Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #430 Building Health Foundations: Sleep, Hormones, and Wellness w/ Dr. Kirk Parsley

Episode Date: November 2, 2025

In this podcast episode, Dr. Kirk Parsley, a former Navy SEAL and medical doctor for the SEALs, returns to discuss the critical importance of sleep and overall wellness. Kyle mentions the recent presence of other experts like Dr. Dan Pardi and delves into Dr. Parsley's background, emphasizing his connections within the Paleo community. Dr. Parsley outlines his journey from the Navy to becoming a renowned sleep expert and details his work developing sleep aids for military personnel. The discussion covers stress management techniques, the underestimated value of sleep, and the efficacy of various health modalities, including HeartMath for younger individuals, breathwork, meditation, and the potential benefits of psychedelics for trauma recovery. Parsley also discusses his current project in Scottsdale, a comprehensive wellness center aimed at holistic health improvements incorporating technology and lifestyle modifications.   Connect with Dr. Kirk here: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sleepremedy/ All Links Sleep Remedy   From Kyle: The Community is coming! Click here to learn more - https://kylekingsbury.kit.com/community   Dr. Kirk “Doc” Parsley is a former Navy SEAL turned physician, speaker, and creator of Doc Parsley’s Sleep Remedy, a natural supplement designed to help people achieve deep, restorative sleep. After serving as the team doctor for the West Coast SEAL teams, Doc saw firsthand how poor sleep and high stress impacted performance, recovery, and longevity. His experience led him to develop evidence-based solutions for optimizing sleep and health. Today, Doc lectures worldwide on sleep science, wellness, and human performance—helping everyone from elite military operators to executives reclaim their energy, focus, and vitality through better sleep. Learn more at docparsley.com.   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. To SUPERCHARGE YOUR STEM CELLS, go to qualialife.com/kyle15 for up to 50% off, and use code KYLE15 for an additional 15%. If there’s ONE MINERAL you should be worried about not getting enough of... it’s MAGNESIUM. Head to http://www.bioptimizers.com/kingsbu now and use code KINGSBU to claim your 15% discount.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyle-Kingsbury Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!

Welcome back to today's podcast. We've got Dr. Kirk Parsley, the return of the sleep expert himself. A couple weeks ago, we had Dr. Dan Partion, which is awesome. He wrote his Ph.D. on sleep. Dr. Kirk was, if you don't remember, a Navy SEAL and then a medical doctor for the SEALs. And he's been on the show multiple times, hugely popular and well-known within the paleo community. He was a speaker at Paleo Effects for many years. Good buddies with Rob Wolf, Dr. Peter Tia, and many people that are working the optimization angle

via food, sleep, and everything else. So I've learned a ton from Dr. Kirk over the years. It was really cool because he just popped into my mind. I didn't realize he had moved out of the state. I was like, I got to hit him up, man. He needs to come back on the podcast. And he's like, dude, I left. I'm in Arizona.

But I'm driving to Texas right now. So fucking super cool. Love little synchronicities like that. We had a great podcast. And we'll all, you know, Kirk's always welcome on this podcast. So this for sure won't be the last. But share this one far and wide.

And without further ado, my brother, Dr. Kirk Parsley. Dr. Kirk Parsley, welcome back to the podcast. I want to get us rock and rolling here so we don't miss any fun stuff. We were talking the prepper group that's just west of here and how much I appreciate them and raw milk and all sorts of goodies. I was like, we can just get this going because that's good food for thought. Yeah, good food in general, raw milk. It's funny, I did a post on, I had Mark McAfee on who to this day runs the largest raw milk distributor in the U.S.

And I think it's organic pastures. I'm not uncertain, though, but maybe I'm mixing that up with a different company. But they were the first all raw milk, but they used Holstein cows. They were down in Fresno. When I was in California, they were in whole food sprouts everywhere. And then they had some scare about some shit. And then that whole foods pulled it. Sprouts eventually pulled it.

But they used to have a pint of colostrum. They had kefir. They had everything you could think about raw butter. The whole lineup was there. And then it got condensed down to just those gallons. I didn't realize when I was interviewing, that was his company. But he gave some cool stories, and he's actually, he works with a couple of scientists from Europe really studying the differences between the two. And he had some cool shit to say that did a little post on it.

And some guy who was right after I had podcasted with Liver King. So that was bringing in just all sorts of shit talking. Oh, yeah. This guy's like, oh, to listen to this guy. He thinks raw milk's a superfood. It's just like, that's okay if we don't yet know that. Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting. Obviously, we've been right around us, helped them all in this space for a long time. I'm in there, whenever the talking heads come and go. But it's interesting how nuanced and complex everything is, right? You would think, whatever, it's milk. You've been drinking milk your whole life. But, you know, part of this little group I went to, they talked about the difference,

the difference between the milks and the different kind of cows and why this one was better than that, and then this process that. And I think we had two one-hour lectures on milk. And it was amazingly fascinating, air, informative, very informative. And I'm sitting there going, why? I had no idea there was so much to know about milk. And then there's that much to know about every other thing on the planet, right?

And we're talking earlier about raising sheep versus raising cattle. I have no idea how to reach either. But it's fascinating to all the topics that you can go on forever with that. And that stuff people have been doing in millennia. Well, that's part of the problem is that there's like a girl, I was a city boy growing up. So like I had one great uncle who lived in Central California who did some farming at 40 acres of a peach orchard, and he raised donkeys, or not donkeys, mules. I need to enter them into the Mule Days contest in Central California.

He won a bunch of blue ribbons and stuff, so we'd go riding on them. He had some horses, too, and different things, but that was the, he was a rancher. He wasn't a farmer, per se. And so I don't have that in me. My wife grew up outside of Vegas, and they had a farm. She was delivering babies from pigs and cutting heads off and doing the whole thing. So she was the only one that really had experience here. Yeah.

But I think to, to your point, like, there was. for so many millennia that was just ingrained and mastery was taught the same way how we raise our dogs the best dogs are born they're as soon as they can they're back in the field and they witness all the adult dogs and how they behave and that's what trains them as the next generation for sure same thing with farming and generational farming those kids don't leave the house at 18 like they're there working with their family they might build a little cottage there or whatever but they're going to learn that and they're going to be able to find out new information and build off of that And so they're going to continue to improve that, hopefully, but either way, it's, and the stuff that they know, the stuff that they know is common sense. We have no idea about. Exactly. We have to read books and listen to a podcast and watch YouTube videos for hours to figure out something that they've known since they were six and didn't even know it was something to know. It was just like, of course. Of course, that's what you do. You always, you clip this, you tie that there. Of course, why wouldn't you do that? They've forgotten more than I know. That's how deep that knowledge is.

Dude, you've been on the podcast a bunch of times. I was thinking. about you the other day. Did you have a part in element? Not a super, not a really official one. Okay. So I became, I became pretty tight with Peter Atia, maybe 10, 11, 12 years ago or something like that where he was really doing a ton of keto research. And I'd known Rob for a long time. And of course, Rob was in the paleo scene. And then I, I've always been like a lifestyle wellness performance physician focusing on those types of things, but I don't consider myself a nutritionist. This guys who are so much smarter than me, and Rob was always my go-to resource for that. But I started talking to Rob a lot about keto, and I was like, like, Rob, convinced me that I need

a carb. Like, why do I need a carb ever again? As I started learning about, and so we had these long conversations, and eventually Rob started doing keto just to, because he's a scientific guy. Let's check it out. He started doing that. And he started noticing some, performance issues and cramping issues and whatever and he's oh i really think and so he and i had a lot of conversations that led to him eventually saying one of the big problems is this essential electrolytes but micronutrients in general like micronutrient deficiency because most people who are doing keto or carnivoreish with a bunch of porn on a bunch of fat not getting organ meat and stuff thinking about your macros more than the micros right yeah and so yeah so rob decided to do that

and then Rob is a partner in my sleep supplement business. That's right. And so I helped him and his guys get started. Yeah, and I came in as the big hero teaching them how to run a supplement company. And now they're down like $500 million a year, dwarfed me. And then apparently Rob told me I was in a relationship with a woman here. There was not a good scene and I was off the grid for a bit. And I didn't talk to Rob for about two years.

We've been trying to get in touch with you for about two years to give you to give you a non- insignificant part of element but we couldn't get in touch with you and we had to just move on and I was like that's where it goes man make your choices but I but yeah but but I was just up at element headquarters last month so Rob Rob is came out to be on the board of the organization the project I'm working on in Arizona he's going to be the nutrition oh that's awesome on the board and so we he came out and we started talking and then I went out there to chat with I went out there and hung out with him for a bit is he still in Montana Yeah, he moved from, is it whitefish? This is Robb, we're talking about here. Rob is, there's many robs, but Robb is the guy in the paleo space, the ghetto space for a long time. Yeah.

Yeah, he came down, is it whitefish? Is that the other than that? I think so. Yeah, so way up north. He went there for a couple of years. I guess they only get 70 or 80 days of sunshine the whole year, and he was just like, this ain't me. So they moved down to Bozeman, and he's been on Bozeman for a couple of years now.

Cool. Yeah, we've been through Bozeman a couple of times for, Fit for service events, and then once I got that camper shell put on at, GoFest Campershow, that's where they're at. Any of you, there's so much I want to go to. The reason element popped into my mind was, this is my son's first year of football. Yeah. And most, not talking shit, if you're on the football team, but most players on the team

and parents are what I would consider muggles. Like, they're just non-magic. They're doing the normal shit. I'll give you an example of that. One of the parents didn't like the way his son was playing. So he says, get your shit in high gear, Tommy, you're no fucking PlayStation. like in front of everybody and I was just like giggling inside thinking oh man and I told my son's oh my dad was mad and I was like what did he say he threatened to take his PlayStation aware right

we don't have any video games in here for very good reasons but I just thought it was hilarious but the first thing I had in my mind was like game day I don't want that my kid drinking gatorate or some bullshit where it dies and a bunch of high fructose corn syrup and all that so I told him volunteer okay man I'm going to bring my own thing I'll have it loaded with element and I've been bringing that every game and then whatever's left over we just take home and drink ourselves but it's been rat and something i wish that i had when i was younger like a prop like a solid electrolyte drink that's going to give them actually the amount of salt that they need playing in the texas heat so that's been a super cool i grew up in texas playing texas 580 football in high

school two dates in the summer is 117 degrees with 100% humidity with all your pads on yeah just like miserable i tell people all the time people ask me like how hard seal training was and all this i was like Texas football is harder. It's not as long, right? It's not six months long and it's not 24 hours a day, but those, there's two days

and those summer practices for some of the worst experiences of my life, man. Yeah, that dehydration and that heat and just, mosquitoes and the, like,

then just the roughness of football and all that, yeah, it sucked. It's significant. Yeah. No doubt. Let's thought, there's been a minute

since you've been on the podcast, give me your background briefly. Most people will remember you by name, but in case it's the first time. Yeah. Yeah, I grew up in Texas, grew up in Katie when Katie was a small town. And terrible student actually dropped out of high school.

I did almost four years of high school, but I was never close to graduating. Dropped out of high school. I joined the military to do this thing that I just heard about on a video, some kind of like a 60 minutes kind of show. We covered this thing called Hell Week and this training for seals, these Navy SEALs and especially the toughest training in the world. And I didn't know what a Navy SEAL was, but I was like hey I want to go do the toughest training in the world and so I went to

that I went through still training did a little over six years about six and a half years total got out went to college during college you got married you started having kids and all that decided to go to medical school and when it came time to apply to medical school I found out hey the military has their own medical school and I was like oh really I didn't know this and my time and the service would count towards pay so it's like all right I could make enough money to support my family while I go to medical school and come out debt-free. Of course, why wouldn't I do that? And then I'll get, hopefully I'll get a chance to go back to the SEAL teams and do some,

give back to the community that really shaped me as a man. And so I did, all that worked out just perfectly. All of my training pipeline, all my intention was orthopedic surgery, right? I was interested in sports medicine and orthopedics. And I ran, I helped to develop and run the sports medicine facility for the SEALs. but what the SEALs came and talked to me about we were like performance issues right SEALs don't usually tell their doctor anything

because they don't want to be put on the bench right? The doctor's the guy who's going to say you got to sit out and figure this out right so they don't tell doctors things but because I had been a SEAL they trusted me and they'd come in and shut the door and say dude let me tell you what just between me and you let me tell you what's going on and I was like I have no idea how to help you but we'll figure it out and it was saying

just concentration issues mental focus clarity, memory, emotionality, mood, sex drive, and then body comp shifts. Like, I'm working with the nutritionist. I'm working at the shrinking conditioning coach. I'm getting fat or I'm getting weaker. I'm getting slower.

And then they'd be like, maybe I'm just getting old duck, right? And I'll be like, yeah, dude, you're 28. It's all over, right? Yeah, you can tell. Yeah, and so I started looking at their labs and stuff. And they looked like, their labs look like a 50-year-old dude who was 30 pounds over weight and pre-diabetic, man. They had terrible insulin sensitivity and terrible oxidation.

inflammation and their anabolic hormones are in the toilet and the catabolic hormones were high and I was like I don't I have no idea but we'll figure it out and over time because when we go through seal training one of the things we do is we go a full week without sleep just to prove that it's a luxury that you don't really need and so when you go it when you go into seal teams if you're hard enough and you don't and you can't sleep for three days you just do it because that's the way we've proven to you that's the way the world works right so not a single guy ever complained to me about not being able to sleep. But as I dug into it more and talked to them more, they were all taking sleep drugs.

And the military was handing those things out like they were candy. It was like the most benign drug ever, man. You can take it. Like there's no side effects. No problem. It was perfect. You just, uh, and I didn't know anything about sleep because I didn't learn anything about sleep in medical school.

And I knew what Ambien was, like from my pharmacology class. I knew that it was a GABA analog. I didn't know what GABA had to do asleep because I didn't know anything about sleep. But then when I started studying all of that and I found out, oh, all your hormones are re-regulated while you're asleep and your immune system is functioning as high as while you're asleep and all that emotionality all that memory all the short-term to long-term crossover foreign durable path all that happens while you're asleep and they're taking drugs while they're asleep and then you look at what happens to a sleep study when you're taking sleep drugs and it's like

you don't sleep you're just unconscious right and i was like oh maybe if we get guys off of ambient that'll help some of the problems and i did that and i just i had to give them something so i i did a bunch of research to figure out what supplements help with sleep, and I just gave them regular nutritional supplements, and I taught them all about sleep hygiene, which is all stuff I had learned there working with them, and we had miraculous results. People's testosterone triple growth hormone, triple. Inflammation went from sky high to unmeasurable. Oxidation went down, fasting insulin, went from 25 to 2 or 3 or something like it should be. And I was like, wow, that was way more powerful than I thought. And then And we had, we brought in guest lecturers for pre and post retreats to motivate the guys.

We would bring them their families together before they were deployed. And when they came back from deployment, just integrate and give family resources and stuff like that. And we'd bring in lectures that Seals were interested in who were guys like Rob Wolf and John Welbord and like fitness and whatever, tough guys and smart guys. And then I always lectured because the Navy had me for free. so it was like you're doing all of them and then they bring in these guys and all the and all these guys started I was the only one talking about sleep like literally the only I was the only person in the health and wellness space talking about sleep and it wasn't because I had some great interest is because that's what my community needed and so I figured this out and so all this guys

started inviting me to lecture and come on their podcast and stuff and then by the time I got out of the Navy I was this nationally known sleep expert and the sleep guy and that stuff and I got out I did a year of brick and mortar, and then I stepped out for a year to start. The SEALs wanted me to make a product out of that because I was just giving them a worksheet with all the handout. They'd go buy all these supplements. And they're like, dude, just make something for us so we can travel with it. And so I said, all right, I'll do that.

And Peter threw in some money and Rob threw in some money. And we just formed that. And with the plan, we'll just build it, get a contract with the SEAL teams and respect or maybe soft and just give it to the guys and then go back to doing practice again. And that was 11 years ago, and I still have the company. And the company's successful, but we still don't sell to the Sill teams or anything like that. You've never got the contract. Never got any contracts like that.

All right, guys, quick break to tell you about what I've been up to. This year has been a year of transition for me with a fit for service making huge changes. I've been working to create my own community. I still don't have a name for it yet. That is in the works. I'm brewing on it. But one of the things that I have come to understand is what this community is about. And so I want to give you a little hint here.

and let you guys drop in. I'd love to get your feedback. And there's a link at the top of the page here if you guys are interested at all. All right, so join in a transformative journey with our exclusive community where a like-minded individuals come together to explore the realms of body, mind, and connection.

For $150 a month, you'll gain access to a treasure trove of wisdom from hundreds of podcast guests, a lifetime of learning and human optimization, and the teachings of legends like Paul Chek, James Clear, and so many others. Reconnect with your inner compass and discover the freedom, health, and sovereignty that await.

Embrace the journey to excellence because we are what we repeatedly do. If that interests you, peep the link in the show notes for the community, and we will get you guys locked in. All right, back to the podcast. I did private consulting all along the way, and now I pretty much work with either former athletes or former military guys. Like my community, I volunteer my time. If you're a former seal, you're getting out.

need to recover from your career. You can call me. I work with you. Never charge a seal, never will. And then I have private clients who are older guys, 50-ish. They traded their health for wealth for 30 years. The 30 pounds overweight now, they're not in good shape. They really haven't been taken care of themselves, but they have $100 million now and they don't really care about the money. They want to be in great shape again. By that body back. Yeah. Yeah. They want to buy their health back. And so I say, it's going to be expensive. And I deal an annual kind of health makeover with those guys with the understanding that after one year you're on your own because I'm not I'm not going to I'm not going to hold your hand through all your goals I'm going to teach you

what you need to know to be able to do all the stuff on your own and and it's an intensive hard year guys get great results and they move on and I get another another couple of guys next year and all that and that's my life in a nutshell and I'm married to a nurse practitioner who does essentially the same work I do and but she specializes in females and I don't understand females in any sense including their hormones and and so she she does everything with they are quite complex they're more complexness in every way and their hormones and all their metabolic issues are no exception but my wife's a lifelong athlete and fitness competitor and nurse practitioner a gym owner all of it so she's just always done what I do and we just have actually a mutual friend of ours Dan

stickler appare on we we met at an apparel conference that i was lecturing at and she was attending well that's super cool i'd like hearing that small world stuff that's awesome that dan mic her incredible yeah it was about seven years ago we met through one of their one of their events and we both live in texas and the event there was an event coming up in austin but dan asked me if i'd go to this one in chicago to do a lecture to their group and i was like sure and then for some reason she decided to leave Texas and go to the Chicago event, which you could have gone to the Austin event, and we happened to meet there. And that was it.

Beautiful synchronicity. Yeah. Yeah. A hell of a coincidence. If you believe in such things. Talk about you just recently moved up to Scottsdale. Talk about what you were putting together there. Briefly, I'll just say, I remember I was that in Arizona long enough to see some big shifts.

Like Tempe, I'd recognize nothing in Tempe compared to when I lived there. But Scottsdale was coming up. At the time in college, that was like party town. And that's where we go to the clubs and it's a little wealthier and there's some good restaurants, that kind of shit. Over the last few, I have buddies that remain like Ryan Bader, CB Dalloway that are always been and always will be Arizona guys. And so when I pop out there, they'd show me different spots where I could go and get

really intensive bodywork done that nobody else was doing with energy and a bunch of other shit that actually worked. So I would, they knew a bunch of experts, but I thought that was cool how Scottsdale was slowly becoming kind of place for thinking outside the box, functional medicine, some of the high-end stuff. I hate the word biohack, the use of technology in a right way. I'm so glad you said that. I knew we were long-lost brothers, man.

I hate biohacking, too. I hate that phrase because it implies you're getting something without doing the work. It's like, that's not where it's like a short-cut expert. Yeah, I'm a short-cut expert, exactly. Oh, you have to do all this? No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to put butter in my coffee. That would depict it right now.

Yeah. Yeah, so one of my private clients, you know, like I just described, billionaire dude, and he's right around 70 when I met him. and dude he listened to all the podcast and he read all the books and he went to all the seminars and he had a hyperbaric chamber in his house and he had a vascular in his house and he had a vassar in his house and he had you name it he lived on the top floor of the w and downtown austin and had every gadget you have ever seen in your life and it had all of them and it worked with all the functional medicine special docs whatever and he called me off of a podcast just like a total cold call and he's just good old boy from beaumont and he's just good old boy from beaumont and he's

He's got this heavy Beaumont accent, and actually the first seven, first eight years of my life, I lived around that area more. My whole family is from the Houston area. And we lived around Beaumont, Deer Park, and San Jacinto and Kima Island, for those years, bounced around. So he felt really home. He felt like somebody I just knew and liked. The way he talked, I thought he probably didn't have enough money to afford me. I was just like, he just seems like a real good old boy, and he asked some silly questions. He probably doesn't know a whole lot.

and I was like, I'd really like to work with him, so I'll cut him a half price. He probably can't afford that either, but I'll give him a half price. So I give him half price, and we start working together, and we become tight. And then we're having lunch downtown one day, and he goes, you don't charge nearly enough for your services. He goes, you should charge twice what you do. And I said, I actually do. I gave you half price because I didn't think you could afford it. And he turned out to be legitimately probably 10th wealthiest guy in the country or something crazy like that.

but he keeps his name off the internet and nobody knows who he is and so i had no idea who he was that's how i would do it i wouldn't want to be known for yeah especially being famous for having money yeah yeah and he can and he can walk around anywhere downtown austin and nobody has any idea who he is man and and anyways at seven years old he was he was diabetic he was diabetic he's about 40 pounds overweight he had just terrible cognition mood affect everything had to take crazy stimulus just to stay awake. My man's shit like that. Yeah.

And he was just miserable. And he had a cabbage already. And he was like, I'm probably about to die essentially, or literally what he told me. He said, I figure I'm probably about to die. But if I can get a little bit of health, I've got some kids, there's some things I'd like to do. And at seven years old, we dropped 40 pounds off that dude, put eight pounds of muscle on him. And I got well-born to come over and help him work out after I got him by the

awesome. dude you got trained from wellborn he got trained by personal training from wellborn which is not what my intention was i said hey i want to introduce you to a guy who's a great trainer who can set you up on a program and then he told him one of the greatest of all time yeah yeah and he and he says and so i introduce him and then he's hey man i want you come over tomorrow and i want to come over the next day and john's it's not really what i do and he's no how to and he paid john some exorbitant amount of money to do it and john's like all right and then john had done up liking him he's just a super likable good old country boy yeah but eight eight pounds of muscle on

him we took him down to rotan and did the mini circle polish that and which i think with a big help i've done that as well i'm curious to see i wonder within it and i don't want to derail us i want to stay on that but let's just put a thought there to circle back on that because i got some questions and things yeah so i think the short answer that i think the older you are the more likely that is to be super beneficial to you right that's what i was figuring yeah so he's 70 years old and to put on any muscle at 70s pretty crazy right put on 8 pounds of muscle in about 18 months and so anyway not only

was you not insulin dependent anymore but it wasn't diabetic anymore either right went down to an A1C of about 5.2 pretty much cured everything and I have pictures of him one year apart side by side it doesn't even look like the same guy so anyway he like said he already read all the stuff

and listened to all the podcasts and watched and worked with all the doctors and had all the gadgets but he never had a quarterback right he never had one guy like me who not that i'm an expert on all that stuff but i know all of that stuff right and i know the guy for whatever you want right like for the one we want this i know the guy for that right and we can put you on a great program and supervise it and so he basically said hey i want to scale that man i like i he said i think everybody needs this he said he'll have to go to rich

people first just because they're the only ones who can afford it let's build let's build a big center for everybody to come into show everybody the power of this and then we can hopefully franchise that out to more regular sort of integrated functional medicine doctors around the country. Then you can work on scholarships and things like that as well. Yeah. And then my big passion is working with the SEALs as they come out of their careers. And he said, we'll donate a few million dollars worth of services to the SEAL teams every year. And your guys can just come through for free. And I'm like, cool. I'm like, I'm in. All right, let's do it. Yes. I moved up to Scotts. I'll do that. It's just monstrousy now. It just keeps growing. Keep adding things.

It's like a 40,000 square foot facility that we're building out with hyperbaric chambers is nearly as big as your freaking house. Hyperbaric chambers hold 25 people in them. Whoa, 25 person? Yeah. That's wild. I've never even seen anything like that. Two of them.

And then a bunch of smaller chambers and, of course, saunas and coal plunges and lightbeds and then full gym and we'll have PT and all the bodywork and chiropractice. Everything you can think of all of the modalities. and then my wife and I'm the medical director, my wife and I will oversee the actual medical component of labs and making sure people are metabolically, physiologically, hormonally healthy enough to actually benefit from the stuff. And then we have smart trainers there and then we use all these other modalities to help people recover faster.

Then we get some good data and say, hey, what would ordinarily take you 18 months to do? We can get that down into six months or whatever we can do. We don't know yet because we haven't done the research yet, but we're working on that. And so my hope is that either we can greatly shorten the duration it takes to get people back in shape because the most two-motivating part of it is when you're in terrible shape. Yeah, nobody likes sucking, especially if you once had it. You once had it and you once had it and you don't have it. Yeah, and then you know how bad you suck and six months later you still suck and you're still fat

and you're still, and it's just motivated emotionally and cognitively really hard to do it. So I'm hoping either we can greatly shorten that and or one. Once people are in shape, we can have a much more efficient way of staying in shape to where it's not this guessing game. Obviously, you can look forever about all the complexities. Everybody's different opinion on how you should be working out. But we want to have enough data to say, no, this is actually how you should be working out. And it only needs to be about this much. And it doesn't have to take out three quarters of your day.

And you don't need a six-hour morning routine. So we can make it realistic for you to maintain your health. Even if we can't get you in that much and shape a whole lot faster, hopefully we can maintain your health with so much more efficiency that it feels like maybe 50% of the effort, right, to maintain your fitness because you're not wasting time doing things that are counterproductive because whatever. Or you don't have modalities to help you recover

or you don't understand your true capacities, like what you're, like we're all wired different. We all benefit from different exercises and all that. Yeah, and so that's one one. And then you got a gung-ho trainer at 24-hour fitness. They want you to hit a 10-ret max every week. Right, right. And you're trying to do, and I think my big passion kind of, as far as my voice out in the health sphere or whatever, like my big passion right now is just trying to simplify things, right?

Because I just think, to your point, there's 25-year-old trainers all over the place who have six-pack abs and live in a gym and don't have any professional, you don't have any personal responsibilities. they're trying to coach guys who are 50 years old with a career and three kids at home and going through bankruptcy and whatever and just had a couple of surgeries and all this stuff and it's just simple it's just that and you just eat it and I'm like it's not that simple but I don't like the biohacking world either because it's this end of one I did this and so I'm not saying this will work for you I'm highly suggesting that it's possible if you do exactly what I did it'll work for you too and honestly it probably won't like right most likely it won't because you had a very unique set of circumstances and the reason nobody could help you is because you had very unique

circumstances and you figured it out on yourself and good for you and you figured out a way to help yourself but now you want to say that's everybody's issues no like if they have a unique circumstance it's probably a different unique circumstance than yours and if they're just and if they don't and if they're and if they're more typical then they don't need to do what you you're doing they need to do more typical things. And, and so I feel like the whole health and wellness sphere, I think when the paleo scene started alongside of CrossFit, yeah, it was cultish. But it was all around actually the work, right? It was the community was about the workout. The community was about eating well, the community. And it was about an exchange of ideas and like everybody, iron chapter and iron,

everybody kind of making each other better just by community, right? Like having, and now it feels like everybody's out selling a niche, like this is just one little specialized thing. This is the thing that you need. It's this one little nuanced thing. It's this gadget. It's this device. It's this technique. It's this. And I'm like, no, it's really simple, right? 95% of it is how you eat, how you sleep, how you move, and how you control stress. Like lifestyle. That's 95% of it. All these gadgets, that's the 5%. Maybe. It's probably closer to 2 or 3%. But until you master that lifestyle stuff, like you're wasting your money on all this other stuff and you're wasting your time on all this other stuff.

And so that's my real passion now. It's just like every time I, like I started my own podcast, I haven't launched it yet because I'm trying to get 50 kind of in the can before I launch it. 15 or 50? 50. Damn, dude. Yeah. Well, so most of mine are by myself though.

So I'm sitting down for 30 minutes and just like Kirk's thought for the day kind of thing. You're going to do one a week? What's the release rate on that? All right, guys, quick break to tell you about Qualia stem cell. Here's a question. What if your body already had everything it needed to repair, recover, and renew itself? It's just waiting for a little nudge. That's exactly what Qualia stem cell is designed to do.

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That's 5-0. And use code Kyle 15 in all caps, K-Y-L-E-15, for an additional 15%. That's qualia life.com slash Kyle 15 for an extra 15% off. you're waking your body's repair crew and supercharge your stem cells I've been recording one a day for about two weeks about two months but I haven't hit every day and I had Rob Wolf on and I had Joe Duturi on wellborns coming on I'll have some of my buddies on and I'll do longer formats

but it's really just more I see something stupid on Instagram that I kind of want to debunk and just okay not necessarily picking on this dude that looks like a golden retriever but here's the truth in it and it's absurd stuff right i'm not arguing nuance because i don't know the nuance either right there's a stack of literature this high on both sides of the argument and i don't know which is true right right i'm not smarter than everybody else when you have guys on there saying glp ones or helo monster venom all right we need to discuss this i'm like all right so it's more stuff like that and i'm just really trying to just get rid of the extraneous noise right there. But everybody's got a podcast now and everybody's got a platform and everybody's got

their own way of doing things. A million life coaches here in Austin since 2020. Yeah. And now there's just too much information for anybody to know what's real and what's not. And I'm not here to say what's real and what's not. Absolutely. But I can say you can get rid of this whole block of nonsense here and you can get rid of this whole block of nonsense here because the reality is somewhere in this fairly narrow zone that oh by the way looks a whole lot like how you evolved a whole lot how a whole lot like how you evolved by definition the best way to operate this body is the way it was designed big shocker and that's kind of that's what I'm poaching for now that's awesome yeah something it's funny in thinking of how many younger people there's nothing wrong if you're young

and this is the space you want to be in but so many young people have gravitated here but now and due to market competition they find themselves as the expert Were you a pro athlete? Did you work with? Were you at S-O-F? What is the where you like really figured this shit out on the front lines per se? Where actually something was happening where you had to elevate yourself to a level and maintain that. And I don't see a lot of that.

But that's one of the reasons I really appreciate guys like yourself, Mark Sisson, Rob Wolf, Paul Chek. All you guys are older than 50. All you guys did some real shit. And I think all you guys, I'm not certain what your story is. But I know Paul, Mark, and Rob all fucked themselves up trying a new fat thing. and had to figure that shit out in reverse, right? Yeah, yeah. And so that sticks, that hits home.

Like, these guys weren't just experts because it fell in their lap. It was birthed out of necessity. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said, you have all these experts who are just experts because they listen to other podcasts, so they've watched YouTube videos or they've been to a couple of courses, and they've coached 15 or 20 people at their gym or something like that, and they have a platform, and especially if they're really attractive

and they look good with their shirt off or whatever, like they get a lot of attention and and and i hate to be somebody who's going to appeal to authority or something and say i'm this guy so you should listen to me over that but come on you have to give some credence and credibility to people who have been like you said they've been around for a long time and have been doing this and i've worked with thousands of people and i have a medical degree and i've been doing this for 20 years and i've i was a athlete my whole life and i've injured myself and i've done stupid things with my diet and I've worked with I had this guy I posted something the other day about the importance of sleep and hormones and this guy sends back this nasty snarky comment about oh if it were only that

simple blah blah blah and you know you obviously don't know anything about military and the operator syndrome and all this and I'm like you obviously didn't bother to look at my bio because I obviously do know quite a bit about the military and oh and by the way like operator syndrome is based off of my work which I called the seal syndrome and so I do know about this go figure and i i responded to him because that one was just so egregious but there's there's literally stuff like that every day like young dudes and young gals calling me out saying i don't know what i'm talking about and they do and i'm like hey i don't claim to know everything there's i know a ton of dudes smarter than me i know there's a ton of things i don't know there's a ton of things i

think i know that i'm wrong about and i know that i just don't know what those things are yet or i'll figure them out but i can guarantee you i'm credible and if you want to to come charging at me because you have 6% body fat and I have 12% body fat. Okay. If that's your argument, then we're going to have issues and I'm going to call you out on it. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about one of our longest running show sponsors, lucy.com. Let's level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to lucy.com slash KKP and use promo code KKP to get 20% off your first order.

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Something that it had come up before, and I think sleep is an absolute cornerstone. You know, I always talk about Czech because he's kind of laid the foundation very well from Dr. Diet, Dr. Movement, Dr. Quiet, right? Quiet being sleep and meditation. Movement is all movement. Diets any supplement of water, food you put in your body. And I like seeing things through that lens, but if you were going to weigh one of those, You have to weigh sleep as the most important, in my opinion, right?

Because bad sleep is just going to fuck you up from a mental standpoint, an emotional standpoint. You're not going to recover. Sleep is the anabolic window. It's when these hormones kick off. And poor sleep will lead to that spiraling negatively very quickly. Then you can't lose the stubborn fat. You can't recover from workouts. You get sick, easy.

All those things start to take place. But then next to sleep, I'd say hormone management is actually pretty critical for a lot of people. and Czech is a guy who's been adamant against steroids and all the things for many years because he's a mesomorph, never needed it, never could understand why people would take it. And he had a great four-hour podcast with Rob Wolf, where Rob talked about his scenario, being a raw vegan for two years, just tanking everything. Then as he gets into Juditsu, he finds he's got a very low testosterone score. And so Rob talked about using a clomophene and some of the different modern-day tools

to boost that naturally. And it took about two years of cycling on and off to get that to stabilize at the level that was correct for him. But I loved that because I was like, that's the case in point. I've been taking testosterone since I was 17 for an attempt to play in the NFL. And it's funny, I ran a little experiment a couple months back where I was like, I've been on for five years. Nothing crazy.

Not like in college when I was trick in Latimer from the program, but just regular TRT basic stuff. And for five years, though. And then I was like, let me jump off and run in Colomafina and HCG and see where I'm at. And at about two weeks, I was losing a bunch of weight at two weeks. I just felt, oh, man, I'm not. horny. I'm like, asexual. I was like, that can't be, I know there's wiggle room here on dosing, so I doubled the dose

of both. And at the one month mark, I did a blood test. Total test after a month of 300. 3504. Free testosterone, 16. They're like, your testosterone's bad, but your free testosterone is fucking really bad. And I was like, I'm not trying to have more kids here. That was a fun experiment. Let me get back on this. And seemingly overnight, my recovery's better. I'm hungry. I've got an appetite for sex. The sex drive is like life force energy. It's like, especially for a man. You're like, or like, I want to get shit done. I have wheel. I have drive. I have my go getter attitude is there when those numbers are right. And when they're not, just I'm a floating log in space. It's also indicative that your brain is working correctly because a male brain should seek sexual novelty in the male, not to say we shall act on it. Right. But it's like our brains are designed that way. And we're designed to want to.

to pursue things, pursue sexual attraction, sure, but also to pursue difficult, challenging what we call mental vigor, right? So there's an idea. I want to know the answer to that, right? Or there's this project. I want to complete that. I want to see this thing finished, right? Testosterone is the primary driver of that. You need your verbal fluency and word finding capacity is highly impacted by testosterone. I used to teach, when I first started lecturing, I used to teach there's four pillars of health sleep nutrition exercise and stress mitigation right i changed that probably six or seven years ago i said there's three pillars of health there's exercise there's nutrition and there's stress mitigation but those sit on the foundation of sleep because if you don't sleep well none of the

other stuff matters because to your point all your hormones are regulated while you're asleep right and even if you're using hormone replacement therapy the utilization of hormones is happening the only like you talk about the most anabolic time of your life is deep sleep and by orders of magnitude or it is an enormous difference right being awake is essentially catabolic while you're awake you are draining resources you are depleting yourself which is why you eventually need to sleep and the whole point of going to sleep tonight is to repair everything you damage today if you worked out right if you went to the gym and you worked out you didn't get stronger right by definition you got weaker if you did anything if you did what you're supposed to do you came out of the gym

weaker when do you get stronger when you sleep what do you have to have a high anabolic state what's that that's high metabolic hormones but it's also anabolic physiology right all of the things as simple as blood supply have to be there right but your immune system is the same system that's repairing your body right it's the same it's the same chemicals it's the same cells it's just different combinations of them are going in there and repairing your muscle and making that muscle stronger or fighting off a virus or fighting off an infection or repairing a sprained tendon. But all those antibiotic processes that are going on while you're asleep. And the lowest stress hormones you have in any 24-hour period is deep sleep. And so that is the antibiotic time. And so the

whole reason I sleep tonight is to repair from today and then to prepare for tomorrow, right? I got to restock the shells, put all the nutrients back, put everything where it should be. And then tomorrow, if I can recover, if I could go to bed and recover 100 percent, if I could repair everything and then restock all the shells get all the neurotransmitters all the electrolytes all the micronutrients everything like totally ready get back to normal i'd wake up exactly the same every day it wouldn't age and the extent to the extent i can't do that is how much i age right aging is catabolic aging is breaking you down right you're when your skin doesn't when you don't produce enough collagen and elastin you didn't repair enough from the sound damage or from whatever

depletion or injury or whatever you had, you get a little wrinkle. Your skin gets a little thinner and we see it, but like all your physiologic aging is essentially a lack of repair. Because you think about it, a little kid is going through the same thing you are, but they're waking up stronger and smarter and faster and taller. So they're more than repairing. They're sleeping longer, but they have a much higher antibiotic processes going on in a much longer anabolic window, and they're waking up better. To the extent we could push that further on in our life, That's what essentially youth is, right? Youth is anabolic capacity, really, because I have enough resources.

I can go to bed. I can repair at night. I can fall. I can break my hip because I'm 70. Hey, I got a lot of strong muscles and I got good bone density and I'm heavily anabolic and I'm in good shape. I'll recover from it. If I'm a frail old man, I'm probably going to die from it, right?

If I get the flu, I'm going to die from the flu if I'm a frail old man. But if I'm a robust guy, I'm healthy, I'm strong, I'm anabolic. I have muscle. I have resources. I can recover. So I never tell people, hey, I don't even like to phrase longevity medicine because I don't have any idea how long you're going to live. So it doesn't make any sense for me to say I'm going to increase your longevity

because you might die tomorrow and you might die 30 years from now. And it's probably not going to have anything to do with what I'm doing. Like you're going to die when you're going to die, most likely. But one would think if you're healthier, if you have more muscle mass and you're more agile and you're metabolically healthy and your hormones are there and you're getting good sleep and you're controlling your stress and you're eating and all that stuff, you're more likely to fight off any disease repair from any injury and all that type of stuff recover from whatever happens to you and by default you should probably live longer but i can't

promise you the thing that you're pointing to though is that you're going to live better i'm going to i would say i can't promise that i will add years to your life but i promise i will add life to your years i will make it to where you can live like you're 25 until the day you die hopefully that's the goal to where you're just like whatever he died bungee jumping at 96 right you want to you want to have some sort of legacy like that. I just do whatever I want to do. I can and I'm 55. Am I as good as I was at 25? No, but there's nothing I can't do. There's literally nothing I can't do. I can do everything now. Everything I can do at 25 I can do now. I can't do it quite as well. I'm a little slower. I'm a little weaker. It takes a little longer to recover. But 20 years from now, hopefully I'll be

pretty close to where I'm right now. And then 20 years from now, probably be dead. But if I'm not, hopefully I like I'm a pretty fit robust person and like said that it hormones you know what a lot of people don't realize is that hormones go into the nucleus of your cell and they and they change the DNA expression so they change epigenetics so what does it every cell in your body has the same genetics right like you you have a genome and your neuron and your liver cell and your muscle cell and your bone cell all have they all have the same DNA in them so why are they different cells because they express different genes, right? And so when you put anabolic hormones into a cell,

they go into the nucleus and they say, hey, you should do more. You should produce more of these proteins and more of this because that's better. That's more anabolic and that will keep us alive. That will produce more energy. That'll make us more robust. That'll make us stronger.

That'll give us more reserves. That'll allow us to put more channels in to get more nutrients into this, to get more receptors, to bring more of this and that, whatever. And the more anabolic your cells are, essentially, the more useful you are, and anabolic hormones are what we're doing with HRT, but it's also what's happening when you're asleep.

And you can take HRT and you can take HRT plus and not sleep well and be 40 years old and you won't get anything out of it. I've seen it all the time. I have executives that come work with me and I'll put them on a program and I'll give them peptides and I'll give them hormones and I'll give them lifestyle and I give them nutrition and they'll hire a chef and they'll start and they aren't getting anywhere and attract their sleep. And I have that benefit now. When I started, I didn't have the wearables weren't there.

But now I had that. And I was like, this one thing here, if you do that and go, lo and behold, you start sleeping better. And all of a sudden, all those things start working. And then, you know, another aspect of animalism that I don't think most people think of is animalism is fuel partitioning, right? So I can eat, you can sleep four hours tonight and eat your normal diet, right? or you sleep eight hours and you eat your normal diet, your body does completely different things with those macros, right? They aren't going to the same places and you aren't getting the same physiologic benefit

at them. And the other thing that people don't realize is that when you choose to sleep, right? So like I said, if you could recover 100% every night, you'd never age. So the extent that you age basically is the extent that you aren't recovering and repairing, right? And it takes eight hours to recover from being a wait for 16 hours. That's just the way the book was written. You don't have a choice about that. you can bitch and moan, do whatever you want, wear whatever kind of glasses or gadgets you want,

but it's the way it is. It's the way it is. It takes eight hours to recover. And if you say, I'm going to burn it down, I'm going to get after it, I'm going to get up early, I'm going to work harder than everybody else. I'm going to get there first. I'm going to do more. I'm going to sleep six hours. You're choosing to age 25% faster. And there's no way around that. And we've proven that with shift work, right? You proved that with shift work because shift workers die 14 to 16 years earlier than the average. 14 to 16 years. And shift work is a type 2A carcinogen,

which is the same as cigarettes. It means that, yeah, it causes cancer. It's unethical for us to prove that it causes cancer, but we're pretty damn sure it causes cancer. So we say it's a type 2A carcinogen. And so what people don't realize is that what's happening when I choose to sleep six hours instead of eight hours,

tomorrow morning comes up, the sun comes up at exactly the same time and everything happens exactly the same time no matter what, no matter when I sleep. And so I still have to do everything tomorrow that I was, that I was going to do if I slept well. I slept 25% less than I should have. I still have to do everything tomorrow. How do I do that? I don't have the resources, right? I didn't repair. I didn't put, I didn't restock the shelves. I didn't give myself all the tools I needed. How do I compensate? I compensate by

releasing more stress hormones and stress hormones are catabolic. And those are the ones that are like cortisol is meant to blast in the morning to help us with wakefulness. Right. Right. So it serves in purpose. Right. Out of whack. Right. Chronically Elevette starts to shift everything. Yeah, cortisol is weight promoting. And cortisol keeps you alert in proportion to your environment. If you're very well rested and your environment isn't all that intense, you only need like this much cortisol to be awake and you can lay around on your couch and read a book

and everything's fine. But then a car crashes through the front of your house and then your cortisol goes through the roof because now you need to be super alert. But if you're poorly rested and you don't have a lot of resources and your ATP production down like your cellular energy is down your cellular nutrients are down your blood flows down metabolic rates down like prefrontal cortex is then firing all that when you your body needs to ramp up your alertness well it does it by secreting stress hormone versus cortisol to elevate your blood glucose and it has effects on other organs and then epinephrine which is adrenaline

and norophenephine which is adrenaline for the brain and all that makes you feel super alert and if you have a really loud shocking alarm that goes off at 4 a.m. and vibrate your nervous system and you go what and you go hop in a cold shower or something yeah it felt great in the morning yeah no kidding man you're running off of eight times more stress hormones than you need and nobody falls asleep during fight or flight nobody feels tired in a car crash or a fist fight you ever seen you fall asleep in a fist fight in months like you're like you're ramped up yeah your adrenaline's going but that's not that's not a healthy way to go through your life that's meant for extremists in emergency situations and we've gotten to a point in society where we use that as a tool

to be high performers or to be to get a little bit ahead to be able to sleep a little bit of less and we do it to our detriment and that combined with the not only are we eating poor food but we have now we have poor food partitioning plus we have more damage plus we have poor nutrient stores plus we have environmental toxins plus we have unrealistic work schedules and stress splits and lack of light and like all the other stuff but the one place that you recover from all of that bad stuff that you can't avoid in your environment is when you're asleep like that's still your best place to recover that's your number one tool for recovery and although the world is a complete at least the western world is completely different

place around sleep like when i started in 2009 this isn't hyperbole i literally was laughed out of the offices of the leadership of the seal teams when i told them that i thought the seals hormones were low because they weren't getting good sleep and they're like doc you need to go back to medical school this is ridiculous and now you can go to any airport or any coffee shop and ask somebody hey do you know when your hormones are balanced and they'd be like yeah when you're asleep so everybody knows it now yeah but so it so everybody's better but I still don't think anybody appreciates it enough and I certainly wouldn't have either it's not I don't give myself any credit for it I learned all this because of the environment I was in because my brothers needed to help and I had to figure

out how to help them and we are with their help I figured out how to do all this stuff and then some of it I really I wouldn't say I was dishonest about it but I was just really trying to over emphasize stuff to get people's attention to get them to value sleep more and now the older I get the more I learned I was even undervaluing it then as much as I was preaching it then and even trying to over emphasize things maybe even slightly exaggerate things to get people to really pay attention to it, it's still far more important than I thought it was. And I learned the new stuff pretty much every week. I learned something like, wow, and that. And there's so much to it now. And I wish the whole world understood how important it was. I think it would be,

I think it's, I think it's the most powerful tool we have as a society to improve our health. No question. Because there's always going to be bad stuff out there. And there's always going to be poor lifestyle choices. And there's always going to be jobs that require poor lifestyle. You can't get the bad guys to quit committing crimes at night. You got to have cops work at night, right? You can't fight wars in the daytime, right? When there's night vision and you got to fight wars at night. There's people, all right? There's people who work on the power lines. There's people who are flying jets transcontinental in the middle of the night. There's always going to be people who need to do that. So it's always going to be a part of society. But if we understand as a

society, like how important that is and we do everything we can to focus on that, I think it's a much powerful tool we have. Yeah, I think if there's any focus on, and it's funny because it's not sexy, but like when you go through foundational principles of health and wellness, longevity, performance, whatever the thing that draws you in, like mastery of that has the greatest ROI. Rob famously said in one of his books, if you're not getting enough sleep, you're cock blocking your fat loss. Yeah. I was like, I love it. Anytime you can slip that in, I appreciate it, even from a weight loss perspective, cornerstone, so many of those things. I'd love for you to talk, because you've been with the seals for so long, and then now with what you guys are building out in

Scottsdale, what are your favorite tools for stress management? What are you guys going to teach in that arena? Are there gadgets and technologies that you guys are working with there? What does that actually look like? My personal, of course, I'll caveat in and say that my personal belief around sleep, as far as I know, I'm by myself. I'm all by myself in my approach to insomnia. And I believe, I think Andrew Huberant, who's coined the term non-sleep deep rest, which is mindfulness and meditation and prayer and breathwork and whatever but the point of it is being this is as physiologically close to sleep as you can get without being asleep and so my approach to to sleep is spend eight hours in bed and I don't care if half of that is breathwork and meditation

or whatever and half of that asleep because the next best thing you can be doing is that and if you aren't looking at alarm clocks and you aren't laying awake thinking about your bills or projects or things you don't have any control of or things you're worried about or whatever as long if you're if you say hey i'm going to get in bed at this time and then until the alarm clock goes off i'm not looking at a clock again because it doesn't matter because the best i'll ever be at handling my life is when that alarm clock goes off in the morning and i've had the best sleep i can possibly have and i've restored as much as i possibly can and if you wake up in the middle of the night and you go to the bathroom whenever you lay back in bed and

stay i'm going to lay here and i'm going to pray or i'm going to lay here i'm going to do breath I'm going to lay here. I'm going to do guided meditation. I'm going to do transidential meditation. I'm going to do whatever it is my technique is that I like to do to calm myself down. And I'm going to lay here and do that until the alarm clock goes off. If the alarm clock's not going to go for four hours, you're going to go back to sleep at some point. And I don't really care when it does because it doesn't matter because the next best thing you can be doing is what you're doing.

And if your alarm clock goes off 30 minutes later, it's like, why, I got seven and a half hours of sleep, I got 30 minutes of meditation. And now I'm off and going. So that's the first thing that I emphasize on people. It's spend eight hours in bed and be okay with not being asleep because all of that mindfulness stuff and any flavor of that is fine. And what matters the most, I work with big burly, Depp Group, meat eating, guys who are like, I'm not going to do any of that gay meditation, blah, blah, blah. And so I'll start off a guy like that was something super simple.

The sense of it, right? I don't need them to tell me. I know who they are. I'm like, okay, this guy's not going to do it. So I say, hey, as an exercise this week, I want you to do everything that you can with your non-dominant hand. Brush your teeth, open the card. Try to start your car with that. I'll eat with that hand.

I'll get everything. Try to write with that hand if you can do it as much as you can possibly do with your non-dominant hand. Just do it all week. And then they'll do it all week. And then I'll say, okay, now this week I want you, every time you stand up, I want you to try to figure out if you have more weight on your heels or on your toes, right? And as you walk, I want you to figure out where's the weight. hitting more. You're hitting the vault of your feet more, the heel of your feet more. And I just do a couple of things like this, right? At the end of the month, they're like,

all right, what's all this about them? So that's mindfulness training right there. All I did, I took you out of the moment, right? I took you out of your default mode network of automatic thinking and I had you think about right now, right? And it wasn't anything significant, wasn't anything profound, but I got you out of that. And then some people I'll have some people will be wearing watches that have stress scores on them. Some guys, I'll be doing ASIs during that time. And I can prove to them that, hey, your cortisol was actually lower. I actually proved that your stress was lower that week doing that.

And now I can get them to buy into something else. And so for me, I don't, again, I don't consider myself an expert in that world. I've trained with people who are smart on all of that, right? And I have trained to a level to where I can talk about it intelligently and help my patients guide through the basics of it. And then whatever kind of avenue they really like and they want to go down, I think that's the right avenue for you. It's like working out.

What's the best workout? The one you'll do, right? So what's the best mindfulness? Some people, it's some type of prayer. Some people, it's some type of exercise, right? It's like some type of meditative yoga flow or something. Some guys, it's breath work. Some guys, it's meditation.

I don't really care as long as you'll do it. Like, whatever it is you'll do. I like using, there's a few gadgets I really like. I like heart math for teenagers. Like for younger kids. Cool. They, they, for some reason, I don't really know why that is, but for some reason, like the kind of 14 to 20 year olds, they really dig the heart math. It's some kind of challenge for them that works.

Gamified? Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's because it's gamified, but they don't get to touch anything. It's just like, I'm playing a video game with my brain. And I would have thought that the muse would work really well with them too, but it doesn't really seem to. It seems like the muse works for a little bit older groups of people. So, kind of any gadgets like that, I'm a big, if you have trauma, if you know you have some super hypervigilance, some PTSD, a bunch of head injuries or something like that.

Like, I'm a huge advocate of get a stelic ganglion block. They're doing some, they're doing stellic ganglion blocks with lasers now. You can at least decrease a lot of that parasympathetic tone so that you have enough relaxation to learn a technique. Because when guys are just like super hypervigilent wired, you can't even, you can't even teach them a breathing. techniques. You can't teach them box breathing because they can't settle down that much. And then, of course, if somebody feels, obviously, if they feel like it's for them and then the right place and they're called to it, then I think psychedelics are an amazing tool to get people started on that. Hopefully you can get them started beforehand. But again, there's some people

who are so wired that there, I don't know if you saw the preprint. Actually, it's got to be published by now, but I haven't seen it come out. But there's a preprint study where they did. functional MRIs after it's one of the big three i want to i want to say it was ibegame but it could have been iwaska but it's either psilocybin ibrahimine or iwaxia but i think it was ibigan but they showed a decrease of amygdala activity of 90 percent damn 90 percent and that was either two or three days after the treatment like after the journey and so when you take somebody like a law enforcement first responder or military veteran or like somebody who's just been through some terrible shit or has a bunch of brain injuries and they have that hypervigilance their brains their brains are so

wired i don't know if you've taught that or been in courses with guys like that but you can watch the fact that they can't even they can't even focus enough on what you're saying to come anywhere close to doing the technique that you're trying to teach them and that just frustrates them and angers them It makes them not want to do it. And so anything that I can do to settle somebody down before I get them in it, if they're like that, which a lot, like the majority of the seals that I work with are that way. Even if they're open to the idea, they're still just too wired for it. So I'll try to do something to settle them down first. And then, like I say, whatever you'll do is the one that I think is the best for you.

I like that. That is akin to the strength and conditioning or anything else for that matter. But that's cool with the study with Ibegain or one of the big three, just due to the fact that like a lot of yogis and spiritual people, People will say, oh, you can, don't use the cheat code. That's your biohacker version for meditation. And all it takes is meditation. And it was always in you the whole time and all that. And I had learned about meditation through my parents, but had never had any success in doing it.

Right. Nor did I even feel called to it. And I think it was my third and fourth and fifth ayahuasca journeys is one a year or one a month, right? So three months back to back where I just kept getting the hit. I needed a yoga to open my body. I needed to learn how to meditate. Yeah. And it happened second ceremony.

Oh, cool. I remember you told me that last time. Yeah. And it was like, third one, okay, cool. And it was like, oh, I keep getting the same information because I haven't actually integrated any of this. Right. And then I started.

It's cool because Czech talks about the pain teacher, right? The pain teacher will knock at the door, give you a whisper, and then eventually break the door down if you're not listening. And so I had a fight camp in 2012 to fight Jimmy Manow on England. And I actually broke my neck in a scooter accident going to 45, swan dive, 45 miles an hour, road rash. I didn't realize my neck was broken. I had a great doctor.

She was like, listen, you only have so many resources to heal. You can keep training if you think your cardio is going to plummet, but it won't. Just you're already in shape, visualize, and meditate every day to get your skin to heel so you don't go across the pond with an open gash and get something serious. Yeah. How's your life been lately? It feels like mine is a never-ending hustle. The constant juggling of responsibilities, the endless to-do list.

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I like it as a drink. I like it as a capsule. This is a must have in your supplement pantry. All right, back to the show. I had now the physical impotence, and I had already gone through those journeys. Yeah. And that whole camp, I meditated every day poorly, but I started to touch those places. that they speak of.

And now I've been drawn to it. I have had the fortune of working with Emily Fletcher. And then... Oh, she's cool. She's great. I really like her. And Savage and Saint. Michael, I always forget his last name.

Michael, I'll figure it out. At Savage and St. on Instagram, if you want to get a hold of him. He's been one of my favorites. He worked with Dustin DiPerna and a lot of those guys, Dan Brown. And just in the way he communicates, like he talks about the three-pointed objects. Like, you have a focal point, right? And it's something I got wrong in the past was like, just trying to let go complete. and surrender and if the thing comes up you either mantra out of it or you just gently see it go away and this is like yes you can use that but you can also look at observe this three pointed object of the inhale the exhale and the in between inhale exhale in between and the more I would bring my focus to that the deeper and deeper I would go in meditation and then I started getting fucking super cool blissed out wow this is what they're talking about but it took that other avenue for me to even entertain the idea of it and to want that I'm sure to some extent we're

working with those medicines also helped get me out of the amygdala, get me out of the default mode network showing me like different pathways are opened up. The neuroplasticity shifted some of the things that I was used to, right, so I could access those things. Yeah, you have to have neuroplasticity to learn how to meditate. That's why it's great to learn when you're young, right? I tell people all the times, hey, I'm not a grumpy old man because I'm 55 years old. I'm a grumpy old man because my brain's been doing the same thing for 55 years and it thinks like this is the right way to do it. And there's just really deep track, right? This wagon will track. it's just this is the right way to do it. This is the right way to do it. This is the right way to do it.

And getting out of that is super hard, the older you get, right? And so the neuroplasticity, if you're going to try to think of it, think in a totally different way than you ever have, that by definition, you need neuroplasticity for that. And most people are never even exposed to meditation until they're much older. And I, like you, I tried to learn Transcendental Meditation freaking a dozen times. And my attention span for it was about 13 seconds or something. And then I was like off and oh yeah bring myself back bring me and it was the most it at least felt like the most useless activity in the world to me and then I did ayahuasca and I did it the first psychedelic thing and his first drug I'd ever used in my life honestly and I and we did it three nights in a row

and it was horrible and I had a miserable experience all three nights and it was a total hot mess but after that I could meditate like the next day I could meditate no problem and I got And I was really good at it. And I got to the point where I had to settle myself down on it or I could just sit. I could sit out on my back patio and never do anything all day. And just like complete, just complete, I don't know, blissful lost experience. Yeah. And I had another point about that.

But I've lost it. So I don't know. I love that. Yeah. The dissolve is a really cool thing to experience. Oh, oh, I know. Is it going to say. After I started really feeling like I could do that, I heard about the book, my big toe.

I've heard of it. No, no, no. I'm not familiar with it. I think it's a 2,000 page book. It's ridiculous. It's written by a theoretical physicist. And he was really early in the meditation scene and he's done the technical science of a bit of it. Anyway, it's just fascinating book about meditation. And when you said something, it reminded me of something. The one thing out of the however many hundreds of hours it took me to get through that, the one thing that I remember the most was he said, meditation is putting your body to sleep and keeping your mind awake and once i started focusing on that for any type of mindfulness work i'm doing i'm like okay that made me realize how much i'm in my body

and i'm sure you are too or like athletic people like people who've done you're so caught up in your body you just don't realize how much tension you're holding and how much like how much all of that is distracting you and you don't you just can't you simply can't be conscious of it this is the A thousand background apps all running, taking juice from you. And once I started learning that, and I would find myself, every time I was drifting, I would be like, okay, what's awake, what part of my body is awake? And that would be, okay, let's get rid of that, let's get rid of that, let's get rid of that. And then eventually, it's almost like the psychedelic experience of, I'm going to actually just leave this body.

I'm just going to leave that right there, and I'm going to fly around. I'm going to go somewhere else and have a true expanded consciousness or whatever. And I think that, once I get good enough to be able to do that, a regular, reliable basis. That was far more impactful than psychedelics were to me. But I would have never been able to do that without the psychedelics. And I think the point of all that was, I think, the neuroplasticity from, we know the neuroplasticity from ayahuasca last three to six months.

Cilocybin's somewhere on 45 days. But I began to last a few years. Wow. Nine to 12 months of enhanced neuroplasticity and enhanced stem cells, decreased amygdilatone. So less anxiety, a better functioning brain. able to form new synapses earlier it's like that's the ideal environment to figure out how to be a better version of yourself but obviously you have to actually do something

yeah yeah can't be a guy taking a shot of testosterone and having a 12 pack every night yeah that's it yeah that's the way some people approach it man and then they those are the guys do it in again again it's like calling it hey i need to do ibegan again you don't no you don't no you don't yeah you probably need to do i begin once that's a if you do what you should I think, yeah, maybe twice, but yeah. Brother, it's been awesome having you on. I'm so happy this worked out, timing-wise. Yeah, yeah, fortuitous, man.

Like, one of those magical coincidences. I haven't been back here since June. Oh, shit. And you text me like, all my drive here, I'm like, as it happens, yeah, I'll be here. Super cool. Yeah. Where can people find you online? We'll link to everything, the show notes, and sleep cocktail.

Yeah. It's Sleep Remedy now. Sleep Remedy. Yeah. Yeah, so sleep remedy. dot com is actually embedded on to doc parsley.com too so doc short for doctor if you're in the military like everybody with medical training in the military is a doc whether you have two weeks of training or 20 years of training your doc and then partially like they're doc parsley.com

blogs on there my podcast will be listed on there my videos ted talks media appearances all that stuff's on there cool do you do anything on social media anymore after all the 2020 bullshit you back on yeah i got back on twitter once once Elon bought it, just magically got an email one day. It said, we've reviewed your, they said, we've reviewed your complaint or something like that. I was like, I never said anything. I knew I was, I knew I was Ben. But I never, I just never really got back into the groove of Twitter.

It just, it's a little, it's a little caustic to me. It just seems like nobody talks to each other that way, like in real life. No human beings in the real world talk to each other that way. And it's, it's just too ugly for me. So I don't really do that one. I'm really active on Instagram. I have a social media guy who does a good job of catching me in good moments and putting it out there in a useful way and making things sing.

Yeah, Instagram and Facebook is the primary ones. And all that's on my site, too. I'm on LinkedIn and stuff like that too, but most of myself on Instagram. Awesome, brother. We'll link to all that. Dude, it's been a blast having you on. I hope you've been a great trip while you're in town. Yeah, I mean, it's great having, great seeing you again, brother.

Thank you, man.