Conversations with the Capones — Full Transcript

Dr. Kirk Parsley on the Origin of VETS, Ibogaine, and Operator Syndrome

Hosts: Marcus & Amber Capone  |  Guest: Dr. Kirk Parsley, Founder of Sleep Remedy

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Towards the end of the meeting, the doctors told me there’s also some evidence it could be helpful for PTSD. It’s been my postulate for a long time that the vast majority of PTSD is actually traumatic brain injury, that the syndrome is simply the culmination of symptoms that come from having a dysfunctional brain that’s been beaten around and jiggled around and all that other stuff.

Marcus Capone

Today on our show, we’re having Dr. Kirk Parsley of Kirk Parsley’s Sleep Remedy. Kirk and I go way back. Kirk is also a former Navy SEAL. Kirk, I’ll let you tell your story, but sleep 

Amber Capone

Expert.

Marcus Capone

Yeah, friend.

Amber Capone

Father, doctor, teammate, so many things, and such a huge part of the VETS story, a story that probably many people don’t know. In launching this show, whatever it turns out to be, Marcus and I really want to honor and recognize those who were core to the mission. Having you on, Sarah Wilkinson, Mikal Vega, I’m sure will be a guest down the road, it’s such an honor.

Marcus Capone

Well, I appreciate being here.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

I’m happy to be a part of it. What you two have done is amazing. You’ve brought a level of professionalism and credibility to this that has thus far eluded this industry, and I think y’all are going to end up being responsible for saving a lot of lives, a lot of families, and a lot of heartache and suffering in general.

Amber Capone

Thank you. Well, you’re such a huge part of this, and of course, we have a mutual friend who was another huge piece of this puzzle. He’s asked us not to share his story or his identity, and we’ve always respected that, but I want to honor him too, and his family, for the role they played. They knew we were struggling, but they were really the only people who knew. I was sharing some of our struggles, and his wife reached out to me and said there’s this thing in Mexico, that her husband had done it, and that you were part of that. So I worked with them on getting Marcus to go, and it took about a year. I was working with them, they were working with you, and Marcus was very reluctant to commit.

I’d love for you to tell us how you heard about this, because I trusted them, I didn’t know anything about it, I didn’t need to know anything about it. I trusted them, and they trusted you. That line of trust is so important in this community. How did you find this?

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Yeah, I’ve told this story many times. He told me I could share it, but I’m going to be careful around it because of the way we brought this in. A brief background for me, for anybody who doesn’t know, which is probably everybody listening: I joined the Navy right out of high school. I was a Navy SEAL back when BUDs was hard and SEALs were tough, and we had wooden boats instead of the IBS boats. I got out, went to college not really knowing what I was going to do, and eventually decided to go to medical school. When it came time to apply, I found out the military had their own medical school. I was already married, already had a kid, another on the way, so it was kind of a no-brainer to get paid to go to medical school instead of the other way around. I figured I’d get to go back to the teams and give back to the community that shaped me as a man, probably kept me out of prison or worse.

When I got back, I’d been gone for quite a while, but there were still plenty of guys there who I’d trained with, deployed with, gone through BUDs with. So they trusted me enough to tell me the real story of what was going on with them. Usually guys don’t want to, because the doctor is going to disqualify them from their job, put them on medical hold or something, so they don’t tell us anything. But these guys trusted me, so I had a good relationship with them. Our friend in question had come back to the West Coast and was working at BUDs, and we reunited during that time.

Toward the end of my time there, which ended in January, everybody wants to come and prove their secret sauce, special equipment, whatever, to you, if they can get the endorsement of the SEALs. It’s great marketing for them, but I also think there’s some genuine patriotism, people wanting to help SEALs. So I constantly got pitched by people who wanted to show me their gizmo or their supplement or their technique. A couple of doctors called me and invited me to lunch. We went to the Coronado Brewing Company, and they told me about a compound called ibogaine. They were pitching it to me for opiate addiction, since that’s what it had mostly been studied for, and I knew literally one SEAL who had any problems with that, and it wasn’t truly an opiate issue, it was a different pain medication. So it wasn’t a big need of mine. I listened to them, and, like everybody else, I kind of thought all the psychedelic stuff was just an excuse to get high and call it spiritual, that it was really just an escape.

But toward the end of the meeting, they told me there’s also some evidence it could be helpful for PTSD, and then I was interested, because it’s been my postulate for a long time that the vast majority of PTSD is actually traumatic brain injury, that the syndrome is simply the culmination of symptoms from having a dysfunctional brain that’s been beaten around and jiggled around. So I was interested at that point. I went back and did some research on my own, and found out this stuff could be dangerous, there’d been a couple of deaths associated with it, and in fact the guys who took me to lunch were the supervising doctors in those documented cases. That’s not a great thing, so I was a little less excited about it.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

I’ll add a caveat that’s important: Mikal Vega, who I know is comfortable with us sharing his story, had been on the West Coast as his medical board was processing him out of the military. He came to my office every day, curmudgeonly, angry, complaining about the system and how wrong he’d been treated, and just sat in my office all day, every day. I didn’t really know him before that. He was a big, intimidating, angry dude, and I thought if anybody’s ever going to do a murder-suicide, it’s going to be in my office with this guy. I was a little afraid of him, to be honest. He came in every day, for hours a day, for probably his last six months in the military. Then he got out, and I did what I could for him, but I could do very little. He was on so many medications from the hospital that who knows what was going on with his brain and body. I don’t think I was very helpful.

Then he got out, and y’all know his story: he basically said, “I’m not going to die this way, I’m going to figure out something else.” He took all his medications and threw them in the toilet, got on a plane, flew to Peru, and lived in the Amazon jungle with a shaman for thirty days, doing ayahuasca every other night or so, kundalini yoga all day. I see him six months later at one of the fundraisers at Dick’s Last Resort. He sits across the table from me and starts talking. I was the doctor for something like 3,000 guys, so I didn’t always know who people were right away, usually after talking for a minute or two it clicks. I talked to him for probably twenty-five minutes with no idea who he was. He finally said something that clued me in, but he still didn’t look like himself to me. I said, “Hooch?” And he said, “Who do you think I am?” I said, “I don’t know, you still don’t look like Hooch to me, for one thing you have blue eyes, and I know Hooch had black eyes, like Bridges, pure black eyes.” He tells me the story of what he’s done, and he’d shed maybe forty or fifty pounds.

I don’t know exactly, but his affect was different, his posture was different, his facial expression was different, his mood was definitely different, his speech patterns, it seemed like everything about the guy was completely different. Granted, he was on a dozen psychotropic drugs when I’d known him too, so factor that in, but at least it made me a little more curious about the power of psychedelics.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Fast forward a bit, and our mutual friend’s wife calls me and says he’s locked himself in the house and is writing what’s essentially a suicide note. I go over there, and he doesn’t want to let me in either. He was my best friend all through training, we were roommates all through BUDs, and he’s telling me he’s going to shoot me through the door if I don’t leave. And you know him, so that’s a very realistic possibility. I remember just sitting there thinking, could I live with myself if I drive off and he shoots himself? I’m like, all right, well, shoot me through the door then, and he lets me in. He says, “Don’t say a word,” and I don’t. We sit on the couch for probably three hours and don’t talk at all, we watch baseball, I hate baseball, I know nothing about it, I just sit there and stare at the screen. He finally starts talking, and we get into a bit of what he’s going through and what he’s thinking. He lays out his rationale for me, and honestly, it’s pretty solid. It’s not tangential or crazy, not what people think of when guys are ready to end it. There was nothing illogical about it. He wasn’t drunk, wasn’t on drugs, he was very matter-of-fact: here’s why, here’s why it’s better for everybody, better for my wife, better for my kids.

I said, “Yeah, but none of us want you to be dead, that’s the bad part. And I don’t think you really want to be dead either, you just don’t want to be struggling anymore.” I told him about this thing done in Mexico. To be clear, he’d already been through everything Mikal Vega had been through: all the traditional Western treatment, all the medications, all the different therapies, the big treatment center we all know about. I said, “There’s this thing down in Mexico, it might be able to help you. Honestly, it’s a little dangerous, it could kill you, but since you’re going to kill yourself anyway, what would you have to lose? Maybe there’s a chance.” Y’all know him well enough to know what a difficult time I had talking him into this. It was a multiple-hour conversation, the sun had been up for hours by the time we finally made the decision, and he said, “Okay, but nobody else can be there, I have to be the only one.” I said, “I need to bring somebody, I don’t know what I’m doing, I have no idea what we’re getting into, and what research I did do was months ago. Let me bring one guy.” He said okay.

So I called a guy, the only person I know who knows anything similar, and explained everything, and said I need your help because I don’t know what I’m getting into and I have no way to talk to him about what he’s going to experience. He said, “I’ll do it.” This was happening that same day. It was a Friday. We called the clinic (Crossroads, at the time) and booked the entire center, I think it was six beds, and said we need to be the only ones there.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

We went down there, and he was in the back seat brooding while we waited to pick up Mikal at the train station. He said, “Who’s this guy again?” I said, “Well, he changed his name because he’s an actor in Hollywood now, I can’t remember what he goes by.” Not a great start. I said he’d changed his name but that back in combatives his nickname was Hooch. So he gets in the car, staring him down, not paying attention, grumping, and I said to Mikal, “Hey, what’s your real name?” He said, “Mikal is my real name, I changed it legally.” I said, “All right, what was your name before you changed it?” He said, “Wait, don’t you know the story of my name, why I changed it?” I said no. He said it’s a contraction of his swim buddy’s name from BUDs, who had died, and in his honor he made his name a contraction of his. He says the guy’s name, and then our buddy going down for treatment looks at him and says, “I repatriated him.” And these guys are suddenly connected. I thought, that’s one hell of a coincidence right there.

We go down there and do the treatment, and he comes out the next morning looking like he was twenty years younger. He looked like the guy I met when I was eighteen. He rarely smiled, almost never laughed, and now he had this ear-to-ear grin. He has really big, bright blue eyes, which I hadn’t remembered, I’d thought of him as having really dark, intense, angry eyes. And now he’s happy, he’s light, his eyes are big and open. He looks younger. We stayed the night there because they were going to do the 5-MeO the next day, so we had the whole facility to ourselves, in two little hospital beds next to each other with a curtain pulled around, almost exactly the same size as our room in BUDs. I said, “Hey, man, we’re in the wrong beds.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “That’s my bed by the window, this is yours.” He said, “Oh my God, you’re right. Do you want to switch?” No, just kidding. Then we start talking about BUDs, and all of a sudden he’s remembering all these guys we went through it with, remembering stories I don’t even remember.

He’d had some really significant memory loss from his injuries, which were pretty significant. We spent two or three hours like little kids giggling, trying not to wake the parents up, telling stories and laughing, and I thought, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. When we got back to my house, my driveway is probably fifty yards long, the car drops us at the curb, and my wife’s waiting at the door. She opens it and just starts crying from fifty yards away. She goes, “What happened to you? You look twenty years younger, I cannot believe this is the same person.” And that’s how it all began. I can’t remember how long passed before he contacted me about Marcus and said, “We need to get the same thing done for him.” I said, “All right, let’s do it.” By that time I’m pretty sure the clinic had closed, and we did it in a somewhat different setting.

Marcus Capone

Just hearing this story from you, Kirk, this is wild, I didn’t know any of this, by the way, obviously aside from some of your past speaking about it. The issue, obviously, is the TBI you mentioned, you recalling stuff so quickly that you were blown away. It’s the same thing Amber will tell you about me. That’s the first thing she noticed, this wasn’t, well, however we define mental health, but she said, “You went from barely being able to screw in a light bulb to suddenly being able to make lists and strategize and think clearly and play chess.” I didn’t know any of this, about our mutual friend here too, so it’s pretty remarkable that you saw it firsthand.

Amber Capone

I didn’t know some of those details either.

Marcus Capone

I think it’s such a team-guy thing, where Doc, you’re like, “Yeah, I had lunch, they said this thing might help our teammates but it could also kill them,” and you’re like, okay, and you do some research, and then the issue gets presented to you and you go, yeah, I think we have something we can take care of you with. And I’ll mention this since he’s talked about it publicly: Coleman Ruiz was the same way. Coleman said he literally read every professional he could find globally, every book written, everything on psychedelic treatments from every expert, and it wasn’t until a thirty second conversation on the phone with a friend that he said, “Yeah, I’m convinced now, let’s go.”

Amber Capone

It’s funny how that trust is so paramount to the SEAL community. When we were struggling, and we didn’t plan to talk about this, there’s a scene in the film where I find Marcus with an empty bottle of whiskey and a loaded gun. The reason I found him like that was I heard two guys’ voices in the middle of the night and thought, who’s in my house? Our friend had come over, there for Marcus, something had alarmed him. That’s the only reason they knew we were struggling. I’m so thankful that happened, or else they wouldn’t have known. When he came back from Mexico with you, his wife reached out and said she thought there was something that could help Marcus.

I approached him about it, and he said, “Absolutely not, that’s crazy.”

Marcus Capone

Yeah, that’s the first thing I said. I didn’t even think about it in terms of people just wanting to get high, I thought, oh, these are the videos I used to watch growing up, both my parents were hippies who went to Woodstock, if I’d heard about psychedelics it may have been through them. I had no idea they were intended for mental health treatment, substance use disorder, PTSD, and so on.

Amber Capone

Yeah, ibogaine is really an interesting one too.

Marcus Capone

I’d love to go back to when I first met you, Kirk. We had a conversation where you said you had to get out because the gray hairs, the gray beards, wouldn’t listen to you about what was actually working for these individuals. I think you were the first one I heard about testosterone replacement therapy from, though I don’t think I had the cash for it at the time, I may have been given peptides through your counsel back then, because that’s when you started looking at individuals and saying, let’s look at your whole body and figure out what’s going on. I want to talk about that, because you’re the one I’d call the genesis of this community starting testosterone replacement therapy, looking into peptides, sleep, everything that’s popular now, if you want to call it popular, I’ll go back and say you started that.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

You’re pioneering a lot of that along too, and I’d also say the special operations community pioneered beards again. Everyone’s wearing beards because the wars started and people started growing them, then athletes started growing beards, everyone wanted to be an operator, and next thing you know beards are cool.

Marcus Capone

That’s why God’s hand was on it, that I had to just be a SEAL when I was young and then get out, because I can’t grow a beard, so I could have never been part of your generation of SEALs, man. If I don’t shave for three days, you can maybe see a couple whiskers on my chin.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Yeah, well, that really goes back to what I alluded to earlier, the reason I was able to be helpful to the teams was because the guys trusted me. You know as well as anyone that SEALs by and large don’t trust the medical guys, that’s the guy who can put you on the bench. So unless you have something really specific you want to talk about that isn’t going to disqualify you, they don’t talk to the docs about it. But because I’d been there recently enough that a lot of guys still around knew me well, and I had a good enough reputation, they’d come in the office, shut the door, and say, “Just between you and me, let me tell you what’s really going on.”

When I got there, they already knew SEALs had problems with testosterone, we’ll just call it anabolic hormones in general. All the anabolic hormone profiles were low, catabolic hormones were high, inflammation was high, oxidation was high. What their labs really looked like was a fifty-year-old, pre-diabetic guy who’s fifty pounds overweight. If I stripped the personal information off and gave the labs to a colleague, that’s probably who they’d predict I was showing them. They already knew these problems existed, but they didn’t really know why. They’d done a little examination, and very superficial reasoning led them to conclude that the guys with low testosterone were guys who’d abused steroids in the past. But I knew the guys. I knew a lot of the guys having problems, and I knew who the guys were that did that stuff, and I knew for a fact the guys sitting in my office weren’t those guys. I said, I don’t think that’s it, and honestly, I said I don’t know, I’m trained as a Western physician, I know how to recognize and treat diseases, and what you’re displaying isn’t a disease, you just aren’t performing as well as you’d like to, and I don’t really know what to do about that yet, but we’ll figure it out together.

I sent them to the hospital. My plan was to have them run every lab marker I knew how to interpret, and that was the decision point on whether something went in the panel, whether or not I knew what it meant and had any idea what I could do about it. I sent these guys over pulling seventeen vials of blood each, about $1,800 per guy. That was one of the first things that upset the powers that be. After I’d sent three hundred guys over there, they started wondering what I was doing, why I was spending so much money.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

They were coming in talking about their mood, their motivation, their cognition, their memory, body composition shifts, feeling weaker, feeling slower, doing everything the nutritionists and trainers told them to do and still not performing well, being snappy emotionally, with their kids, with their wives. But they were SEALs, so not a single guy ever told me he had a problem sleeping. Not one person complained about sleep. But they told me all their other lifestyle issues and problems. I’m ashamed to say how many people came through my office before a light bulb went off in my head. I noticed, hey, it seems like a lot of these guys are taking Ambien. So I made a note in the margin and kept going with the interviews.

After he left, I went through my shadow files. Part of why the guys trusted me is I didn’t put anything in their official medical records, I kept my own shadow file for my office and gave it to them when we were done, saying, “You should put this in your medical record if you want.” That still wasn’t popular when they found out I was doing it, but it was legal. I went back through everybody’s files, and every single guy who’d been in my office was taking Ambien. I thought, I wonder what that could do. Like every other Western-trained physician, I hadn’t had a single class in medical school on sleep, so I didn’t know anything about it that the SEALs sitting in my office didn’t already know. I went through Hell Week too, I knew sleep was probably just an optional luxury you got to when you had time.

I started educating myself about sleep to figure out if I thought Ambien could be a factor, and did some research on it and the lawsuits against it and its side effects. One thing I had going for me, being the doctor for the West Coast SEALs, is I could really call anybody. I could read someone’s book, see their TED Talk, hear them present, and just call them and say, “I’m the doctor for the West Coast SEAL teams, could I ask you some questions, could I come train with you, could I consult with you, could you teach me this?” I got to learn a lot really quickly that way, from a lot of experts, a learning curve I could never have achieved without that advantage.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Once I learned how well all your hormones are regulated while you’re asleep, that’s when it’s done, that’s when ninety-five percent of all the testosterone you’ll produce in a day happens, when all your stress hormones, your anabolic hormones, your inflammation and oxidation get managed and reset for the next day, I said, let’s see what happens if we get everybody off of Ambien. I couldn’t just take it away and say suck it up, since obviously they were taking it because they couldn’t sleep. So I got guys off Ambien and gave them over-the-counter supplements I’d looked up through the Cochrane Database and other conservative, mainstream Western medical sources, things that help with sleep and why.

The SEALs helped me figure out how much they needed, since that wasn’t really known, and we spent about six months building a worksheet I’d give guys: go buy these supplements. I’d convert their Ambien to a serum so they could titrate down from ten drops to nine to eight, one milligram a week, and got everybody off it. Then I was giving guys DHEA and pregnenolone, either zinc citrate or sometimes an actual aromatase inhibitor, giving people the substrates to make their own hormones, and omega-3s to decrease inflammation, since there was a big inflammation problem. Lo and behold, once guys started sleeping well, their testosterone tripled, quadrupled, their growth hormone doubled or tripled, inflammation went from off the charts to unmeasurable, oxidation markers went down, they started performing better, body composition started shifting. It wasn’t a hundred percent solution, more like an eighty percent solution for about eighty percent of the guys, because it took another year to figure out how much traumatic brain injury was involved, which is its own story.

Once I had some success with that, the military wanted me to start lecturing on it at the pre- and post-deployment retreats. I called that combination of symptoms the SEAL Syndrome, since I lack imagination and like alliteration. Here’s what people complain of, here’s what happens when we fix it, here’s how you fix it, here’s the worksheet. That was kind of it.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

After I got out of the teams and went into private practice, the SEALs were tired of going around buying six different ingredients at three different health food stores. This was pre-Amazon Prime, you couldn’t just order stuff to your door, and some things were powders, some liquids, some capsules, some came in 90-count, some in 30. They said, “Dude, just make a product for us.” So I made it into a stick pouch guys could throw a handful of in their pocket for a week’s supply, and Robb Wolf and I partnered on launching that, with the intention of selling it back to the SEAL teams so guys would have something. That was eleven years ago. I still don’t have any contract selling to the SEAL teams, but it turned out to be a profitable business, and I still run that company to this day, which further solidified me as “the sleep guy.” That’s probably twenty, twenty-five percent of what I actually do, but it’s what I’m known for because of my time with the teams.

The other part I didn’t get into is I constantly got reprimanded and investigated and paused in my practice while working with the SEALs, for practicing outside my scope, since this wasn’t officially what they’d hired me to do. I didn’t really care what the Bureau of Medicine or Navy Medicine wanted, I was going to help my brothers. Because it made so much noise, four people from the Naval Health Research Center over in Point Loma came to my office and said, “Hey, we’ve heard about what’s going on, can you tell us what you found?” I spent the better part of a day on a whiteboard showing them all my lab values and what I’d found, what I was seeing as the solution. At that point I already knew about the TBI component too, so I talked to them about that as well. They started doing research on all of it, and as far as I know, validated pretty much everything I’d told them. Chris has since published a book on it, and he wasn’t one of the original researchers, but he was part of that NHRC team at some point.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

That’s the story of how I got to be here doing this. Now I still work with foundations, and I help guys when they come out of their careers. When guys finish twenty years as SEALs, and they’re a bag of bones, and their brains don’t work very well, I work with them for a year, and the foundations pay for whatever treatments I prescribe, sometimes psychedelics, sometimes hyperbarics, sometimes both, usually hormones, usually some peptides, usually some supplements. That’s it, man, that’s all I know.

Amber Capone

Well, thank you for the pioneering work you do. Our family has benefited so much from your willingness to think outside the box. I’ve said so many times this is a very unconventional group of guys, thinking unconventionally, and you were the pioneer of this entire thing. Marcus and I have just been blessed enough to pick up the mantle and try to find a way forward. To your earlier point, how are you going to pay for this? When he came through treatment, Marcus said, “This is it, this is exactly what the guys need.” And fundamentally, how are they going to pay for it?

Marcus Capone

Yeah, that was my big thing, Kirk. I felt lucky enough to have someone pay for my treatment, and I’ll never forget.

Amber Capone

Kirk helped arrange that, by the way, and Mikal.

Marcus Capone

And Kirk, yeah, that arranged. That was actually me too.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

We ran it through Mikal’s organization.

Amber Capone

If we haven’t said it enough, I want the whole world to know how grateful we are.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

I was happy to do it, man. I wasn’t going to let a brother suffer if I could help.

Marcus Capone

Well, we’re going to pay that back to you. But that was the idea behind starting an organization: these treatments are so expensive, how is a person coming out of the military supposed to pay five or six thousand dollars, or now more like eight, nine, ten thousand, for a treatment?

Dr. Kirk Parsley

That’s exactly the problem I had continuing my work. When I was working with SEALs in the Navy, everything I did was covered by the military. Once I got out, these guys were like, “What am I going to do?” For the first five or six years, all the guys I worked with just had to pay for their own stuff. I’d tell them, I’m never going to charge you for my time, but you’re going to have to pay for your own medicines, supplements, and treatments. And everything’s expensive. Psychedelics are obviously expensive, hyperbarics is eight grand, and a lot of the peptides run a couple grand a month once you add it all up.

Amber Capone

It does add up very quickly. Kirk, I love that you’re focused on the foundation, sleep, since it’s such an important one, and I feel psychedelics are a good step one in some cases, laying that foundation so all these other things can be even more effective. We did it the opposite way. Marcus tried so many things that didn’t work, and I think for guys like you two, who are used to setting out to achieve something, checking the box, moving on, he got so frustrated. Which takes me back to that year that passed after I brought up ibogaine to you, when I didn’t even know what it was. It took you a year to commit, and during that year you were trying all these other things and they weren’t working. What was that like, Marcus?

Marcus Capone

I think like everything else, you have to commit and be disciplined to do a lot of these different things. Kirk, you’d be the first to say, getting individuals off Ambien and giving them “quote unquote” natural supplements to help them sleep isn’t going to happen overnight. If you talk to someone Monday night, this may take weeks, it may take months, it’s discipline, it’s like you can’t go to the gym for a month and expect to be in shape for the rest of your life. So sticking with it matters. I think that’s why sometimes people who come out are so angry at the world, isolated, everything you spoke about before, they have to get back to a baseline of feeling good before they’re open to moving forward and trying some of these other things. Everybody’s got a different starting point, but getting themselves to a better place first is what opens their mind to trying new things.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

And I think also what’s underappreciated is you have to be metabolically and physiologically healthy enough to repair coming out of Tier One. Guys come out of this beaten up. Decades of completely abusing their bodies, and we know there are toxin buildups from ordnance, unexploded ordnance, burn pits, and everything else we do. We know there’s a ton of overpressurization injuries in the brain causing inflammation, this chaotic sleep cycle that’s been going on forever, guys living off MREs, who knows what that did to them nutritionally.

A lot of accidents too. And then living in a community where any medication you take is disqualifying, so it’s, well, this one’s legal, so I’ll self-medicate with that. What people don’t understand is when you have these overpressurization injuries, chaotic sleep cycles, chronic sleep deprivation, head injuries, overtraining, overuse, chronic inflammation, and then you self-medicate with alcohol and sleep drugs, you get poor sleep, which exacerbates the inflammation and further upsets the hormonal balance. The brain doesn’t have anywhere to swell, it doesn’t have any place to inflame into, so when it’s inflamed, all it does is create pressure in the skull, and that pressure starts impacting brain function. Your brain is the master of all your hormones, which is the master of all your physiology, so your body simply doesn’t work right at that point.

It’s not as simple as coaching someone on lifestyle, because you have to get rid of a lot of that brain inflammation first, and the psychedelics are amazing at that. The other component is that after years of a brain chronically malfunctioning, the autonomic nervous system, the amygdala tone, leads to this hyper-alert, hyper-anxious state. The psychedelics calm all of that down too. You decrease that amygdala tone, decrease the inflammation, give the brain some room to work, and getting rid of that hyper-vigilance, that sense that everybody’s trying to kill you or thinking something horrible about you, all those brain games about falling apart or dying of cancer, all the things that enter your brain when you’re in a chronically beat-down physiology, it’s impossible to just say “eat well and sleep well and you’ll be fine.” It doesn’t work that way. Guys who’ve been through that need expertise, need help, need powerful tools. Hyperbarics is a very powerful tool. Psychedelics are a very powerful tool. Hormones, peptides, very powerful. These aren’t things you can just do by yourself, read a book, and set an alarm clock and be disciplined about light before bed. It’s not that easy, and I completely recognize the struggle our community, and other similar communities, like first responders and cops who’ve done shift work their whole lives, all have very similar problems. It’s finally getting on the radar, and y’all have been an amazing part of that.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

One of my colleagues I respect the most is Dan Engle. I’m sure you guys know him, he’s both a neurologist and a psychologist, a very smart, introspective, measured, sober, judicious guy. I remember him telling me, really early in this, that all of psychology and all of neurology combined, if you take all of their tools together, isn’t as powerful as one weekend with these types of substances. I thought, that’s a big claim, but coming from him, who’s not a hyperbolic guy at all, it was a very thought-out comment. And I believe him.

Marcus Capone

I’d call him an objective guy. He’s seen and probably prescribed everything. For him to say that is, wow. I haven’t heard that before, hearing it for the first time from you.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

He’s definitely a level-nine wizard at all this stuff. I don’t know if y’all know this about him, but he also went and lived in the Amazon with a shaman, and he’s board certified in both neurology and psychology. There are very few guys in the world with his pedigree who could make a statement like that.

Amber Capone

The mission at VETS has been incredibly blessed, from your shepherding in the initial days, and I truly feel it’s been divinely guided. Speaking of Texas, how crazy is the Texas ibogaine win, which will unlock a hundred million dollars to start FDA clinical trials on ibogaine, so people don’t have to leave the United States to access this therapy. It was monumental. Go Texas!

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Yeah, I’m proud to be a Texan for that. I know y’all were instrumental in it. It’s certainly going to be the most impactful thing that’s ever been done for veterans.

Amber Capone

Wow, thank you for saying that. I’m just trying to keep up with what seems to be happening organically. Luckily I’m a rather strategic thinker and problem solver, but never in a million years did I think the initial trip for ibogaine you helped arrange would turn into this. It’s wild.

Marcus Capone

Kirk, there are always going to be veterans listening to this, and I never want to speak without them walking away with something they can do or work on. You have so much knowledge, so if that veteran’s out there listening, whether they’re a SEAL, a Marine, an Air Force guy, an Army grunt, whatever, what can you tell them to take away from this? Something they can hear you say on a podcast and go do, that’s going to help them get better. I know you’ve covered a lot of ground here, but what’s one thing they can do to maybe help them climb out of a bad place, or get back on track?

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Things get really hard when people give up, when they stop believing there’s a possibility tomorrow could be better than today. When they think, I don’t see any way this is going up, my functioning sucks. The most powerful thing to do in that situation is at least have enough hope to ask for help, to admit to yourself that you don’t know everything, that there might be somebody out there who knows how to help you, and that you owe it to yourself to find that person, because as long as there’s breath in your lungs and blood in your veins, you’ve got a chance to get better. People feel ashamed or self-conscious about asking for help, as though they should be able to fix this on their own, and that maybe it means they’re unworthy if they can’t. That’s just not the case. Everybody gets better, every single person I’ve ever worked with gets better, and it doesn’t take any kind of magic. It takes some knowledge, it takes people who have tools and understanding. Things can get a lot better, a lot faster, than you think.

So if you’re really struggling, ask for help. If you’re just minor-struggling, start doing your own research on lifestyle, sleep, nutrition, exercise. If you can figure out a way to eat well, sleep well, and exercise regularly, and I’m not talking about brutal training, just some type of activity that improves mitochondrial biogenesis and overall physiology, hormones, circulation, all of that, some moderate activity, good sleep, and decent food, not living off fast food and Mountain Dew, you’ll be surprised how much better you’ll feel just from getting those things right.

Marcus Capone

You actually covered everything there. I’ll bring it back to what I asked, and to the three guys we’ve talked about on the show, me being one of them, Mikal being another, and our third mutual friend. We were all in a really bad, really dark place, we didn’t want anything, didn’t see any hope or purpose, and we all asked for help. Mikal came in to see you every day, he asked for help. And I’ll put myself in this category too, but those two are extremely hard, tough, some of the baddest dudes I know, and they raised their hand and asked for help. I raised my hand and asked for help. So if you’re out there and think you can’t turn to anybody, the first thing you can do is pick up the phone, call someone, and tell them you need a lifeline, that you’re trying to figure it out, and go from there.

Amber Capone

I do think there’s something about true strength being found in the depths of vulnerability. I think you guys are kind of hardwired to think you can’t be vulnerable, but to me, that’s really what true strength is.

Marcus Capone

Yeah, I’m past that point.

Amber Capone

If you think about the hope and power of one life, because our mutual friend is still here, and you were able to intervene, he was able to help Marcus, and collectively we’ve all been able to help countless others.

Marcus Capone

Thousands of people, all of us here collectively, yeah.

Amber Capone

Everyone who comes through the program wants to help too, and a lot of them have been right up to the line of suicide.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

There are few men on the planet harder than our mutual friend. That is the definition of tough and hard. If anybody asks me who’s the hardest, toughest person I’ve ever known, that’s who I think of.

Marcus Capone

We’re around some of the toughest individuals I’ve ever known, and they’re doing all these things because they want to get better, that’s all that matters. I always refer to you as the sleep doc, Kirk Parsley, so, oh yeah, Kirk. But thank you for coming on our show, thank you for sharing your knowledge. I love you, and we should talk and do this more, offline, because I know we can help each other. I almost feel bad we haven’t done more together, but we’ll work on that in the future.

Dr. Kirk Parsley

Yeah, we had to divide and conquer, man, so there’s nothing to feel bad about, there are so many people who need help, but we’re both working in the same direction. I love what you guys are doing, I respect both of you, and I’d always be honored to be helpful in any capacity I can for y’all, that’s always there. Y’all have a lot of really smart guys now in that world who know way more about psychedelics than I do, so.

Amber Capone

No, no, you’re one

Marcus Capone

Tool in the box, as you were saying today, there are many different treatments we need to be doing. So, to wrap it up, thanks for coming on the show, thanks for listening today, we’ll see you next week. Stay tuned, we’ll drop all the information you need in the show notes,

Amber Capone

Including a link to Doc Parsley’s Sleep Remedy.

Marcus Capone

And his future, this big project he’s working on, we’re really excited to see when it’s complete. And on that note, bye.

Amber Capone

Yeah, I guess we’re out. All right.