Dr. Kirk Parsley on Truth Serum Podcast with Tyler Minton: How Sleep Fuels Peak Performance

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Kirk Parsley  0:00 

We know shift work kills people. People die about 14 years younger on average, but they work a lifetime of shift work. If we could have evolved to sleep less, we would have evolved to sleep less. There’s no controversy in sleep. Sleep less. You die younger. Sleep less. You have more disease. Sleep less. You’re fatter. The extent that I can’t recover 100% is how quickly I’m aging. Well, if I choose to sleep six hours instead of eight, I’ve chosen to age 25% faster. If I could repair 100% and prepare 100% I would wake up exactly the same every day. I would never age.

Female Voiceover  0:32 

Dr Kirk Parsley is not your typical doctor, a former Navy SEAL turned physician. He spent years working with the world’s toughest operators, helping them optimize their performance. And his biggest discovery, sleep isn’t a weakness, it’s a weapon. When he saw elite warriors breaking down, losing strength, focus and resilience, he knew something was off. The common denominator chronic sleep deprivation. He set out to change the game, proving that real strength starts with recovery. Now he’s here to cut through the noise, expose the myths, and show you how mastering sleep can make you stronger, sharper and harder to kill.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:00 

The mental vigor of being a man is highly associated with testosterone, mood issues, sex drive, sexual performance, memory, short term memory, confidence, all the stuff that makes you a man, like a 20-year-old man now versus 20-year-olds 50 years ago…

Male Influencer Clip  1:14 

“Men are not meant to be dominant. Men are meant to be submissive.”

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:19 

Night, night and day. You mentioned Ambien briefly, on average, you will fall asleep 13 minutes faster, and you will sleep 37 minutes longer. However, you reduce REM sleep by 80% and you reduce deep sleep by 20% and you may pass out, but you’re not asleep.

Tyler Minton  1:32 

If there was one piece of sleep information to change your life, what would that have been that people can apply?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:39 

Well…

Tyler Minton  3:45

So, Doc Parsley, you’re a Navy SEAL and a doctor, which is a very unique thing. I mean, anyone that’s watching looks at you and says, this, God, doesn’t look like my doctor. What was the journey? How does that happen? How do you go? How are you one and then the other?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  4:00 

Yeah, that, yeah, good question. Well, I’m more, I think I’m more of a SEAL than a doctor, obviously, obviously, I’m not a SEAL anymore. But, you know, I grew up. I grew up being interested in sports and cars and girls and fighting, and had zero interest in school. You know, I got, you know, rural Texas football. So my coaches helped a lot during the football season, and I passed my classes. And when football season wasn’t on, I didn’t pass my classes. And, you know, by the time I finished four years of high school, I was a sophomore by credits, and I just kind of like a family value for us, like, just what I grew up with was kind of like, if you can, if you can, join the military, give back to your country you should, like, even if it’s a short time. So I kind of my whole life, knew that I would be in the military. The funny thing. Actually is that my my boxing coach in Katy, Texas, was the Marine recruiter from my hometown, and he coached me for a couple of years. And it was never explicitly stated, but it was always just kind of assumed that I was going to go into the Marines. And we talked a lot about amphibious recon, force recon, and because I I’ve always been a water guy, you know, I’ve always loved water sports and swimming, and I’ve always been like lifeguarding and like water whatever, water sports. And just love it. So then this documentary came out about being Navy SEAL. Is called 48 hours, which is kind of like 60 minutes, you know, it’s like a video documentary thing. And they started saying how this is the toughest training in the world, right? Toughest training in the world, toughest training. And I was like, Well, I want to go do the toughest training in the world. And so when my so I watched that video, I was so dumb, I was so naive. I just laugh at myself. I was 17 years old, and I got had that on VHS, and I watched it like 20 times and probably a week. And then when my Marine recruiter was out of town, I went down to the Navy office, and I joined the Navy, and wanted to go be a Navy SEAL. I honestly did not know what a Navy SEAL was. I just thought it’s the toughest training in the world, and I want to go do that. Like if it’s supposed to be the hardest, I want to go try that, right? So obviously, I was fortunate enough to make it through that, but then I was a SEAL during the, you know, the Clinton administration and George Senior, so like, we had the kerfuffle and Iraq, it’s like, and it’s kind of like, are we ever really going to go to war again? You know, it’s like, yeah, when, especially when you look at that campaign, when we just bombed them for like, a year, and then everybody just quit. We just basically rolled them there and took their took their surrender flags and their guns, and I was like, You go do something else. And so I thought I’d be, you know, I didn’t graduate high school, didn’t so I dropped out of high school to join, got a GED to join the Navy, because I would have had to stay another couple years to get through high school and and so I didn’t have that high ambitions or expectations. I was thinking like athletic trainer, maybe, like a stretch goal would be like a physical therapist, was kind of my thought process. And so I started volunteering at San Diego Sports Medicine Center, just in case I could get into P in case I decided to apply to PT school. And they very quickly hired me on as an aide, and then I became assistant and and I pretty quickly decided I didn’t want to be a PT or an athletic trainer. Those are kind of too limited for me. And I worked with a bunch of young doctors, and they’re like, you should, you should apply for medical school. And I was like, right, brother, I’m like, you know? I’m like, let’s be realistic here. I didn’t even get through high school. Like, I’m not getting into medical school. And then the doctor who owns it, Dr Lee rice, he’s still down there in San Diego, great, great man. And he comes out here’s Kirk question, isn’t, could you get in medical school? The question is, would you go if you could get in? And I was like, of course, I’d go if I could get in. He says, “there you go”. So I’m like, so I got, you know, shamed into going, like, shamed into applying. So anyway, yeah. So then I, you know, I decided to go towards that after that conversation was really like a watershed moment in my life. Very few of those things ever happened in your life, and that was like very, very important, few sentences that came out of his lot, out of his mouth. And I, when I started applying to medical school, is already married, already had kids, and I found out the military had their own medical school. And I was like, I don’t really want to be in the military again, but they’ll pay me instead of the other way around. I can support my family while I’m going to medical school. So it seemed like a no brainer. I figured I’d get back to the SEAL teams as their doctor, and I did. And then I guess another big watershed moment there. It’s like, weird. Kind of completely changed everything I thought about, everything I’d learned in medical school, got thrown out the window, and I kind of went a whole different direction in medicine after that. So that’s, there’s the backstory, right there, yeah.

Tyler Minton  9:13 

Yeah and I was curious about how being a Navy SEAL shaped being a medical professional. Because if all you know is what you learned in school, right? And I’m not, I’m not trying to be against the education, or any of that new in my own world, in the nutrition, but you do, you see people who all they know about nutrition is what they were taught from the books. They have no practical application. They don’t know how this applies to a healthy person. They only know how it applies to a sick person, right? And they just kind of fell when it comes beyond that. And like, how much did who you were as a football player, a football player in Texas? Now, first off, people need to understand, if you don’t understand that, like a high school football player in Texas is like a college football player and a lot of other Yeah, it’s serious.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  9:59 

Yeah, it’s a serious, I don’t know… orthodoxy.

Tyler Minton  10:06 

It’s bigger than a sport. Yeah, it’s a culture here. And how much did being that guy and then being a Navy SEAL, then you become a doctor? How much did that influence your practice? And how does your practice differ from maybe someone who’s only had the education and without those life experiences. Yeah. So,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  10:28 

You know, a couple, a couple of big, big players in that, you know, SEALs are a lot like professional athletes, and that the worst thing you can do is put them on the bench. And the most likely guy to put them on the bench their doctor. So usually they don’t tell their doctor anything they will. They will, deliberately, and you know, very strategically, lie to their doctors to get to be able to stay in their job. And then they’ll go out in town and pay money out of their own pocket to get treated by healthcare professional to get whatever’s going on with them because they don’t want to be put on the bench, and because I’d been a SEAL, and I’d been a SEAL recently enough to where they’re still a ton of guys at the teams that that I trained with and deployed with and and obviously had a good enough reputation where they trusted Me, and so they came in and closed the door behind him and said, Hey, man, let me tell you what’s really going on with me. And they start listing off this list of litany of symptoms, you know, basically, like, I can’t concentrate, my short term memory screwed. I walked in a room. I don’t remember why I was there. I walk around. I walk back in. I like, you know, I believe my house five times because I forgot my badge. Oh, I forgot my lunch, or I forgot and, and, you know, and this goes on every day. I can’t concentrate at work. I I’m giving the brief, and I can’t concentrate on the brief. I’m sitting in the brief. There’s no way I can concentrate on the brief. My motivation sucks. My body composition shifting. I’m snappy with the kids, I’m snappy with my wife, and edgy at work, whatever, and I just don’t feel good. I don’t feel motivated. Now, they’re Navy SEALs, so put that on its appropriate gradient. They’re still crushing it. They’re still going out working really hard. But for them, this is not acceptable, right? It’s they’re struggling way more than they should, because I lack imagination and creativity. I dubbed it the SEAL syndrome because it was SEALs telling me this. It’s since been documented by researchers, and it’s now called the operator syndrome, which is sort of, sort of official medical jargon now that’s accepted in in sort of veterans methods medical space, I said, again, Chris free wrote a book about it called operator syndrome, and it’s all of that. And so, you know, in this, in the civilian sector, it’s really hard to know who’s a good doctor, right? So like, if, if you move to a town and you say, hey, I want to find a good doctor. How you going to do it? You know, like, go on the internet and look at rating badges. You’re going to call any of your friends, and so you know someone who lives here, and you’ll be like, Hey, do you know good doctor? Like, how does anybody know, right? And largely, they go by credentials and stuff. It’s like, well, he went to Harvard, he went to Yale, he did this. He usually, like, what it right? And he’s got his degrees on the wall and all this other stuff, and that comforts the layout, ends, SEALs. Do not give a crap about any of that. Are you effective? Are you good at what you do? Get me back. Can you help me? That’s all they cared about. And so, you know, I was a Western trained physician that knew how to recognize and treat disease. These guys did not have any diseases. They just weren’t performing the way they wanted to perform, and my job was to help them perform better. My job was to give them what they needed. Now, big Navy leadership and medical leadership did not agree with me. They thought that my job was to follow the standard of care and document things and disqualify people and give them pills and stuff like that, but I wasn’t about to do that. So, you know, that wasn’t even like a moral quandary for me. It was like, of course, like, there’s, there’s no chance I’m doing what you want. Like, I like, these are my brothers, and I’m doing what they need, and I don’t care what you do. To me, it was kind of the way I approached it, but that forced me to just learn completely different stuff, right? Because, like I said, there was no disease here in medical school, I learned this goes wrong. That goes wrong. You test this, you do this lab, you do this imaging, you get this result. You call it that. It’s this code. You prescribe this pill or that treatment, whatever. None of that applied. Why aren’t you feeling good? What’s going on with you? And we work on little things at a time, and kind of the first thing that popped out at me was almost every guy who came in my office was using Ambien. And I thought, I know maybe has something to do with that. Now, again. I’d never learned anything about sleep in medical school. Didn’t have a single class. I didn’t do any rotations in sleep medicine. So I knew nothing. I didn’t know anything. The SEALs didn’t know about sleep. So I started educating myself in that world. And the benefit that I had was, this was 2009 so the SEALs and they already killed Bin Laden and like there to kind of have a celebrity status. So I could, I could call anybody, right? I could watch somebody’s TED Talk, read their book, hear them lecture, hear of them, hear them on a podcast, and be like, Hey, I’m the doctor for the West Coast SEALs. Could I come train with you? Could I consult with you? So I got to learn a lot, really quickly, and sort of that integrative, functional performance kind of medicine. And then I had probably the ideal population to do that with, because really hard working, very motivated guys who were very communicative. They would come in every day if I asked them to, like, hey, I want you to journal this. Like, do this and do this and like, they helped me figure out, you know, I couldn’t just take the ambient away and say, suck it up buttercup, right? I had to give them something. So, like, the SEALs actually helped me come up with the combination of ingredients that. And I, like, I started with very traditional things like Cochrane Database, like what, what supplement has been proven to improve sleep, and why? And then once you learn about sleep, it’s like, okay, that of course, of course, of course. And it makes sense why? And so the SEALs helped me figure out, like, what’s the right dosage of that? Of each one of the sayings, what’s the right combination? And they would come in every day, if I wanted them to, and they’d journal and say, this happened, that happened. And we, you know, we settled on a formulation, you know, that was probably the biggest mover we had, getting guys off of Ambien, tripling free testosterone, taking an HS CRP from 3.5 down to unmeasurable. You know, oxidation down to unmeasurable. You know, insulin sensitivity was going up 50, 60% you know, like all, like, all of the metabolic markers were improving, just for them, improving their sleep. And then there’s a big TBI component, which I didn’t really recognize until, like, the last year that I was there, because the teaching in medical school was, if, like, in order to have a TBI, you have to been physically hit in the head with something, and you have to lose consciousness. And so, like, I had a, like, my best friend from the SEAL teams went through training with him. You know, known him since I was 18 years my roommate all through buds. And he there was, there’s a guy on the ground, and he was shooting like this, and he had nods on the guy released a frag grenade at his feet, and he never saw it, and he’s like this, and it blows. And he kind of almost blows his arm off, but all the shrapnel comes up like this, and it goes through the palette of his mouth, up, hits his optic nerve and actually goes into his brain. So he’s blind to an eye. He doesn’t have a TBI, by negative standards, because he didn’t, he didn’t lose consciousness. I’m like, he has foreign material in his brain.

Tyler Minton  18:01 

We brought the definition on that one yeah.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  18:03 

Yeah, but if that’s not a traumatic brain injury, I don’t like, I don’t know what is Yeah. And so anyway, that that was another big component of it. And so I just really started getting savvy on the last year and trying to figure out things that we could do to help with that. And then I was leaving the Navy, and I kind of left this big vacuum, and the SEALs were like, What are we going to do now? Because it like it was just going to replace me with some GP guy who’s who’s going to do traditional medicine. I’m like, I don’t just keep calling me and I’ll keep I’ll keep helping. And so I just kept helping guys. I was writing prescription. They had to pay for all their own meds. I didn’t charge them anything, obviously. And so I, I said, Well, I’ll just do I’ll do my consulting. I’ll make enough of my consulting to where I can afford to treat the SEALs for free, and then they just have to pay for their meds. And now there’s several foundations that I work with that pay for the meds, and so they get all their supplements, and Meghan on and peptides and whatever I prescribe. All that gets paid for. I don’t charge them. And now I can treat, you know, 10 times as many guys as I could. And so I don’t, I don’t remember what the question was, so it kind of, but that’s how we ended up that. That’s kind of the whole story there.

Tyler Minton  19:18 

Yeah. So it’s kind of, it’s a way for you to give back to the sales which helped you develop

Dr. Kirk Parsley  19:23 

Yeah. I mean, got me out of prison. There’s a lot, there’s a lot of bad things that would have happened. There’s a lot there.

Tyler Minton  20:33

You mentioned operator syndrome. What is the etiology of that? And like, what would that look like to a non-operator? Because I have a feeling there’s just average people out there having those same exact things, and obviously they’re not getting it from the exact same experience.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  20:51 

Yeah, well, so the operator syndrome is really metabolic syndrome and the civilian sector, these are my private clients. They’re really the same guys, so I work exclusively with men. My wife’s a nurse practitioner. She does exactly what I do. She works exclusively with women, so we can handle it that way. But you know, my private clients are the counterpart to the SEAL, right? So they’re C-suite guys, or they’re more likely, entrepreneurs. They traded their health for wealth for 30 years, burning the candle at both ends, grinding and now they sold their company for $100 million or their younger brother had a heart attack, or, you know, something like this, and now, all of a sudden, they’re like, hey, I need to fix this right now. They’re fat. Usually, the SEALs weren’t fat, obviously. But if you look at the simplest way to describe it, because I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think there’s any anything too small to include in there. But basically, it’s like, if you look at it from a medical standpoint, sort of every metric and marker for catabolic activity is high and every anabolic marker is low, and then their performance isn’t what they want it to be. Like, that’s all I care about. Like, you don’t have to have a disease. So, you know these, these entrepreneurs that hire me, you know, it doesn’t matter what their goal is. Like they want to be they want to have more energy for work. They want to they want to get, they want to lose a bunch of weight. They want to get in great shape. They want to start doing some races of whatever age group activities. They want to become a jiu jitsu player, like whatever. I don’t care. They just want to be better at work. They want to have a better memory. They want to have more longevity. Like I never promised longevity, because I have no idea how long you’re going to live, so I don’t know if I extended it or not, right? But, you know, I say I don’t promise I’ll add years to your life, but I promise I’ll add lives to life, to your years, right? Like you can just be healthy, go lucky, do whatever you want to until the day you die, and then you just die, instead of decaying over the course of your life and becoming less and less capable. But yeah, it’s, you know? It’s basically like you’re not happy with your body. Comp, different for SEALs than a 55 year old rich guy, right? But same idea, it’s usually mood issues, sex drive, sexual performance, memory, short term memory, confidence, you know, verbal acuity, strength endurance, like, you know, just kind of all the stuff that makes you a man, all the masculine activities. You know, the mental vigor of becoming a man is highly associated or the mental vigor of being a man is highly associated with testosterone. When you have low testosterone, you can’t do that masculine thing. Of like, I’m just going to focus on this one, trying to get this screw in this hole for like, the next 12 hours, right? And for no reason, no reason, not even a reward to it. It’s just like, I’m going to get this in there. And, and like that type of just, I’m going to go, I’m going to go, I’m going to go, I’m going to grind. I have an idea. I’m going to find the answer. That’s very masculine trait totally associated, like, almost, you could probably find an almost one to one correlation between your anabolic status and your and your brain thinking that way. And we see this in the culture today, right? With all absolutely, the testosterone drops in these younger, younger cultures, and the way young men, like a 20 year old man now, versus 20 year old 5050, years ago, Night, night and day, night and day, the way they see the world, the way they think, the way they act, the way what what drives them, what motivates them, how much quit they have. Yeah, I mean, you see it, I mean, and it’s like, I don’t want to villainize the youth. It’s not their fault. It’s like, this is the this is the world ever brought in. Environment is the environment their parents raised them. This way, our environment, you know, our, our literally toxic environment is, is, is poisoning them. And then. And the sort of moral and cultural toxicity of the world is polluting them as well, you know. And you and I probably would have been those guys if we grew up now. Like it’s, you know, it’s just like your product of your time. Yeah, I mean, just thinking what the SEALs would always tell me when they’re leaving or kind of ending their story to me about their what was going on with their problems the way they’d kind of always end it was, well, maybe I’m just getting old, Doc, like, maybe I’m just old. And I’d be like, Yeah, dude, you’re 32 I mean, it’s all over from here. It’s like, I just start going the backyard, start digging that hole. Now, you know, but that’s true at any age, right? Because I have like, 7074, year old patient who really was about dead when I started working with him, and now he’s just like, he’s like, I feel exactly like I did when I was 20. And I’m like, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t, yeah, right. You should feel that way until the day you die, man and that. And there’s no reason not to, because we have control of all that now, and that’s all I do. And you and I, you and I see the world a lot alike, like we’ve talked about this, like health, we see that very similarly. And it’s like, if I can make it look on paper like you’re a 25 year old, healthy, athletic man, you’re gonna feel and perform a hell of a lot better, and we can set goals from there, but, like, that’s the foundation, and most of that, as, you know, is lifestyle, right? Yeah. So, so I coach on lifestyle and nutrition and extra, you know, sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress mitigation, like, you know, how to balance your life, how to how to live, the way you evolved, the way this machine was designed to, like, try to operate it, the way it was designed to operate, you’ll get much better results out of it, right? And, and that’s the that operator syndrome, SEAL syndrome, metabolic syndrome. It’s all kind of like that metabolic with some cognitive, yeah, you know, cognitive.

Tyler Minton  26:58 

Well it’s the same problem. It’s just the causes, the causes are different. And I would say that your average person’s dealing with on a much lesser scale.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  27:08 

But I don’t think even, I wouldn’t even say that the causes or etiology are different. It’s just more intense as a SEAL, right? So it’s like much more chaotic sleep, much higher peaks and valleys and stress, more injuries, more physical activity, right? So you’re compressing the timeline. So what the 35 year old SEAL is feeling is what the 55 year old entrepreneur is feeling, right? And they, you know, they were grinding it in different directions, like, you know. I mean, you know you, you know you’re an entrepreneur. So, like, the entrepreneurial ideal of just like, I’m gonna keep grinding this until it works that never ends, right? And it’s the same thing for a SEAL. It’s like, I’m gonna, because there’s two types of SEALs, right? There’s undefeated and dead. Like, that’s it. So it’s like you don’t have a choice. And so it’s like you have to be good at what you do. You have to grind, you have to keep training, and more importantly, you have to protect the guys on either side of you. You’re responsible for their lives, and you’re going to feel you’d rather die than, yeah, one of them die because of your mistake, and so you’re going to keep grinding. You’re going to keep pressuring yourself. You’re going to keep pushing. And it’s great. It’s a great culture for the machine that it is. There’s no better machine to do what that machine does, but it’s terrible for the individual cogs, like each cog is getting burned up very quickly. And so, you know, the go get it. World is the same, and it’s just the timeline is the only difference.

Tyler Minton  28:36 

I feel like one of the issues too, is people don’t look at it as performance. And the fact is, I say a lot, performance is objective, right? So performance for me, at one point was winning a fight, not not getting knocked out, literally going out there and choking someone out, breaking something like it was survival and to an extent. And now performance has changed from, I still, I still want to be that guy, like, I still train for that because, you know, Lord willing, it doesn’t happen. If it happens, you gotta be ready. Yeah, I don’t want to be surprised by it, so I still do. So to me, that’s still performance, and everything is, well, my mom doesn’t need to perform at that level, but performance for my mom is being able to get out of bed on assistant being able to pick up the grandkids, right? And we don’t look at it that way. We start to look at things as survival. I’m old. I’m supposed to feel this way. No, you’re not right, like you’re not the basic primal movement patterns and the basics those were never meant to be hard running a 5k and I think, I think it’s great if you’ve never run a 5k It’s a great goal to have, so I don’t want to say it’s not, but that was never 3.1 Miles was never meant to be something you had to train up to right like it’s something that we should just be able to do right. But life deconditions us, and we don’t stay in that position, so we then have to train ourselves. To perform at levels that really we were just supposed to exist at. I don’t think people see that. They don’t see themselves as, like, it’s necessary that you perform these tasks and do them well, so therefore they don’t treat themselves like they would if they were making money to perform.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  30:14 

But it’s the problem of the modern world, right? Because I agree with you 100% like, there’s a basal fitness level that should be there, just because that’s going to improve the quality of your life, the performance. And this is a huge struggle word for me. Like, I’m I’m involved in a big business endeavor right now for Performance Center, and I’m getting, I am fighting tooth and nail the business side of this to call it performance, because they’re like, no performance. They think of athletes. They think of like this, that, and I’m like performance, like it, you know? But you know, we do live in a culture where the performance that is rewarded incentivized has nothing to do with your health. And so now you have to tie. You have to find time to do both, right? Because, like, well, I can’t just focus on getting in shape and lose my job and not have any money and not be or whatever. And like, my kids still have to go to the same school, the same schedule. I still have to follow that schedule. There’s still traffic at the same time as holidays are the same time. Like, I don’t get to opt out of the world. Now I gotta add this layer in, and I’m metabolically broken, which is even harder to do now, right? And so, like, it, it’s, it’s a conundrum, because nobody wants to give anything up. You know, it’s kind of like, you know, when women enter the workforce heavily in, like, around the 50s and 60s, or whatever, is like, right? Great. Like, women get to go out and do what they want to also, they don’t have to be marginalized or diminished by this, if they, you know, if they felt it was that way, a theory that I disagree with. I think being a mother is probably the most important job in the world. But while

Tyler Minton  31:53 

I’m here, yeah, exactly. I had one, yeah,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  31:55 

and I like but, you know, they entered the workforce, and what happened? Well, the price of everything doubled. And then now you needed a 200 now you needed two people. Like now both parents have to work to be middle class and just do average things. So like, the more responsibilities we put our on ourselves and the in the world, you know, some of it useful, some of it detrimental, and with no noticeable utility or benefit. Something like social media, you know, it’s just like the but all these things we keep adding, adding, adding, and there’s more and more things to do in the world, and more and more distractors, more and more time requirements have you, and now you also need to carve, like you got to carve out time to get in shape. And, you know, and this whole idea that you know you’re you’re doing really, really and you know you and I both know this is true. You’re doing really, really well. You’re exceptional. You can carve out an hour a day the other 23, hours down with those right? But if you can get one hour a day, like, you’re exceptional, like, well, we evolved to essentially what we would call exercise, yeah, it’s just activity, right? What we call that exercise was probably the vast majority of every day of your life, oh, survival. It was just survival, right? It’s like, this is what you have to do. This is how you get food. You run it, you run it down, or you chase it, you kill it, you fight, like, whatever, like, that’s a totally different world than what we live in right now. And so now it’s like, well, we want both. Well, I want that Hunter gather verb, body, physique, performance. And I want to live in the modern world and be successful in all these things, like, you can’t do it all, and that, you know, that’s the struggle. And so, you know, that’s where I come in. Mainly, I work with SEALs now, once they once they’re post career, right? So they come out, like the majority of my time is spent there, and then my private clients again, kind of same thing. They still have ambitions, they still have goals, but they’re usually wealthy enough to where they they have control over their time. And these SEALs are retiring, so they have control over their time. And it’s like, okay, let’s reevaluate your priorities. Let’s reevaluate your sleep. Let’s reevaluate how much time you’re spending doing each things. And doesn’t matter who they are, where they come from, or what their problems that are, lifestyle as we know, 80 to 90% of the solution. And then we’ll start messing around with hormones and peptides and any pharma we need supplements, whatever, different treatments, hyperbarics, psychedelics, maybe, if that’s appropriate, like, who knows? Like, whatever the problem you know, whatever the goal set is. But yeah, I agree. I think it’s all performance. I had this argument for about four hours yesterday with one of the business partners. Like, explain to me how anything we’re doing is not performance. Yes, everything is performance, but we can’t call it performance. I’m like, Well, I don’t care what you call it, it’s performance. Yeah,

Tyler Minton  34:46 

I don’t want to pander to the people who don’t see it that way, because they might not be the right people in general. And it and it really is, and, and I don’t think people we’ve, we’ve the goal posts keep moving and they’re in the wrong direction. Direction of what we accept, right, of what is medically accepted as the standard. And it’s like, I don’t want to be the standard. And I talk to clients about that, like, well, this is the average, but look around like you. We don’t want to be the average. And we’ve, we’ve fooled people into thinking that things are normal like you. You’re getting all you know, and it’s going to be to talk about some things that can get a little bit a little bit embarrassing. My wife might kill me when she watches this one. But when you talk about things like people my age, like, well, you know, like, it’s normal to not want to have sex so much. And I’m thinking, right? No one told me, like that. That’s not, that’s not like, I don’t, I don’t feel, and I don’t feel like a man should, like, I’m 36 years old, and just to be honest, like, I don’t, my sex drive is not different than it was when I was a teenager or a young man. Like, yeah, I’m because I’m doing the things necessary to make sure that I have the biology that a man should have, right? But I think that that’s been changed by culture and changed by the environment that we no longer we were supposed to feel that way, like you’re, yeah, you’re supposed to not have a sex drive when you’re in your 30s, 40s and 50s, and then, like, you’re not supposed to have energy when you wake up, right? You’re supposed to do like…

Dr. Kirk Parsley  36:10 

No, I’m almost 20 years older than you, and I still feel pretty much the same way. That’s inspiring, yeah? But I mean, and it is possible, you know, and I have hundreds and hundreds of guys that I’ve worked with who will testify to you the same thing. It’s like, Yeah, I’m beat up. I have some injuries and stuff, and some things hurt my like, I can’t do everything I could do when I was younger, but I feel pretty much the same. You know, it’s like, I feel pretty much the same, just a little more pain, like I said, so a little more limited, like some someday, and it’s, they’re, they’re like, sleeping injuries, man, I just like, wake up and I’m saying, oh, today the shoulder doesn’t work, and that might last three or four weeks. It might last just three hours. I don’t know, you know. So that’s, but that’s really the only difference. Like my mental acuity, my sex drive, my sexual performance, my ability to work out, my ability to stay, say, on task, stay focused, draw and like all my all feels pretty much the same.

Tyler Minton  37:04 

And now the efforts changed, like, I can’t say, and again, 36 for a lot of people watching this. Now, I’m a kid, but you gotta, you gotta push harder, yeah, but when I look at, when I look at some of my peers, people maybe I went to high school with at 36 like they can’t imagine doing some of the things I do. But I’m like, listen, it’s because I set a standard as a teenager when the moment I decided I no longer wanted to be an overweight kid, because I was I was an overweight kid, the moment I decided that wasn’t going to be me anymore, I decided it was like that for life, and I began to make those lifestyle changes, and by the time I was older, it was just already something within me. So I don’t want to say that’s advantage, because that’s a I made those decisions. But I have other clients that maybe they were in their 20s or 30s before they understood I need to make these changes. And they made it, and they’re 4050, years old, saying they feel better than they did in their 30s, yeah, because they started living those, those those lifestyles. And that’s the biggest thing, people just don’t understand. You don’t you don’t know how bad you felt until you change those things and you can look back. I just don’t think if people could say, like an obese, a metabolically metabolic someone that’s in metabolic syndrome, they’re there, there have all these, these comorbidities and all these issues, if they could spend one day and feel the way they would. If they changed all those things, they would change pretty close to their optimal self. Yes, but they don’t. They don’t think it’s possible. I found that that’s a lot of people never make the changes because they don’t. They don’t think they can number one, or they don’t think the reward is all that. You just don’t know.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  39:20 

This happens when I work with SEALs and when I work with private clients and the time, the time frame differs, depending on a lot of variables. But pretty, pretty soon after we start working together, they come to me and they’re like, Oh, my God. I cannot believe I how like, how I feel. I cannot believe I used to feel the way I just felt whatever, how many months ago, like I feel like I felt when I was young. Like, this is so much different. I cannot believe I can’t like. I can’t believe how far I let myself slide and I. Didn’t even know I’d slid right, and then kind of at the same interval. So if that was two months, about two months later, they’ll come back and go, oh no. Now I feel like now that usually happens three times. So so there’s like three epiphanies of, like, how bad I was. And then something I always do is always, always videotape my first consult with my client, and I show them their video at the end of the year. And it’s not just that they are physically look better. Yeah, they physically look better. But they’re like, they are more alert, they’re happier. Their faces are like, they can look at themselves, like even their verbal fluency is different, like their their speech patterns, their facial expressions, everything about them is different. And they look at themselves and go, Oh my god, I cannot believe I used to be like that. I mean, I’m not gonna dime anybody else. But a lot of guys cry. They look back and they’re like, Man, I can’t believe I was I cannot believe I was that way, like, and they had just kind of like, you said, they just kind of accepted that this is life, this is the way life’s gonna be. I’m old, right? So these SEALs, you think about these SEALs retire, if you go into, if you go into the Navy at 18, you retire after 20 years. How old are you when you retire? You’re Tyler’s age, right? Yeah. Like, so I have guys retiring, you’re two years older than you, four years older than you, who think I’m retired, like, this, is it? My life’s over? Like, I’ve done everything I’m gonna do, and now I’m gonna live off of my retirement, which is not, yeah, so the military retirement, it’s not a lot of money, right? So I’m gonna live in a fifth wheel and drink a bottle of Jack Daniels every night, or whatever, you know, and I’m going to be dead in five or six years, or they just have really low expectations. And then you get them feeling healthy again and ambitious again, and they’re like, Well, I don’t know what I was thinking, like, I’m gonna go start my own company. I’m gonna, like, you know, I’m gonna dive back into this. I’m gonna do that, whatever. And I said, it’s just expectation and it’s belief systems, and when, unfortunately, I work with a great population, and they, they trust me, especially now. I mean, I’ve been doing this for the community for 15 years now, and so they trust me. They know my name, and they’re like, Hey, if you say I can do it, I know I can do it. And and, you know, it helps speed results along, but it’s true for the whole world, man, you know. And I’m not trying to get political, but I was, I was just thinking yesterday about this correlation of, kind of, like, where, like, where America is in the world, in the world standing and like, like, how did the world and America itself see America in the 60s, 70s, 80s, right? And then what did the people look like, and what were the people expectations, right? You know, because I was watching is, you know, it’s in a parking lot, watching a bunch of people get out of their cars and going, none, none of these people are capable human beings, right? They might be great at their job, like, maybe they can make money, maybe they’re good parents, whatever. Just like in a world where physical activity is required to survive, these guys are useless. A war, these guys are useless, you know, you just think about it like, that’s you look around and say, well, the average American is defining America, and how capable is the average America and how the how good? How does America look on the world stage, and how does the average American look to you? Right? It’s core. It correlates very strongly. And I’m just like, that wasn’t that long ago. We can get that back.

Tyler Minton  43:33 

And whether people want to admit it or not a lot of that world perception was built off that look. It was built off the fact that look at these American athletes, look at these American movies, look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. Look at, I mean, that was, look at these soldiers going to war. I mean, giving them nick names based off of that.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  43:51 

And it was like us against Russia and the Olympics, right? Yeah. There’s only two people that are going to win, right? Like, yeah, there’s some outliers, but mainly it’s going to one of these was going to be yes, right, yeah. And you look at what type of job like America said, Okay, we’re getting into World War Two. And it’s like, okay, World War Two is over, because we just right, and that’s how the people thought of the world. And then, of course, it was easy, because the whole Angular sphere was destroyed, except for America. So now we were the production powerhouse of the world. Yeah, we can do all kinds of things, but, yeah, but, but you, you know, you, we’ve all seen it like a picture of the people going to the beach in the 70s. It’s like, find, finds the fat guy, you know? And this is, this has been, it’s been a huge shift, and my lifetime, and the very short period. So my wife and I, we were bored when I we really don’t watch television very often. We have it, we obviously have one. And we’re like, let’s go on Netflix and look at something. But we didn’t want to spend all the time, so we were looking at shows like, oh, we haven’t seen Seinfeld in like, 20 years. Let’s watch a Seinfeld episode. And George Cassandra. Who is he? He’s the fat guy, right? Right, go look at that show and tell me he’s fat by today’s standards. He’s not fat at all. Yeah, when he has a brown face, you know, like, but I was sitting there looking going, he’s not even close to being fat by today’s standards. And he was the fat guy. He was like, he was, it was funny how fat he was, right? It was part of the like, he was, like, comically out of shape and unattractive looking because he was fat and doughy, he would well above average. Now that’s a short period of time, yeah.

Tyler Minton  45:31 

And it is, again, you know, to avoid too much political commentary. But the fact is, a lot of what made us the world power in the eyes of other people, though, a lot of what made America the the standard to a lot, is what’s toxically masculine now, right? And it’s just true, like, you know that that’s just the way it is, like we, and we’ve, we’ve tried to reverse some of that and change that. And I do think there is some correlation there. And it goes back again. It goes back to the fact that we have changed the acceptable standards. Yeah, I really think that that that is so much, and there’s so much things that tend to become normal and pop culture, and it’s cool, like, these are the things that are making everything worse. Like, we could say that about sleep, like, how hard you work and how little you sleep. Sleep has it became like a badge, right? A badge of honor. And then alcohol is like the social connector of people. Being overweight is no longer. It’s just normal now, right? Like, if you look at every any disease state, like, if we’re going through name, every single possible ailment and disease, and you’re looking at the the thing that the etiology of those there could be lists, and obviously different diseases are going to have different causes, right? But two of the things that are always in there, almost it seems, is going to be overweight and obesity and alcohol consumption, right? And I’m not anti alcohol consumption, right, but I tell people all the time, the safest, most healthy amount of alcohol to drink is zero, right? And the next is as little as possible, right? And we go, we look at this health at any size and like, it’s not a real thing. Can you? Can you be healthy by some metrics and still be overweight, sure, but

Dr. Kirk Parsley  47:17 

if you get to randomly define

Tyler Minton  47:21 

Yes, yes. And then you are going to have these outliers, these grand outliers. But the fact of the matter is, there are things that this is just putting you on warped speed to an early death, and these are things that now are just normal, accepted, and they’re not really seen as bad things.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  47:37 

Yeah, and I agree with you, people, people completely under appreciate the impact of obesity. You know, it sounds like a very grandiose statement to say that obesity increases the you know, is correlated to every disease state, but I would, I would say, Okay, you get you really got it. You’re gonna have to stretch to prove me wrong, like, you have to show your work as to how that’s not true. Yeah? Okay, some genetic disorders maybe you’re born with, like, Yeah, I’ll grant you that. But even infectious disease, does your immune system work as well when you’re obese? No, like, orthopedically fat, you know, fat adipose tissue, like, that’s an endocrine order organ that’s affecting your your endocrine system, like, they’re like, there’s absolutely nothing you know. Because basically, when you think about it, what does being older mean? Conceptually, we’re less capable, we have fewer resources. We’re more likely to die from any cause that, I mean, that’s really kind of why we don’t want to get old, right? Because I’m less capable. Yeah, right. I’m more likely to die. I have fewer resources. Well, those resources are available to you when you’re older, like, but you just have to work harder for them, like we’re saying, right? So, like, the primary thing, of course, asleep, like, sleep is where all restoration and all recovery comes from, right? If you could. So the whole reason for going to sleep tonight is to repair all my damage from today. The difference between an injury and a workout is, do I recover from it? If I recover from it, it was a great workout. If I don’t recover from it, it was an injury, right? And that’s determined on how well I can that’s determined by how fast I can recover, right? So it’s like, okay, the whole point of sleeping tonight is to recover from today and to prepare for tomorrow. So restock the shelves, get all the nutrients and then play, get everything set up, all the neurotransmitter everything. So my fuel partitioning is right. The next day, my energy levels and my cortisol is going to be appropriate, and all this. And so it’s like, I go to sleep for eight hours. I repair, I prepare, if I, if I could repair 100% and prepare 100% I would wake up exactly the same every day. I would never age. I’d be exactly the same, right? So the extent that I can’t recover 100% is how quickly I’m aging. Well, if I choose to sleep six hours instead of eight, I’ve chosen to age 25% faster. Yeah. So you can’t get away from that, because that’s when all the resources for tomorrow are being laid down, is tonight while you’re sleeping. So you short change that tomorrow still comes at exactly the same time. You still have to do exactly the same thing. You have to do it with fewer resources, and your body compensates by secreting more stress hormones. Stress hormones are catabolic. They make you feel great, right? In fight or flight, you feel amazingly capable. Do you not like you could do anything. You are the super you, but you stay in that state for 24 hours, you’ll be dead because you’re consuming yourself, right? You, you are the resource to get, like, to get away from that dangerous situation. That’s all that matters, survival, right? Survival. So anything that doesn’t lead to immediate survival gets shut off in your body, and anything that can enhance your chances for survival gets ramped up in your body, right? And so you’re super hue Well, if you sleep six hours every night, or five hours every night, you will wake up with higher and higher stress hormones to compensate for that. And you’ll tell me, you feel fine like I feel fine, like, I get up without my alarm clock and I’m ready to go. It’s like, yeah, because you’re stressed out of your mind, because your stress hormones are 40% higher than they should be, and now you feel good, but what’s your body composition doing? Like, how does your how’s your brain working? How’s your strength? How’s your endurance? Like, like, all this stuff. And again, like we’re talking about with other things, some of it, you know, people genuinely believe that they’re accommodated to it. They forget what good felt like. They forget what great felt like. This just becomes the new normal. And they’re like, I feel fine, like I’m I’m doing, I’m doing as well as I’ve ever done. Maybe true, because you’ve been sleep depriving yourself your whole life, but go sleep for eight hours a night, you do. And that’s that’s actually been the quickest transformation. When I tell you, people will come in and say, I can’t believe I felt like this. I used to do a one week challenge on my on my website, you know, is around the sleep supplement, and we would, we do a one week challenge like, get eight hours like, here’s like, here’s this whole guide for sleep hygiene, how to take stress out of your sleep, how to set your bedroom up, all this other stuff. Give me one week. Everybody else wants a 30 day challenge. I want one week, one week sleep, eight hours a night for eight you know. And then if you don’t feel better, where did you lose? You lost nothing? Just go back to where you were. Nobody’s ever said it. They didn’t feel better. Everybody’s like, I cannot believe I used to feel this way, you know? And it’s the same in all this areas, right? It’s the same in nutrition. It’s the same with fitness. Is the same with body composition. We’ve just slowly and still things, we say, you let go the rope, right? Yeah. It’s like, when you’re climbing the rope, you let go the rope, you fall right? It’s like, Hey, man, you let go the road, and it’s really hard to get back up there. You got to climb all that again. You and you want to get further than you were, and you got to climb up just to where you were.

Tyler Minton  52:49 

Something I like to say when it comes to sleep. So we evolve and adapt out of everything that’s unnecessary, that’s just part of survival. Animals do it human like we all do that there is no more vulnerable time than while you’re asleep. It’s when you’re most vulnerable to be killed by something, by an enemy. It’s, it’s what you have. You’re nothing, you’re, you know,

Dr. Kirk Parsley  53:12 

You lack complete awareness of your environment as the definition of sleep. Yes.

Tyler Minton  53:16 

So if there was, if it wasn’t so vitally necessary. It is something we would have evolved to where it was no longer became necessary. It was no longer needed because it is when we were most likely easiest to be killed and all. But it’s just, it’s so necessary that it’s we’ve never adapted to a point where we need less. We just our body’s very good with that adaptation. So we just adapt to where, like, I’m going to stay alive getting less, but like you said, the body’s going to keep the score. But to stay alive, we’re going to have to do with a little we’re going to have to perform less. We’re going to have to have a worsened body composition, because the body only cares about being alive. It doesn’t care about looking good, it doesn’t care about performance. It cares about survival, right? And you’re not to to force that adaptation into less sleep. You are forcing your body to give up other things, right?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  54:09 

Yeah, I mean, I made that. I’ve made that statement in my lectures for forever, for, you know, over 10 years, in fact, you know, a Tia’s book. He there’s a few pages in there about talking with me about sleep and and, and I said it to him, I’m like, hey, if, if we could have evolved to sleep four hours a night, evolution would have favored that. And we probably, we probably evolved, by favorable evolution, to only sleep eight hours a night. Look at other apex predators. How long does the lion sleep? Like 21 hours a day, right? So it’s like, okay, well, we’re now we, I mean, we weren’t designed on this planet to be the apex predator like we don’t have great claws and speed and, you know, whatever, but we had the best brain. And now we are the apex predator every other animal on this planet, that, if hit that stage, would be sleeping all day. And we are like, No, we got to work all day. Sleeps. The last, the least important thing that sleep is a luxury in our culture. Because, you know, and I there’s, there’s pretty solid evidence, and, you know, a few people have tried to document it out in books. I don’t think anybody’s done a great job with it, but there’s, there’s a lot of evidence out there to suggest that, like humans only started sleep, Doc, sleep depriving themselves when we started getting paid by the hour. So it’s like with with the Industrial Revolution, when people started quit working on their farms and started going working in factories and punching a time clock. Well, the more hours you could spend at work, the more money you made, the more things you could buy that your wife and kids wanted. And you know, that’s and that’s the way it worked. And so sleep then became its luxury. And well, you aren’t making enough money because you’re lazy, and you only work eight hours a day when you could work 14 hours a day, you know, if you, if you got a little less sleep. And now, you know, time is money is our saying now, so it’s like, oh, well, if I’m sleeping, I can’t be making money. And I, I’m not a, I’m not a worthwhile person if I don’t have a Bugatti, you know, or whatever Rolex is, like, you know, that’s a lot of social programming. But yeah, if we could have evolved to sleep less, we would have evolved to sleep less and, and you know this too. You know you work with athletes, and there are a lot of athletes who care what they look like esthetically, and they want more muscles. They want this to be shaped like that and all this and and you’re like, okay, but your body is a very, very smart, efficient machine. It’s not going to carry any more muscle than it has to, because it’s metabolically expensive to carry that muscle around. So if you aren’t doing things with your body that require your body to be that big and strong, your body will not be that big and strong. Like, that’s all there is to it, and that takes a lot of time, and that takes a lot of effort. So if you want to maintain that, you just have to do that. Like, we’re all kind of genetically set up to where we’re going to carry about that much muscle. You know you’re short of taking a ton of performance enhancing drugs, your your muscle mass, maybe, if you’re very diligent your whole life, you increase it by 5% Yeah, it’s not what people think. 10% maybe like, maybe a far stretch, like 10% you’ll you can carry 10% more muscle if you really work hard. I think that’s probably a stretch, but maybe, maybe that much. And, yeah, that’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear that, man, I gotta just put butter in your coffee. Wear these blue blocking glasses, lay on this grounding mat, get in a nice bath, sleep four hours a night and meditate, and you’ll be great. And you can go get it. And you know, you’ll make 50k start your own business. You’ll make 50k start your podcast. You’ll make 50k podcast, you’ll make 50k how to make 100 grand and like, and everything’s just this hustle. And go, go and go and like, everything’s a sound bite. Everything’s a snapshot. It’s like, that’s not how the world works. That’s not how that’s not how people works. It’s not how the machine works. We’re the only animal on this planet that sleep deprives itself on purpose. It’s interesting. The only other time any other animal will sleep deprived itself as if it’s being preyed upon, if it’s being stalked, so to sleep as little as it has to or if it’s starving to death, and so it can get up earlier, go further, find more novel foods. And so since we evolved so the other animals on this planet, and we’ve been here for hundreds of 1000s of years, it’s completely reasonable to think that our brain has some wiring to believe that as well. So if we’re sleep depriving ourselves, our brain may very well think I’m under I’m in danger of being killed or eaten or I’m starving. Let’s go eat more. And what do you feel like when you’re sleep deprived? What does your body want to do? Hey, man, we’re going in famine. We need to store some fat. We need a bunch of sugar for the brain, right? Your fuel partitioning will be different that day. Your cravings will be different. That day, you will and right? And you will eat sugar and fat. And in fact, if you’re a good American, you’ll fry some you’ll fry some sugar bread, yeah, and some deep fried fat, and then drink some coffee and have your donuts and coffee and, man, you’re gonna feel great for a few hours because you’re you’re feeding that danger signal from the amygdala, right that there’s a little alarm center in your brains going, danger, danger, danger. And people don’t understand that. That literally impacts everything about you. It impacts the conversation we’re having right now would be negatively impacted by one of us being sleep deprived, like You’re like my reading of your facial expressions. You’re reading my facial expressions, what we thought was going on, the words we choose would all change just based on sleep deprivation. And it changes with your wife, and it changes with your kids, and it changes with your co workers, and that’s that’s the minor part, not to mention you do that over a lifetime. What does that do to your overall health? There’s no metric there. Yeah, there’s all sorts of controversy in your field. I man, I do not, I do. I do not envy you that, because you can find the science, the science for either side of any argument, for infinitum, right? Yes, there’s no. Controversy in sleep. Sleep less you die younger. It’s true. Sleep less you have more disease. Sleep less you’re fatter, like there’s no there’s no and what is sleep less? Less than, less than eight hours, like there’s no controversy. Oh, there’s super sleepers. You hear all this sleepers, super sleeper gene. Okay, we’ll clear that up. There is a suit. Therefore there’s a set of super sleeper genes. They do not say that you don’t need eight hours of sleep. They say you you suffer significantly less than other people with sleep deprivation, but you’re still not optimal. Your ideal is still eight hours of sleep. Your body is just more likely to have them you like you can just compete like you can just compensate better, like you have, whatever you have, certain metabolic pathways that that allow you to degrade less right, and no different than, say, Go run, get 100 people to go run a marathon, how much suffering is involved greatly depends on the person right. Like some people nothing, like, who cares? Like that was an easy thing for me. Like, I’m an ultra marathoner, that was like a little jog. Some people life altering experience, and they’re gonna be injured for four to five months from running that that one day, right? Sleeps the same way, right? It’s like, there’s, there’s a gradation of how much you you perceive your suffering, and then how much you metabolically suffer, but, but the labs, you know, the lab markers that we can track on them, you know, 100% concordance. There’s no there are no outliers that look really healthy, that look their healthiest when they’re sleeping less like they aren’t there.

Tyler Minton  1:01:36 

And earlier you mentioned Ambien briefly, yeah. But I know there’s people that will be watching that are taking Ambien that have they they are going to say, because I hear this, like, I can’t sleep if I’m not taking ambient Right? Like, that’s the only way I can sleep. So why should I get off of it, if the counter argument is, I don’t sleep, so why not Ambien? What’s the issue with Ambien? And someone who says that I have to be on Ambien or I’m not sleeping, right? What is it that they really need to fix the sleep hygiene? What is it they really need to fix, and what is the reason they think they need Ambien?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:02:19 

Well, Ambien is one of three, what we call Z drugs. That’s just a category of drugs. They came out of the farmers pharma land. There was an evolution of the benzodiazepines. So valium and Xanax and those types of drugs, and what and both of them are fall into a category of what we call a GABA analog. Means it’s a molecule that acts like GABA. It binds a GABA receptor. So we have all, of course, to be on this planet. We use the sun as our cues to want to be awake when to be asleep. We have some nerves in their back of our retina that sense blue light. They have nothing new, nothing to do with the vision. They just sense blue light when blue light goes away, my guess is because the sky’s blue. But the blue light goes away, that triggers some pathways in our brain, and a few hours later, we feel like sleeping. And one of the things that has to happen to feel sleepy is the neocortex, which is that wrinkly bit with all the cracks and grooves in it that we think of when we think of a human brain, not the midbrain, not the brain stem, you know, not the lizard brain and all that. But you know that that big thing, when we think of, well, that’s how we interact with the world, that’s our sensory and motor, right? And then that, then there’s perception, like interpretation of, what does that sensory motor mean? So that’s all in the neocortex. Well, after melatonin gets secreted, which does not make you sleep, melatonin initiates a cascade of 1000s of cascades that eventually make you feel sleepy, but one of the first big cascades and is a huge, huge increase in GABA in your brain. GABA sensor, gamma, immuno butyric acid, capital GABA, so neuropeptide, and what it does is it basically makes it harder to fire every neuron in your near your neocortex. So there’s something called a resting potential. So the lower the resting potential, the more energy you have to put into that cell to make it spark. It’s like it’s a neuron is kind of like a capacitor. There’s a bunch of stored energy in there. If you can bridge that gap, you get all the energy out of that cell. Well, how much does it take to bridge that gap low? You know, it increases that by lowering the resting potential. So makes it harder for you to interact with the world. And that’s all sleep really means, right? Your eyes still work. Your nose still works, your mouth still like everything’s still working. All your sensory still there. You just you aren’t paying attention to it, but you can turn on a light and wake somebody up. You can make a loud noise and wake somebody. You can touch somebody and make you can wake them up. So it’s still working. You can get over that threshold, and that’s really what sleep is. So GABA is the primary chemical that leads to you being that way. So the pharma industry is like, Hey, we’re smarter than evolution. We’re smarter than God. We can handle this. We’ll make a drug that binds that GABA. Scepter, and it works 100 times more. It’s 100 times more powerful than GABA. That’s benzodiazepines, Valium and Xanax. However, the problem with those is they can they repress, they suppress respiratory activity. So you take too much of that when you go to sleep and you quit breathing and you die. So that wasn’t a good thing. Anytime, of course, you start loading your body with the chemical that needs a receptor. The higher the chemical concentration is, the fewer receptors you’ll have, because your body is a smart machine, like I only need, I only need 100 molecules. There’s a billion molecules. I only need a couple of receptors for that. I need 100 molecules, and there’s 100 molecules, I need a ton of receptors, right? So that’s so that’s what happens you have this drug that works 100 times more powerfully than GABA. It’s like, okay, well, I only need 1/100 of the number of receptors that I would need if I was using GABA Z drugs come wrong? That’s 1000 times more powerful than GABA. So one GABA molecule has 1000 times if or one, one ambient molecule has 1000 times the effect of the GABA. So it binds that receptor has 1000 times more power than that. So you down regulate those receptors, and then when you quit taking Ambien, you have 1/1000, of the number of GABA receptors you have. So if you have a normal amount of GABA, you’re 999, deficient, right? Because you don’t have enough receptors to bind that GABA. So that’s why people feel like they need to take it. Now let’s talk about why you shouldn’t take it. When the pharmaceutical industry applies for a drug patent, they give them the research that proves their drug works. Who did the research? The pharmaceutical industry, who owns the research? The pharmaceutical industry, who decided what research to give the FDA, the pharmaceutical industry all right, when they get sued, however, they have to show all of the research. So the Z drugs all got sued. Eventually, once they got sued, had to lift up the kimono, open the kimono, whatever they say. Here’s all research. Okay, so the research shows, on average, you will fall asleep 13 minutes faster, and you’ll sleep 37 minutes longer. On average, however, you reduce REM sleep by 80% and you reduce deep sleep by 20% most of my SEALs were taking were using alcohol with our Ambien, overdosing on the ambient because their SEALs, if one is good, two is better, three is great, right? Ever, and you have a few drinks with that, well, alcohol has the opposite effect, reduces deep sleep by 80% or reduces REM sleep by 20% so you combine those two, and you may pass out for four hours or six hours or eight hours or whatever. But you’re not asleep like we do a sleep study on you, and the SEAL sleep studies came back 99.9% stage two sleep. So no deep sleep, no REM sleep. They were just unconscious. No kidding, they weren’t and you know, all of your hormones are regulated while you’re asleep. During deep sleep, that’s all anabolic activity. It’s the lowest stress hormone you’ll have in any 24 hour period, just during deep sleep. It’s the highest anabolic activity. 100% of the testosterone you’re going to have for tomorrow is going to be made tonight, right? That’s the way it works. You aren’t going to make testosterone during the day. You’re going to make it all tonight. Growth hormone, your insulin sensitivity, your fuel partitioning, your appetite, all that stuff we were talking about during deep sleep. That’s all being set REM you’re rehearsing everything that you heard today, everything you’ve thought about today, everything you think might be important. You’re going over it in your brain again and deciding if it’s important. If it is, I’m going to try to connect it to some other information. The more information I have connected to it, the more I know that I can think about it from so many different angles. Now actually know that I’m going to think about anything emotional that happened. I got an argument with my wife about dishes in the sink. We’re going to prune that right off, right? Because that’s not significant whatsoever. However, I’m going through litigation for bankruptcy or something. Okay, that’s that’s something I really need to focus on. I’m going to think about that. I’m gonna save that information. Have you ever taken like, a language class or high level math class and you work on a problem and you can’t figure it out, and you go to sleep and you wake up the next morning? You’re like, Duh, right here. Yeah? Part of that. And you just like, Well, my brain’s resting now, yeah, partly. But what really happened is you thought about it when your brain was in a better state and you had recovered. You’d already been through deep sleep, you’d recovered metabolically. And now you’re using your brain and you’re rehearsing it, and you’re like, oh, it’s that you connected it to some new information. Now it’s the most obvious thing in the world to you. So you’re giving up all of that with Ambien. You’re just you’re saying, Yeah, I don’t need all that. I don’t need all the benefits of sleep, right? So your your mood, your cognition, your, we call mentor, mental vigor, just like your ability to stay on topic and think about the things you want to think about and move towards the future that you want all of that’s compromise when, when you lack REM sleep, like said, 80% decrease in. REM sleep. It’s a huge thing, so it makes you dumber, worse memory, worse, a worse communicator, worse at perceiving other people’s interpreting other people’s facial expressions and all of that stuff. More likely to feel anxiety, because when you don’t understand what’s going on in the world, things seem to be more threatening. When you have higher stress hormones, things seem to be more threatening, so you’re giving up all of that. And the most powerful thing I could say to convince anyone listening is that we know shift work kills people, right? We know people die about 14 years younger on average, if they work a lifetime of shift work. Part of that’s being outside of their circadian rhythm, needing excess stress hormones and essentially aging faster, right? That’s that’s a part of it. But they also never get great sleep. If they’re working night shifts their whole lives, they don’t. They never get great sleep. Who else doesn’t get great sleep? Well, Chronic Insomniacs. A chronic Insomniac, which is only divide only only defined as six months. So you say for six months that I can’t sleep, you’re a chronic insomnia Chronic Insomniacs die again, just like shift workers, 14 years earlier than their peers. People who take Ambien routinely die 14 years older than I don’t think the ambient has anything to do with it. I think they’re just in the same category as the Chronic Insomniacs, because they aren’t getting sleep, they’re becoming unconscious, which is not the same thing as sleep. So if you’re you know if it would be the same as like if you exercise but your body didn’t upregulate glute four receptors, and your mitochondria didn’t reproduce. It didn’t produce more ATP, and you didn’t like you, if you biochemically did not respond to the exercise, and you still exercised every day, well, you still didn’t respond to the exercise, right? So you if you aren’t getting the benefit of the exercise, then you know, and you know, if I, if I, yeah, that’d be a great metaphor. I never thought of that. But if there was a drug I could take that would make it easy for me to exercise intentionally for two hours, but I don’t get any of the benefit of exercising this two hours. That’s the same thing as taking a drug that makes me feel like I’m asleep, but I’m not getting any of the benefit of sleeping.

Tyler Minton  1:12:17 

Wow. What about melatonin? So because that’s a lot of people are taking melatonin, I do know this is one of the only places America where you can just go to Walmart and bought the milligrams of melatonin. That’s not normal.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:12:30 

No, yeah and melatonin, again, is a hormone, any hormone. We’ve never been able to establish this in humans, because the only way to do it would be able to drill into people’s brains and take samples of you know what, what’s the chemicals in your brain? But every other hormone that we know that we can test, because we don’t have to get into the brain to do it, we know that if, if I give you that hormone, what we call exogenously, so if I give you testosterone through an injection, your testicles will quit making testosterone because you don’t need to right. Your body doesn’t do anything it doesn’t need to do right. So if I give you melatonin, most likely your melatonin production is going to go down again. We can’t prove that. We’ve never proven that yet. What we have proven, though, is that the receptors down regulate because, again, if I give you more melatonin than your body would ordinarily see, just like I give you more GABA by giving you these GABA analogs, I down regulate receptors. So melatonin, again, is the hormone that initiates dozens of cascades that leads to 1000s of different chemical changes in your brain which are still being mapped out, but it would be infinitely complex. It would take us months to describe and we’d be wrong about half of it, even if we were accurate of what people think is true. So melatonin initiates all these cascades, but from the time the sun goes down, if you live like your ancestors, from the and you were using the sun as your cue, and you didn’t have artificial lighting, from the time the sun goes down until the time the sun comes up, and you wake up in the morning, your brain will produce your your entire brain will see somewhere around 600 micrograms of melatonin. Okay, so if you go take a five milligram melatonin pill, you’ve given yourself, I mean, not that all of it’s going to go to your brain, but you know, you’ve given yourself exponentially more melatonin than your brain needs. But still, all you’re doing is initiating the cascades of events that have to happen anyway for you to feel like you’re sleeping, and so you’re overdosing your brain with this melatonin to just kind of keep this initiation cycle initiating. Well, it’s just like starting your engine over and over again while the engine’s already running, right? I mean, you’re just grinding down your starters like, hey, the engine’s already running, unless there’s some. Them broken. And the you know the engine has to, if you have to keep restarting the engine, there’s something broken. So if you need the melatonin to go to sleep and to stay asleep, well, then there’s something broken, right? There’s some other pathway in your brain that’s deficient. If you can’t stay if you can’t stay asleep without melatonin, it’s because something else is going wrong. 90% of the time that’s excess stress hormones. Okay?

Tyler Minton  1:15:21 

So if there’s one thing, well, we’ve talked a lot about sleep, there’s a lot of things, but I think it’s pretty conclusive that sleep is the one thing that people can the change that people need to make. So if there was one thing, you could go back in the early days of being a fitness, you know, being an athlete, being a sill and being this, if there was one piece of sleep information you wish you understood then that you could have applied then to change your life, what would that have been that people can apply?

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:15:54 

Well, I think the most important thing would just simply be the concept, like, if I understood how important sleep was to my performance. Is, you know, getting being able to sleep is not that difficult. Like we’re born knowing how to do this, right? We unlearn it throughout our lives. So, it’s really like, if you if you’re motivated to sleep, you’ll figure it out. If you have the internet and you’re motivated to sleep, you’ll figure out a way to sleep. But I would say the biggest, the biggest challenge to sleep is stress. We live in a high stress world. We have too much stress hormones. So, if I knew anything, it would be like the technique. So, like, I don’t know if I, if I’ve ever shared it with you, but I have like a three or four-page worksheet. I think it’s called the stressless sleep guide or something. It’s like, how to get stress out of your sleep, and it’s part sleep hygiene, and it’s part cognitive behavioral therapy and whatever. In this part just explaining in the physiology and why you need it and what. So if I had that piece of information to help me sleep during the stressful periods of my life, you know, like medical school and residency and like that kind of stuff, that would have been, that, that would have been the tool that I wish I had, and we, and we can give that to your audience, but it basically just, it’s basically just, you know, how, how do I? How do I prevent sleep? How do I prevent my stress hormones from waking me up once I start recovering? Because what happens when you get, when you’re when you go through the first couple of sleep cycles, your brain has recovered and restored enough where you don’t have so much sleep pressure, but your stress hormones are as high as if they as if you were awake. And so when you come out of a sleep cycle, you just wake up and you have a hard time going back to sleep. So this, this pamphlets all about that, like, that’s what that worksheets about. But the the most important thing is get on a reputable site, you know, get on PubMed, or get on Google Scholar or something, and put in sleep and whatever you care about, and then scare yourself into understanding the importance of sleep, because you will realize the best performance enhancing tool on the planet is optimizing your sleep. Nothing will make you better faster than that, anabolic steroids and everything are way distant second to this man. Any bio hacking is like not even a whiff, I mean, not even close to this. So, if you can optimize your sleep. You’re much harder to kill. You’re much more robust. Everything in your body will work better. Everything that you care about happens while you sleep. You only get better while you sleep during the day, we’re breaking ourselves down. We’re kind of learning things, but we don’t really learn them, and we can’t really learn them and apply them until we sleep. So, sleep is the most important performance enhancing tool in your life. I think we talked about before, when I first started, I had, I said, there’s four pillars of health, there’s sleep, nutrition, exercise and stress mitigation. I changed that about five years ago. There’s three pillars of health, there’s exercise and nutrition and stress mitigation. But they sit on a platform. That platform the foundation of sleep, because if you don’t do that, the other ones, you can’t optimize the other ones. It’s just not possible.

Tyler Minton  1:19:02 

Well, I appreciate it. I’ve followed you for probably 12 years through Rob Wolf. Rob Wolf’s connected a lot of people. Yeah, the great connector. Yeah, he is. And I’ve followed you and your works. And it 12 years ago, really is when I started improving my sleep, because I had seen those things I’d read, some of the studies you’ve been, you’ve been part of, and some of the things you were putting out. And it did, it changed my life. Everything got so much better. And, you know, as we’ve talked and connected more over the last, I guess, 12 years, and I’ve really gotten to know you more in the last couple and then I’ve turned you myself because of HIPAA, you wouldn’t mention that, yeah, but, um, but I’ll mention it. You know, you’ve, I’ve worked with you for for many months now, and it’s been a game changer in my goal is to constantly improve my own performance, so I appreciate it. It’s just been really cool for me to be able to talk to you in person and hopefully share some life changing stuff with other people.

Dr. Kirk Parsley  1:19:55 

Yeah, I hope your reach is great, and you keep, you know, keep spreading the good word, man, you do good work.