How Lifestyle Medicine Can Reverse Aging & Stress | Dr. Kirk Parsley DSH #1153

Yeah, it's a total mess.

Oh my gosh.

I think this...

We do some good things, but maybe it's a good idea.

Yeah, it saved my life.

I had pneumonia once.

I can say Western medicine did save my life.

They're great for that.

We're great at infectious disease, like severe infectious,

great at trauma.

But everything else.

Yeah, you probably want to

take care of yourself.

All right, guys, Dr.

Kirk Parsley here.

Today, we're going to

talk Navy SEALs, talk peptides, and a bunch of fun health stuff.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me, man.

Absolutely.

We were talking out there.

I was just so fascinated that the SEALs are dealing with some major issues.

Yeah.

You know,

a lot of people just think military guys are young and indestructible and they can just keep going forever.

It's like

any other

organization,

it takes years to get really good at it.

You know, to get really, to be proficient, to be a leader, to be able to

plan and lead missions and things.

You know, you're looking at a decade or more to be in there, which is a lot of training and a lot of deployments and a lot of battle and a lot of injuries and a lot of sleep deprivation and

a lot of

psychological trauma,

for lack of a better word, and all that stuff.

And it pays,

it costs,

it weighs on the individual.

And they they are very strong, very resilient, very capable men,

but they're not indestructible.

And they do start breaking down and their performance does start to decline for reasons that are by and large repairable.

But

you want to talk about

a stilted, overly conservative medical

organization, nothing to worse than military medicine.

I mean, they're just

very

staunchy, old, old school kind of,

you know,

anything, anything that, anything that our troops have to have disqualifies them.

Because if they have to have a medication, well, then you can't deploy them because what if they don't have their medication?

So it's a tough battle.

And there's a lot of political stuff in there that upsets people too, because

like technically when

when

somebody wants to do transgender, whatever, and they need hormones, those people are considered okay and deployable but if a seal needs hormones to be not above normal but just to be like high in the like in the high reference range of where what his age group should be yeah the upper the upper say 25% of that range if you need you know or if you just want to take them out of the tank like I see a lot of guys who you know they're only in the normal range by one point out of like a 800 point range right so they're one point into it but you can't but that's normal uh And

you can't give them hormones, even though

it's much different than what people think of when they think of cheating in sports.

Like cheating in sports, like a high end of normal would be 1,100.

Somebody who's cheating in sports is probably going to be like 1,500 or 2,000 or something.

They're going outside to be superhuman.

It's like, no, we just want to get them up to the 900 range, right?

To be in the high normal, which they had, you know, five years ago or 10 years ago.

There's no logic to saying that that's dangerous, right?

I mean, if you're just putting somebody back to where they were when they were younger.

So it's

a lot of politics.

I don't know if you heard about

a whole drama a couple of years ago with

a SEAL trainee or budget trainee, not a SEAL yet.

He'd gone through hell week and then he died

the night of recovery.

And

they were just trying to they were trying to burn the officer in charge of that command as though it was something that he had done wrong.

And fortunately he went on Sean Ryan's podcast and

that podcast caused enough attention to it where they reversed everything.

And they're really going after this guy and the doctor who is a friend of mine.

And this kid was abusing drugs, man.

He's abusing.

you know, testosterone and growth hormone and all sorts of peptides and who knows what what else.

And it was all, you know, it was all bootleg illegal stuff.

Yeah.

You know, he wasn't getting treated by a doctor.

He was just doing all this on his own.

And that's resulted in Seals now being WATA tested, which is like the strictest

governing board.

So I don't know if they can get randomly tested like WATA athletes, but they can, but they have to meet that same criteria, which is crazy.

There's like caffeine limits.

I mean, there's all sorts of, like they can't take over the

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Downer D-H-E-A, which is a supplement anybody in America can go buy.

That's a longevity supplement, right?

Yeah, I mean, and SEALs can't go buy that, you know, right?

They can't go buy that and take that now because of,

you know, political reasons.

So, yeah,

this is mind-blowing to me because when I think of a SEAL, I think of someone who's high testosterone, super healthy.

But we were just talking out there, and you're saying some of these guys' levels are super low.

Yeah, I mean,

so I was the doctor there for

about three years, a little over three years.

And of course, it's self-selection bias, right?

But

the guys who came to see me, I'd say the average guy was probably early 30s

and had

not just testosterone, but the full anabolic profile.

So like growth hormone, testosterone, DHEA,

IGF-1, like all of kind of the markers for anabolic activity,

they'd have about the same level of like what a fat 50-year-old, fat 60-year-old man would have.

Wow.

And they're like six-pack ripped, you know, great shape, 32 years old, 30 years old.

Yeah.

Saw that all the time.

And that has to do with the head injuries of the job.

It has to do with the sleep deprivation, use of sleep drugs, use of alcohol for sleep and all that.

So that's kind of like, that's kind of what got me into the career that I do now.

Yeah, and that was the first problem you tackled, the sleep, right?

The sleep, yeah.

So,

you know, the guys were coming to my office and SEALs don't, SEALs don't trust doctors because the doctor, like a doctor can put you on the bench.

He's the most likely person to put you on the bench.

And the worst thing you can do to a SEAL is put him on the bench, right?

That's, that's not just his job.

It's his identity.

It's his, it's his community.

It's, it's everything.

Like, seals are SEALs, like first and foremost.

And that's all we are when we're SEALs.

It's like, that's it.

We're SEALs.

And we might be a SEAL who's also married, but we're a SEAL first, right?

And that's the way it goes.

And so they don't want to be put on the bench.

So they don't trust their doctors with their problems.

And a lot of times they'll go out into town and they'll spend money out of their pockets to have a doctor outside of the military treat them to help with them.

So they'll hide their injuries and everything.

And so

because I'd been a SEAL and I'd been a a SEAL recently enough to where there were a lot of SEALs there that I had trained with and deployed with and stuff, the guys trusted me and they would come in and close the door and go, hey, man, let me tell you what's really going on with me.

And really, if you just think of

what a kind of fat, pre-diabetic

55, 65-year-old man would come and tell you, that's what these guys were telling me.

And I had no idea.

I was like,

I don't know, but I'll help.

We'll figure it out together.

Right.

And so I just,

the good thing was the SEALs, like when I was a SEAL, nobody knew what a SEAL was.

So it wouldn't have been helpful.

Movies hadn't come out yet.

The movies and bin Laden and all that stuff.

Like none of that happened.

But when I was treating these guys, they already kind of had this celebrity status.

And so if I saw somebody's TED Talk or heard them lecture or read their book, I call them and be, hey, I'm the doctor for the West Coast SEALs.

Can I consult with you, run patients by you?

Can I, you know, whatever, come train with you.

And every single guy we, that I talked to was like, sure, I'd love to help.

Nobody ever charged me for mentorship, and I just got to learn a whole, whole new way of treating people.

You know, it took me out of like sick disease care to, into

this performance optimization world is what I call it.

Right.

Like taking people who are.

you know, relatively healthy compared to the general population.

And SEAL is, of course, exceptionally healthy compared to the general population.

But

there's a delta between what you're capable of, what you know you're capable of, and what you can actually do at this moment.

And

how do we close that delta?

And it's a lot of the same stuff that a longevity doctor would do, but

I don't know how long you're going to live.

So I can't really promise you longevity.

You could work with me and die tomorrow.

You could work with me and not die till you're 90.

Maybe you're going to live to 95.

If you didn't work with me, I don't know.

So

I'm not comfortable with saying longevity, but it's a lot of the same stuff.

Yeah.

You're basically improving their numbers.

Yeah, I mean, the way I look at it is if I can make my goal is basically as I take your lab, but everything that I know how to measure,

and now there's all kinds of wearables and there's all sorts of stuff that we, there's genetics, you know, epigenetics, there's all kinds of things we can test now that I couldn't do then.

Everything that I know how to measure and everything I know how to have impact on,

I know what a 25-year-old, healthy athletic man looks like, right?

If we use that as the baseline and we say, hey, I want all your metrics to look like, if I gave your packet to a colleague of mine and said, who do you think this is?

They'd say a fit 25-year-old athletic man, right?

Which means

you have the most potential at that point, right?

You're the most resilient.

As far as what we can measure, your capability of being strong, your capability of being enduring, your capability of handling injury and recovering from disease,

which is essentially youth, right?

What's the difference between a kid who falls down the stairs and an 80-year-old who falls down the stairs?

What resources do you have to recover from that?

Well, when you're 80, not many, and that's why a lot of people die, right?

When you're a kid, it's like, oh, you're metabolically healthy, strong, your hormones are up,

your healing is super fast and all.

And you're just more pliable, more athletic, whatever.

And so a little kid can recover from something that an older person can't.

And really what

being older older means in the sense that we don't like aging, you know,

is that we have fewer resources and

we're more vulnerable to disease or more vulnerable to death or more vulnerable to any kind of serious injury doing the same thing.

And so if I can make you stronger and faster and more enduring and

you can choose what you want to be good at, this could be all like you could, like some of my clients, you know, they focus 100% on cognition, right?

They just want to be smarter.

They want to want their brains to be better.

They want to be able to, like they're big CEOs or something, they want to be smarter in the boardroom or better entrepreneurs, whatever.

You can drive it wherever you want to, but we know what metabolically and physiologically healthy looks like.

And that's what I shoot for.

And if I'm keeping you physiologically healthy and you're 60 and

your markers look like that of a 25-year-old, I would have to guess that I'm probably extending your life, right?

If we can do this for the rest of your life and the whole health span idea that

you're just healthy and healthy and then you just die one day instead of this constant decline, the slow trickle down from 50 down to 85 where you're just getting worse and worse and worse.

We just try to cut that off, like make that a square where you just fall off a cliff one day.

Yeah.

Hopefully.

But time will tell.

I can't say that's true yet because I've only been doing it for 20 years.

Yeah.

You'll probably need another 40, 60 years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you focus mainly on the physical side or do you do any of the trauma work, the mental side?

I work with all of it.

uh like i'm not a i'm not a therapist or psychotherapist or anything like that um i mean i i'll i'll talk to the patients to the limit of my expertise um but i i work with like i i work with experts on everything right so um

you know i i'll i'll send people there's people i trust that do kind of anything that you're interested in um you know breath work, yoga, meditation, kundalini yoga, mindfulness training.

I'll send people to that.

I have therapists, marital therapists, people that I refer to who I'm really familiar with their work and I can do maybe 30% of what they do and then they've got to pass them on if you get more complex than that.

Psychedelics,

I'll send people out to psychedelics.

Have you seen success with that route?

Amazing.

Really?

Amazing.

Oh, wow.

Psychedelics were a big surprise to me.

Yeah.

Big surprise to me.

You know, I grew up in rural Texas, very,

very rednecked.

Like we do think of just like, you know, beer was the only good drug in the world.

And

I didn't like anybody who did any kind of drugs.

And I always thought that psychedelics, it's just, that's just a hippie excuse, different way of getting high, right?

And that's what I thought it was.

And then I had a SEAL who had a, he had a really bad brain injury.

He was in a he's in a vehicle that had run over an IED and had blown up and it broke his neck.

He hadn't become a paraplegic or he wasn't, he wasn't paralyzed from it, but

by the grace of God, like

he had a ton of reason to be paralyzed, but he wasn't.

But he had, you know, just unrelenting headaches and psychological issues and pain issues and all kinds of stuff.

And so he was getting medboarded out of the military.

And he was on, you know, the typical cocktail.

They start with an antidepressant, they add something else, add another antidepressant.

Then they got to give you some Adderall to keep you awake during the day for the depressants they're giving you to get you asleep at night.

And

end up on antipsychotics and you know pain medications and the whole thing and I saw this play out a few dozen times when I was the doctor there guys would be on between 13 to 17 pharmaceuticals

and this one guy that I had was really really really bitter he was scary like the The only time I've really been scared is a doctor, and he came in my office every day because he didn't have a job.

He was just getting med-boarded out.

And he came to my office every day and sat in there for hours.

And

I literally thought he might murder suicide.

Cause he was so angry at the system that was taking his career away from him.

And then he got out and I didn't hear from him for about six months.

And then I ran into him again.

He was so transformed that I didn't recognize him.

Wow.

So he's a guy who'd been sitting in my office, you know, four or five days a week for six months.

So I know what he looks like.

I got a lot of experience with him.

And I sat this close to him for 20 minutes talking to him, could not figure out who he was.

And he finally said something and I was like, oh my God.

And I said his name and he's like, who'd you think I was?

I was like,

I don't know.

I still don't think you're that guy.

Like you look, you look, and I have pictures of him like before and after.

You can't tell the difference.

Like you cannot tell it's the same guy.

Did he lose a lot of weight?

He lost a bit of weight because the psychotropic drugs had put some weight on him.

But it wasn't huge.

I mean, he's a big guy.

He's bigger than me.

So I think he's probably like 280 or something in the teams.

He maybe got down to like 250 or something.

So he had lost some weights, but still a really big, really big guy.

But facial expression, the way he talked, his posture, I swear his eyes were dark brown or black when he came in my office and they're bright blue when I saw him.

And I was like, I don't believe this is the same guy.

And now he's super successful, like doing all kinds of amazing stuff in Hollywood.

He's the producer of,

I don't play video games, Call of Duty.

He's a producer?

He's a producer of that.

Oh, crap.

And like great dude.

He's comfortable with me telling the story.

And so I was like, what'd you do?

Like, what happened?

He said, well, I got out of the military and I threw all my meds in the trash.

And I got on a plane and I flew down to Peru and I lived with a shaman

in the Amazon jungle for 30 days.

nude for some reason.

I don't understand that part, but whatever.

So nude in the jungle for 30 days.

I think like he did kundalini yoga like eight hours a day.

And then I think, I want to say he said like every third night he did ayahuasca.

And I was like, all right, man, like

I'm sold.

Like, because nothing in medicine, we didn't have anything, right?

Neurology and psychiatry and psychology all combined couldn't do 5% of what the change I'd seen in him.

And it had only been six months.

And he had been treated for four or five years when he was sitting in my office, right?

So, and he was just getting worse.

So I was like, all right, well, well i'm i'll have an open mind about that um and then some doctors approached me um who were doing at an ibigang clinic down in mexico which is they call like the the father the grandfather of a psychedelic it's like the most harsh it's the most stern teachers like you aren't get you aren't escaping there's no not giving me unicorns and butterflies like this is gonna be a hard lesson um

and uh And I had a, I had a buddy who was just a guy

that I had gone through SEAL training with and been my friend my whole life and very similar to that guy I was telling you about and he was just at his he was at his wits end and I was like

let's go try this Ibogaine thing and amazing transformation amazing like I watched it because I was there with him yeah and then the next day when he got up I was like wow I cannot I cannot believe this is like he he became the 18 year old kid I met again you know like he just looked lighter he like his mood was totally different smiling for the first time and you know I don't remember the last time I'd seen him smile before that.

And,

you know, and it's not, you know, it's not a permanent change, but it gives you an opportunity to make permanent changes.

Right.

So

psychedelics increase something called neuroplasticity.

I'm sure you've heard of that, right?

So your ability to change the way you think about things.

Like I'm not a grumpy old man because of my age.

I'm a grumpy old man because my brain is like solidified and like this is the right way and that's the wrong way.

And like, right.

And that makes me grumpy because I think, well, no, it's this way.

Well, neuroplasticity would allow me to think of different things.

Well, maybe purple hair is okay.

Right.

Like, you know,

but

that's a simplistic part of it.

And then there's also

like,

are you familiar with the amygdala region of your brain?

So it's like the alarm center, right?

It tells you what to pay attention to and primarily dangerous things, right?

But also attractive of

whatever, right?

And so you think of any of the primal, you know, feeding, fighting, effing, right?

All of that.

So you could,

these regions kind of walnut size on each side of your brain and they, it determines what you pay attention to.

And that's the sympathetic nervous system.

You probably heard it.

Like, so it's the stress.

It's the fight or flight pathway.

When that, when that thing maxes out, that's when you're in fight or flight.

That's when all of your hormones shift and all that amazing stuff happens.

And of course, being in the military, being something like a SEAL, being a combat veteran, like all that stuff makes you more and more amygdala heavily, heavy, right?

And that's the hypervigilance you hear about people

always on that.

They're always looking for

always, yeah, always looking for threats.

Like, where's the threat coming from?

Everything's a threat.

Every facial expression, like, what, what was that eye twitch?

Like, is he right?

Is he doing something, right?

And it's almost a paranoia.

And

the publish hasn't, the paper hasn't been published yet, but a colleague of mine

had did the research, and they showed a decrease of amygdala activity, so we call it amygdalatone, a decrease of amygdalatone by about 90%.

Holy crap, from ibogaine?

Yeah.

Well, for all the psychedelics.

And then the difference is how long, how durable is that change?

So psilocybin does it, ayahuasca does it, ibogaine does it.

But psilocybin lasts a couple of months.

Ayahuasca lasts

six to nine months.

Ibogaine can last up to a year.

Damn.

As far as that decrease, now it's not 90% for a year, but it's like significantly decreased amygdalatone,

which allows you to drop your ego.

You have the neuroplasticity.

So you have the ability to change.

You have the insight of the experience to go, hey, maybe I should, maybe I should not think of that some way.

Maybe I should process this differently.

Maybe I should consider changing my approach to these things.

And it's the ego death that comes with these heroic journeys.

Get your ego out of the way.

Now I have less stress.

I have a brain that I can actually change and my ego is not getting in the way.

So if I do the work during that window of time that I have, I can change myself significantly.

Wow.

But if I just go do the psychedelic and then go back to my normal life, I'm going to be exactly the way I was.

Yeah, it's going to creep back up after a year.

Yeah, because I'm still thinking the same way.

I'm still processing the same way.

You know,

for anything you want in the world, for any outcome you want in the world, there's a specific way of acting, but there's also a specific way of thinking that brings that to you, right?

If you can't change it, like if you, if you don't have the ability, if you don't have the insight to change it, or

enough neuroplasticity, enough, you know,

good enough sleep, good enough recovery, good enough hormone profile, if you don't have that stuff, you can't make the change.

And so that gives you an opportunity, a big opportunity to do it.

Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's the most transformational thing that we have.

I don't administer it.

I have, you know, like I have colleagues that do, and I refer that out.

Yeah.

Uh, when when it's appropriate.

But

I had a super, super successful experience with a long COVID patient for that.

Really?

Psychedelics?

Yeah.

So

he's a

guy.

When I met him,

I want to say when I met him, he had been out of work for two years.

and showed no signs of being able to go back to work.

And he was, you know, he was seeing Peter McCullough in Dallas like the top COVID guy and he was doing all the right things.

And a lot, I mean, 90% of what I would have had him do.

The only thing I did is I worked with his hormones and I had him go do psychedelics.

And so I can't say it was 100% psychedelics, but he'll tell you that there was a huge shift in his,

because he had a lot of neuroinflammation.

And that's another thing that they're good for is they reduce neuroinflammation.

Interesting.

Yeah, because they made all the SEALs get the vaccine, right?

Yeah.

So that probably caused some long damage.

Yeah,

there's some problems with that.

And they were trying to kick some SEALs out for not taking the vaccine.

And fortunately,

they hung in the battle long enough for everything to reverse.

Yeah, shout out to those guys because they were facing a lot of pressure.

Yeah, a lot of pressure.

Yeah.

And a lot of expense.

And

yeah, and that's a...

And that's an exceptionally tight community, right?

So if you're going against

your community there, like you're going against yourself, really, you know?

Yeah.

So that was that was it took a lot of courage to do what they did wow i would have never thought psychedelics would help with something like long covet that's interesting yeah um that

i i'm not sure that it would always help but his i knew for sure that his specific issue was neuroinflammation and because it decreases inflammation in the brain i knew it would help him and hyperbaric helps with that too right hyperbaric is an amazing tool i mean i'm literally getting one from my house yeah they're expensive but

they are but they they're worth it uh and if you get a good one it'll literally last you your entire life, right?

And your whole family can use it, and your friends can use it, and you know, like people, you have friends that have surgery, you can have them come over, and you're like,

so uh, and they've they've come down a lot in the last five years.

You know, they've gone from over a hundred grand.

You can get it, you can get a good one now for 50.

Really?

The hard shot one, the hard one, yeah.

Oh, wow, yeah, when I was looking, they were like 100K.

OxyHealth, uh, OxyHealth has a 44-inch chamber that you sit upright in.

It's just kind of

like one of these chairs sitting there.

And

it's at least two ATA, but it might be two and a half.

And two atmospheres is about where you need to match most of the research.

And that has an oxygenator instead of having O2 bottles.

You only get like 93% oxygen, but

it's very.

It's almost certain that that's insignificantly different as far as what you're doing.

Because what's happening in hyperbarics is because of that pressure, because you have, you know, right now we have one atmosphere by definition sitting on top of us, right?

When I go to two atmospheres, I have twice that, right?

But it's not, you know, it's an exponential curve.

So when I have two atmospheres of pressure,

the volume that a certain amount of air or a certain amount of oxygen would take up is cut down to like a tenth, right?

So I have,

I can put 2,000% more oxygen to all of my tissues at two atmospheres.

Wow.

One, because I'm breathing 100% O2 or close to 100% O2.

Now, if you breathe 100% O2 right now, it doesn't do anything because your hemoglobin, like your red blood cells are the only place you can carry oxygen.

But when you go down in depth, when you increase that pressure and you have two atmospheres of pressure on you, you can crush those oxygen bubbles down small enough to where they dissolve in your plasma.

And then you have oxygen in your plasma that's going everywhere in your body.

And capillaries are the only place that red blood cells can exchange oxygen, whereas the oxygen and the plasma can leak out anywhere.

It can go all over your body.

And so you'll get, you get super oxygenation to all of your tissues.

And, you know, oxygen is what your mitochondria use, you know, to produce energy, to produce ATP.

So you basically increase the energy production of every single cell in your body.

Crazy.

Yeah, I had a TBI and I went to a place nearby.

They're great for TBI.

Yeah.

And yeah, I paid like 50 bucks a session or whatever and it went away, dude.

Yeah.

I just got my brain scanned.

It's completely gone now.

Isn't that crazy?

What's really crazy is that it works for TBIs.

They're like 10 years old.

Yeah, mine was old because I don't even remember getting mine.

Okay.

So I think it was from childhood or something.

So

there's a lot.

There's a pretty good acceptance in the medical community that it will work for what they call an acute injury.

So it's like you get in a car crash today.

They take you to a chamber.

About maybe

high end, high estimate, maybe 50% of the medical community would say, yeah, that's a good idea, smart use.

But if you told somebody to have a 10-year-old TBI, they'd be like, it's not going to help.

But it does.

Because when your brain's inflamed, it doesn't have anywhere to go, right?

Because your skull doesn't allow, like your brain can't swell.

I mean, it can swell a little bit, but then it just increases the pressure inside your skull.

And when you increase the pressure,

you know, you're fighting your blood pressure, basically, right?

And so then you get less perfusion to the brain.

You get less blood flow to the brain because you have pressure pushing on there and reducing, reducing the

ability of the blood to flow.

And that can last

for years, I mean decades.

And we don't, and it's pretty hard to measure without like cutting a hole in somebody's head.

And so,

but

when you, when you super oxygenate people with hyperbarics, 10, 20-year-old brain injuries, and all of a sudden,

you know, cognition changes, hormone production changes because all of your hormones are regulated by your brain.

Yeah, it's a game changer.

Yeah, so it's an absolute game changer.

And a lot of military guys have brain issues, right?

Almost all of them.

Wow.

Almost all of them.

Because of explosions.

Yeah.

So

when I first went through medical training,

this is remarkable how fast medicine changes.

When I first went through medical training, in order to have a TBI, right, traumatic brain injury, you had to be physically hit hit in the head and you had to lose consciousness.

So you take either one of those out and they said it wasn't a TBI.

Wow.

As an example,

my buddy who I was telling you I took to do Iby game,

he had a grenade go off at his feet and it came up here and some of it went through the palate of it, like through his soft palate and then through his hard palate into his brain.

So he actually has grenade material inside of his brain.

Holy crap.

But he never lost consciousness.

So when he was getting out of the military, his medical record said he didn't have a TBI.

And I was like, wait a second, what's more traumatic to the brain than having foreign material?

And

that's got to account for more than getting knocked out, right?

But,

you know, in 2010, I went through a medical conference

and there was a lot of things going on.

And

I...

I just saw this one lecture on TBI and I had one patient.

So I was focusing mainly on sleep when I first got to the SEAL teams because that was such a a big mover for everything that was going on with them.

But I had, and they'd sent me a guy from a combat zone, and they'd sent him home because he hadn't slept in a week.

He'd had an RPG hit right next to his head on a wall.

And it was enough of a blast where it caused

some disruption in his brain where he couldn't sleep.

And so I was like, oh, I have a TBI patient.

I'm going to go listen to what this guy has to say.

And he starts throwing up his case reports.

And he'd been working with

some pugilists, like MMA fighters, bare knuckle

boxers, and NFL guys.

And he starts throwing up his labs, the same labs that I'd been running on the SEALs,

identical patterns.

Wow.

And I was like, whoa, maybe I've missed this because I'm thinking it's all sleep.

And so I talked to him for a little bit afterwards.

I got some references.

I went home and started studying it.

And what they found was that you can get a mild TBI from the acceleration changes on a roller coaster.

Whoa.

So 1.09 Gs

was the minimal force to cause a mild, a very, very mild TBI.

And then

you keep going through the literature and they started talking about what they call this overpressurization injury.

So a hard room like this with these

very sturdy walls,

if we were in this room shooting M4s, right?

Every bullet that comes out is 35 Gs of blast force.

And

if you have four guys in this room and everybody's shooting multiple times and you do that multiple times a day, well, you're getting traumatic brain injuries because what some really brilliant guy did, and it was because of one of our SEALs who had suicided, he came up with this idea to test it.

He built a trans, a completely transparent skull out of some sort of epoxy, you know, that

simulated the density of a bone.

And he built a brain inside with all the layers with different materials to represent the different densities.

And then he fired off a blast and had high-speed photography on it.

And he could watch the blast wave, just like when you see a blast wave on television and all the trees move and the car sways and all the dust flies and all this well the brain moves the same way whoa but what happens is the brain every every different density moves at a different rate just like the car moves at a different rate than the leaves on the tree right so different densities move slower or faster and so it causes a shearing effect so like everywhere there's two different densities so like where the where the dural where the dural sac uh you know is laying across say blood vessels well that shears off because they're vibrating and they're moving at a different rate.

And then where the blood vessels meet, the gray matter and that shears off.

And then where the gray matter meets, the white, the white matter, or the white matter meets the gray matter, like, and that shears off.

And then where the vesicles meet.

And so

when we were doing autopsies on seals who were suicided, we found these plaques around their entire brain.

It didn't make any sense because usually it's like a TBI.

You have a

foci, like a focal point of where you've been hit.

Like football players will have it.

The CT is like right here and right here, depending on what side of the line they play or whatever, right?

And they were like, why is it all over the brain?

Well, it was, and that's what it was, is an interface of different density.

So every time it sheared.

And so we have,

and we have anti-tank weapons that are 200 Gs.

Holy crap.

So it's 200 G for the guy shooting it, 300 G for the guy spotting it.

Oh my gosh.

And you have,

you know, if you're in the back of a Humbee with a 50 cal shooting, it's like 65 Gs inside.

Like I said, the M4 is in a room, 30 to 35 Gs for every time you're pulling,

every time you're pulling the trigger and you have four guys coming in the room and you move to the next room and you move to the next room, and you do that for 10 hours a day for

weeks and months.

And how many thousands of brain injuries do our guys have?

So

I do a lot of volunteer work now for SEALs who are getting out.

And the first thing, I just assume they have brain injury.

So I do all their labs.

Their hormones always suck.

Their inflammation is always high.

Their oxidation is always high.

Their insulin sensitivity sucks.

Their anabolic hormones are low.

Their catabolic hormones are high.

Same pattern I was seeing when I was the doctor there.

And I just automatically assume, well,

you have some brain injury stuff.

So

let's get the hormones in order, see how much corrects, and then we'll start slowly moving down the ladder of importance.

So

in an ideal world, I'd have like a fleet of chambers I could just drive around and drop off at guys' houses, you know, because a lot of guys live rurally.

And it's a big time commitment to do hyperbarics.

Yeah, it's like an hour.

Yeah, so it's an hour a day, five days a week.

If you got to drive 30 minutes or so to get there and change clothes or whatever, it's like, you're talking about your whole morning every day.

And

what we call a table eight, which is kind of like the standard treatment protocol, that's eight weeks.

So it's 40 chamber dives.

And so we have these guys who live, you know, they're not within five or six hours of a chamber.

Jeez.

And, you know, they live in some rural community.

So I've been trying to develop.

I've been trying to raise interest and money to just put chambers in trailers, like air-conditioned trailers, and just be able to drop them off.

That'd be smart if you could take them portable.

Yeah.

Drive around.

Yeah, and just drop it off there for a month or two and like teach them how to use it.

And then their whole family could use it.

Yeah, there's definitely a gap in the market because they're so expensive.

So most guys can't afford them.

But to rent one, there's not many.

Even in Vegas, there's a good amount here.

But if you live in like Perump or something.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's not even.

You'd be surprised at how many towns and cities don't have them.

Like one of my patients lives in Santa Fe.

They don't have one there?

No.

Closest chamber to him is three hours away.

Holy crap.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

I have a patient who's up in Maine who's like on the border of Canada.

Like he's, I don't know, probably 10 hours from a chamber.

Jeez.

You know, and he, you know, and he lives in

kind of like Ted Kaczynski kind of cabin, you know, up in the woods or whatever.

You know, it's like,

but he, he needs it in a bad way.

And

there's, there's very few things that I think are as powerful as hyperbarics.

Like hyperbarics, again, again surprisingly psychedelics are they're an amazing tool

I don't think you can I don't I don't know for sure.

Nobody knows yet.

We're still doing the research, but I don't think you can like Continue to use psychedelics and get the same benefit I think you know, there's one or two exposures is kind of most of the benefit you're gonna get and it's the work you do afterwards that matters But you have to be metabolically and physiologically healthy enough to do the work afterwards.

So if you just get that but your hormones are still sucked and you're metabolically broken, you don't have any energy, you can't stay awake, you're depressed, all the time it's like that's not really going to, it's not going to help you.

Yeah.

So

if

and then and I'd say the next thing are the peptides, you know, there's peptides that help.

Yeah.

Like something like cerebral lysin does a lot of the same things that psychedelics does, increases neuroplasticity.

You know, the hyperbarics grows new blood vessels in your brain or your whole body.

Something called angioneogenesis.

Hormone therapy does the same thing.

Some peptides can do the same thing.

The psychedelics help with that.

So there's a lot of things you can do to recover from brain injury, but

if you look at traditional medicine, they don't have a whole lot of answers for you, right?

Yeah, and it's nuts because I know so many veterans and none of them are aware of this brain injury.

Yeah.

Well,

I have a friend

who he ejected.

He ejected from a Navy jet, an F-22, I think.

He ejected at the speed of sound, pulling 4Gs.

Holy crap.

Zero survivability event until he did it.

So he's the only person to ever survive anything close to that.

And a huge, long trauma story.

I mean,

it goes on for years.

He actually got healthy enough to go back to flying jets.

Nobody even thought he would ever walk again.

They weren't even sure if he'd talk again.

The amount of brain injury he had.

And then he got back to flying jets and then started having a lot of cognitive issues.

Ended up in a psych ward against his will.

He warded the state

and on completely sedating psychotropic drugs.

And fortunately,

he had lawyers and doctors in the family that were able to get him out.

And

he went back home, but was still psychotic and still had tons of problems.

And psilocybin.

He had a buddy who had worked with, I think, the Warrior Foundation and said, hey, you should try the psilocybin thing.

And

the story I've heard a dozen times now, if if not more, he went and did psilocybin and he's never needed another psychotropic drug.

No, what?

Never had any hallucinations again, never had any psychotic issues.

He does ultra-marathons now and cross-the-country mountain bike races.

And he's written a book.

He goes around.

He's on the speaking circuit.

He'd be a great guest.

Yeah, I'd love to interview him.

Fascinating story.

I was riveted the first time I heard that story.

I was like, what?

What?

And then what?

And it's just unbelievable.

It has to be a movie one day.

It's the most inspiring thing you've ever heard in your life.

Yeah, that one hits deep with me because my dad was in a psych ward.

I think that whole system is terrible.

Oh, this is a terrible one.

I mean, he died shortly after.

You know, they put you on all sorts of medication.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, it's a terrible, and, and, and a lot of,

I won't say a lot of, but there's a substantial number of that's like medically induced.

Um,

it's classic.

People say

it's in the medical literatures.

A lot of stuff in medical schools just taught us fact, and you don't know.

Yeah.

You're trying to learn as much as you can.

You just repeat the fact and you say it's true.

One of the things you learn is that

for some reason, there's a significant number of people that come out of

like a cabbage, right?

Coronary artery bypass grafts of whatever, triple, double, triple, quadruple, whatever.

And they'll come out of it and they'll be bipolar or they'll be manic or they'll come out and have some kind of psychiatric disease that they've never had before.

Well, they're throwing clots up to the brain doing the surgery, you know.

Wow.

Because they're so long under.

But they don't get treated like they have clots.

They get treated like they have a psychiatric illness.

Holy crap.

And they end up in hospitals and stuff, too.

I did not know that.

That's super concerning.

Yeah.

Medicine's a mess.

It's a total mess.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

I think this.

We do some good things, but maybe it's not.

Yeah, it saved my life.

I had pneumonia once.

I can say Western medicine did save my life.

They're great for that.

We're great at infectious disease, like severe infectious disease, and we're great at trauma.

But everything else.

Yeah.

you probably want to take care of yourself.

Yeah, I mean, look what they're doing with peptides.

They're banning it.

Yeah.

Most psychedelics are banned.

Yeah.

We are making some headway with the psychedelics, actually.

Some friends of mine are really involved in the lobbying for that.

Nice.

Like, I don't want to say the battle's won, not by a long shot, but, but there is a lot more buy-in than

people would realize.

It's kind of quiet buy-in, but lots of congressmen and senators are like, yeah, yeah, like you should keep doing that.

And

we'll give you a a little approval or whatever.

You know, you can do a research grant on that.

So there's some buy-in on that.

And that is getting better.

But yeah, the peptides,

that's a whole big medicine

problem that everybody's heard of,

big pharma influence.

And then pharma influence is really tied to

pharmacy influence, right?

So

as an example, during COVID,

a few weeks into COVID,

a

really high-ranking officer in the Austin PD called me with COVID.

And all they had told this patient is get a pulse ox and go home.

And if your pulse ox gets below this, come back.

And it was not an acceptable answer.

I'm like, you know, we already had

this protocol

that...

you know, with the hydroxychloroquine and, you know,

butconide inhaling inhalments

you know there there's a whole series of there's a whole protocol out that was being adopted daily it was being adjusted daily by a team of doctors worldwide and it was the

yeah I don't want I'll I'll mess up the name but it was you know like that Simone Gold was associated with and all that group

I think it is four C's critical care something whatever

but that whole protocol I couldn't prescribe it because the pharmacies wouldn't let me.

Wow.

And I was like, you're a pharmacist.

Like,

you're not seeing the patient.

You don't have any idea what the patient's going through.

You have no idea what the patient's history is.

You have no idea.

Like,

you can't give hydroxychloroquine for COVID.

I'm like, why not?

I can give it for scleroderma.

I can give it for all kinds of other stuff.

No, you just can't do it for that.

Why?

And then that empowered them.

And then they started doing the same thing with ivermectin.

And then

I had a pharmacist a few months ago tell me that um

tell my patient that he was on too much testosterone

and then ask

me for the patient's labs to justify the testosterone level wow and i was giving him 120 milligrams of testosterone a week which is what the average person the average male makes in a week it was not high at all not even close to being high the pharmacist didn't know what they were talking about but i mean

We had to come to Jesus talk and that the pharmacist backed down, but like

the medicine medical system's broken.

Yeah.

Money's driving everything.

Like the money and money and bureaucratic influence is driving everything and not the patient care, not the doctors either.

Yeah, I kind of feel bad for the doctors because they want the best.

Of course.

Like doctors don't, you know, doctors aren't into this to screw their patients over and get sick.

Like they want, they want to, nothing makes the doctor feel better than solving their patient's problem.

Right.

Like you come to me with a problem and I help you solve it.

And like you walk, you're like, I'm totally fixed.

I did my job.

Like I'm happy about this.

Right.

I'm not going to be like, oh, well, secretly, I'm only going to give him half the solution so that he keeps buying medicine from me.

Like I don't make money off of pharmaceuticals anyways.

That's illegal.

So,

you know,

but yeah, it's, it's a broken system.

Yeah, it's a tough system.

It's a very, very broken system.

Unfortunately, I don't really play within it.

Like, I don't, you know, I don't really do disease care, so it's not a big issue for me.

Yeah.

But them banning, you know,

the peptides.

You know, the peptides have been, most of these peptides have been around 50, 60 years.

They're used in other countries.

There's a lot of research on them.

But it's competing with drugs.

And they're like, yeah,

we don't want you to do that.

And so,

you know, the really,

you get one pharmacy that's really good at

really good at making

the right varieties.

They have good quality control, good product.

And doctors like me will flood to them and start ordering them.

And then they grow and they're super successful.

And the FDA comes and shuts them down.

And then they do it over and over and over again.

And then about nine nine months ago now, the FDA just said, all of these peptides are banned.

And it was the vast majority of the peptides I use.

Crazy.

Like 80% of the peptides I use.

I thought that was just a Cali.

Was that the whole country?

Whole country.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's nuts.

But RFK put out a tweet

the day after he got announced, whatever that position is being called, that he's going to.

And he's, and it's one of the first things he listed.

He said, I'm going to, I'm going to work on hormones, peptides, hyperbaric stem cells.

something else, like all the stuff that I have trouble with, and all the stuff that are like, you know, the primary movers of microbiology.

Yeah.

Psychedelics, you mentioned psychedelics.

That's huge.

Yeah, even stem cells.

You got to fly to like.

Yeah, you got to go out and

it makes no sense what's going on.

Because they're not as strong here, right?

Well,

they don't let people do them here.

Yeah.

So you can't harvest them from the same sources.

Crazy.

And then they'll raid a raw dairy farm.

Yeah.

These core farmers.

Go kill the squirrel.

Like the stuff they do.

I had that guy on the show actually.

Oh, Oh, did you?

The squirrel guy, yeah.

That is such a crazy story.

That's such a crazy story.

Yeah.

Saturday Night Life couldn't write something that stupid.

You know, like you can't parody it anymore.

It's like the reality is more ridiculous than the parody of it.

Yeah.

I mean, he literally had an animal sanctuary, was having kids come and making their day.

Yeah, I've read all about it.

I saw a few videos he did.

I'm like,

I mean, that was a pure power trip.

It's nice.

Their story is just dumb, too.

It's like,

oh, what was their story that it bit one of, it bit one of

the people and they had to put it down to see if it had rabies or something?

It's like, all right, first of all, if you're in animal control, you should have had gloves on handling the story, right?

I mean, come on.

You know, you did.

You know, they did.

And it probably didn't bite them anyway.

No, no shot.

And they just said, ah, and you don't have to kill it.

Like, if you, if you can control it and you put it in a cage, you can observe it for 10 days.

Yeah.

So it's like, it was all.

The poor raccoon they killed for no reason, too.

That's insane.

Messed up, man.

Well, dude, what's next for you?

It's been really, really interesting talking to you.

I didn't know all this was going on, so thanks for coming on.

Yeah,

my pleasure, man.

Well, what's next for me is just more of the same.

Like I said, I spend most of my time working with veterans,

primarily SEALs, but

I work with some other veterans.

I have my private clients that really pay the bills.

But

all the same stuff.

I don't know that it's scalable.

What I do isn't really all that scalable.

But

the message I'm always really trying to get out is that

most of health is lifestyle.

And so I sometimes call what I do lifestyle medicine because I work with, sleep's a huge one.

That's the whole reason.

I had any success with the SEALs is because one of the first things I noticed was their sleep problems.

And of course, course, their seals,

they don't complain about, so they never complained about sleep.

They came in and they told me all their problems.

They never complained about their sleep.

But it just hit me how many of them were taking ambiene.

And I'm like, why are you all taking ambien?

I'm like, well, you know, they just give us this.

And then you start questioning them.

And then they'll tell you, oh, yeah, like, I don't really sleep.

I take two to three times the recommended dosage of ambien because I've been taking it so long.

I chase that with a few cocktails.

And then I go to sleep and I wake up at like 3.30 in the morning.

I can't go back to sleep.

And I go, well, well, I'm going to go to the gym, work out really hard, not take a nap today,

push it till bedtime and I'll sleep well at night.

And they've been doing that for five or six years.

Hasn't worked yet.

It's like probably not going to work.

We probably need to do something else.

And so, you know, when I learned enough about,

I didn't have any classes on sleep in medical school.

I knew nothing about sleep that the CILS didn't know.

But when I educated myself on it and figured out what's going on and how the hormones are regulated while you're asleep and how that's where you get stronger, that's where you get faster.

That's where your memories are formed that's where you emotionally categorize like all this amazing stuff happening during the sleep that could explain all of their symptoms if their sleep wasn't quality so i said i got to get them off of ambien and that's why we came up with that the the sleep supplement that we have is it's like the seals helped me to

you know

develop that because i i didn't know i didn't know anything about supplements and so i just had them go i just did research like hey what helps with sleep and why and so we just put it all together piece by piece and figured out how much to take of everything and took us about six months And then all the cells used that to get off of Ambien.

And just getting off of Ambien and improving their sleep and taking just some daytime supplements that they had already been taking triple, quadruple their testosterone.

Wow.

Decrease their inflammation by an order of magnitude.

Decrease their oxidation.

So sleep is huge.

I used to say there's four pillars.

Sleep, exercise, nutrition, and then stress mitigation.

Now I say there's exercise, nutrition, stress mitigation.

Sits on the platform of sleep.

Wow, it's number one.

Because if you don't do sleep, you can't do the other ones.

Like, you know, what you eat changes.

Like what your body does with the food you eat changes with how well you sleep.

So if you get a, if you get a terrible night's sleep, what your body will do the exact same thing, you eat the exact same thing two days in a row, but you sleep badly, sleep poorly one night, sleep well the other night.

What your body does with it, as far as like, does it preferentially store it as fat?

Does it use it as energy?

It's called fuel partitioning.

Like where does it put the calories?

That changes what you crave, how hungry you are, how much you will eat, your brain's registration of whether or not you're full when you're eating.

All of that's determined by sleep.

And so

if you don't get good sleep, it's really hard to control your nutrition, right?

Because your brain thinks you're starving.

The only animal on the planet that sleep deprives itself is humans on purpose, right?

Every other animal will only sleep deprives themselves if they're being stalked.

like if it's they're worried about being prey or if they're starving and they need to wake up earlier to to be able to travel further and look for food.

And so evolutionarily, our brains believe that we're starving or we're being stalked.

And so we sleep deprive ourselves.

Our bodies in the next days, when we wake up, our body's like, oh, well, we must, our brain and body are like, well, we must be in some sort of danger.

And so we're going to store fat like we're in famine.

And we want to get as much blood glucose as possible to keep our brains going because we're obviously starving.

And so you're going to crave sugar and fat.

And that's where the donut comes from, I'd say.

Yeah, and then, you know, if and then, of course, when you exercise, you get weaker, right?

You go to the gym.

If you go to the gym, you do anything worth doing.

You come out of the gym weaker than you went into the gym.

When you sleep,

your body uses what you did in the gym as the template for what you need to be better at tomorrow.

And it repairs you in a way to where you could do the same work tomorrow that you did today with a little less damage to yourselves.

And that's how you get progressively stronger.

That's how you get progressively more enduring.

So if you don't sleep well, you don't recover well, exercising the next day is a waste of time because you didn't recover from yesterday.

You're going to exercise again today, and then you know, even if you get a good night's sleep now, it's not enough time to recover from two days of exercise, right?

And then, the stress mitigation,

you know, controlling your stress is the key to all health and longevity.

Like, that like that is imperative.

But,

you know, it takes eight hours to recover, recover from being awake for 18 hours, right?

16 hours.

16 hours, sorry.

So you're awake for 16 hours, it takes eight hours to recover.

So you have to repair and then prepare.

You have to like restock all the nutrients, restock the shelves, so to speak.

And that takes eight hours.

If you choose six instead of eight, because you want to get up early and get after it and be the winner,

well,

you didn't complete the process.

You didn't repair and prepare 100%.

Tomorrow shell comes at exactly the same time.

What do you do?

Your body compensates by releasing stress hormones.

And stress hormones are what break you down.

Stress hormones are catabolic.

Stress hormones are what age you.

If you could go to sleep and repair and repair and prepare 100% every night, you'd never age.

You'd wake up exactly the same every day, right?

So to the extent you can't recover, that's aging.

So you're choosing to age faster.

But the point is, If I sleep six hours tonight instead of eight hours, my body's going to compensate in the morning by releasing more cortisol, more epinephrine, more norepinephrine, more stress hormones, which are catabolic.

They're aging me.

They're breaking me down.

And then I'm going to have a hard time sleeping tonight because I'm going to have too high of stress hormones.

And so that's, and so when I say stress mitigation, it's something like meditation, breath work, prayer, progressive muscle relaxation, certain types of yoga, Tai Chi, like those things lower your stress hormones.

Well, if you wake up with 30% higher stress hormones and you do your stress mitigation techniques today, all you're doing is getting back down to where you would have been if you wouldn't have cut yourself out of sleep, right?

You aren't doing yourself any favor.

So that's why I say sleep is the foundation for all this and you have to do that.

And

all the stuff that I use, and we've touched on maybe 25% of the tools I use, but the most powerful thing I have is

like this simple little worksheet to help people get stress out of their sleep.

Because everybody,

if you sleep poorly in a Western country, it's almost certainly because of stress.

Wow.

And And it's like this simple little

form you fill out.

I'll link it in the video.

Yeah,

a couple of little alarm clock tricks and a little bit of psychological coaching of yourself.

Practice that for three or four weeks.

You'll never have a problem sleeping again.

Yeah.

I know when I was younger, I could get away with five, six hours, but as I get older, I feel like you're not.

Yeah, you're so resilient when you're young.

And your body responds so well to stress hormones, right?

So stress hormones actually make you feel good, which is why to an extent, like if you think of fight or flight,

like you almost get in a car crash, you get in a fist fight or something like that.

You're in fight or flight.

You're like in the survival mode.

You're not going to fall asleep.

Like you're not going to quit paying attention to stuff, right?

You're going to be super alert.

You're strong.

You're fast.

Your reflexes are great.

Like you feel great.

Like you might be stressed, but you feel physically great.

You feel very capable.

So if you're using stress hormones to compensate for poor sleep, you wake up feeling pretty pretty good, especially when you're young and your body responds well to them and you can handle the stress hormones.

But when you do that chronically, then chronically elevate your stress hormones like that will actually age you faster and

make you sicker, decrease your immune function, decrease cardiac function, all sorts of bad stuff happens from it.

So that's why people will say,

you know, I feel great after five hours of sleep.

Because you're running around with stress hormones.

Yeah, get the stress hormones up terrible.

Yeah, that that makes sense, man.

Well, we'll link the quiz below on your website.

Anything else you want to link?

No, that's good.

That's good.

Cool.

Thanks for hopping on, man.

That was fun.

We'll have to do a part too, for sure.

Yeah.

Hold your sports.

Thanks coming on, man.

See you guys.