy. Tape me up. Some guy grabs your nuts and starts squeezing them. Yeah. And anyways, yeah, so when we go out in the town and I don't even remember how it started.

Like, I don't even, I hardly remember the fight at all. I like knocked some short patrol guy out and just went to the bar because I was drunk moron and like I'll be fine like he's unconscious

so I go on the bar and then when we come out of the bar they're like there he is and like all these people start swarming out of them and try to run and then like I hit some other guy while I was trying to run away and they finally got us and then or got me and then they handcuffed me in front

and I'm like even a drunk guy's like that's a dumb idea right and uh so i so i start walking to the paddy wagon it's like a toyota truck with like the built-on kind of uh camper or like whatever like a paddy wagon wagon thing and uh and the dude that i'd the tour patrol guy that i'd hit was like standing there holding the door smirking and said like said something smart and i fucking hit him again with both hands in front of me like he he went out cold and hit his head on the bumper and i was like Oh, that's probably not good. So then they threw-

Don't recognize how stupid we can be. Yeah, yeah. They just don't know. Yeah. So then they throw me in the paddy wagon, and I'm drunk. I just like through the wagon spinning. I'm so drunk.

And so I lay down on my back and put my feet in the corners. And then when we get to the jail, so when I get in there, Jason's in there with him. And he's like, hey, man. I'm like, hey.

And they, like, I don't know what he was in there for her. I don't even remember. And then they get us to the police station and they pull everybody out. And I'm like, I'm not getting out. And they're trying to pull me out. They can't get me out. And so they lock the door.

And they go in and they come back and try to get me out again. I won't get out. And then they bring out this big, their big tough guy, short patrol guy, whatever. And he's going to get me out. And so they put him in and lock the door. And I managed to like put some pressure on his shoulder and like pull him into me. And he and it was like essentially breaking his wrist backwards. which right like because he and he couldn't get off of it because like the way his body position like

he was just half his body it was on his wrist and it was inverted and I'm just pulling on him and he's screaming and they let him out and then uh I'm still laying there and then all of a sudden I hear at least maybe 45 minutes go by and I hear my officer go hey buck I was like yeah he's let's go and I get out they unhandcuffed me and and I went back to barracks with him and then you know your mat your senior chief whatever goes and smooth things over the next day gives the guy's a case of beer or whatever like it was the stupidest time you know like we like all of our excitement was self-induced and and I was in for the first Gulf War right like it the so the first Gulf War shut my workup down um was that your first work up my first work up yeah

and and we were we were so we got the cool thing was because of that whatever they thought the mission set was they we became a free fall platoon and so the first thing I did was go to free fall school. That's cool. I think I only had like two or three more jumps. Whatever you get in STT, it was like the only other than jump school. So I'd never did static line again, right?

I just, unless it's in the water, right, for a duck or something. Yeah, so we, we got our workup, got, I think workups are like a year and a half then, right?

Yeah. And we got shut down to about a year, got compressed. And then we didn't end up going to the Gulf War anyways because I think maybe it was like half over something like you know how limited that whole thing was and so then we deployed to the PI

and then a Mount Pentatubo blew when we were out there and that that was a very interesting what did you guys do on that just like provide as much security and help yeah so we were so a lot of people don't know this but like when that mount

when Mount Pentatubo blew probably because it blew there was a typhoon at the same time. And so, you know, Clark Air Base, the Air Force Base, which was, I don't know, 45-minute driver or something. They had boulders the size of this room coming down from miles high in the sky and just like landing on buildings and cars and whatever. And that place was demolished. And but we just got all this ash. We got some rocks, but like we got all this ash and the ash had a ton of metal ore in it.

and it was mixed in with a typhoon. So you have like 70, 80 mile an hour winds with rain and then this ash with all this metal in it. And it was sticking, it sticks to everything. And it looks like kind of grayish snow, but it's super heavy and it collapses. It's like all the buildings are collapsing. Like our PBs and our peers or floating peers were sinking. And all our buildings are collapsing. So they're like, there's like the first night of this thing.

And they're like, hey, we all need to go. down to the unit and like save all the, like we go and we, you know, we, we, we, we we don't even have shovels. We have boat oars, right? Like, and, uh, and we're just, and like a boat or of this stuff probably weighed 30 pounds. Like, it was just super compact. And, uh, so we go and we shovel all that off and then we're going up on the roofs and we're trying to save, you know, the buildings. We got up on the para loft and, uh, there's no light, right? You can't see anything. We're wearing flight suits with scuba mask. Uh, and you could shine. a flashlight and you could about see your feet pre headlamp yeah it's so crazy no one

had thought of headlamps yeah and so I get up to the top of the parallel often these guys are yelling hey over here over here over here and sound like I'm walking their way and all a sudden I stop I'm like I feel like I'm going the wrong I'm trying to remember what the building was like I was like I feel like I'm going the wrong way and I pull out a flashlight and I look at my feet and one of my feet's like one of my toes are hanging over the edge like one more step I was going to fall sick 60 feet. And so anyway, we're shoving all this off and then we go into like one of the big barn kind of things and we're shelling off and like buildings are collapsing while we're on them

and we're like jumping off whatever. And so then we all kind of show up in this and this barn has like the big eye beams supporting the roof, right? And we're in there and somebody's like, I think maybe we should get it out of here. What if this one collapses? And I look up and I'm like, there's no way this is going to and we're like we all dive out like the doors you know it's like this wide the doors open this wide and like 20 guys get through

that thing in like five seconds you know and the whole thing collapses and so um so there was no power for like six weeks there's no water there was no anything and there were bodies laying in the ditches all over the place of course in town they have like generators going and everything's going like two days later

they're like up and running like nothing ever happened and then we had like the they call them the NPA like the Vietnam equivalent or the Philippine equivalent of the Vietnamese communists I guess

and they start trying to infiltrate the base and like get equipment and all this stuff and we were closing the base because there was so much damage and the negotiations had failed I think we offered them like $10 million and they went like $100 million and we're like sorry we're out of here

so we're going to close the base anyway And so they started trying to come on the base. And so we were like patrolling against them and like, you know, arresting some of those guys and stuff. And I was like they're kind of like the closest thing to combat that we saw. Yeah. And we had like drug interdiction with the FBI and stuff. And it's like the most exciting thing I did.

Which is kind of one of the reason that I got out is like, you know, just like the same training trips over and over again, doing the same stuff over and over again. It's like, I don't think we're ever going to go to war again. I got to do something else, you know. Yeah. And then, of course, while I'm in medical school, 9-11 happens. So you did a couple more platoons at Team 5.

And like you said, like you're, it's the 90s. And you're just going through workup. It's always fun. I mean, I, it's super fun. Hollywood seals is what we call it. It was like, it was super fun. Yeah. And you're, well, for me, I was always like thought the big mission was coming.

And so I was always just like, hey, you know, we gotta be ready. In my mind, I was trying to be ready. I wish I had your confidence in that. I was like, we had Bill Clinton. in the white house I'm like we're never going to war kidding me so you do a couple more platoons and then you're like all right did you when you when you decided to get out did you know you wanted to become a doctor no no so what was your plan when you got out well so I started dating this girl who became my first wife like after after my first platoon um I dated her

during my second workup and then I deployed and then I came back And I was supposed to do like nine months of short duty, you know, like work in the department, start school, kind of transition out. And then I got thrown in a platoon because somebody got hurt. And so kind of deployed actually until, it's supposed to be until the day I got out. But it ended up being like four or five days after I got. I was technically out and I came back. But anyway, so I, she was in physical therapy school. So wait, so you're dating each other or you got married?

Did you say that we were dating at the time? You're dating and you figure this, you start dating this girl, you figure you're going to get out, but you end up getting thrown into a platoon. You do the deployment. You come home. You have no plan and you're out of the Navy. Right. Okay. And she's going to physical therapy school?

Yeah. So by the time I came back for my second deployment, she's like three months out of grad school. And she was working at San Diego Children's Hospital. And I used to take her textbooks on deployment and read them because I, like, I was just interested. and, you know, physiology and anatomy and, like, anything to make me bigger and stronger and faster and whatever, better. And so I felt like I had an interest in that, but I didn't, you know, I'd never done well in school.

I was convinced that I was dumb, really, until I got in the name. Like, in A school, I did really well, like, at the top of my class and then, like, I did really well academically in buds. And so I thought, well, maybe I'm not stupid. Maybe I just, like, never really applied myself. But we'll see, right? So, you go, like, you know, I have a GED, so I can't get into any. college. I have to go to at least a year of junior college probably two. And so I went there and

like started setting the curve in every class. I thought maybe it was going to be like Jadju or something, like an athletic trainer, maybe a physical therapist if like things really worked out great for me. And to apply to physical therapy school, you have to like have 2,000 volunteer hours, right? Well, that's a year of full-time work, right? So part-time work. That's a couple of years. And so I'm like, well, I start getting my volunteer hours in. And they hired me after I'd volunteer there for maybe a week. And they're like, we don't should come work for us. And so then I worked as a physical therapy assistant at San Diego Sports Medicine Center

the whole time I was in college. And that was like a health care mecca. They had everything. You know, they had orthopedic surgeons. They had sports medicine guys. They had DOs. They had MDs. They had podiatrist.

They had massage therapists, PTs. athletic trainers. So we had everything. And I got to know all of the people and got to see everybody's work. And I'm standing in the hallway with a couple of doctors. Because they were about my age, right? Because I'd been in the teams first. So they're maybe two or three years older than me.

And I got to be friends with them. And we're standing out in the hallway one day. And they're telling me you should go to medical school. And I'm like, right. Pump the brace there, Sparky. Like, I'm even close to medical school. And so they're trying to convince me that I can get in a medical school. And I'm like, no freaking way I'm getting, I'm getting into medical school.

And then the doctor that owned it, Lee Rice, he's out here still. And he said, he steps out of his office and he goes, Kirk. I didn't even know he knew my name, right? It's like, Kirk. the question isn't whether you can get in. The question is, would you go if you got in? And I said, of course. He goes, well, then you kind of have to try, don't you?

I was like, shit. Trapped you. Yeah, I was like, that's right. And then I ended up going to work for him when I got out of the Navy. Like my first year of the Navy, I went back to his practice. He had a concierge practice in Pointe Lama out here. And, yeah. But that's how that came about, man.

And I mean, I was fully planned to be an orthopedic surgeon because I'm like a mechanical dude and I like the succinctly broken, not broken. Hey, this is broke. I mean, put some bolts and screws and then plates and it's not going to be broken anymore and that's it. And then I'm going to go on and do it again. I don't want to look at anybody's freaking antion gap

or like you care about what medications are on. I don't interest me. I want to go fix things. And then in the Navy, you have to do an operational tour before they'll let you finish residency so you do like your first year and then they you have to go out to the fleet if you don't if you don't uh so wait sir do you already gotten commissioned or were you planning to go back in navy what was oh yeah i totally skipped that part yeah so when so when i decided to apply for medical

school pre-internet so i went to the bookstore and started looking through the capland books to see like what schools would i be competitive for with my with my GPA and my mcat and all that and that's when i found out that navy had its own school and i was like no what way. Are you kidding me? And so I look into it. It's like they'll pay me to go to medical school instead of the other way around. And of course I'm married and I have a kid and I have a kid on the way. I'm like, well, that makes a lot more sense, right? Like I wasn't excited to go in the Navy. Trust me. Like I was in the team. That's a good fit for the team, but I wasn't a good fit for the Navy. I knew that. And I was like, all right, well, I'll do this, right? And I knew that there

was this eight year commitment afterwards. And I was like, well, I'll go back to the teams for a while. And I'll like give back to the community who saved me from prison or, you know, whatever I was going to end up if I, if I didn't have, you know, something to channel my anger with, right? And so I, I did. You know, when you do your operational, so you got commissioned in 2000, go to OIS, Connecticut, basically. That's the knife and fork school. the knife and forks school they gave me some kind of award there it's ridiculous I don't I think I did like

I participated in like 25% of that school like they couldn't make pants for me I have really big legs and kind of a normal waist and they kept making they're like trying to make khaki pants like from scratch like these girls and they were ridiculous I mean never and it was just like they kept trying all this stuff so I never had a uniform and I'd be like well I got to go the I got to go to the uniform store again. And that's all I did for like three weeks was like try to get a uniform to fit. And then and so and then they gave me some sort of award. It was comical. And then go to medical school. And then from there I did, you know, there was some hoopla I won't get into, but ended up coming back to San Diego to do internship, which is the first year residency, essentially.

and then you have to go out to the fleet. Do you do that at Balboa? I did it Balboa, yeah. And the, you do that and if, and then after that year, if you just say, hey, I just want to come back as soon as possible, then they just send you out to some fleet job. You're probably going to go 30 second street to be on a ship or something, right? But if you go to flight school, you can be a flight surgeon, you go to dive school and a UMO school in Connecticut, and then you can obviously go back to our unit. or dive in or something like that. So I was like, yeah, I'll do DMO

and I'll go back to the team for a while. Then I'll come back and finish residency. And I went to dive school and then at the end of it, there weren't, there weren't any orders to the teams. So they put me on at the submarine rescue unit out here on the end of Point Loma. No, not.

I'm sorry, it's at the end. of North Island now. And that was like a policy job, really, because a lot of people don't realize this. But like every country that has submarines, like they all have this agreement that will rescue each other submarines, even our enemies. Like China, Russia, it doesn't matter. Like your submarine goes down on our waters and it's savable. We'll use our system to save your guys because technically these systems can go anywhere in the

world, but with a realistic time windows, it's probably not realistic to, like, fly it over there and set everything up. So you're going to be much better off of the country that you're closest to saves them. And so then you have to make all these agreements, like, who, whose patients are they going to be? Whose dive tables are we're going to use if we have to recompress them? Like what, like what's going to be our pro? And so that's all we did is travel around the world and meet endless meetings and come up with new policy. And then, uh, then I had the, the opportunity to either go back to the hospital or go to the teams. I was like, I really feel like I should do that.

And so then I go back to the teams. And that's right when they called it, I think they were calling it, they're still calling it the human performance program and then switch to the tactical asset program. And so I got there right when they were funding the build out of that clinic. Nice.

And of course, I was a perfect fit for that. It's a freaking PT clinic. Yeah. Duh. Like I did this for, I did this all through. college. Like I know what I'm doing. So and then like and there's a great time. Like I got to be

there when we hired everybody like when when we hired the first, you know, the first athletic trainer, the first PT, the first nutritionist, the first and conditioning coach. Like, which is crazy to think about everything that you're just saying is the first, the first, the first, because we had, we didn't have any of this stuff. Yeah. Like, it was just like your PT was whatever your CO or your XO was into. So your X or like to run and swim, guess what you were doing for PT? Like run swim. swim run. And if you got injured, it was like...

Yeah. Like you dealt with it, like figured out. Whatever your corpsman could do for you. Because you weren't going to drive across the bridge and go to rehab at Pek, it freaking Balboa.

Yeah. And even if you do that, what are they rehabbing a sailor at Balboa for? They're rehabbing him to like get out of the Navy with a medical retirement or whatever. That's what they're rehabbing him for. In the teams, the guys want to go back to work.

Right. Like I'm hurt. You make me better now. Right. Yeah, I've got to go. to Nileland in two weeks, make me better right now. Right. And that's the other thing. You're traveling so much. Like, how much rehab do you really have? Unless you're going to get pulled out of your platoon, but you might as well die before you do

that. Like, just let your arm fall off. Like, maybe you'll still be able to make it. Yeah, that, that happened with Stump. So Stumpf came over and saw me when he was. Uh-huh. And he's like, I didn't know him. Uh, I knew who he was. And, uh, and he, he comes over and he's like, hey, you know, I'm getting out in like two days and everybody keeps telling me you should look at my record. So here it is. So he gives me his record. It's like paper thin. And I open it and his and his discharge physical is like good to go. Everything's good. I'm sitting there. I'm like, didn't you get shot? He's like, yeah. I'm like, you know, no, that's in here. He's like, does that matter? I'm like, yeah, that matters. Like I said, regardless of how you feel now, if you start,

having some serious problems and you need surgery, revision, like big care. Like that's, you know, what if, you know, what if? And so he's, he's like, oh, okay. And so then I check into it. I'm like, dude, you're going to have to stand in it. And he was, he was. And he ended up, he ended up. I did, I just saw him recently.

And I was like, should you still pissing me about that? He's like, no. Best thing ever. How much longer do you have to stay in? I think he ended up in like in another year. Damn. Because he had to go through a med board. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. But, I mean, there was nothing in there. There's nothing in his record. It was literally just like signed off. Like good, good, good, good, good. Like I said, what's your answer to the question? It's like, fine, yep, how's your shoulder? It's fine.

Neat, fine, neck, fine, yep. Got surgery, yep, it's fine now. Everything is just fine, fine, fine, fine. Can I get out of here now? Yeah. I want to leave. Yeah. Like you're saying at the beginning, nobody wants to see the doctor, but more to the point,

nobody trusts the doctor, right? Because that's the guy who can put you on the bench. What's the worst thing you do to do to the team guy? Pull him out of his balloon. I give you something that's disqualifying. I say, oh, you have a problem. You need meds. You're just qualified.

You can't take any real medification in the teams. And, you know, that, I mean, interestingly, because of that nuance, that's why I ended up learning everything that I learned as a seal teams. And doing what I do now, I mean, less than 1% of what I do now has anything to do with what I learned in medical school or residency or anything. Like it's all outside. I was talking to a guy that was, oh, it was Jason. I think it was Jason. But, you know, he'd come from where?

The baseball or football? Where do you come from? Yeah. He had Jets who was baseball. Yeah. And maybe it wasn't him. I was talking to somebody that was football. And he said something like, and he worked at Bud's medical.

And at Bud's medical, he said he would see, like, whatever the number was, 40 cases of Patela femoral syndrome a week. Yeah. And he said when he was with the NFL, he saw like two cases. Right. And it was like that for every injury. Like shin splints, if you're at Bud's medical, you see 50 cases a week of shin splints. And you just go down the list of shoulder injury.

And so the team's the same way. Like, you're just going to see so many of it. You get so good at it. right uh that it's it's like an environment we're just going to learn so much so so you were in this critical role as this thing kind of stood up where the the teams started taking the health of the seal more like as serious as we could possibly take yeah and doing proactive stuff too right so what did you what does being in the teams do to a dude So this is how it all got started, right?

We built that facility. We hired all these great people, like you said, pull people from pro teams, from Olympic training center for like top-knocked, top-tier colleges and so. So we have all these brilliant people that are great at their job. Now I'm the dumbest guy there, right? Because, like, I'm just a guy who worked into sports medicine center when I was in college. And, like, I don't really know any of this stuff. So what does the Navy do when you're the dumbest guy?

I put you in charge, right? So, like, well, now you're going to supervise all these people. And so, like, I now have this supervisory position in the rehab facility. And so, as you know, like, my office was in between those two sides of it. And so guys would be over there doing rehab. And, you know, I had been a seal recently enough door. There's still a ton of guys in there that I went through training with and that I deployed with. And so I had a good enough reputation.

The guys trusted me and then come and shut the door and, like, hey, let me tell you what's really going on with me. because like you said, fine, fine, fine, fine. Like, fine, fine, everything's good. It's like, you know, they'll put rigorous tape over a bullet hole if they had to. Just like, you know, I don't want to get put on the bench. I don't trust this dude.

And so they came in, I can't remember who the first guy was at this point, but it comes in, it's like, you know what's really going on with me? And he's talking about, well, you know, you can't remember anything, right?

He comes in a room, forget why he's there, leaves. Oh, remember, come back, forget. Oh, but leaves his house, five, six times in the morning, I get in this car, back out. Oh, I forgot my badge. I'm going, oh, forgot that.

And then they'd be saying, you know, my motivation just sucks. My concentration sucks. I sit in meetings. I can't follow anything anybody's saying. Like my attention spans like two seconds or, I can be given the brief and I'm not interested and like, yeah, but they're team guys. So they're still getting after it, but they just don't feel like getting after it. And they're like, basically I'm getting cold or weak or fatter.

You know, like they're following the nutrition. They're following the strength and conditioning device. They're doing everything exactly how they should do it. And they're just, they're getting weaker. They're getting fatter, they're getting slower. They're getting moody. Sex drives down, sexual performances down, right? And it's really all performance issues, right?

So I'm not as fast. I'm not as strong. I'm not and then they'd be like, well, you know, but maybe I'm just getting old. And I'm like, yeah, man, you're 34. Like it's over for you, right? You're screwed. You might as I just go, go to suck start your sick right now, man. right now, man. So I honestly didn't have the slightest idea. First guy comes in my office

and tells me this. I'm like, I'm bewildered. I don't know. So I'm like, I'm going to do a bunch of labs. And it's first important to preface this with when I first got there, the department was actually a PA. So a physician's assistant was supervising the physician. And he'd been then Navy, like, he's a former team guy. And one of the first things he tells me in his office, he's like, hey, these guys are going to come to you and expect some special treatment. I'm like, yeah. Like, we can't give it to them.

I'm like, why wouldn't I give it to them? He's like, you have to treat everybody the same. I'm like, no, it's in the name, special forces. Like, they get special treatment. Like, we're here because of the team guys. We're not here for tech support. Like, those guys can go to the hospital, right? Like, if we have the capacity, we'll see them.

But, like, I'm here to help the team. guys. He's like, you can't think of it that way. And I'm like, we're not going to get along then because that's what I'm going to do. Like, I'm here to help, I'm here to help the community. I don't give a shit. My, my CEO was a supply officer, right, at Group 1. I mean, I don't get shit with that guy once. I don't care. Like, I'm here to help my, my boys, man. I'm going to do what they. So, so everything I did was in that vein. And I, and it wasn't popular. It wasn't popular with the seals. It's popular with the seals. So they came and they tell me this story about all this stuff

and nothing they're saying. And this is just like repeat, one guy a day, one guy a week, two guys. You know how it goes, like word or mouth. It's like one and then one and then two and then four and then, you know, I'd say three months after the first guy came in and I'd probably seen a hundred guys, right?

And now, I mean, I could have told them their story, but I'd listen, I'd take notes and listen, let them tell it, and they all told me the same thing. They've since they've done some research and they're now calling this operator syndrome. I was calling it the SEAL syndrome. And the syndrome basically means here's all the symptoms. We don't know why.

And so it's a syndrome, right? And so I'm just like, well, I'll just test a bunch of labs and see. Like, I don't know. I was doing 98 blood markers. So they're going over the hospital, giving like 17 vials of blood. And then again, everything that should be high was low, and everything that should be low was high. Like their anabolic behavior, super low, catabolic stuff really high. Their inflammation really high, oxidation really high, insulin sensitivity, even nowhere near what you would expect it to be.

I got this fit and this in shape and just eating this way. And I didn't have the slightest idea. I'm just like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And then I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 guys into it. Somebody said to me, he takes Ambien every night. And I thought, a lot of guys seem to say that.

Yeah, a lot of guys say that. So I put a, I remember, like, one of a few days, I was in khakis, like, somebody you just remember, super clear, like, the way I sitting at my nose and I'm like, remember putting this note at the margin. And then after he left, I kept shadow files because none of the team, that's one of these stuff in the record. So I'm like, I'm just keep a shadow file.

I give it to you when you leave. Yeah, or when I leave. You do what you want to with it. So I checked in my shadow files. Every single guy who had been in my office was an ambient, 100% of them. And I was like, huh, I wonder if that could be it. Now, I took pharmacology in medical school, so I knew how Ambien worked. But I didn't know enough of, like I knew it acts like GABA, right?

Gaba is a neuropeptide. and like you heard of GABA penton, you give it for nerve pain because it slows down their function essentially, right? Okay. And I'm like, but I don't know enough about sleep to know why that's significant. What GABA does in sleep, I don't know. I didn't have a single class on sleep in medical school. And, you know, the way the pharmaceutical industry works, you know, when they apply for FDA approval, they own the research. and they give the FDA what they want to give them

and they don't give them. They don't give them what they don't want to give them. But then if they ever get sued in court, they have to pull up the skirt and show everything. So that had happened with Ambien, like right before this happened. And so they were getting sued. And so now we knew the real side effect profile. And so I just had to learn a ton about non-traditional medicine, and had to learn a ton about sleep.

I thought maybe it was adrenal fatigue, like I was trying, which isn't even like a real thing. but yeah that was kind of like the alternative medicine thing with the adrenal fatigue it's like an HPA mismatch that there's some validity to it but it's really not like the way it's proposed but I was I was having some success doing that like but it wasn't huge and then but I noticed like everybody's testosterone was low everybody's growth hormone was low like low low right but in medicine like I'm a western and trained medical physician, right?

So I know how to recognize and treat disease. What do I do if it's not disease, right? It's within the bell curve, but it probably should be higher, but there's no, right? So the chair at UCLA, the chair of endocrinology at UCLA had done this research where he stratified the bell curve for testosterone and broke it into quintile, so 20, so 80% to 160 to 80, right? And the top quintile you had the lowest risk of death from any cause

the lowest risk of any disease every quintile you go down it doubles. So by the time you're in the fifth quintile it's 16 times you're 16 times more likely to die of any cause you're 16 times more likely to have any disease every guy who came in to see me was in that quintile now if that were magnesium

it would be medical malpractice to not give everybody magnesium and keep them in the upper quintile but because athletes use testosterone to cheat in sports. It's political. So you don't give that, right? And that's a no-no. So I wasn't about, they weren't about to let me give guys testosterone.

But then I learned, hey, when you're sleeping, that's when your testosterone's made. Like, that's when everything's rebalanced. All your hormones, the most anabolic time in your life is the first sleep cycle, right? You go through your first sleep cycle and most, the most of that is deep sleep. Deep sleep has the lowest stress hormones, the catabolic hormones that you'll ever have in 24 hours and has the highest

anabolic. So most of your repair right, obviously when you work out you don't get stronger. You're weaker. You damage yourself. When it repairs, it comes back stronger. Well, that's happening while you're asleep. So I thought, so once I learned what goes on when you go to sleep

and what I had going for me was the teams had already done some great work and I'd had a great reputation because this is like 2009, right? 2010. And And so I could call up anybody to be like, hey, I read your book or saw your TED talk or heard your lecture. And I'm the doctor for the West Coast SEAL team.

So I was wondering if I could train with you or consult with you on clients. Everybody was like eager to help, right? That's awesome. So I got to learn a lot really quickly. And I started trying to tell the leadership that I thought that a lot of our performance issues are chronic injuries and are, you know,

just guys. not feeling good, not performing well, not feeling motivated, not being resilient. I think a lot of this is from their hormones. I had the proof that their hormones are, they have the hormones of an 80-year-old man. And an 80-year-old fat man, actually.

And I said, and I think it's sleep. Was that everybody was like that? I remember you talking to me. You're like, I mean, I was good. And you're like, dude, you're free. You told me, had the testosterone, 17 year old football player. I was like, yes, yes.

There are some people who just get through, like, for whatever reason, they stay resilient. You know, but, but I obviously have a biased sample because people are coming to me is because they have problems. So like everybody. So you were just getting me because I was retiring and like here I am. Right. Right. Right. So most of the guys were coming to you, they feel like shit.

Yeah. And they're just coming to you like, bro. Can you please help me? Right. So then once I figured out the ambience. saying I started digging into that. Which, by the way, I've never taken Ambien. Yeah.

You're super unique. Yeah. I had the Corman pull medical records and look and 85% of our command of the West Coast. 85% of the West Coast SEAL teams had a prescription for Ambien. Whether or not they were taking it, I don't know. But like my doc, we're on deployment. My doc's like, hey, we need to get, he was like, see, he didn't need to tell me, but he was just telling me like, hey, we're out.

of Ambien. Or like, we're almost out of Ambien. I got to get more. I'm going to whatever. And I was kind of like, I didn't really think much of it. Because like I said, I've never even tried it. I don't even know what it feels like, but guys were freaking on Ambien like it was like it was eaten M&Ms, man. Right.

And so what is it? Does it jack up your. Yeah. So they thought. So the way they used to get people to sleep was with benzos, like volume. Right. And turns out if you overdose on those, you quit breathing and you die. And they're super hard.

to get off of, right? That's what happened to Jordan Peters. Yeah. Like super hard to get off of. So they found these Z drugs. So GABA is this neuropeptide that basically slows neurons down, right? So when you're, when you go to sleep, one of the primary things that's happening in sleep is your neocortex. So the part of the brain that you think of is the human brain, the wrinkly bit, that's where like all your motor function is, all your sensory and all your processing of that, like your interpretation of the world.

That's how you interact with the world. It was that part, right? So that slows down and you quit interacting with the world. You quit paying attention. Your senses still work, obviously, right? Because I can turn it on the light and your eyes still sense the light and you'll wake up. All right. I can make a loud noise.

All your senses are still working. You're just not paying attention to them. So GAB is the primary neuropeptide that's making that happen. So the pharmaceutical industry, the way they work is like, well, if we figure out this one step of this process, then we can supercharge that step, right? So now this is going to bind a GABA receptor, but it's going to do 100 times more than GABA does. And that was Benzos.

And then the Z jugs like a thousand times what GABA does. What's a Z? I don't know. It's like another brand name or another form. That's a category. So that's like Ambien and Lunesta. And there used to be a third one. I can't remember what it is.

And these are like a thousand times? That's a thousand times the effect of GABA. So what was happening. is just dissociating people. So they would take this and basically they quit interpreting their senses, but they could still be awake. And so the reason they were getting sued is people were like driving down and doing lizard brain stuff.

They're driving down and picking up prostitutes. They're driving down and eating, you know, oh God. $50, $100 worth of fast food. They're going to Vegas and gambling their life savings away and mortgaging their house. and wake up the next day they only remember it.

They have no recollection of it whatsoever. And so that's what they start. That's what they're getting sued for. Is it somewhat addictive too? Ambien. It is for this reason. So, so yeah, the first thing that happens, obviously the blue light goes out of our eyes.

That change, that makes some changes in our brain. And melatonin gets secreted. Everybody's heard of that. It's a hormone in your brain. And that's like the initiation of everything, right? that's the, as Matt Walker calls it, the starter pistol, which I think is a great metaphor. So that initiates everything.

And then one of the primary things that happen is GABA comes in and slows down the brain. You quit paying attention to your environment. Your body temperature goes down and like, that's what makes you feel sleepy. So if your body's a really smart machine, right, it's efficient. It's not going to do anything it doesn't need to do. That's why if I give you testosterone, you quit making testosterone. Why the hell are you going to spend energy making it? You're getting it for free.

So if I give you GABA and it's having a thousand times the effect of GABA, or I'm sorry, if I give you a Z drug, it's having a thousand times the effect of GABA, all the receptors for GABA, you only need one one thousandth of them, right? Because you have all, you have all of this freaking GABA everywhere. It's like you don't need all these receptors, you know? So what happens is you downregulate receptors. And now you quit. taking that, you're gaba deficient no matter how much GABA you have in your brain,

because you need a thousand times what you would ordinarily have just to be normal now, because you have so few receptors. And then the receptors take six to eight weeks to come back. Nobody can wait six to eight weeks to start sleeping again, right? So they're really hard to get off of too. Sure, that's why the ambient becomes addictive. Yeah. So people can't quit it because it's just making them normal.

It's the same thing when people take, you know, 50 milligrams or even 10 milligrams of melaton. It's like your brain only makes about six micrograms from the time the sun goes down until you wake up. You're taking 10 milligrams all at once. Way more than you're going to downregulate receptors. And now when you quit taking melatonin, you're melatonin deficient because you don't have enough receptors. How long does it take to get back to where you're producing melatonin again? Well, you're still producing it.

It's just like you're producing a normal amount with maybe a tenth or one one hundredth of the receptors. So you're deficient because you need both. It doesn't matter how much. Do you get them back? eventually the receptors yeah it takes like six to eight weeks that is you know SSRIs are very similar like they're working on serotonin reuptake and they're working on receptors and takes like six to eight weeks to really start working and takes six to eight weeks to recover from and guys that do testosterone you you do you ever

start making that again if you go on if you're on testosterone it depends on how long you're on and what you do while you're on it right so there are things that you can do to maintain testicular and function. Most doc in the box guys don't do this. You know, they're just like, here's what does testosterone. And then most of the, most of the guys that I end up seeing, you know, they're, they're being seen by some guy who's given them like two or three hundred milligrams once a week

or once every two weeks. So it's getting like this huge surge. They're going super physiologic for a few days. They turn into a caveman for like two days. And then they downregulate their receptors. and that testosterone gets converted into estrogen, and estrogen is the signal in your brain to tell your brain how much testosterone you have.

So if your estrogen's high, your brain assumes that's from testosterone. So now you quit producing as much testosterone. And so they get this peak. Now they downregulate their receptors, right? And they downregulate their own production. And so after a few months of that, once all the receptors have changed

and all the physiologies change, now they're super physiologic for maybe a day or two, and they're normal for a day or two. And now they're low the whole rest of the time. Some guys, that's two weeks. And so they'll always come in and be like, hey, I started this and I felt great. And now I feel just like I did before I started. And I'll say, how much are you taking?

How often, like, are they looking at your D.HT? Are they looking at your estrogen? Are they looking at your sexual and binding globulin? Or they're looking at anything other than your testosterone? Or they even looking at your free testosterone? Because total testosterone really doesn't matter. How much of it is available? And so, like, this is true with every hormone.

Anything, any hormone I give you, you're going to quit making it. Now, there are things that I can, there's things I can give you that will cause you to keep making testosterone while you're taking testosterone. It's not perfect. But those guys that can come off of testosterone probably be okay. They're still going to be bad off, right, because they weren't able to make enough when I met them. so now they're going to be a little worse than that when they get off. And so like what I was doing with the team guys is I was first doing it with like all supplements. First I was getting guys to sleep and getting them off of the Ambien, right?

And that's that just came from me. And I couldn't just say quit taking your Ambien because our, you know, our community, if one is good, two's better and three is probably great. So they're taking like three Ambien with, so they're taking seven. They're taking three Ambien with like a couple of cocktails. And then they're waking up at 4.30, not in 10. And you know, the way you get up at 4, 430 and they're like, can't go back to sleep.

So I'm going to go into the gym. I'm going to work out really hard today. I'm not going to take any breaks. I'm going to work all day. I'm going to come home tonight. I'm going to be tired and I'll go to sleep. I'm like, all right. How long have you been doing that?

Like, three years. Keep going on tonight's tonight, I think, right? Like, obviously it's not tired of them. Obviously it's not working, right? And so, like, once I learned how Ambien destroys REM sleep, like 80% of REM sleep, like 80% of REM sleep goes away. And it knocks out about 20% of deep sleep. alcohol is exactly the opposite. So destroys deep sleep, gets rid of about 20.

So when I sent these guys in for sleep studies, 99.9% stage 2 sleep. So they weren't getting any deep sleep, any room sleep. Do they wake up in the morning and feel like shit? Yeah. How do they even, I don't even know how they survived it, honestly. And that's one of the things about medicine.

Proofs to you how little we know because that should kill them. It should kill them in a couple of weeks because that's the same as getting no sleep. you would think. But this is what, you know, the Ambien lawsuits kind of were fortunately out to where I could learn all that. And so I couldn't just take away their ambient and alcohol and say, suck it up, buttercup, right? Like I had to give them something.

So I did some research and came up with a bunch of things and they were having to go to all the pre-Amathons. They were having to drive around to three different stores and get all the ingredients and try to travel with it and it was a pain. And so, you know, they really rang me into making a product out of it to make it easier for them. So I, you know, I figured out the sleep was a huge component and that that was causing probably a lot of their low testosterone. And then there's things I can give you like the precursors to testosterone, like DHEA. And you can do a form of DHA 7 keto DHA that can't be converted

into estrogen. So that's good, right? I can give you zinc citrate, which will decrease the amount of estrogen you make from a testosterone. And then some guys I was giving a pharmaceutical call to RemedX and that blocks estrogen conversion too. It's called an aromatase inhibitor. And so just with like DHA, pregene alone, which is another precursor to the testosterone pathway and some zinc or arimidex and getting guys to sleep, guys were tripling, quadrupling their testosterone levels over. six months, 46 months, right? One of the CEOs out there,

he got like, in the couple of years I was treating him, he had like three PRs, like weightlifting and running and like say something else. And like in his 40s, like this is the best he's ever been in his life because he's, you know,

he's been broken down. We, and like our community has some of that just because of the chaotic sleep anyway, right? just because, well, tonight you're working. And then tomorrow you're working too. And then, you know, and now we're going to travel and we're going to go over here. We're going to do this.

And so every, like, you sleep when you can, obviously, right? And so it's chaotic. And if you aren't aligned with your circadian rhythm, sleep is nowhere near as valuable. And so I got guys sleeping and they had huge performance gains. There are a few older guys that I couldn't get them to make enough testosterone to be in the upper quintile. So I think when they, they like shut me down and had me under investigation for a while. And like I, I mean, I essentially sacrificed my career. Like there was no way I was getting any kind of Navy residency or anything because I was just in trouble all the time with Bumet or the hospital or Warcom, whatever.

Like everybody's, then even like my. What were they mad about? That I was practicing outside of my scope. that I was, like, I was giving people, it was called Myers Cocktails when I thought that it was adrenal fatigue. It's IV vitamins. Apparently I'm not allowed to do that as a doctor. And I got in a lot of trouble for that.

The Arimidics, ignorant doctors will say, it's a cancer drug. Why are you giving somebody a cancer drug? It's not a cancer drug, you're moron. I mean, you give it to women with breast cancer because their breast cancer is estrogen sensitive and you want them to make less estrogen. That's nothing to do with cancer.

Like, you just don't want them to have estrogen. It's an estrogen blocker. That's all it is. So, yeah, I just, like everything I did, you know, and all it takes, because I was a junior doctor, right? Like, all it takes is for somebody senior to me anywhere in the medical chain to be like, he's doing what? Why is he doing that?

Like, no, we can't allow that. And so then they call Warcom and complain that this rogue doctor's doing all this crazy voodoo stuff. That's what it's called like voodoo. Even when I when I told the leadership Andrew or was Kron guard, Alex

Alex Kron guard. He was the Commodore at the time and he was super receptive. He was smart, educated on all this stuff. But everybody else like literally laughed me at their office going, you got to be kidding me. Their testosterone's low

they aren't sleeping right doc like you got some problems and uh but then started getting results and people started performing better and word of mouth spread and then they started having me lecture at the pre and post retreats and then i you know that's when i like was sharing the stage with like rob wolf and well-born and cressor and like all those guys and then they started inviting me on podcast and invited me to other symposiums and stuff and like that's kind of where my career win because of what I was doing with our guys. So what year did you end up getting out of the Navy? January 13.

So you retired from the Navy of January 13? I didn't retire, but I got on, you know, 19 years. You serious? Yeah. Wow. Well, so, but medical school is like the academy, so it only counts retro, so you have to do 24 years to retire. So I would have to stay in five more years.

Okay. And there was, there was nowhere for me to. go. I mean, I was going to end up in Antarctica or something. Yeah. I'd burned, I'd burned a lot of bridges to do what I did. So then what'd you do when you punched out? So you kind of had a, I went, worked at the concierge practice in Pointe Loma with the doctor who talked me into becoming a doctor. And then he wanted me to succeed him in that practice and take it over. And it was exactly what I thought I wanted, you know. And I was already doing some private consulting. People heard me on podcast and be like, hey, I want to work with you. And so it's sort of

telemedicine like Zoom stuff Skype in those days I guess And so I was doing some of that And then But of course when I left I created like this vacuum Because the next guy who came to the teams Was just like a doctor Like regular doctor

He was just waiting biting his time Do you try and do like a turnover of what you had learned with him? Yeah But he was like I'm I want to stay in the Navy Yeah after seeing what happened to me There wasn't anybody who's going to be interested in doing what I'd done Has the world caught up with these protocols? Yeah.

Yeah, like, I'd say maybe four or five years after I got out, like Socom hired me to come and lecture there and, like, lecture all their medical staff and, like, damn neck hired me to come in, do a lecture and teach all their medical staff. And I consult them on all those guys on a fairly regular basis. This is...

V.H. Liddell Hart, who wrote the book called... He wrote a bunch of... He wrote countless books, but, you know, he's a... He's a world war one guy fought at the Somme. And he wrote the book that I love called The Indirect Approach. But one of the things he says in that book is the first person with an idea, if they stick with that idea and they hold on to it, guess what they become a margar? So you look out throughout history.

Like if you have an idea and you're like, hey, this is the way it should be, you end up a margar. And that's kind of like what happened to you because it takes a while for ideas to get accepted. He rolls out this one example of with the major change. that have been made to warships over the past whatever it is 200 years every major change that came Like no one accepted it until like somebody got marred and then you know like going from Whatever from sale to like steam you know those first guys like are you an idiot what are you gonna do when you're out at sea and there's no coal You're an idiot. Yeah, like we can sail forever and sure enough these guys get fired and then the next guy says you know we should make the holes out of out of metal and Instead of wood, what are you an idiot?

How are you gonna repair those things? Metal's heavier than water. All those things. And that's what happened. So if you're the first person to roll out, if you're not careful, now you can be careful, you can get it done in a more, this is what he talks about, a more indirect manner.

So if you had said, all right, I'm gonna be like super strategic and I'm gonna run this up the chain, it would have taken longer. You had to tell a bunch of guys, like, can't do anything for you now. You know, it would take you seven years or whatever. So I'm not saying it would have been, it's just that indirect approach,

is the only way to, well, I'm not the only way, but it's probably the only way to avoid becoming a margher, but for you, you're sitting there looking at people that are hurting, and you're like,

all right, I'm going to help these guys, and that's where it is. The guys need help right now. Like, it's totally worth it. Like, I was fully aware of what I was doing. I'm not,

I'm not whining about it. Like, I knew what I was doing at the time. I had a, I had a quote taped to my monitor from Buckminster Fuller. It said, it said, never fight the system,

create a superior system. to makes the old one obsolete. And so it's like, I know, this one we do. I'm just going to do the right thing. Because, like,

I learned all this stuff from other people, right? It's not like I invented what I was doing. I mean, I had a few novel ideas, but for the most part,

like, I learned all this from other people. So this was going on in the world. It just wasn't going on in our world. And now it's in our world. Like, you know,

but I left this vacuum when I left, and so all these guys kept coming to me, like when they got, when they got out, especially, and I don't know if you Do you know anything about the honor

The Honor Foundation? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely know about it. Yeah, for sure. So Joe Musselman was... I've spoken there a couple times.

Yeah. So Joe Musselman was the guy who found it. He's a guy who didn't make their buds. And he wanted to do this educational component of it. And I'd seen enough team guys like, this guys need a medical rehab that year too, right? So like educate them for a year, but like let's get them in medical shape first

so that they can actually learn. So they can remember. They can sleep. They can, right? And so they're not emotional wrecks and, you know, wracked with anxiety and all this and all this other stuff. And so we pitched, that's how I got back and involved with Dr. Rice, a guy who talked to me in medical schools, he had this great clinic.

And Point Luma is huge. And he had very few patients. And so he had the clinical space. And we were like, so we pitched him like, hey, man, could we run like this pilot? program through here and we were trying to raise money for that and the money just wasn't there for the medical because it's too expensive but we did like I think we did like 10 families like team guys family or something proof of concept and so and then I and then I ended up working at the clinic instead of just doing but my plan was to do that like to build that because all the everybody

was calling me anyways all the team guys are calling me anyway and they still to this day like I'm always managing 50 guys. And one, they trust me, too. I know our community better than anybody. And I know what they need. I know what their problems are before they even know what their problems are. And so I was, like, that's probably been in my philanthropic work. It's just like I just kept. Do you do that for civilians as well? I do it for civilians and they pay me. They pay me a lot so that I don't have to charge the team guys. Right. And. And. And. And. You do it for civilians. And, you know, I'm always. And, I'm always. I'm, I'm And up until just recently, like I'm on a bunch of different advisory boards for the nonprofits who are trying to help our guys out. And so I've never charged any of the team guys for my time, but they have to pay for their meds because they're not, you know, it's not coming through TRICARE.

And so now a lot of these foundations are paying for their meds. And so in the last couple of years, like it's gotten a lot better, you know. And there's even, I haven't seen any, but there's other doctors that are doing this work with these foundations. And they're treating some active duty guys too. And then you ended up making your sleep supplement too. Yeah. So actually when I was at the, I was at the clinic, when I was at the concierge clinic, is life wellness, by the way, give him a shout out maybe. Life wellness.

In Point Loma still? In point Loma. Still active? Still there. Yeah. Life Wellness Institute, I think it's called. And, you know, so I worked there for a year. And, I mean, I just, I just had so much, there's so much demand for my time.

And like, there's no way I could do what I needed to do. The team still hadn't caught up. They still weren't doing anything about sleep. And so the guys were just kind of haranguing me into like, too, just make it a product. Like, how hard is this to do? I'm like, all right. I'm going to step away from the clinic for a year. I'm going to start the sleep supplement.

I'll just live off of my consulting. And I think I was doing an hourly rate back then. I do like annual programs now. But I said, I'll just live off of my consulting. I'll start this thing up and go back. So your consulting is this medical consulting for individual humans? Is that what it is? Okay.

So I mean, I do like I do some organizational stuff. Like they'll like whatever, law enforcement or professional sports team, whatever they'll hire me to lecture and kind of help them design a program but you're talking about like hey i want you to help me feel better yeah so here's my money yeah so now i have now i now i do annual programs people can only do a year like i won't i don't do multiple years like i'm going to teach you everything you need to know in a year you have to have another doctor because i'm not i'm not your primary care or whatever yeah you got you got a cold you have a broken leg like that's not me so i and and what i do is performance like i didn't break i didn't i didn't break i didn't

call it that at the teams, but if you think about that's exactly what it's doing, it's performance, right? None of these guys had a disease. They just weren't performing like they felt like they should perform. And so, so that's what I do now. And so it's mainly like, you know, big executives or entrepreneurs

traded their health for wealth for 20 or 30 years. And now they had like a big exit, whatever. Like, you know, they sold their company. They got $100 million. They don't care about money. They want to buy that health back. They want that health back. wouldn't be division one athletes again.

I'm like pump the break sparky. Like maybe we can get you, we can drop 40 pounds of fat off you in the year and get you back into being able to be physical. And, you know, yeah. So, so yeah, I charge those guys a lot of money, one, to make sure that they're motivated. And two, just pays for me to treat team guys.

And then like right before, I'd say like a year before I got out, I was at a conference where, a guy was lecturing on TBI and I had at least one guy I knew that had TBI because that's this is what we thought about TBI's in this time

so you know if somebody hadn't been knocked unconscious then you didn't think they had a TBI so then I went to this guy's lecture and he was working with pugilist and some NFL guys and he starts throwing up his case reports and like

looking at their blood markers I'm like, that looks exactly like my guys. You're kidding me. So then I started doing my own research. And in 2009, there was a JAM article written. And it was done between Cambridge and Harvard, thousands of people. And they have these imaging called DTIs. And it's like, it's so, it's so, I don't know,

the resolution is so clear they can see a single neuronal track breaking. Bang. and they call that a minor TBI. So they're like, what's the threshold? It turns out as 1.09 Gs. They got that from the... 1.09 Gs can cause... A minor TBI.

A minor TBI. They were getting that from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster. And I'm like, I wonder how much our stuff is. So I started investigating. And the stuff we've tested, like we haven't tested everything, obviously. But, you know, that they're like the fat, like, damn next fast food.

they average 60 Gs for hours. They peak over 100 Gs. So they're just like, boom, head injury, head injury, head injury, like every freaking wave, right? And then I started learning about over-pressurization TBI, right? That's going to be great. And so I don't know what the threshold is for that,

but it's something close to that one point around Gs, right? Well, if you're in a concrete room with 3M4s, like every round that comes out is 30 Gs. If you're shooting a Karl Gustav, the shooter gets 200 Gs. The Sparta gets like 300 Gs. You know, hard parachute openings or two to three Gs. Being in the back of a Humvee with a 50 cow going, it's like 60 Gs with every. round, you know. So I'm like, well, I don't have a guy who doesn't have thousands of TVIs.

And this has now been proven. And if you know, Lark and Frank Lark and, you know, his son, suicided. And he had his brain analyzed. And so when you look at, if you look at fighters and look at NFL's, NFL guys, they have the CT, right? You heard of that. And it's like specific regions of the brain that shows some specific abnormalities. what happens in the and the over pressurization is like that pressure wave goes through your skull right

it goes right through your skull and then they have it on photography now like um i guess it's what a lot of frames per second or so uh 60 frames per second or something i can slow that down and get really resolute with it so as the as the wave comes by it's just like any other wave it's moving it's having impact on the material that's going through. Well, the different densities move at different rates. So the lining of your brain,

the dura, that moves at a different rate than the vasculature, and that moves at a different rate than the white matter, and that moves at a different rate than the gray matter, and that moves at a different rate

than the little vesicles that hold the cerebro spinal fluid. So just put it in a blender. So you just shear everything. And when you do autopsies, you just on our guys who's suicided, their entire brain is covered with these tau proteins, like these markers for damage.

At every interface, so where the vascular meets the brain, where the dure meets the brain, where the white matter meets a gray matter, where the gray matter meets the cerebral spinal fluid, the entire brain. And we don't know what to do about that. Now there's peptides out that we know help. That's going to be the next frontier of medicine, I believe.

That's where I'm spending a lot of my time with our guys now. Hyperbaric helps. for sure. Hormones obviously help. So, you know, that's, you know, that's what our guys need, but it needs to be done proactively because you think about it like over time, the equipment just keeps getting more and more dynamic. The people inside the equipment are the same, right?

We're the fragile bit now. And there's got to be like, it's different for different people. You always bring up George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Like George Foreman right now, he's up there, you know, totally good to go. Right. And I've known a lot of fighters and some fighters are just like they're fine. Right.

And some guys are not clearly. And it's the same thing with football. Like you meet guys that played football their whole life and then they went out and they're doing totally normal things. And other guys get totally messed up from football. So there's got to be some genetic component to it as well, right? Yeah. There's genetic variation to everything.

Right. And I don't know why anybody's surprised by this, right? It's like, you know, we'd like to say that all men are created. it equal is not true. This is not true. Like every people aren't equal and some people have aptitudes that other people don't have. You know, it's like this, this misnomer of the super sleeper, right? If you have this gene combination, then you don't need as much sleep.

It's not true. You know, what's true is that you don't suffer as much as most people when you don't sleep. Right. When you short, when you short sleep, you don't have the same problems as the average Joe. Now, there's somebody on the other side of that spectrum, too, that you take a few hours to sleep away and they're completely incapacitated. These are people who don't make it through Hell Week. These are people who don't make it into our community.

I've always, well, you know, people always talk about my sleep. And I, the genetic component I talk about because, like, my oldest daughter, I would be going to bed at 11 o'clock at night when she was in high school and she'd be up studying. Yeah. And I'd wake up at 4.30 in the morning and she'd be up studying. And so she was just kind of like me, right? She didn't need a ton of sleep. my wife like this girl's going to bed yeah I mean she's going to bed and like she'll be up later right right my my middle daughter if there's not an emergency going on she's in she's she's gonna get out of bed when she feels like it like yeah there's not major emergency going on my son's kind of like he can be he can deal without sleep pretty well and then my youngest daughter is like my wife so it seems to me like any

you know, we all live in the same house. Right. There's like half of us get up early and are going to do something. The other half are still in bed. And that's the way it is every day. And it's not because I treated them any differently. Yeah. I wanted them all to get up early.

And some of them just, it's not part of their gig. Right. It's not part of my wife's gig either. People say to me like, how do you get up in the morning? Like without waking up your wife. My wife ain't waking up unless I start firing weapons in the bedroom.

Like, I'm good to go. That girl is, she's out and she's in her own little la la la. land which is awesome so it seems like there is a some level of genetic component to it where and you know this even happened in the teams like I would I definitely 100% like I wouldn't need to sleep with at all and guys would be like hey I need to go down and I'd be like cool yeah go to sleep and I could go for a really long time without you know on very little sleep and I've always been like that right and so there's there's got to be some level of like and

I'm not claiming to be like oh I've some genetic gift but there's something where it's like oh I can get by a little bit less, you know? We can test your genetics and see if you're on super sleepers. I wouldn't be surprised if I was and I wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't. You know, I mean, it's super rare. It's like the, everybody wants to put themselves in that category and be like, well, I'm just right. And I'm not saying that.

I'm not, I'm not saying this as you, but. Well, I just kind of did that. So I guess I'm guilty. But no, I actually don't think I really am. Yeah. I don't think I really am. I think I, I think, you know, I think the odds of being that is something like being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark.

I mean, it's super, super rare. But I go to sleep. But think about it's like anything else. Like how much do you suffer from a ruck? Like, you know, you're going to go do a whatever, 10, 20 mile rock. Like how much are you going to suffer? Does everybody suffer the same? No.

Right? How much weight can you lift the same as everybody else? Like if you train the same. Like, if you, I'm like, yeah, how fast can you read? How much do you retain? Like, everybody's different than everything. How much sleep do people need? Eight hours.

So, like, I. if I go to sleep, I can't sleep eight hours. Like I will not sleep eight hours. And not because of... How many do you sleep? I could have been at 10.30 wake up at 4.30. Like, that's kind of all. Seven hours.

Yeah. Six hours. Yeah. And sometimes I go to bed at 10. You know? Like, there's six and a half hours. But, you know, if I'm... It's hard for me to sleep.

Like, I'll be in some situation where, you know, whatever. My wife and I go stay somewhere, whatever. And we have... There's, you know, no, what is it? There's nothing to do, right? We're on vacation, for lack of a better word, Echo Charles. We're cruising. We're cruising.

And like, I'll go to bed and it's so annoying because, you know, like, then I'm awake. We're in some random place and my wife's going to sleep for four more hours right now. I'm like walking around in circles doing burpees in my room. Yeah. So, yeah, it'd be interesting. You know what, you know what else was an interesting sleep experiment? The ARG. Did you ever do an ARG platoon?

No. I narrowly avoid it. You go out on a ship and when you're out on a ship, you have no job. As a seal, you have no job. And you're in this weird compartment where it's just dark. If you, you know, guys. And we had guys, I had a guy in one of my platoons.

He would sleep for days. Like seriously. And he was also a guy that probably had some kind of a sleep disorder because he would fall asleep on patrol. Like we'd be patrolling and, you know, take a 10 minute break. You know, patrol for 50 minutes, break for 10. patrol for 15 minutes break for 10 we'd be doing a hump across the desert we'd we'd sit down was it an older guy no no no he lives in Texas I'll introduce you to him but he

we'd like take a break and you know you're like freaking sword your hump in the desert thirsty and all those three minutes in the break you'd hear like and he'd be snoring yeah but he would go on the ship he would go on the ship he sometimes he slept for like actual like like 18 hours you know and then need get up looking all groggy. And so on the ship, you could sleep as much as you possibly could want. I mean, there's nothing to do. Like sub-ops.

Yeah, sub-ops, same way. Even if you're the most, like, highly disciplined person, and you're trying to complete your degree, and you're learning to play guitar, and you're working out. You still have, like, an extra 17 hours to do nothing. Yeah. So, but even on the argument, it was like, I could sleep, but I, and I didn't really think about sleep too much,

but, like, I'd go to sleep and then just wake up, like, okay, I'm going to do whatever. I mean, there's several genes that. I wouldn't be surprised if you have some of them. I'm a guy who can get away with it about much sleep as well. It's not as true now. It's not true now. The older you get, the harder it is.

Bro, my freaking old neighbor Vietnam dude, this dude, like, I'd wake up in the morning. He'd be sitting out on his porch. Yeah. He's like, yeah, I don't sleep. I don't need to sleep. I'm watching the neighborhood. He'd tell me.

I'd be like, right on, man. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, there's there's variation like when when I was in I mean obviously the whole time I was in college and the whole time I was in medical school like because I had to marry and I have kids you know like I'm coming home for medical school I'm like making dinner for my kids you know giving them baths or eating them to sleep just like all deprivation like and I'm sleeping five hours a night on a good night for 10 years now though part of its age but part of its and it

It wasn't until I figured this out for the team guys that I said, well, maybe I should apply this shit to myself, right? So I started sleeping more. And now I'm really bad at functioning without sleep. Like I got used to it. And I think you kind of, the thing about sleep, like one of the things it makes, obviously I don't just do sleep, but sleep is a big component of what I do just because it's the most important factor of your health.

if I do my job well first of all the sales pitch sucks because what is sleep good for everything what's the worst thing you can say in marketing is like it fixes anything like every you're better at everything when you sleep well you're smarter you're faster stronger you're smarter you're better looking like everything everything's better lower stress hormones higher antibiotic hormones higher anabolic hormones, better appetite regulation. Everything's better when you sleep. And so that's a terrible cells pitch. Now the other thing is like if I do my job really well and you sleep amazingly well, you won't remember it at all. And I'm like, no, trust me. It was great for you. And like, you know, now at least you have wearables and you have people tracking their sleep and

something like there's some, you know, there's something to make it a little easier for me in that, in that respect. But like there's, I mean, there's no question that's the most important. an aspect of your life. And the big problem, the other big problem of sleep is that when you, so like the whole point of me going to sleep tonight is to repair everything that I did to myself today, right? Everything that,

every fuel source I exhausted that needs to be replenished or any damage I've done, that needs to be fixed. And then I need to, you know, store things and organize things and set hormone regulation for tomorrow. So I'm repairing from today and preparing for tomorrow. Well, it takes eight hours to recover from 16 hours. Vast majority of the time, let's say 95% of people in the planet are that way, 98% of the people maybe that way.

If I only sleep six hours instead of eight hours, tomorrow still comes, right? If I didn't repair and prepare 100%, how do I do tomorrow, right? Where am I going to get the energy from? Well, I'm going to get that from stress hormones. That's going to increase, and stress hormones are catabolic. If you think about it, if I went to sleep and I could repair 100%, and prepare 100% for tomorrow, I would never age. Right?

I'd be exactly the same every day. I'd wake up exactly the same every day. There would be no aging involved. The fact that I can't is the reason I age. If I decide to cut away 25% of my sleep on purpose, I'm choosing to age 25% faster if I'm somebody who's capable of sleeping eight hours. Right. And like you said, like not everybody is.

And some of that's learned. Some of that's genetic. Yeah, I might just be like half. habitually. Right. And like I had a 80, well, she was in her late 70s at the time, a client like probably 10 years ago. And she's like, I haven't slept more than four hours and 20 years. And I was like, that's not good for you. Yeah. That's not good for you. So I get her like just sleep hygiene, just my sleep supplement, no drugs, no hormones, like just like nutritional supplements and sleep hygiene, ritual around sleep. Start sleeping eight hours in night. As far as I know, she still is. You know, I haven't talked to in a few years.

And she feel better? She just feel like she's wasting half one quarter of her day. No, she's. So, so here, here, this is true about everything I do. So everything, performance base. So I get people to sleep. I get people to eat right. Get people to exercise, right,

and get people to control their stress, get their hormones in order. I get their inflammation down with peptides or whatever. And they come to me and they're like, oh my God, I didn't realize how bad I was until, I felt good. And that's like a month into her. And then another month later.

Oh, no, no. Now I feel like I used to feel like now. And then three, it takes like three or four months of like really good behavior to realize how much you've lost because our awareness, like I said, our awareness of sleep isn't there. That's the whole idea of it, right? We're not paying attention to that. But our self-awareness of how impaired we are, just like a drunk person.

The research has been done over and over again. I deprive you of this much sleep. I give you this many alcohol drinks. Your blood alcohol level is this. You haven't slept this much. Same thing. Like correlates exactly. I just like that's so hard for me to understand.

It does plateau. I like the, here's an example of this. So we do an event at Eschonleinfront called the muster. And it's a big event. And when we first started doing it, I'll talk about the second one that we did was in New York City. It's,

you know, there's 900 people coming. There's all this stuff to get done. And so long story short, we, behind the scenes, we weren't as squared away as we should have been. So we had a bunch of stuff to do preparing these big briefs, these slides get ready, and we had to do all this stuff. And so Laif, who's doing it with me, I think it was like 1.30 in the morning. And we're, the events the next day, it's 1.30 in the morning. We're signing 900 certificates of graduation.

We're going to wake up at 3.30 to go do PT. So we're on stage. I mean, I'm on stage with two hours of sleep. Yeah. And I'm answering questions. I'm giving presentations. And that day is like starts it. We get up at 3.30.

We PT. We go 430. The group comes in PT's. We go, we get up on stage. We do all day. Same thing the next day. The next day we got other stuff we got to do. We get no sleep.

And like, and bro, I mean, we're on operations. We used to like going on an operation, especially in Ramadi, you're planning, You're planning, planning, planning, right. And I'm saying, especially in Ramadi for me, because we would plan with the army. We've got to go checking. We've got Iraqis. We've got all the stuff going on. By the time we go in the field, we haven't slept.

Right. I remember being so happy to go in the field because I can finally sleep for like three hours. Yeah. Under a bush on rocks and cactus. Yeah. And so I never, and look, I mean, I've been drunk before. Right. And I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't trust myself to get up on stage.

Right. And, you know, if I had, if I had, I think I could probably have four drinks and still, like, present at the muster, it'd be a little bit extra. Yeah. But if you got me to, like, six drinks, it'd be a different event, right? And it wouldn't be good. That's a little bit. Is that some kind of an exaggeration? Acutely, you can compensate, right?

So if you think about it. So, you know, you have the autonomic nervous system, right? You have the parasympathetic and sympathetic. And the maximal sympathetic output we call fire or flight, right? So when you get up into fighter flight, what happens? You become superhuman, right? Your pupils dialy, you start taking it in a bigger field of vision, right? Your lungs expand.

You start taking more oxygen. Your blood pressure goes up. Your peripheral profusion goes down. So if you get cut, you don't bleed to death. You know, your reflexes get faster. You release a bunch of glucose. You have more endurance, more strength, faster reflexes. Like you're super human.

You feel, you don't feel amazing because you're scared, right? But you feel alive and ready, right? And you're like, you can react to everything faster. Why don't you run around like that all the time? Because it's catabolic. You're using yourself as the fuel source to get away from the danger because it doesn't matter. So that's where I do in those events. Yeah.

So it doesn't matter if you can digest your food. It doesn't matter if you can fight off infection. It doesn't matter because, like, you need to get away from this threat before any of that matter. So you're going to marshal 100% of your resources and test. that so that's what you're doing you're digging into the well or whatever yeah you're digging in now if you recover from that yeah and believe me like not a big deal like we have gone through great lengths like now at the muster it's everything is just so well oiled I mean we're going to bed at like you know nine o'clock and we joke about it we're like all right 830 I'm ready to go to bed like we we we

love that you know it's this this this is to support what you're talking about I know this 100% if I don't get I actually when I'm going to an event like if I'm going to speak I sleep a little bit less because it makes me more engaged with what's happening even more emotional like right I will be more emotionally engaged if I'm super well rested I'm just kind of like cool like yeah everything's good um and and I'll tell you another thing that well you already mentioned it like when I'm If I'm eating like crap, bro, it's a disaster, I feel like crap, but the sleep is crap,

and that's a disaster. The other thing is when you talk about stress, I mean, I don't stress about a lot. Like even like, and I think it's getting, you know, you get used to in the teams like what, you know, I wrote about it in this book, like you gotta know what to worry about. What's important and what's not important?

And for me, the list of things that are important is this list that has like four things on it. Is like, is your family? Am is my family healthy right right like okay like that's something out but hey they're healthy so I'm not stressed about that I can't like there's nothing else in the stress box that I'm really like what because if you know what's going on? Oh I This product's coming out. Okay. Well what if the product fails? Okay. Then we'll do something else. Yeah like I So I think I'm pretty good with the keeping myself out of the stress zone eating good when I eat like crap

I feel like crap look and pizza's a you know you gotta look at some pizza like whoever invented that like what an evil bastard and chocolate chip cookies on the yard so like you get that but I'm lucky I don't

I don't like pizza I didn't like it until I was like 10 but like my wife man she made this my wife is the best prime rib in the world like it's the world class prime rib and somehow she triple ordered or something

over Thanksgiving because we eat we eat prime rib for thanksgiving but she we thought we're having people people didn't show up bubble wash we had just massive hunks of prime rib yeah and bro I did like almost a carnivore thing for like four or five days and then and then she cooked another one and man I felt so good bro just eating like one big slab of prime rib a day yeah and I just was like so good diet and then the sleep works out and the and um so So everything matters, right? Everything matters. You and I are very similar in that I don't stress or anything either.

And by and large, I think it's because I don't really remember. I don't remember all the stuff I have to do. If I could remember all of it, I might be stressed. But stress hormones get a bad rap because everything so that is negative. It's not negative, right? With no stress hormones, you die, right? Stress hormones keep you alert in proportion to your environment. So if you're doing something that's really intense, you want to be able to stress, right?

You want stress hormones because that's got adrenaline, noradrenaline in it, right? That's amping you up, making you feel good. That cortisol is helping us, releasing blood glucose and stuff. Like, you're stored glycogen into blood glucose. So it's making you feel better. It's making you sharper, right?

Like, there's some things that's making you sharper. Now, it does impair the prefrontal cortex a bit, which is like your executive functioning. So you don't want them to be too high because, like, you think about, you know, if you're in a fist fight, can you remember your phone number? Like, probably not, right? Because, like, your prefrontal cortex,

that ain't working. Like you're not going to be planning your next trip or something while you're while you're in something stressful. So that's one factor. Now, another factor is if you sleep really well and if you don't stress a lot during the day, even if you short sleep, it's not as big of a deal, right? Because the quality of sleep is keeping your stress hormones lower. Like the lowest your stress hormones ever are is when you're in deep sleep.

And of course, they peak somewhere in the afternoon. I've heard 11 to 1, 1 to 3. Like it seems to be somewhere on noon to 1 and most of the people I test. You know, that as, as that peak goes up, people are fearing more and more alert their body temperatures going on. There's all sorts of like good physiological things going on. But people feel better under more stress hormones. Now you can go excessive and it becomes, it becomes negative. But just the fact that you're not somebody who stresses a lot.

Like one of the biggest things I do and I can I can put out a link for your if anyone your audience wants to check this out. It's like a it's a PDF on my website, but I can like do lander for we'll do Doc Parsley. Dot com. Yeah, jaco. Forklash jocco or something. Like when we'll do but people can download this. The most powerful thing I do is seems ridiculous. have people take a piece of notebook paper and like draw a line straight down the middle.

And it's like on the left side you're right to do. And the right side is to worry. So to do list is as far out as you're likely to worry about. Like me, I'm kind of, I never really got out of butts. I'm kind of like one evolution at a time. Like maybe I'll plan two or three days ahead. Like I don't, I'm not somebody who's going to be worried about something in months down the road. But some people are.

So as far out as you're to do. To worry is shit you don't have any control over, but you know you're going to worry about it. You don't want to forget to have the opportunity to worry about it. So you put that on the list. And then, you know, there's some other stuff about setting alarms and getting ready and all this stuff. But the big thing is when you go to sleep, you realize like, first I have to convince you of this. You have to convince yourself of this that the best you're ever going to be at handling that list is after you slept well. Right. Your exercise is good.

Your nutrition is good. You're controlling your daily stress. the best you're ever going to be is after you fully wake up, right? It's maybe an hour after you work up. After a good night's sleep. So there's no sense in thinking about anything on that list while you're asleep, right? Because you're interfering with your goal of being the best to you tomorrow. So now from the time you go to bed until the time that alarm clock goes off in the morning,

you don't ever know what time it is because it doesn't matter. And you're going to lay in bed and you're going to like meditate and breathe and relax if you're not asleep. And then you're going to sleep when you sleep. And if you wake up, you just lay there and meditate and, breathe and relax or like whatever. If your alarm's not going to go for four hours, you'll fall back asleep.

If your alarm goes off 30 minutes later, all right, you get seven and a half hours of sleep and 30 minutes of meditation. Get after it, go. Right. So you kind of have that built in naturally and I think a lot of team guys do

because you go through some really stressful shit. Relative to like you get out in the entrepreneur world is like, it's kind of stressful, but like if I fail, I can just start something else. you know, like something collapses. Like, it's not really that.

I mean, I'm not getting shot at. I'm not cold. I'm not wet. You know, it's just a different scene. So I think that's why you're experiencing what you're experienced. Now, the other thing, too, to remember those, like, if somebody goes out for a drink, right, they meet their buddy at a bar. Like, you know, I'm going to stop by, chat for a little bit and take off.

So I'm just going to have one drink. Because I don't want to drive. drunk, right? I want to be impaired. And then somehow they end up having two. I'm like, well, maybe I'll have another. And then by like the fourth drinks, they're like, I'm fine. I can, I can drive home. Like, where did that decision making shift? At some point, you lost awareness of your impairment. You became more impaired and you lost your ability to recognize that you're impaired. Sleep deprivation is the same way. So you wake up and you're just like, I feel good because the stress woman's making you feel good, right? You're impaired, though. Like, we just know.

Like it's unavoid. It's just like putting alcohol in your blood, putting, you know, putting stress hormones in your brain make your prefrontal cortex not as active. Now, there's a little bump where it's actually better, right, because you're adrenalized. You can't do everything better, but there's some advantages to certain behaviors. But then it goes too high and it's like it's really impaired, right? Like you think about somebody who's super anxious or they good at anything. Yeah, that's a bummer. No, they can't be good at anything because their prefrontal cortex is impaired.

That's what anxiety really is. You don't trust yourself. You don't trust yourself to make a decision because you have a bad track record of making good decisions or something. And so you don't trust your ability to do it. And now that's stressed you out even more. And so it can be really a death spiral for a lot of people because like I said, if you don't get enough sleep, then you wake up the next day with more stress hormones. Well, the absence of stress hormones is what allows you to fall asleep.

So if you're running around with 20% more stress hormones than you need, now when you try to go to sleep, you're 20% higher than you should be. And it might not be low enough to fall asleep. And the other thing is your stress hormones are what's waking you up in the morning. And cortisol is waking you up. So if you're running 20% higher than you should be running, then your genetic background would have you running at, well now you're going to wake up when you hit that same level that you maybe would have hit an hour later if you didn't have this excess stress hormones.

Let's talk sleep protocol for optimal sleep protocol. So like I was talking about earlier, you just think about humans 200 years ago. right or maybe go back say a thousand years hunter gatherers right um we aren't we don't see well at night we're we're crappy predators anyways right without weapons we're useless right we couldn't fight a raccoon right we're um so we don't see well at night the sun goes down the blue light um leaves our eyes we have nerves in our eyes that sense blue light they have nothing to do with vision And then that triggers the changes in our brain, which leads to the melatonin being secreted in the melatonin, then changes a lot of things. But one of the big things happens increases this neuropeptide gabbo, which slows down our brain.

We quit interacting with the world as much. And our body temperature goes down because the sun went down, right? So it's dark. We can't see. We back up into a corner to be safe because we're prey a thousand years ago. Like maybe we get in a cave, whatever we make a fire. now you really can't see, right? Can't see past the fire.

So your world gets secluded. You're not interacting. You're not jumping around. You're not climbing. You're not lifting. You're not, right? Maybe telling some stories, whatever. And then about three hours after the sun goes down,

you feel like sleeping and you lay down and you sleep. And your body temperature keeps going down. Your stress hormones keep going down. At some point, all that, you know, starts coming back up. Your body temperature kind of hits a maximum low. And then it starts, it kind of fires a survival response. And you start building.

things back up and your cortisol comes back up and you wake up right around the time the sun's coming up. You don't wake up because of the sun. You're just coincidental, right? Because that's how you're wired. Like every animal, every mammal on this planet uses the sun as its cue is going to be awake and when to be asleep. So that's how our ancestors did it. The closest you can get to that, right? That's what sleep hygiene is, right? Everything you read about sleep hygiene is that, right? So blacking out your windows. Yeah, because you don't, one, you don't want the light. Two, you don't want to know what time it is when you wake up, right? Turning down the temperature of your house, taking a shower, taking a cold shower.

Like, you know, when, so you think about what do you do with a little kid, right? You have a three, four-year-old kid bashing trucks together, banging drums, whatever. You don't just throw that kid in a bed and turn the light up and walk out. They need a ritual. They need time to get ready to go to sleep. We study hunter-gatherers today. Like, they're just like, I don't know, 30,000 people who've never experienced, electroste, never experienced electricity.

They still live like our ancestors live. They go out, they hunt food, hunt and gather food for two hours a day. The rest of the day they're fucking off having sex, playing around, whatever. Like, they're the original aristocrats, right? Like, that's where we would be if we stayed in that lifestyle. So, like, you take your kid and what do you do? It's like, it's time for quiet play, right? Like, put that stuff away.

And we're going to do puzzles or, you know, whatever. We're going to do something more today. We're going to kind of dim light and that stuff. Right. And then we give them a bath. Why? Going to lower their body temperature, right? Because you're not going to give them a 98 degree bath. Give them like an 80 degree bath, 85 degree bath. Then they get out and you powder them up and you put them in a really soft clothes.

Okay, so you're not stimulating their skin. And then you put them in bed, you know, make everything soft and comfortable and warm and cozy. And then you read them a book that they already know, right? They can think about something like Dr. Seuss, like transinducing, rhythmic rhyming like this. I do not like Jane, right? And so the kids already know what the story, and that's why they want to read that book.

It's like they want to be settled down and you want to distract yourself. So you can overcome any of that, right? You can overcome any of those systems. Now you're still going to secrete melatonin, but you can get past the GABA, the GABAurgic slowdown of the brain, right? So if you've ever had an experience where you're, like, you wake up and you're super tired,

you didn't get enough sleep. You're regretting whatever you did last night because you didn't get enough sleep. And so I'd be like, well, man, I'm just going to go to work today. I'm like, I'm going to do what I have to do today. And then I'm going to come on and go to bed like 6 o'clock and I'm going to sleep for like 10 hours and feel great tomorrow. And then one of your friends talk to in and they're like going to have a beer. And then that's a C&S depression. It should make you more tired, right?

and you start drinking beer and like there's attractive women around there's music going there's lights so there's whatever and like you all the sudden feel really good and you don't you don't need to go to sleep anymore and like and then you stay up until midnight that night now you're sucking again the next day so so you can you can work yourself past it so just blocking the light say like whatever you wear blue blocking glasses you're dim your lights you have light bulbs in your house so don't have any blue lights. Like all that's available. You're blacking everything out.

Maybe you're living by candlelight after, you know, whatever. And you're spending three hours, getting ready for bed. But you're at your computer working on some tight deadline for something for work that's stressful. And you're going to work till 9.59 and go get in bed at 10? No, that's not going to work. So you got to, you got to, you have to do something to approximate the loss of light in your eyes. You have to do something to slow your. brain down to where you're not paying as much attention to your environment and you have to

drop your body temperature. That, I mean, that's what it is. So that PDF I was telling you about that's really for people who have problems falling asleep, problems going back to sleep when they wake up. And so I have those people set an alarm clock like an hour before bed. And this is generally a good idea. But like anything else, if you have problems, be super, like be fast. is and with this and like be exact and be you know very regimented and then once you get

healthy sleep back just like once you get fit you don't have to do everything that you had to do to get in good shape like you just generally adhere to those principles so like but when you're having problems like set an alarm clock an hour before it's time to go to bed and then you spend at least that hour getting ready for bed right even if ideally you'd be dimming the lights in your eyes three hours before bed. But there's ideal and there's reality. We'll take an hour. Yeah.

And so, okay, so do that. Once you get in bed, you have your list, right? You've convinced yourself that the best time to handle that list is after you get a good night's sleep. You get in bed. You have no awareness of the time until that morning alarm clock goes off. Whether you need an alarm clock or not, right? Because if you don't have the alarm clock, that's something to worry about. Oh, here's a jaco admission.

If I don't have an alarm clock and there's any, like if I have to be at work or I have to do something and I don't have an alarm clock, I literally will not sleep. Yeah. I will just sit there and like, you know. Hey, when I first started traveling and lecturing a lot, I was petrified. I was going to oversleep and like not make it to some lecture. So even with a couple of alarms set on my phone, I kept like, like every, every, you know, I'm like, wait a minute.

Does my alarm go off? Okay, sorry. Right. And that's the thing. So I say, you have a morning alarm clock, even if you think you don't need it because that's one thing you're not going to worry about. So you're going to, the last time you're going to see your clock is when you get in bed. And until that alarm clock goes off, it doesn't matter because you've already made yourself

the agreement that I'm going to be resting, relaxing, meditating, doing breath work, whatever, or I'm going to be sleeping for the next eight hours. That's it. I'm not doing anything else. And if something pops in my mind, I go, that's on the list. I'm going to handle that list in the morning when I'm feeling good, right? When I'm prepared. Now, if there's something that's not on the list, give my permission to turn the light on and write it down.

Now it's on the list, right? And then you just lay in bed. When you wake up, you don't know what time it is. If you go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom, get back in bed. You don't know what time it is. So I have like a little LED red like clock by my bed. That's not needed. It's not needed.

In fact, it's counterproductive. Counterproductive because then I'm thinking about what time it is. As soon as you know what time it is, you have some decisions to make now, right? Because it's like, well, I start doing some mental math, right? I'm like, well, I'm not feeling sleepy. It's only 1.30. So if I can fall asleep in the next 30 minutes, right?

And you start thinking about stuff like that. Or my alarm's going to go off in 45 minutes anyways. I'm feeling kind of awake and I got this stuff to do and I got that stuff. I might as well just, right? And so it's better to just not know and go, hey, no, I'm going to be, I want to be at my best tomorrow. My best is when that alarm clock goes off. And like I said, I don't care how much meditation and breathwork and relaxation you get relative to sleep. Do your best to get all of that asleep.

But if, you know, an hour of that meditation and breath, broken relaxation, progressive muscle relaxation, and whatever you want to do, whatever kind of cools you out, whatever lowers your stress hormones, I don't care. It's like that's restorative. Like that's non-sleeping rest has its benefits as well. And it's helping with all of that stuff. And as I'm sure you've heard at this point,

you know, sleep regulates your appetite. Right. So how hungry I am tomorrow is going to be determined by how well I sleep today. Also, what I crave. The only animal is, in this planet that sleep defrages itself is us. Other animals only do it if they're starving or they're being preyed upon. So if they're being stalked, they're only going to sleep the bare minimum.

If they're starving, they're going to wake up earlier, go to sleep later so they can travel further and find some food. So evolutionarily, it makes sense that we're wired the same way. So if we're not sleeping, our brain's like, oh, are we being stalked or are we starving? Which is it, right? and so I want to eat novel foods when I'm starving so I'll eat anything right like a green and brown green and orange donut yeah let's eat that right also if I'm starving what I want I want sugar for my brain like right now as much glucose as my brain can get this is my brain's working off of glucose right I don't have an option there ketones can do some of it if you're really ketotic but it's not it's still majority glucose and then if I'm starving what do I want to store some fat so I better eat some fat too right

so what's a donut it's fried sugar brand right and so like I get all the I get the fat and I get all of the you know and I get all of the glucose in me so not only is it regulating how hungry I'm going to be but what am I going to crave and then the work part is that it determines what my body does with what I eat. Right? So I eat proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Some of that's going to be stored as fats. Some of that's not going to be absorbed at all.

And it's going to go out of waste. And some of that's going to be used as energy. It depends on how well I've slept and how my hormones are balanced. And so, you know, one of the big jokes, especially on men, is that, you know, the fat that we think of as being fat, right? not the fat around our organs and stuff, but like our subcutaneous fat, that has a lot of aromatase in it,

the enzyme that converts testosterone from estrogen. And your brain uses estrogen as the measurement of how much testosterone you have. So if your estrogen's really high, your brain's like, oh, that's coming from testosterone, so our testosterone must be really high too. So we don't need to make as much testosterone now. And now you get more fat,

and more of your testosterone becomes estrogen. And like it's this self-defeating spiral. It just keeps, getting worse. Like now you're getting fatter because your hormones are low, but you're converting like you have higher estrogen levels because more fat means more and down and it's more inspired. Yeah. And so now you're, uh, it's like it's the same thing of having high stress hormones because you're not sleeping. Well, now you can't sleep because you have high stress hormones and now you, now you're not going to get to sleep. So tomorrow you're going to have even more stress. And so you can't

sleep because you have too much stress hormones and you have too much stress hormones because you can't sleep. Same thing with estrogen and testosterone like testosterone gets converted. Like where you're not making test as much testosterone because your estrogen levels are high, which leads to higher estrogen levels, which means lower testosterone level. And that's a self, you know, defeating itself propagating downward spiral. And so like all, um, all of the, all of that stuff's, uh, non-negotiable, right? That's, that's going to happen no matter how will you eat, no matter how well you can

control your stress and all that other stuff. So, um, and how much you exercise. And the other thing I tell people all the time, which is not popular at all, is that if you're sleep deprived, you shouldn't work out, right? Shouldn't exercise. I mean, you should move. You should do activity because there's benefit to that, but you shouldn't exercise with the intent of getting better at something, right, to get stronger or faster, more

coordinarily because like I said like all that's happening when you're asleep all of that's all that repair and actually getting better at anything is happening while you're asleep I'm just going to plead the fifth over here I'm yeah I was I was gonna ask you that and I was like I pretty much know what your aunt's going to be because there's people that have to make that decision like am I better off tomorrow okay I know I got to be at work by eight I know it's a late night it's one o'clock in the morning my kid was awake or whatever it's midnight my kid was awake or whatever it's midnight my kid was Do I get up and do the do the work out? Do I get an extra hour of sleep?

Which is better and yours is like sleep all day. Sleep is the is the answer to an extent like if sleep is going to prevent you from doing anything any type of activity then I find a half a medium on that Like go every other day or split it in half or something like that because you need the activity. There's a lot of benefits and by activity. I mean You know, whatever going on a walk down to like some zone two type of of cardio doing some movement like you could do like whatever you could do like movement drills or something like that but like I wouldn't recommend rolling somebody intensely and you know you're not doing skill work like actually fighting like I wouldn't do that if I'm sleep

deprived one you're way more likely to get injured as well like there's a there's a very very clear correlation between how many hours you sleep and your risk of injury and it's and it's it's huge it's substantial it's it's the it's The difference, they was studied on high school students, the difference between five hours, six hours of sleep and nine hours of sleep was like a 300% difference. Right, so you're.

Of getting injured. Getting injured. Well, the dudes are spending three more hours in bed every day. Of course, they ain't. Well, he's getting injured in their sport. So, like, while they're doing this work. Yeah. So we need to get our sleep.

That's the, so here's something that's really interesting for you. your guys for your um when you're working with fighters right so you know let's say I'm a great grappler and I'm going against a striker and I want to like I have a camp and I'm like whatever eight weeks to get improved my boxing or whatever my striking units and so it so if if I wanted to teach you something and I said it's something you know I do right so I'm going to teach how to type with your left hand or something or play an instrument or something like that and I say hey come in for an hour of training in the morning.

And at the end of that hour, we see where you're at, we see where your skill level is. And then once you come back at 7 o'clock tonight, and I'm going to retest you. When you come back at 7, you're going to be worse than you left training. If you go home and you go to sleep and you come back and test, you're going to be better than you left training because you're actually learning when you sleep.

Interestingly, if I say, I'm going to teach you something this morning. I want you to take a nap today and then come back and test at 7, you'll come back and test better than you left your training. and then when you go home and go to sleep, you're going to get better again. So if somebody could break their day and like have a midday nap, they could essentially get two days worth of training in a day.

All fighters are doing that all the time. That's what fighters do. They're like, come, train, go home, sleep. Come train, go home, sleep. Right. Come train, go home and sleep for the night. Yeah, that's like awesome. And that's like two days in football too, right?

Like a huge, huge skill bump during those two weeks because all you're doing is sleeping and practicing. Like, that's it. It's like, it just seems like one long day. It's just like, I don't know, I slept, woke up and went to practice and slept and woke up and went to practice. Because we would, like, you know, because it's so damn hot where we were like, you know, 115 degrees in the summer. So, like, midday, they, you know, sent us home, go eat. You fall asleep for two hours or whatever and then you go back to practice.

And, but, like, they weren't doing it for that reason. you know a lot of things that once you start learning the physiology of things a lot of things become obvious you know it's like the sleep deprivation in boot camp the sleep deprivation like hell weakened buds that's a strategy like we're one we're seeing how well you deal with it because that matters but two we're also looking for psychiatric disease right because sleep deprivation can, you know, can... Things come to the surface. Yeah, can reveal that.

And we're in that age group where young men tend to have their psychotic break, if they're going to be schizophrenic or they're bipolar. Like, that's going to be revealed in their teen, mid-20s kind of thing. So let's just make it happen. It's also a brainwashing thing. Like when they brainwash, anyone that gets brainwashed is sleep deprivation. Yeah, you're way more suggestible. Yeah.

Because again, your prefrontal cortex isn't working engine like you can't. And you don't have enough energy to like defend your thoughts. You're like, fine. That sounds like, okay. Pass me the cool. Pass me the cool. China's great. America sucks.

Yes. Green another donut. Oh, man. Awesome. What else, man? Does that get us caught up to the current day? Other than where to where do people find you? Yeah.

Doc parsley.com. You got Doc parsley. com. You're on Instagram. You're on Instagram. Kirk Parsley. I'm on Instagram. At Kirk Parsley.

Yeah, at Kirk Parsley. And you say you're back on Twitter. I think we were talking about. Yeah. You're back on Twitter. Yeah. I got reinstated. Yeah.

Because you got shut down. You got, um. Yeah. I was like, I was like publishing or I was like sharing, you know, published research about. About what? COVID. And you got shut down. Mask.

You know, social distancing, like whatever. When, my Instagram, account I started really with doing a bunch of videos on COVID because it was such such bullshit at the beginning. I was just like oh like everybody knows this too. I'm not brilliant. It's like everybody with any kind of basic biology understands that natural immunity is a thing, right? And it's better than a vaccine. Everybody knows that always that's always been true. We acted like it didn't even exist. I'm like I'm pointing that out, you know? CNN has their death tracker rolling at the bottom the screen every day.

I'm like, if you did that with car wrecks, no one would drive cars either, right? Because it's like, and they never give the denominator. Like this many people died today. How many people usually die?

Right. Oh, so it's only 20 more. Right. All right. So you, so I, like,

I spoke out a bunch of things. Surprisingly, I didn't get banned by Instagram. But Twitter, I was just sharing some, I'd like share research and be like, you know, this suggests that that doesn't work or this suggests that we're missing that, right? And just one day, nobody said anything, never got an email, I just wasn't there.

And then I was like, huh, couldn't get on. So you know, you've been banned or blocked, whatever the phrasing was. And then I had about, I don't know, $10,000 or something. And then all of a sudden they were gone, like zero, zero. But all my posts were still there. And I couldn't access many of my photos. So I couldn't do anything with them. And then it was after the announcement that Elyle was going to buy Twitter,

but just before he actually bought it. And I just reappeared? All of a sudden just reappeared. I got an email that time. That's so crazy. You've been reinstated. Oh, okay. So.

After they can find it. And you can get your seat. formula at doc parsley.com if people want to order that. Yeah, we're going to do Doc parsley.com jaco though. Okay. Yeah. Cool. For your audiences. And I'll put that

worksheet on that too. So anybody who digs this stuff. What else? Echo, you got any questions? Yeah, a couple. So the... By the way, Echo is in full support of everything you say like to the end through this guy. Rest is at the top of his list for life. I'm telling you.

Right, you can't just... He's so. He's so... He's Hawaiian though, right? Yeah, and why there's a very good robust rest culture. Yeah, there you go. Very robust. So, okay, so the downregulating of receptors, is that kind of the whole explanation for tolerance of any drug? Like, you know.

Yeah, so the technical phrase for that is tackyphylaxis, yeah, and that's really what that means, essentially. There's some nuance to that, but that's an easy way to think about it. It's just it doesn't matter, you know, it doesn't matter what's in your blood if it doesn't have a receptor, right? So you have to have a place to catch it. Both of those things are. So think of it like a lock and a key, right? So like the keys maybe what's floating around in your bloodstream, but then the lock is, the lock that fits that key is the receptor. And so if you don't have the receptors, it doesn't matter how many keys are floating around.

Yeah. And then different receptors can bind to like different stuff, right? Like, you know, Holly, you said, and you mentioned that, I forget all the names, but, you know, a receptor made for a very specific thing. A drug can be developed to be like, hey, it can bind to that receptor. That's how most pharmacology is. So most pharmacology, well, you know, most medicine, most biology is just, it's really just descriptive, right? And, like, we figure out a way to look to see something or to measure something. And then we go, oh, this happens.

And then we memorize the steps as though we now know something. Like all you did is like put names to shit that was happening and memorize it like you're not it but then they'll fit well okay so this molecule we know when this molecule binds that it does this so we can like cut that out if that's a problem or we can add some we can have something bind that receptor that will do nothing or we can have something bind that receptor that does better than whatever is going to bind it right and so that's that's really what pharmacology is mainly about other. than antibiotics, which is a different category. But most drugs that have some effect on your physiology, that's how they're doing it. And then is catching up on sleep a thing? Yeah. So there is. You got some sleep?

You got to catch up on them? Sometimes, yeah. Well, it actually, at first I was like, I heard that it is and I heard that it isn't. Right. But then you guys were talking about like, hey, don't work out when you're sleep deprived. Like, bro, I'll work out sleep deprived. Sometimes have a great workout. Yeah.

He asked me to do that the next day. bro, I'm dead. So I'll never do it. So I feel like I used, I went into the bank a little bit, used some stress hormones, banged out a solid workout. Yeah. You know, caught up on some sleep, did my full recovery, and I'm good to go. Yeah.

What was your original question? Is like catching up on that? Is that a thing? Or am I kind of at a bigger loss because of that sleep? So what I say about it is like the reason, the reason that it takes eight hours to recover from being awake for 16 hours is because you're essentially, you're essentially stripping yourself of resources and you're building up waste products, right? So every cell in your body is like a miniature version of you.

What do you do? Like you're awake, a certain portion of the day, you're asleep, a certain portion of the day, you take in nutrients, you do work with that nutrients and you create waste products, right? And your cell has to do all of that, right? And so your cells are producing waste products. A lot of that stuff isn't clear it out while you're awake. It has to be cleared out where you're asleep, especially in the brain. So if you don't do that, and let's say it's mildly toxic, so it's causing some inflammation.

And then you don't get enough sleep. And especially like you stay up all night. Well, you're now going through tomorrow and you're just building up more waste products. And so that's sort of damaging you. I'm not hugely. It's not like it's not going to. you know, cause some sort of noticeable brain damage, but just a slight impairment, right? Maybe a little inflammation.

It's maybe strips some cells of some nutrients or something. So I say it's like if you break your leg and you just walk around on your broken leg until it heals, it's still going to heal to some degree at some point. And it's just going to become the functional new you. Now, how badly it's broken and how well it repairs will determine how, and how good the new you is. But if you break your leg and you go see a doctor and you line everything back up

and you make sure that everything's right there and you put a cast on it and you take the weight off of it. And like now when that repairs, that bone's actually stronger, but there's still like a scar tissue in there. I can still get to do an x-ray and say, oh, that was broken there. That bone might actually be better than it was,

but there's some noticeable changes. There's some noticeable difference in there. Whereas you didn't repair it as quickly as you could, and maybe there's a lot of deformity and a lot of problems. It's a weak metaphor, but it's the best thing I have. So paying back your sleep debt does rebalance your hormones, rebalance your inflammatory cascades, a lot of your signaling molecules that tell your other cells what to do

and tell, well, tell cells what to do, tell cells how to communicate. All of that stuff can be mended, but if there's some damage done in there to where, like, you start, You have some inflammation. You wall off some of the waste products with, you know, with like a protein that kind of like encapsulates it. Like that's all damage.

And so you don't necessarily recover 100%. But you can recover your function back. But that doesn't mean that you didn't do maybe a little bit of damage here and there, you know. Interesting. See how complex this is? Bro, it goes deep, right? You better get your rest, hoang. Doc, any closing thoughts, man?

Oh, man. Just happy to be here proud to serve. I don't know. There's so much to talk about, but, you know, for people in there not, not, not, not, sleeping well, I'd say that's, that's the, that's the foundation. I think you get, get that in place. And then that should repair hormones, but if it doesn't, like, work on hormones. And then, you and I were talking about outside of it, I think,

Anybody who has some lingering issues after that, it'd say, you know, go find yourself a doctor that does good peptides. That helps regenerate, helps changes the cell signaling, changes what the cells do, a lot like hormones do. There's a lot of promising stuff in there. You can, we can probably start fixing some, well, we can definitely fix some injuries without surgery now that used to be surgical, especially tendons and ligaments and stuff like that.

So unsolicited advice for your audience. No, it's awesome. I know I always, I often get a bad rap for being anti-sleep, and I'm certainly not. And, you know, even in the book Discipline, it was Freedom Field Manual. I wrote like, hey, you need sleep. You need to get as much sleep as you need to be performing at your optimal levels. So, yeah, I'm on board.

So, you know, I say eight hours because the research bores out of it somewhere around seven and a half hours, plus or minus half an hour. So it could be closer to seven. And the only way anybody really knows how much sleep they need is if they go to bed at the same time every day, wake up the same time every day without an alarm clock and they feel good and refresh. And that's the only way to know. And again, that's ideal. What's reality? Like, I don't know. There's some, there's a bridge in between those two where we're going to use gadgets and tricks and supplements and things like that like to help bring reality closer to ideal.

But that's the only way you'd really know. And it's not the same every day. Like the thing is to remember, this is biology. It's not a car. We're not tuning a carburetor. Like this is biology. It's messy. It's approximate.

And you don't need exactly the same amount of sleep tonight as you'll need the next night or the day before. It's like if I go run an ultra marathon today, then I probably am like 26 hours in a row of sleep. If I do nothing but lay on my couch and watch television, I might get away with six and a half hours of sleep. Like it's an approximation. whole idea, you know, the prado distribution, like anything else, man, it's like 80% of the time you want to be doing the right thing. And that makes you more resilient for the 20% of the time when you can't do the right thing, right? Or when you don't want to do the right thing. And, you know, the tradeoff is worth it for you. So, you know, the most important part is not to be a zealot.

And the number one reason people don't sleep well is because they're worried about not sleeping well, right? Because they hear something like this, or I, like, they'll hear me on a law enforcement podcast or something. I tell them shift workers die on average 12 to 14 years earlier than everybody else because the World Health Organization classifies shift work as a type 2A carcinogen, which is the same thing as cigarettes were, which means we're pretty damn sure this causes cancer, but it would be unethical to test that, like we can't do research and cause cancer in people. So it's a type 2A carcinogen. And your risk of heart attack stroke, like everything increases, because, you know,

because you're sleeping against your circadian rhythm, right? And so they hear something like that. And now they're panicked because it's like, well, I work shift work. I don't want to die. I don't want to die 12 years earlier. So what do I do? And so the number one reason people don't sleep well is because they're worried about not sleeping well.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I sleep well. Chill out, right? Like, chill out, chill out. Do what I said, like download that worksheet and, you know, do what I said, get, get in bed, like, get in bed for eight hours or night. figure out a way to do that. That's not impossible. I realize that it's not necessarily 100% possible for 100% of people,

but do the best you can to do that. And let it be what it is. Like you'll help people say, oh, you can't go to sleep, get up and get out of your bed. You don't want to associate your bed without not sleeping. And so then go sit in the living room and read a book or something and then come back and when you feel tired, I don't agree. Like I have not seen that work well.

and I mean I've been doing this for I don't know 13 12 13 years now I've been having people on this and I don't I don't see any way around the fact that if I get up and read I'm not doing myself any benefit right if I lay in bed and meditate at least my stress hormones are lower at least I'm getting some non-sleep rest now so just lay in bed and the only reason that you're going to associate with negative thoughts

is if you're stressed out about not sleeping. So if you're not stressed out, you're just going, well, I'm just going to meditate. Like, well, then now it's just a place to meditate and sleep and have sex. Like, why not? Like, all those are great things. Like, just being there as much as you can be. So I think Echo's next tattoo is going to say,

get in bed, stay in bed. Maybe. My son, he wrote like this commercial for me. I couldn't find anyone to work in it to work to act in it. Because everyone's like, oh, like all the, team guys are like, oh, that's cheap. Like, I don't, because it says, like, you know, I'm a badass or whatever. It's like badass is like me or something.

And whatever. And then, like, I can't afford any sag actor because they, like, you got to pay and have insurance and all this stuff. And so, uh, never ended up making it. But at the end of it, he's like, so what are you waiting for? Wake up and get some sleep. Like, oh, that's cool. Put that like a tagline in the back.

We have like T-shirts of that and stuff. Pretty cool. Wake up. Get some sleep. Yeah. Awesome, man. Uh, well. Thanks for coming down.

Also, anyone that's listening to this podcast right now at this time or if you ever listen to this podcast before, you can thank Doc Parsley. Because if it wasn't for Doc Parsley, this podcast wouldn't exist. Why is that? Because Doc Parsley introduced me to Peter Atia and said, Jocko should go on Tim Ferriss's podcast. So that is literally the one little pivot in my life. like, oh, you know, I meet Peter. And Peter's like, yep, tells Tim you should have this guy on. Yeah.

And there it was. I went on Tim Ferriss's podcast. And Tim Ferriss, when we got done recording, he looked at me and said, you should have your own podcast. And I was like, hmm, that could be a thing. And then Joe Rogan heard that podcast and invited me in his podcast immediately. And then in the middle of that podcast, he said, you should have your own podcast. And so between those two guys, I started this podcast.

Well, when the kind of two top podcasters tell you that you should have a podcast. Yeah, it's funny. The first podcast I've ever did was Rob Wals. And it was because he was at my house. I think we were doing one of the pre-or-post retreats. Maybe not. But we're definitely lecturing at the same event. And so he was staying at my house.

And he all of a sudden goes, oh, shit, I'm supposed to be on a podcast. You want to do a podcast? I'm like, yeah, what's a podcast? And so I get, so we sit down with like, like a computer between us and uh and he's uh and it's like on the armrest in between the two of us and we just talk in his computer and like i don't even know what we're doing like i'm not the slightest bit nervous or concerned because i don't know what the hell we're doing on it's like i'm just talking to rob and uh then he he he calls me and then maybe like two weeks later and he goes he's

dude you got to do your own podcast i'm like why he's like he's had ferris on eight weeks ago and your podcast has more downloads than his. Double the podcast downloads his and it's only been up for two weeks. And I was like, well, it's a download. Anyway, so he tried to talk me to do my own podcast and I'm like, I don't know. Like, when I'm going to do a podcast on sleep? Like that doesn't seem sustainable. Like, you can't do 400 episodes on sleep.

Like, maybe, I guess, maybe you can. I don't know. And that's the only thing anybody knew me for back then. So, yeah, I think it would be cool because I'd, like to, there's lots of people I'd like to talk to, but I don't have the work ethic in time. I do it. Just like, like, I travel so much, like, I don't, I'd be scattered, like, trying to compress doing 10 in a day or something.

Like, I don't know. Like, it's more work than people think. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, yeah. I think people don't realize what goes into it. But, um, well, like I said, if it wasn't for you, introduce me to Peter and then to, uh, Tim. Well, well, I think you got to give yourself plenty of credit. I mean, lots of guys have been on this podcast and not done with you,

not done with you, done. Like you know. Well. But yeah, we knew the, we knew the jocco legend spread. Well, I appreciated it, man. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. Thanks for coming down.

Thanks for having me on. Obviously, thanks for your service. Thanks for, uh, what you did in the teams holding the line. And, uh, you know, especially for when you got done with the teams coming back and taking care of the teams and the team guys and thanks for what you're doing today to continue to take care of them and take care of other people man appreciate it yeah definitely is definitely my honor like it truly is my favorite thing to do if i if i could just do if i could just work with sf guys like i don't do that all day like it's it's fun like in other communities it's like it's cool

it's cool guys to to to treat and they're not fucking entitled little bitches they're gonna call me every hour. So like they apologize for calling me once every three months. We're like, hey, I'm really sorry, but I ran out of men like six weeks ago. Yeah. So it's a great community. And like I said, the teams totally turned my life around. Like there's no way I would have achieved 10% of what I've achieved my life if I hadn't gone there first.

So like I, there's no amount of payback for that. It's like I'm indebted to that organization for the rest of my life. Yep. You and me both, man. Awesome. Thanks for coming out, bro. Yeah. Thank you.

With that, Kirk Parsley has left. The building, Echo, probably your most beloved podcast you've heard. We'll say it's my cup of tea. It's your cup of tea. Talking about the fact that rest is important, as you like to say. Yeah. Right, he was talking When you guys were talking about the fast twitch

Slow Twitch And you know like your intermediate twitch Yeah, bro that was like I never categorized Even though I understand I understand And so I was like like him Where sprinting cool Even if I get in good shape

Brought sprint all day as long as I get some rest Between the sets you know kind of a thing But bro put me on the bike or running or something But I feel like I'm suffering the whole time I still do it And then even when I'm done, if I'm in normal shape or whatever, when I'm done, I don't feel super gassed. It's just that I'm suffering so much during the run. That's how I felt.

And I wish I should have looked it up. I don't know we're going to cover that subject. But I remember reading an article and they had discovered this new intermediate twitch muscle. And I was like, that's me. And I felt like I felt like so good because it made sense. Okay. Because like I said, I was never winning any sprints. and I was never winning any 14 mile runs,

but on a rucksack, where it's just like, hey, you got to put out for a long period of time and be a little bit strong. I was good at that. Grapling is the same. And by the way, my grappling, my physical genetics,

they're good for a particular kind of grappling. And it's actually, unfortunately for you, it's the kind of grappling that you and I do. Right? Like you have the genetics for a three-minute round or two, three-minute rounds or something like this.

I have good genetics for 38 minutes. Yeah. You know? Well, yeah, and I would put it this way. Yours, you're good for 38 minutes going like putting on, yeah, putting on some heat. Yeah. Look, you're not exploding through stuff, which actually in Jiu-Jitsu, you should probably avoid exploding into and out of stuff. Unless it's a seven-minute match, you know, unless it's seven-minute.

If it's a seven-minute match, I'm going to, you know, you're getting the takedown. Like, if you and I went in a, if you and I did a tournament right now. A tournament match, 10 minutes would be problematic for you. So we couldn't even go black belt. We'd have to go like Blue Belt, like five minute or six minute match. You could win. With, you know, you could win. Even, I would say more like a three.

Okay, three minute match you could win. Six minute match, probably going to be here. Yeah, after that four and a half, five. Yeah. Because you could get like some kind of a takedown maybe. Even though the problem with you trying to get a takedown on me is you, you would be too threatened by the guillotine and you'd probably not go for it you probably lose.

That's true. See, and now you're talking, and this is not, I'm getting strategic on you, though. Yes, which I respect what I would be doing anyways, by the way. Yeah, so, which is a good point, actually. So look,

we're talking about jiu-jitsu here, right? Even though before we're talking about kind of like endurance and condition or whatever. So jih-too, the mental part of jih-too is way more important than the physical part of it. We're, like, getting excited and, like, all these things and what I'm going to do, how much you know compared to how much I know,

what you know about my, like, all this stuff, like, is such a huge factor. So just keep that in mind. So we're just talking essentially like nuts to nuts. If me and my physical attributes and a given or we'll say standard amount of Jiu-Jit's knowledge versus you and your physical attributes versus the same amount of like knowledge, just the physical attributes,

it would be problematic for me anything after four and a half minutes, I would say. That's if we were even on everything else. Even on knowledge, basically. Yeah. Because we're both about, I mean, we're both like 225. Yeah. and we're both the same height. And so that's a pretty good even match.

But I just know more than you do. But if we took that away and we were just you against me with the same brain, the same knowledge, you'd be good for a little bit of time. Actually, I might. I could probably turn up the heat for a good two, two and a half minutes and maybe get the better. But bro, that heaviness and that like after a while,

I'm like, bro, just kill me. Yeah. And I could survive too. and a half minutes pretty much with anything so that makes sense when you're talking about the rock where like someone like me would be like rock this light do that for like 10 20 30 minute bro no ways bro when i want to take that thing off like after a few minutes or whatever but it'll feel light then it'll get heavy real quick and then you and then an endurance guy brother things can be yeah yeah like it's kind of too like i can jog pretty easily even with a rock even with a rock

that's like 75 pounds, I can jog. Like jog. It's going to put a hurting on some guys that are a little bit smaller, you know. Or they have so much endurance muscle. So it made sense, man. And thinking back to all my experiences where I'm suffering, you know. And again, it's not like I can't do it, but I feel like, bro, these guys running have to be suffering way less than this.

Yeah, he trained for a couple years and got worse at triathlon. That's crazy. That is crazy. All right. But I know you like you because we talked about rest. Yeah. You're a proponent. Oh, yeah.

One of the best, one of the best at resting. You're probably the best rester that I've ever known. Bro, I used to be. You know the kind where like you can fall asleep? What do you used to be? Well, you know, now I'm a little bit spoiled where like if someone has like, like, if I go to hotel bed and the pillows not the right thickness. You know, like, it'll jam. Come on, bro.

Or the, or the bed is like kind of like the cheaper bed. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's actually, here's like a little thing I feel bad about sometimes I'll go and do an event for somebody and they'll put me in

you know, the presidential suite, right? Hell yes. And then I'll come down in the morning like, how's the room? And I'm always like, oh, it was great, you know, but in my mind, I literally do not care at all. Bro, remember the time. And I'm damn sure not going, well, you know, the piddle pillow is a little staff or whatever it is you just said.

It's too soft. No, okay, remember the time. It was you. Okay, you went somewhere like and you stayed at i don't know you didn't have a hotel or something so you stayed at like jamie's rental i don't know so you stayed somewhere like at someone's like unoccupied house and you didn't have any blankets or anything so you got like a shower curtain oh yeah that wasn't james's unoccupied house that was yeah okay okay right you told me that story and this was like well into your career so it's not like you were just that was like a year ago actually noticed jocco live it was 20 just before.

Bro, that story, like, of course, made me laugh, but, bro, I was suffering with you mentally. I was like, bro, no pillow. Like, and you were just battling through it, like, whatever. Brother, I couldn't have done it. Br, I would have canceled the show. It would have canceled. A shower curtain and a rug or something.

I was like, bro, no way, bro. No, no way. Jack. All right. Well, we need rest. You're going to need to fuel another component. It's true. As they say.

Yeah. Of physical fitness, rest. and get that fuel. Exercise, rest, fuel. That's the three components for getting stronger. Yes, sir. So, jaco fuel.

What do we got? Kind of everything now. Yeah. We have pretty much everything now. So we'll go discipline. That's the energy drink, new paradigm, all healthy. No, not healthy.

All healthy. No sugar. No preservatives, no nothing. And tastes good. All upside. Yeah, all upside. Also, milk. That's the extra protein.

And you need extra protein when you're trying to build. It's hard to get. get all the protein you need by the way for real yeah how much protein you think you need uh well you know i i usually have seven ounces of protein per lean body per pound of lean body ounces damn bro it's one gram per right that's like the standard one gram per i know some people say 0.7 grams per i say one gram per i say one gram per pound okay so if you're if you're going jaco philosophy that's if you weigh 220 yeah 220

grams of protein. Yep. You got 30 grams of protein one can of tuna. 30. So you need how many of those? A lot. It's freaking a lot in one day prior. That's a lot of protein. Now if you eat steaks, it's like what? I have to work it out for you. If you eat a steak, that's like what, 50, 50 grams protein? Yeah. So you need four stakes in one day, but I get real. You know, not all of us can eat four stakes, but boom, you get the roll the moke into the equation, right? Easy money. And it tastes good. And it tastes good. like a dessert. It ain't going to help you with your math,

though, apparently. That's what the discipline is for right there. That's got to most stuff. Suffer your joints, keep you in the game. Creatine. It's all good. Creatine. Back on the creatine train.

Yeah. Right? That was a thing. And then it's so, it's so well studied. That's the cool thing about it. Yeah. And the cool thing about it now is they're finding it's not just, it's not just for getting stronger.

There's all kinds of, there's cognitive benefits. There's health benefits. So creatine, we just rolled out with that. Joint warfare, super cruel. Immunity stuff. Immunity. It's kind of everything. You know what I have to, remember how this is a real thing,

getting sick when you take a break? Remember that? Getting sick when you take a break. It was Huberman. If I was telling Huberman, or he mentioned something about when your body kind of, when your mind stands down, like, oh, you have a break now? Your body's like, oh, cool, he can get sick now real quick.

Because you get, you know, and that happens. That has happened to me. like legitimately five times in in the past 20 years where I had okay I'm going going hard working really hard and then I finally get a break and I immediately get sick Oh yeah, yeah and so I'm you know cranking the Cold War oh yeah keep that stuff at bay Yeah all that anti-inflammatory stuff man is good man uh joccofuel.com Wawa vitamin shop the military commerce commissaries hannahford Dash stores in Maryland, Wake Fern and ShopRite.

Circle K in Florida, H.E.B. Come on, H.E.B. Man, you're in Texas. There you go. Murphy's Southeast and Meyer in the Midwest. That's where you can get this stuff. Go get stronger, get better, get healthier. It's true.

Jock Fuel. What else? Origin. Boom. You got your Jiu Jitsu geese over there. Got rash guards. Got apparel. Durable goods is what they call.

Jiu Jizuiz. Yeah. Train Jiu Jitsu. That's my recommendation. Yeah. Oh, yeah, big time. Also, don't forget about the jeans, the belts, the boots. Don't forget about that kind of stuff.

That stuff is like a big deal because nowadays it's hard to grab, get the stuff that's made in America, but for real made in America. From the dirt. Yeah. From its inception as a thought, it's made in America. When someone thought about it, it was in America. Yeah, it's true. So there you go.

OriginUSA.com. Also, Jocko has a store. So where you can buy the stuff to wear to represent on this path. Discipline equals freedom. Good. Remember the concept of good. Right. You want to represent that all day.

Hats, hoodies, all that stuff. Christmas is pretty much done. Yeah. At this point. You missed it. You missed it. It's okay. You didn't miss nothing.

Jocco store.com. Also, we got the shirt locker, which is a subscription. People like this. People are representing hard on the shirt locker. where, you know, a little bit different designs always has to do with the path, though. Always. The designs always have to do with the path.

Now, for you to understand, it's going to take some mental work, but it's kind of fun. But anyway, a lot of people like it. There's a reward to it. It's called the shirt locker. It's on jocco store.com. Is it fair to say that the shirt,

locker shirts can be heavily layered? Is that fair? Heavily, heavily, heavily layered. Yes, it is fair. Right on. Awesome. Subscribe to the podcast. Go to jaco underground.com.

We're recording a couple of those today, $8.18 a month. That's why we have our own platform. You can see what's going on with platforms right now. They're getting people getting banned. Some people not getting banned. People are turning from this, turning to that. It's mayhem out there. That's why we have our own platform, jocco underground.com.

We own it. We totally control it, which is nice. So if you can't afford $8.18 a month, just email. Assistance at joccoeunderground.com. We'll take care. Because we want, I want you to be free. We want to be free. Sure.

We want you to be free. So there you go. YouTube channel, psychological warfare, flipside canvas.com. We got a bunch of books. Check out jocco publishing.com. Get Only Cry for the Living. Get final spin. All the other books I've written.

Get them. Eshlamfront, Leadership Consultancy. If you need help in your organization, go to eshlamfront.com. We have some events coming up, Orlando, Florida, April 3 to 5. 2023 in Dallas October 18th through the 20th 20th 2023 FTX council battlefield about we did those civil war podcasts civil war excursions and those things are now selling out so just if you want to go to battlefield go and sign up for battlefield either come to Gettysburg and and check it out or little big horn very awesome events we have online training platform called extreme ownership Academy, Extreme Ownership.com. This is leadership and life lessons that you can learn online.

So check that out, Extreme Ownership.com. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star Families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate, only want to get involved. Go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also, don't forget about Micah Think, taking veterans out of the wilderness. Heroes and Horses.org.

And if you want to connect with us, well, remember you got Doc Parsley. He's on the interwebs, docparsely.com. He's got Instagram, Kirk Parsley. He's got Twitter, Doc Parsley. And for us, Echo, is that Echo Charles? He's back on Twitter, by the way.

Are you engaging? Sparsely. Okay. But, you know, they engage more, I think. I hope. I'm going to try. Maybe. Well, anyways, I guess it's not really worth following Echo Charles on Twitter if he's got

that kind of attitude. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I'm on the Instagram. Echo Charles on all those things too. Echoes at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocco Willink. Watch off for the algorithm.

It'll get you. Thanks to, again, to Doc Parsley for what he's doing and what he has done. And thanks to the people out there in uniform of pushing your body to the breaking point to protect our great nation. That's what Doc was talking about. You do that job, whatever you're doing in uniform, and you're sacrificing your body to protect the country. So we thank you all for what you do, everyone in uniform.

And the same goes for police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. You heard what Doc said about shift work when you're staying up opposite hours and every one of those jobs I just mentioned, you all do that.

You also sacrifice your bodies to keep us safe. So thank you for what you all do every day. And everyone else out there, yeah, look, you got to push hard, but you do need to get rest. You do need to recover. That is critical for growth and for health. That being said, just do me a favor. Don't lie to yourself.

Because there's some people that are going to take this and run with it. They're going to make rest the priority of their existence. And I'm not saying, look, I'm not saying don't rest. Rest, you heard me. You heard Doc. You heard Echo Charles chiming in. But when it's time to get up, get up. And use the day to make yourself tired so you can sleep well.

And the way you make yourself tired is, of course, by going out there and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.