Doc Parsley: Sleep or Be Weak

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

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What is going on everybody? This week, we have somebody who's making their second appearance on the Warrior Soul podcast, and that is doctor Kirk Parsley. You don't know who Doc Parsley is, you should Google him right now. He served as a US Navy SEAL, then he wanted to get out, but he also wanted to go to medical school. And he found out that the US Navy has this amazing program where you can go, can train to be a doctor, and then you could come back and you can serve.

And he got the chance to do that, but not only did he get the chance to do that, he got the chance to put together a resiliency clinic with the US Navy SEALs. Now, one of the things about Doc Parsley is you'd expect him be a Navy SEAL, you know, go all out, balls to the wall. One of the things he's constantly talking about is making sure that you're taking care of yourself, making sure that you're getting adequate sleep. Because if you're not, if you're one of these people who thinks they can survive on five four five even six hours of sleep, you're fooling yourself. It's decreasing your performance and decreasing your quality of life, and we get into that in this conversation.

Doc Parsley is one of the smartest people out there when it comes to this stuff, and it's a real honor to have him on the show. So without delay, let's get into this episode with Doc Parsley, and you guys are gonna enjoy it. Talk to you soon. Doc Parsley, welcome back to the show, man.

Kirk Parsley 00:04:03 (link to this point)

Oh, thank you. Pleasure to be back.

Chris Albert 00:04:06 (link to this point)

We had you on a couple years ago, and, I got to meet you out at Paleo FX. My my friend introduced you to me. But, you know, I'm a big fan of your work. And, you know, for anybody who's really wants to get down in the details of that Parsley story, definitely head back to that podcast. We're gonna put a link up on the show notes.

But could you quickly just tell people who you are and where you come from?

Kirk Parsley 00:04:34 (link to this point)

Yeah, sure. So I guess what's relevant to who I am, what I do today is, you know, I I joined the military right out of high school. Went went to SEAL training, made through SEAL training, became a SEAL. Did that for six years, and then, you know, just decided to go on and do a bigger, better things. That was the Clinton administration when we were kind of the world's police force and not really doing anything that we trained for. And it got out and, you know, got got out, got married, started having kids, went to college, and then decided to want to be a doctor.

Found out while I was applying for medical schools that the military had their own medical school. Honestly, I wasn't a big fan of the military. Like, I'm not a very good rule following kind of dude. But they were gonna pay me to go to medical school instead of the other way around. It's pretty hard to pass up.

And that comes with a commitment, obviously, like, as being a doctor after graduation for eight years, essentially. And I figured I'd get back to the SEAL teams as the doc, and I did. And that was, you know, just kind of rewarding to be able to get, you know, kind of come full circle and provide back to the organization that helped me become who I'd become. And, you know, it's really well versed in sports medicine and orthopedics. And I really kind of figured that's what I was going do as a SEAL.

Was like, they're gonna because that's all I knew of when I was a SEAL. I didn't even know we had a doctor, honestly. Know, built this great sports medicine facility. What guys came to talk to me about was performance issues. And it wasn't from an injury.

It was just they just weren't feeling good. They're they felt like their motivation was low. Their body composition was suffering. Their energy in the gym, their ability to put out work, just everything was suffering. And, you know, I'm I had no idea because I was a Western trained medical doctor, like I only knew how to diagnose and treat disease, and they didn't have any diseases.

So I had to really learn a lot about what, you know, kind of what goes into being able to sustain performance for a long period of time. And one of the biggest factors, right, well, I'd say no. By far, the biggest factor that I came across is people just weren't sleeping enough. Once I and I didn't know anything about sleep because they don't teach you anything about sleep in medical school. I didn't have a single class on sleep.

And, you know, once I started learning, like what actually happens while you're asleep, I'm like, well, Jesus, no shit. Like, this is like, this is this is the panacea. This is the the best sports enhancing compound or activity in the world, you know, or performance enhancing activity in the world is sleep. And by by a long shot, I mean, it it it would outperform any drug that we know today. So, you know, that just led to me preaching a lot of that in the SEAL teams.

And fortunately, the leadership, you know, bought into it and did a lot of changes and training and so forth. And it wasn't an organization that really valued sleep before, because that was just kind of a sign of weakness. You didn't really need to. And if you wanted to, you could just push hard and push through it and all that crap. And yeah.

I mean, and I I was able to make some changes, help a lot of guys out. You know, I I mean, I still get I've I've been out of the team or I've been out of the military for almost seven years now. That'll be seven years in January, and I I still get probably one call a week from a team guy, you know, asking me questions, like, trying to get their performance online. And so I I was really fortunate enough to, like, go in there and learn a lot and and build make make a difference with the guys. And that just kind of led to other speaking gigs and then consulting gigs.

And now I work now I work primarily as a as a as a consultant, sort of like, I'm like a I'm like a health coach with a medical degree and a psychology degree. So I like I I work for I work with people for a year, and it's usually it's usually people who burn themselves out, you know, they're 45, 55, you know, traded their health for wealth for twenty or thirty years. They're overweight. They're metabolically broken now. They're depressed.

Their marriage is falling apart. Or, you know, like their brother who's a year younger than or a year older than them died of a heart attack, and now they're all scared. And so that's that's my general that's my general client. And, you know, if you're if you're realistic about it, and then you and you do things in a lifestyle way, and you're not tricking your physiology, you're just actually improving your physiology. You know, it takes it takes a year to lose 30 or 40 pounds, you know, and that's still ambitious.

And I mean, there are plenty of guys who can't quite get that off in a year. But, you know, everything else improves, and I get them to quit worrying so much about how they look with their shirt off and more about how they perform. Is that that's that's where happiness comes from, right, performance. It's not whether or you have six pack.

Chris Albert 00:10:07 (link to this point)

And just being there for life, you know?

Kirk Parsley 00:10:09 (link to this point)

Yeah.

Chris Albert 00:10:10 (link to this point)

Enjoying themselves. And it seems like it's so hard to tell people that that that you can't burn the candle from both ends. What you come from two professions Navy SEALs and the medical profession where there's not a big premium that's placed on sleep in your training.

Kirk Parsley 00:10:28 (link to this point)

I mean, yeah, the opposite fact. I mean, I mean, you we were rewarded. Well, I mean, I mean, you know, you've been in the military, like, in in the military, like, your rep your reputation is everything because it's really hard to have metrics on how good you are at being a SEAL, especially when you we didn't even have combat. So, like, your, you know, your reputation purely comes from living up to the values of the organization. And the organization is you're always ready and you're always working and you're gonna work until it gets done and and you're willing to pay any price to do it. And so when you get tasked with something, the SEAL team's like, sleep isn't even an option.

Like, nobody even thought of that. It's like Yeah. We're gonna stay. I wanna be one of those guys who who can thrive off of, like, two or three hours sleep. You don't need food.

You just need a little bit of Copenhagen and some water and a cup of coffee maybe once you get in your thirties like the Chiefs, like, you know, the the e seven, eight, nine, they'll drink the coffee. Yeah, man. And then medical school is the same way. Like, when you're rotating through the hospitals, like, if you're the guy who stays up all night on call and, you know, is busy and hustling the whole night and getting tons of work done and, like, now you're the hero and, like, you're you're the one that gets the good grades and all the accolades. Of course, the smarter guys, one who's, like, you know, doing the bare minimum and getting a few hours to sleep.

You know? But but I didn't know that. I was out to prove, man. Like, I can do this. I can work harder than anybody.

Yeah. Nearly killed myself.

Chris Albert 00:12:11 (link to this point)

You know, that that type a personality that that guys tend to have who went through those professions. It's it's like the Achilles heel where they think they've constantly gotta push themselves, and and it goes on. I mean, even guys that I've I've met who are getting into their late thirties, early forties, I see them out there. They're they're they're trying to train like they're trained for BUD/S.

Kirk Parsley 00:12:35 (link to this point)

Yeah.

Chris Albert 00:12:36 (link to this point)

That that's a big thing right now. Right? Training training like you're gonna train for BUD/S, but I don't think people understand the attrition rates that happen in BUD/S. And and if you're you're somebody who's just training to be good at your business, at your life, that's not necessarily gonna help you.

Kirk Parsley 00:12:51 (link to this point)

Right? Right. Well, I mean, the the other the other reality that, you know, people don't like to swallow. So one one thing that people don't like to swallow is that you need to sleep eight hours a night. Everybody on this planet needs to sleep eight hours a night.

Like, there there are no exceptions. There are people who suffer less with less sleep, but everybody suffers. So if you want the fullest out of your life, you know, you have to sleep eight hours a night, like and that's a minimum. I think the number ends up being I got my ears pinned back on LinkedIn. I've argued with a PhD about this, and it turns out he was right.

It was it's eight point it's essentially eight point two hours is what's been clinically proven to be kind of the bare minimum for ninety five percent of the population or something. So people don't wanna hear that because they say they don't have time to sleep. You know, they have time to watch television and go on social media and, you know, jerk off all day, like, do all kinds of stupid shit, but they can't sleep an extra two hours. Like, yeah, you can. So I don't even work with people who won't do that, but that's that's hard for people.

That's a tough pill for people's fault. They don't wanna hear that they need to sleep. The other thing they want to hear is that aging matters, man. I mean, and I always thought, well, I'm not going to be one of those guys. They all stay in shape and I've stayed in shape, but I'm damn near 50.

I couldn't, I couldn't survive one single day of SEAL training right now. I mean, not not one. I wouldn't make it through a single day and I would be broken. I'd fail everything and I'd be broken. And I've and I've worked hard to stay in shape, you know.

And I train with really good athletes, but not even close. So for somebody who's never even been a SEAL to think at 30 years old or 35 or 40 years old to to train anything close to being a SEAL is ridiculous. I mean, why not just say you're going to go sprint like an Olympian or something? I mean, it's like, you're you're like, you're nowhere near that level. Like, don't even why even attempt that?

Be smart about it. You know it? And that's another I think that's just another kind of thing that's that's it is part of this immediate gratification culture. It's like, I should be able to get in shape in six weeks or eight weeks or three months. Like, no.

No. No. No. If you're like if you're broken, it's a year, maybe two years to be really like, to be very rugged again. And then guess what?

You have to work every day for the rest of your life to maintain that and it's gonna keep declining no matter what you do. You're gonna keep getting worse, but you could stave that off and like, you know, slow the deceleration of your performance and all that stuff. But, you know, age matters, man. And, you know, we might be getting close to being able to, you know, put a serious break on how fast we age, but not gonna help me because I'll be 60 before we get there. Like, best I'll be able to do is probably hold on to a 60 old's performance.

But, you know, that'd be great for people who are, you know, 25 or 30, you know, ten or fifteen years from now when that happens.

Chris Albert 00:16:04 (link to this point)

Yeah. And, you know, I've I've heard all types of rationalizations like I'm fine with five hours of sleep. I'm fine with hours of sleep. I'm fine with with I could do three hours of sleep once a week and be okay. But I've been hearing a lot about sleep deficits and you know, if you're burning the candles at candle at both ends for a period of time, there's gonna be a debt, I think, that needs to be filled.

Right?

Kirk Parsley 00:16:31 (link to this point)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and that's I mean, that's that's been proven by just about every kind of performance sleep research that we do. So one of the things that if you want to test the impact of sleep, of sleep deprivation, if you want to test the impact of not getting enough sleep on any kind of performance, The first thing you have to be sure of is that they're not already sleep deprived when you start.

Right? And so what they do is something called an accommodation. And this started with William Dement and something called the bunker trials, where they they put they were college students because no one else would do it for that amount of money or have that much time to take off work, you know, but so they were college students and, you know, they've they've since done it with other cultures and other age groups and all that. But what they've what they found is they would so they would put people in a cold dark room that had nothing in it. This is obviously way before electronics and cell phones and, you know, all that stuff.

So they put him in a in a it was a World War two pill bunker, which is where they got the name from. They put him in this cold dark room with nothing except a bed and a toilet. That's it. Like, not any light. And they kept him in there fourteen hours a day, and then they let him out ten hours a day, and then put him back in for fourteen hours.

And they did this for a really long time. I can't remember. It's been years since I read the study, but I wanna say three or four months this went on. And what happened is the average person when they started this study slept twelve and a half hours a night because they had no idea what time it was or how long they've been asleep. There's no frame of reference.

They slept twelve and a half hours. But then over time, somewhere between three to six weeks, they would, you know, gradually sleep less and less until the point where everybody was sleeping about eight hours a night. And then it didn't matter how long you kept the study going, they're asleep. They're only sleeping eight hours a night, which means that they're staying awake in a cold, dark room with nothing but a bed for six hours and being wide awake, which is if you can do that, you're having sleep deprivation, obviously. So, you know, that that was that was sort of the the evidence that we that they paid back to sleep debt.

Now, lot of people confuse that idea with, well, now you've repaired everything you've damaged. No, not at all. It's just like being out of shape and then getting back in shape doesn't mean that there was no sequelae of no no consequences to the twenty years you're out of shape. Like you did some damage. There's some suboptimal things about you, you know, about your physiology and your performance that are just going to be there.

Maybe over time, you can doodle it down, but, you know, it damages the brain to have sleep deprivation. And in the original point, when you said, you know, how people feel, that's that's kind of the biggest problem with sleep is that, you know, if I'm coaching you on working out or nutrition or something, you have a very accurate subjective experience, right? You know what it feels like when you're working out. You know if you went to the gym or not. You know if you ate right or not.

You know what you feel like when you eat well versus when you eat poorly. But our self assessment of our sleep isn't that great. And there's a couple of things that point to that. So there's there's research trials where they're where again, they're testing people's performance and they they sleep adapt them. So they pay off their sleep debt, and then they start training them or testing them on something.

And then in the morning, and they're depriving them two hours of sleep and they do worse. And when you ask them, they say they know they did worse. Like, yeah, I was tired and kinda as well. And then day two, that happens and day three, maybe that happens, but by day four, almost every single person, even though they've gotten two hours less sleep than they need for four nights in a row, they'll say, I feel fine. I've totally adapted to the new sleep routine and I think I'm performing as well as I ever have.

And the data shows exactly the opposite. Now you've gotten worse every single day, including today. And they get worse the next day and they get worse the next day and they get and they'll swear that they're not tired, or that they feel fine and they adapted to the sleep thing and it's pull up totally normal. And so I I use that metaphor with drinking. Right?

Like that's in my TED talks. Like, well, if a if you like, if you have a couple of beers, you're aware that you've had a couple of beers and you probably shouldn't be driving, you know, or you're on the verge and you need to, like, make sure that you that you're plenty of time to get sober before you drive. But if you have, like, six beers, you know, like, I can drive and it's, you know, like, you make stupid decisions. You're still you're like, your self awareness goes away. And the same thing happens with sleep deprivation.

And it's actually the same area of your brain as the prefrontal cortex. And that's what makes all your executive decisioning decisions where you're basically using that to predict, you know, working with things you haven't actually done. Like, you don't have to jump off your roof to know if it would hurt to jump off your roof. Right? You have enough experience and you understand gravity enough.

You're like, yeah, that'd be a bad idea. That's prefrontal cortex. Interestingly, when you're sleep deprived or if you're drunk, those are the areas that are impacted. And all the attention deficit disorder is is that area being impacted. So that's why a drunk person and a sleep deprived person and an ADD person all act the same because they're missing that same kind of function in their brain, which is, you know, where, like I said, where all the simulation goes on, all the predictive knowledge and problem solving kind of.

You you lose that self awareness because you're losing that that function of your brain, which is really what makes you the smartest animal in the planet. It's the prefrontal cortex. It's none of the rest of our brain is all that remarkable.

Chris Albert 00:22:29 (link to this point)

Wow. Wow. Now I gotta ask this because, you know, I I think we've all been through it. A lot of the guys who listen to the show been through it. But, you know, on deployment, there were there was long periods of time where I was up for, seventy two hours.

I remember times when when I was actually I've been up so long.

Kirk Parsley 00:22:50 (link to this point)

Yeah.

Chris Albert 00:22:51 (link to this point)

And then beyond that, you know, when I got out, I went to grad school for a while was doing, you know, all nighters and and and kind of killing myself through that. Then, you know, going off into the entrepreneurial world. I mean, as an entrepreneur, I can't say that my sleep hygiene hygiene has been the best.

Kirk Parsley 00:23:09 (link to this point)

Right.

Chris Albert 00:23:11 (link to this point)

For for for the people listening to the show, based off of what you just said, how long do you think that kind of impact lasts? And and what should guys do if they're they've gone through periods like that?

Kirk Parsley 00:23:26 (link to this point)

Yeah. Well, so two lots of news there. There's good, there's a good news and bad news. The bad news is it probably lasts to some extent forever. The good news is that you'll have a lot of company because we'd like, we've, we've all done that to ourselves, You know?

But, you know, there I would say if you got heavy into regenerative medicine, which is kind of where my passion is these days, and that's a lot of things peptides and hormones and stem cells and hyperbarics and IR and transcranial magnetics and all of that type of stuff to improve, accelerate brain repair because that's the biggest cost. Right? Like, it it affects all of our physiology. It affects our, you know, our lipidology. It affects organ functions.

It affects, you know, whether or not we get atherosclerosis, which is degree we get that. So it has, it has physiological effects, but the biggest, the biggest impact is probably on your brain. And basically what what happens is you just, you, you don't, you don't flush out the waste product. So like, if you just think of a human, like we, like we eat foods, we use that food and we produce waste from that food. Well, all we are is like, you know, 7,000,000,000 cells that all do exactly the same thing.

And we're just like the we're just like the big manifestation of it. So every cell in your body is producing waste when it when it's living, doing whatever work it does, depending on the cell. What happens when you don't sleep is as waste products build up, and then it's this is this is inaccurate, but it's a good metaphor essentially. It's that it's it then kind of like atherosclerosis, right? When things kind of build up in your arteries, your what the reason atherosclerosis is so dangerous is because that leads to an inflammatory condition.

And then, you know, when you have these blood vessels that have inflamed walls and these little pockets of lipids and whatever they have on them, your body solution is to lay calcium over that, you know, because that protects it. And that's the same thing you do, like, if you have a chronically inflamed tendon or chronically inflamed ligament or anything. Like, you've you've probably had x rays where a doctor tells you you have a bone spur. Well, there's no such thing as a bone spur. Like you didn't grow a bone.

You didn't grow like this blade of bone. What you did is you calcified a tendon, and in an x-ray, that looks like a bone spur. It looks like a little needle of bone come out. So you kind of do the same thing in your brain. It's but it's not it's not really calcium deposits, but it's it's it's something very akin to that.

And you're just kind of you're walling that off because that area is damaged. You're just kind of going well, let's ignore that so that our immune system isn't constantly fighting it really because that's just constant inflammation, but you have some low level inflammation to that. So if you just start sleeping well and getting to where you should be, you can probably nearly stop that process. Reversing that process is where the question comes from. I'm not a 100% sure to the degree it can be done.

I know it can be done. And we're working with new compounds essentially every day. I'm hearing about new compounds that are showing promise in this area. And basically, it's what it's going what these processes do is they cause like an acceleration of the repair processes that would have happened had you slept. Because that's kind of what's going on every night.

Your brain is essentially flushing out waste product, repairing, you know, pruning off unnecessary stuff and making important stuff more durable. That that's what's going on in your brain when you're asleep. So if you aren't doing that, you have the opposite of that. That's all kind of a repair process. So now nowadays, like we're really striving towards finding things that can reverse that can reverse whatever has been done historically.

But, you know, the the easiest and most effective thing right now is just to get going on a good lifestyle right now and valuing your sleep. And you can at least put a halt to that and you'll you'll reverse a lot of it because if you're running around sleep deprived, you just aren't nearly the you you think you are. And you won't know that until you get rid of your sleep deprivation. And once you pay all that debt back and and start sleeping well, you know, colors look brighter and the world looks like a happier place and you feel better and you're more motivated and your body composition shifts and you become a better husband and a better parent and a better friend and then, like, you you just become a better version of yourself when you sleep. And so that that's worth it right there.

And then if, you know and if you really feel like you have some deficits or if you just wanna go as far with it as you can, you know, get into, you know, you know, you get them basically to like traumatic brain injury type work. And that's that's really what we're doing. Because it's kind of similar. Right? You know, you've been damaging your brain slowly over the course of decades.

It's kind of the same as like getting like one big whack and, you know, having a big TBI. And that's military guys are screwed because we have thousands of TBIs on top of sleep deprivation. So, you know,

Chris Albert 00:29:11 (link to this point)

can come from, you know, just being in proximity to a blast, meaning a 50 cal. machine,

Kirk Parsley 00:29:16 (link to this point)

Actually, like, just just doing CQC, like, just being in a closed space and shooting, you know, even an m four, like, you just, like, you know, the blast from it like this, the muzzle blast from an m four in a concrete room is thirty thirty to 35 gs's. And traumatic brain injury happens like, the threshold for traumatic brain injury is somewhere just barely over a g. So it's like one point zero nine or one point something, 1.1 maybe, but it doesn't take much to damage your brain. And then, you know, breaching doors and hard parachute openings and Carl Gustaf rounds when you forget about like that. Like, Carl, like one Carl Gustaf round, like, that's a lifetime of brain injury.

It's like 200 g's or something ridiculous like that. So yeah. So I mean, it it you know, we're resilient just like if you look at like, we know what guys in the military go through with their bodies. Right? And it breaks people.

Right? It I mean, the equipment is more durable than the people wearing it, you know? And and we break. And we repair, and we break, and we repair. And some guys seem to do pretty well even though they've been shot 20 times and had 15 surgeries, and they'd still walk around like they're normal dudes.

And some people, you know, get really messed up from just a couple of injuries. And the it's the same with their brain. You don't really know to what degree you're suffering until you have the chance to repair it.

Chris Albert 00:30:51 (link to this point)

You know, you mentioned the combination of of first going for the lifestyle changes and then potentially doing some regenerative stuff. It seems to me we're we're in this kind of period where people are learning more about HRT hormone replacement therapy and we see clinics popping up everywhere. And I see this this kind of cookie cutter protocol being put out there where guys are given like a half cc of testosterone cypionate a week and then a couple of other things And it seems to me that that a lot of these clinics, they don't seem to be doing the requisite analysis that needs to be done to see what people actually need beforehand. And it seems like a lot of people are using it as a band aid rather than doing it in combination with a lot of the lifestyle stuff. What do you think about that?

Kirk Parsley 00:31:52 (link to this point)

Yeah. I mean, there there's a, there are many layers to that, but what you have to remember is that for the for the biggest part of it, and I and I don't mean this to spurge anybody, but for the for the biggest part of it, it's a bunch of medical doctors who have learned kind of a new way to make some easy money. And like I said, I don't mean that to be disparaging. It's just clinicians work hard, and if they can get out of the 27 patients a day grind and go work in a strip mall at an HRT clinic and make the same amount of money, they probably will. Unfortunately, most of those guys don't really know what the hell they're doing.

And to your point, I mean, it it's just garbage. Not only is it cookie cutter protocol, but it's all complete garbage. Like I do hormone replacement on people and it's the most complex thing I do. I mean, it's the endocrine system is I mean, the only thing more complex in the body than the endocrine system is is the immune system. And the immune system is heavily impacted by your hormones.

The endocrine system is super complex and everything matters. And, you know, this whole idea of, you know, just take this certain amount of testosterone every week is about the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. I mean, you only need a basic understanding of physiology to realize that that's not going to work. Because if you take one shot at the beginning of the week, you put more testosterone in your body in a single day than your body would have made in a week. Your body is a smart organism and then it says, well, shit, we don't need to make this stuff anymore.

So you quit making testosterone, but then you also decrease the number of receptors you have for it because there's so much of it around. If you decrease the number of testosterone receptors by 90%, you only end up with 10% of the receptors. That's the only thing that's active. It has to bind the receptor for it to matter. So if you're only binding 10%, it doesn't really matter how much testosterone you have in your body at that point because you don't have that much binding capacity.

And then what happens also is that the half life of an injectable testosterone isn't that long. Like we produce testosterone every single day of our lives. When we start taking testosterone, it decreases or completely stops our own testosterone production. So now you basically have this big bolus at the beginning of the week and you're super physiologic, you're way higher than you would ever normally be. And then but you only have enough receptors to kind of perform normally as if that was the ideal amount of testosterone for you.

And then two days later, your testosterone is kind of average where it should be, but you only have a tenth of the receptors. So now you only have about tenth of the testosterone effect that you would have had if you just were using if you just had normal testosterone levels. And then by the end of the week, you're really low. You know? And then another thing when you do this big bolus is a lot of that converts into estrogen.

And then estrogen is a signal to our brain how much testosterone we have and it shuts down testosterone production even quicker. And it binds these proteins in the blood that carry sex hormones around. And that's called sex hormone binding globulin. And when you bind those up, that's irreversible. So once one of those proteins grabs hold of a testosterone molecule or DHT or estradiol, estradiol, esterone, all those, it doesn't really matter.

But once that binds, it's useless. It's going to go back to the liver, chopped up into little pieces and made into something totally different. So what you'll see is when people first start doing testosterone therapy, they feel really good until their receptors start down regulating. And then over the course of about six months, they'll feel worse and they'll look worse. And then about if they keep on it for a year, they're usually far more miserable than they were when they went in to get the treatment.

And it's just frank irresponsibility, but it took me twenty years to learn what I just told you. And and most in you know, most of these guys are opening up a little shop in a strip mall or they're taking like a weekend course or maybe an maybe an online course. It's a month or six weeks or something. They just and they just don't know enough. And it's really complex.

You can't use the same thing for everybody. And, you know, when you have and there's all these intermediates between cholesterol and testosterone. There's like 17 different molecules that are made during that period of time. And probably all physiologically active. I mean, we know that probably like we know for a fact that like six or seven of them are, but probably they're probably all metabolically active to some degree and we just don't know how yet.

So you're missing all of that benefit and you're just getting the one thing. And it's kind of what pharma has always done. Right? And that's what they did with sleep. They're like, well, when you sleep, GABA increases in your brain and that dissociates your brain from your environment, which is really what makes you which is kind of the definition of being asleep is being is not being awake.

Now that's actually the best definition is the lack of wakefulness. You're not aware of your environment. You're not paying attention. You're not you're still hearing, but you're just not registering it. Right?

Yours are still working. Obviously, you aren't seeing because your eyes are closed, but you're not interacting with your environment. That's all it really is. And so the pharmaceutical company said, we can make this molecule that's a thousand times more powerful than GABA and it binds GABA receptors. And that's what sleep drugs are.

And that's what benzodiazepines are. And again, you skipped over about 53,000,000 important steps. You're just doing this one thing. Yeah. And you think, oh yeah, we've outsmarted the body.

Like how arrogant do you have to be, you know, to be like I don't know. Even if you're in your sixties. You've been on this planet sixty years. This this body has been evolving for millions of years, and you think you've got it figured out and you've outsmarted it? Come on.

So

Chris Albert 00:38:02 (link to this point)

Yeah. It's I mean, it's such a complicated cascade of of of interactions and hormones and and all these different things. And it's it seems like, you know, if you if you go about it irresponsibly, you're basically painting yourself into a corner. And if you're Yep. Not doing the requisite work as far as the lifestyle changes and not fixing the underlying condition, you're gonna make it much worse because you might feel better for a period of time, but maybe you're doing other things to increase your inflammatory levels, and that in turn is gonna affect your health in another way, right?

Kirk Parsley 00:38:45 (link to this point)

Right. Yeah. I mean, and, yeah, the reality is, I mean, I work really hard to to bring some reality to to this concept of optimizing your health. You know, people think if they go buy, you know, a couple of wearable gadgets and reading a dozen books that they're gonna be fine. I think, well, you're better off than if you didn't do anything.

But it'd be no different than me saying, I'm gonna I'm gonna read a few books, and I'm gonna be my own lawyer. I mean, I can, I can do a lot of the work of a lawyer by not breaking laws? Right? And so like, my lifestyle is to not get in legal trouble. So I don't need a lawyer.

That's the best thing I can do about being a lawyer. But if I do get in trouble, or, you know, if I do need a lawyer, then I need a lawyer. And it's the same thing. Like, if you've been taking care of your health your whole life, you're probably fine. And if you have a medical corporate issue, then you go see somebody who's an expert.

But if you haven't been living your life well, right, it'd be like, I've been breaking laws every day of my life for twenty years. Well, you know, I I need I need help. I'm not gonna be able to I'm not gonna be able to get myself out of that because it's a really complex issue at that point. It's it's not that complex of an issue to just kinda keep going with your life and make good lifestyle choices and sleep well and exercise regularly and eat well and, you know, control your stress and, you know, don't beat your body to death, you know, don't go do 4AM CrossFit courses and you know, that kind of crap. But, you know, after, you know, after you've already done the damage, it's totally different than just maintaining.

And so if you've done a lot if you've done a lot of damage, if you're starting with the deficit, you just need help and you're not I mean, unless you just quit your job and you just study full time, like you're just not gonna you're just not the right person to be solving your issues. You need help. And not necessarily a physician. Mean, but you need like, you know, a good a good health coach or good, you know, good trainer, good nutritionist, you know, maybe somebody to help you with your sleep or somebody to, you know, work with a psychologist or somebody who can help train you to reduce your stress in your life, those types of things, you know, do some mobility work, get some, you know, all that stuff. So that that yeah.

That's that's my metaphor. But you you I mean, you you just really have to appreciate how complex it is. And and a lot of people feel like they should be able to do that. Well, I don't feel like I should be able to defend myself in a lawsuit. I don't feel like I should be able to defend myself in, you know, any type of criminal issued against me.

I would hire somebody who knows what the hell they're doing and does it for a living.

Chris Albert 00:41:44 (link to this point)

Yeah.

When we it seems like we latch on to quote unquote miracle cures too. So, you know, we've got like the rise of cannabis right now, which right?

I use cannabis from time to time or, you know, we've had I had on a couple of people who were talking about the carnivore diet, just eating only and things like that. You know, when see somebody either using these natural remedies to try to sleep or to try to reduce stress or to try to reduce inflammation, what do you think about that and how do you explain to them that this new quote they joined might be, you know, might be masking over the issue?

Kirk Parsley 00:42:34 (link to this point)

Yeah. Well, you know, that that, again, as I as I alluded to earlier, it's part of the immediate gratification cult of one is like, you know, we're so technologically advanced right now that I can solve this thirty year deficit with, you know, one pill, or one exercise or one dietitian. It's like, no, no, no, no. It's not that simple? Everybody, you know, use your brain. I mean, if it were that simple, there wouldn't be fat broken out of shape people.

You know, and I think that I think that what what gets overlooked and and and, again, I don't think this is the consumer's fault as much as it is the advertising and marketing fault is that in social media to a large extent as well is that we kind of portray this ideal lifestyle, and this ideal lifestyle is like getting up at a certain time every day and doing certain things in your morning and eating like this exact food and then doing this and then doing it's very prescriptive. All that will do is make you very good at that. Now, soon as you get outside of that, you're going be just as screwed as you are right now getting outside of whatever it is you do. To me, what what being fit is is sort of like the Darwinian idea of being fit. And it's that, you you are capable of handling a variety of stressors and a variety of stress levels.

And whether that's how much sleep you're getting or how, you know, nutrition or how much work, you know, muscular output you're putting in a day, like how like how much physical work you're doing. I think it's I think it's very detrimental to have, you know, I call them candy ass diets. And, you know, candy ass diet is just basically, oh, I only eat these three things. Like, alright. Well, you're dead.

Like, as soon as as soon as anything major happens, you're gonna die because you can only eat three things. And those things aren't, you know, those things aren't gonna be available if you get stranded in the woods somewhere or, you know, whatever. Like, you know, electricity go like, we lose the power grid for a week. You're dead in a few days because you can only do you can only eat a few things. And the same thing with, like, exercise.

Well, I only run or I only lift weights. I'm just like, no. You like, if you want to be able to thrive in this world, you have to be able to do everything that could possibly come your way. Now, I would go as far I would even go as far as to include, like, crappy junk food in there. Like, I don't think you should be going to a store and buying Twinkies every day. But, you know, if you if you go out with your buddies and then it's like, hey, we're gonna have some beers and fish and chips and, you know, like, whatever, you should do that now and then because your body needs to be able to handle that in case, you know, the unforeseeable happens, and all you have to live off of is fish and chips. Now, of course, you're gonna suffer a little from but it's it matter what matters is where you live.

So you eat, you know, you you eat a healthy diet and you maintain a healthy lifestyle. That's where you live. You can visit anywhere. Right? You can you can go to LA and live in a homeless camp for a couple of days, and it's not gonna kill you.

But, you know, it doesn't change who you are. But if you lived in a homeless camp all the time, you know, that that's who you become. So it's it's where you live that matters. Do things every day that you know are the right things to do to make you more resilient and stronger and be, you know, stronger, faster, smarter, better looking, more lean, like whatever, whatever your values are. That could be cognition and mood and, like, artistic creativity, whatever it is.

But you do the things that optimize you and your world. But you definitely need to strike out and, like, just dip your toe in the water everywhere and just go, oh, you know, what if, like, what would it be like to be a vegan for a week? What would it be like to be a carnivore for a week? You know, I think personally, I think that's what makes people the most resilient and and longevity. And not just when I say longevity, I don't mean necessarily the years of your life, but like your health span, like how how long how many years of your life are you really capable and how capable are you like, I can do just about anything that I could do at 25.

I can't do it as long, right, as many days in a row, but I I, you know, I can do just about anything. And so to me, like, that that's longevity. To me, that's health span, that's what I'm aiming for. I would like to be able to perform really close to how I perform right now, you know, twenty years from now. And when I die, I don't know.

Maybe I die twenty years from now. Maybe I die fifty years from now. I have no idea when I'm gonna die, but I wanna I wanna be as metabolically flexible and physiologically effects flexible and, you know, psychologically flexible, emotionally flexible, just, you know, experience at all so that you're capable of everything.

Chris Albert 00:47:39 (link to this point)

You know, it it seems to me, and this kinda just occurred to me. You know, when you're dealing with clients and have them coming in, there's this there's this idea of need versus want. Right? And so these guys might wanna come away feeling like they're studs, feeling like they're they're they're Superman, feeling like they they, you know, they're gonna be able to do BUD/S or they're gonna be able to roll jiu-jitsu seven nights a week or things like that. But it seems like you've gotta go through this period where you're you're you're talking to them and you're kind of bringing them bad back and resetting them psychologically.

How do you do that? Because that's a big business point, too. When you're doing something they need, it's a lot harder to sell them on it.

Kirk Parsley 00:48:30 (link to this point)

Right. So so one thing that I think it I mean, it's just it's imperative, obviously, is that you have a lot of you have a lot of credibility and a lot of rapport with them. Because they they have to willing to do a lot of stuff they don't really wanna do or think that they should have to do. So, you know, the the first business step there is to develop to have that in place, whatever that is, whether that social proof or credentials or, you know, testimony, whatever it is. But you need, like, you need to go into these relationships.

You wanna be really helpful. You need to go into this relationship with them willing to do anything that you say to do. Because if you're not gonna listen to me, then I why am I gonna work with you? Now the the next important step is to set realistic expectations to your point, which is what I I I spend I do annual programs, and I probably spend about the first month talking them into the reality. Because to your point, they come to me, you know, they're 45, 50 years old.

They're forty pounds overweight. They haven't exercised strenuously anything that I would consider strenuously for years. I mean, maybe at all in those twenty five years. And almost all of them were like division one athletes or, you know, fancied themselves great high school athletes or whatever it is, and they think they're gonna get back there. And I'm like, well, you're not.

I mean, there's a very, very, very, very slim outside chance that you might be able approximate your 25 year old performance at 50 in very limited sports, very limited activities, but that's not gonna happen in a year. Like, you're it's gonna take you multiple years to to get there. And so a big part of that is just proving to them how far off they they are, because we didn't we're we we dilute you know, we deceive ourselves. You know, like, even my comment, well, I could do anything I could do when I was 25. Well, it's probably not true.

But a lot of those stuff. Right? Like, I'm I'm deceiving myself a little bit. Like, there's there's things that I just plain couldn't handle even a few minutes of. And so you you prove you know, you you have to prove to people that, look, you're way worse off than you think you are.

And you do that by doing their blood labs, and you do that by doing like a lot of testing on them and, you know, tracking some data, and getting them to be really honest with their subjective assessment of how how they're able to handle these new things that you're putting them through. And you got to kind of grill them and you got to kind of make them uncomfortable. It's not really a pleasant thing. I mean, maybe it's like the last quarter of it's kind of pleasant, you've become really good friends, and they've seen a lot of progress, and they're really optimistic about their future. But, you know, the first the first three quarters of the year, just really not that pleasant.

They're they're really kind of second guessing why the hell they got into this thing. And like, man, this really kind of sucks. And surely, could just, you know, read this book, and I should just be able to, you know, whatever, put butter in my coffee and drink athletic greens, and I'll be fine. You know, it's like, no, no, sorry. If we're that easy, we'd all we'd all be studs, man.

Like, who wouldn't be? It's like a penis enlargement pills, right? It's like if they had that if that could work, every guy would have, you know, giant penis or anybody who could afford the bills, you know, so just just just silly.

Chris Albert 00:52:07 (link to this point)

That's awesome. What would you say to, like, the 24, 25, maybe even 30 year old who's who's just getting out and they're finding themselves in this place where, not able to stay in shape like they used to, they got a full time job now they're they're, they're not getting paid to train anymore.

Kirk Parsley 00:52:29 (link to this point)

Right?

Chris Albert 00:52:29 (link to this point)

What would you say to those guys?

Kirk Parsley 00:52:31 (link to this point)

Yeah. So to those guys, I, you know, I say, you know, you just think of it like a rheostat, you know, like, like a volume knob on us on the stairs is like, look, man, just be realistic. You're gonna have to turn this down for a while. You don't have to turn it off, though. Like, just just turn it down.

I find I find the biggest problems with guys is that they're really is it they become sporadic when they get out. So they don't train much or they don't train at all. And then they kind of get a little upset with how they look or how they feel or whatever. And then they're just gonna, like, crush it and get in really good shape. And they just work super hard and overdo it.

And then they get injured or, you know, they just feel like crap, and then they fall off again. And then the other thing is, you know, when you're, you know, like, when I was a SEAL, I probably ate 10,000 calories a day. And I was like, 7% body fat, right? I mean, I can eat maybe 2,000 calories a day and maintain my weight right now, you know? So I mean, that that's the biggest thing is just, you know, to to tell guys, you know, look, you and if if they're 25, they're not gonna experience this yet.

But if they're 30, they're kind of they're getting at the beginning of this. But, you know, you you just have to, you know, reinforce to them. It's like, look, you you know, what you're doing right now is way more physical than way more challenging than you think it is, because it's just normal life to you. And once like me, well, I got out and started going to college. And I worked I worked at the sports medicine facility.

I was in college. I had a wife. I had a kid. And like the opportunity for me to stay in shape or even physically tax my body to anywhere near the level I could and and the SEAL teams wasn't wasn't even close to being realistic. So what you what you just have to convince people of is like, you're not gonna be in as good a shape as you were.

And what I always tell people the goal is is you just wanna be in striking distance of being able to get in really good shape in a few months. Right? So you just wanna be able to maintain maintain your body weight fairly well, maintain your strength fairly well, your mobility, your athleticism, your endurance, like, maintain that to a reasonable level to where you're not, like, decaying. But just set the bar lower. You're not going to be like you were.

Set the bar a little bit lower, and then just challenge yourself a few times a year. Have your buddies, like, you know, I had a group of buddies, probably the first ten years I was out of the SEAL teams. Every year, one of us just chose a challenge that we were all gonna do. And, like and it'd be like, alright. August, we're gonna do, like, a rim to rim hike in the Grand Canyon, whatever.

It's like, alright. Crap. I guess we better get ready for that. Or it's like, no. We're gonna we're gonna go climb Mount Whitney.

Okay. Well, let's do that. We're gonna go do a triathlon. We're, know, we're gonna do a power lifting meet. It doesn't matter, like, whatever you and your buddy is into.

And even if you're not into it, just just train up and do something like that. That builds that resiliency in that, and that will maintain your ability to to get in shape. But if you're not just like, you know, as as a doctor and entrepreneur now, I did not have this mental, and cognitive capabilities that I have right now. Didn't have that when I was a SEAL. And I and I couldn't have gotten it.

Right? I couldn't have become a doctor while I was a SEAL. It takes too much. Right? It's it's its own time commitment.

You just have to say that you have to admit the same thing is true. If you get out into the private sector, and you're doing like corporate type work and office type work or even entrepreneurial work, you know, you're not like out physically using your body. I mean, if you're, I guess, you're, you know, if you're a personal trainer or an athletic trainer or something that's different, but, you know, if you're getting out to do, you know, nonphysical work, you just have to realize that your your performance base is gonna be lower. But that doesn't mean that you have to decay. You just like set the bar lower and then strike out from that every now and then just to prove to yourself that you can do it, to maintain the flexibility and versatility to be able to do that.

Chris Albert 00:56:36 (link to this point)

Right. And just understand that there are seasons in life. You know, there's

Kirk Parsley 00:56:39 (link to this point)

Exactly.

Chris Albert 00:56:39 (link to this point)

Where you gotta use your body, periods where you gotta use your brain.

Kirk Parsley 00:56:43 (link to this point)

Right. And and neither neither one of them are you know, neither one of them is best. Just like, you know, I I'm you know, sometimes sometimes I really wanna be in my body, and sometimes I'm really happy just being in my brain. And then, like, there's no right or wrong answer to that. It's just, you know, maintain the ability to do both and stay as flexible as possible.

Chris Albert 00:57:06 (link to this point)

So I well, I wanna I wanna thank you for coming on here. I know you got a new ebook out and, you've got a few other things going on. There's the Doc Parsley sleep remedy.

Kirk Parsley 00:57:16 (link to this point)

Yeah.

Chris Albert 00:57:17 (link to this point)

Which is outstanding. And, and and a few other things. Where can people find this stuff and, and where can they look for you?

Kirk Parsley 00:57:24 (link to this point)

Yeah. I mean, my website has most of it. I would say 90% of what you can find on me is on my website at docparsley.com. And otherwise, you know, put my name, you know, put Kirk Parsley into Google and and my, you know, my website will pop up and, you know, various lectures and videos and so forth. I've shot that.

It'll all kinda populate that way too. But the sleep, yeah, the sleep supplement is on docparsley.com. The link to the ebook well, the ebooks on Amazon, but I think the link to the ebook is on my website as well. And that's that e book isn't meant to make anybody a genius on sleep. It's, you know, it's well, I'm sorry.

The e book is on the website. The book is on Amazon. So the I actually wrote a book called Sleep to Win and that's on Amazon. And it's it's really kind of like the 100 most common questions I get asked, you know, in in the narrative format. So if if if you read that book, you'll know more about sleep than your doctor or or any health care professional you work with probably.

And it's it's very easy layman's terms. And, the ebook is it's kind of a 10% version of that same thing, but kind of the same idea. Just just captures the wave tops, you know. Get gets people of gives people a foundation to be able to start valuing sleep. And that's really the key I find is, like, if I can get people to really believe that sleep is super important, most people are smart enough to figure out how to get good sleep on their own.

You know, they can go on the Internet and read a few you know, read a book here and there, change their diet a little bit. Like, I It's not that hard to figure it out for most people. If you have a sleep disorder, that's different, but for most people, it's just value it. And that's what both of those publications are meant to do is to encourage people to at least seriously look into the value of sleep for themselves.

Chris Albert 00:59:29 (link to this point)

And the sleep supplement is something that you developed over your time. And and, you know, it's when when somebody takes that real quick is is is it one of these things that that brings you down immediately and puts you into sleep? Or is it something that's more gradual or something that's just as as kind of like sleeping?

Kirk Parsley 00:59:51 (link to this point)

Yeah. So, you know, it's a a supplement by name and just a supplement to me very much by concept. So the ideal thing is to optimize your lifestyle around everything and sleeping one of the major components of that. But there's also reality. You know, there's a difference between optimal and reality because we can't all live optimal lives because we have external drivers to our lives. And so you supplement the difference, right?

And that's where nutritional supplements come in and that's where gadgets and other things like that come in. And so, you know, we evolved to use the sun as our cue, and I think most people know this. We use the sun as our cue as when to get when to be asleep, when to be awake, and so does every so does every other mammal on the planet. And, you know, ancestrally, the sun went down and that you essentially didn't have any light in your eyes for about three hours, three and a half hours, and then you fell asleep. Well, nobody does that now.

I mean, we have, you know, we have electronics and we have lights and, you know, we and it's just not realistic that you aren't gonna have any light light in your eyes at all for three hours. And what that three hours does is it starts changing your brain, the physiology of your brain, and getting your brain ready for sleep. And I alluded to that earlier. There's GABA that kinda slows down your cortex and makes you not pay attention to your environment as much. And then there's also the melatonin secretion, which most people know of, which gets secreted from a gland in the back of your brain called the pineal gland.

And that secretes something called melatonin, which is a hormone which reduces the effect of stress hormones in your brain. It also triggers things like the release of GABA and a whole lot of other physiological changes. So all my sleep supplement is meant to do is to is to try to preload, front load your brain with all the ingredients that would have built up over the three hours or three and a half hours had you not had any light in your eyes and you had like, lived this optimal lifestyle. But all I'm really doing is bringing lumber to the construction site. Like, I'm not there's nothing in there that's going to force you to go to sleep.

There's nothing in there that's gonna trigger any mechanism. It's just making sure that you have everything that you need. Your brain has everything it needs to do to be able to initiate sleep. And then it's a super, super light dusting of melatonin, like, just enough to kind of get you into that initial cascade, but your brain has to keep making it. It's not enough melatonin to keep you asleep all night by a long shot.

And nothing in there really lasts more than three or four hours, but the cat once the cascade starts going, people, you know, people come up to me all the time and say, man, I took your product last night and I slept for twelve hours. And I'm like, that's great, but my product didn't make you sleep for twelve hours because there's nothing in there that lasts anywhere close to six or twelve hours in your body. But, you they valued sleep and they gave they got into a good initiation, strong cascades, and they gave themselves permission to be asleep, and they got a great night's sleep. So that's that's really all it is. You know, we we recently reformulated it and I, you know, tinkered around with a few other things to improve the efficacy of the GABA.

And also, I put something called phosphatidylserine in there, which decreases which actually decreases the production of cortisol, which is one of the major stress hormones that makes you awake. And as I said earlier, the definition of being asleep is the lack of wakefulness. And so you have to get rid of all the wake-promoting neurotransmitters and chemicals and cortisol is a big one of those. That's it. Nothing magic.

Chris Albert 01:03:40 (link to this point)

Well, that's awesome. You know, I know people who swear by it. I know people who who who say it's it's completely changed the way they look at things. And I think that's an important concept you mentioned there is giving yourself permission to do this.

Kirk Parsley 01:03:57 (link to this point)

Yep.

Chris Albert 01:03:57 (link to this point)

And meaning that it's a huge part of who you are, how you're gonna perform, and how you're gonna show up as a human being.

Kirk Parsley 01:04:04 (link to this point)

Right. And then and and that last statement, I think, is the most salient. It's really kind of what I'm trying to convince the world of right now. It's kind of what we opened with is it makes you a better person. It makes it makes you the best version of yourself you could possibly be.

You cannot you know, you could be pretty damn close to optimal and eat a marginal diet or exercise in a marginal marginally effective way, but you can't do that with sleep. Sleep impacts everything. It affects how you process information and it affects how people perceive you, how you perceive other people, how you communicate, what your emotions are like, your, you know, your emotional intelligence, your ability to handle stress, your ability to handle physiological stress, your your pain threshold, how much force you can generate, how much endurance you have, your gut biome, how well you can digest food, how well you can tolerate alcohol, how well you can tolerate any type of toxin in your environment. It's all determined by how well you sleep. And you've you short chain yourself on sleep, you're basically just making any stressor in your life worse and harder for you.

And if and for me, I mean, it's it's my line of work, so it's obvious, you know, but for me, it's like, this is the easiest damn thing I could possibly have you do is just sleep. But it's still the hardest thing for me to convince my clients to do. Even though they know of me as like the guy who harks on sleep, they still wanna argue with me about how much sleep they need, you know? And it's it's a cultural thing, man. It's just something we've been we've been misled on.

And it it takes a lot to go against the grain of society and say, yeah, people are gonna think you're lazy if you sleep too late and people are gonna say you're lazy if you go to bed too early or you're weak or whatever. It's like, alright, but as far as I know, this is your life. You only get one and they have their own life to live, so you should probably worry about your life and let them worry about their lives. If they want to worry about your life, they can, but I'd put myself first.

Chris Albert 01:06:08 (link to this point)

Right. And before we go, I just want to acknowledge you because not just for your service as a SEAL, but to to take the path that you've taken. I mean, there there's probably a million places you could have gone as a doctor, a million different things you could have done that were a lot easier than this.

Kirk Parsley 01:06:26 (link to this point)

And Yes.

Chris Albert 01:06:27 (link to this point)

That you you've chosen to to spend a good part of your life putting warriors back together after they've broken and and, you know, telling people the hard thing, which is that that, you know, it's not always what people wanna hear. So I think you're speaking the truth and I appreciate what you do.

Kirk Parsley 01:06:48 (link to this point)

Wow. Well, thank you very much. That means a lot. I appreciate the I appreciate the kind words there.

Chris Albert 01:06:56 (link to this point)

Absolutely.

Kirk Parsley 01:06:57 (link to this point)

And And it's useless without guys like you to put it out there though, like, you know, nobody can hear me if I'm not on a podcast or a stage or a television.

Chris Albert 01:07:05 (link to this point)

So Well, that's the beauty of living in this time and place where where anybody can do it. Right?

Kirk Parsley 01:07:11 (link to this point)

Yeah.

Chris Albert 01:07:11 (link to this point)

You And, know, you you've made a lot of effort to get the message out there and it's it's it's, you know, requisite for people like me to put the message out there and help you to do that. So Yeah. And, to everybody out there, make sure that you pay attention to what we discussed in this episode. I'm gonna have all the links for Doc Parsley up on the show notes for this. Make sure you get over, grab that book from Amazon and take a look at that sleep remedy.

These are things that can truly help you to become a better person and to live your best life. So with that, guys, thank you so much for listening. Get out there and live your best lives while you can, and we are out. Alright, ladies and gents. I hope that you enjoyed that conversation with Doc Parsley.

Like I said, he is one of the smartest individuals that I've ever met when it comes to human performance and when it comes to your overall health. Be sure to not just listen to this stuff, go out there and actually apply it to your lives. And we'll have all of Doc Parsley's links up on the show notes for this episode. For those of you who want to go and check it out, you should definitely check out his TEDx talk. It's really eye opening as far as the things we do to ourselves and burning the candle at both ends.

I wanted to mention this, as many of you know, we have this group called the Warrior's Obituary Society. It's a group for men who are working to empower each other to live their absolute best lives. And the thing about this group is that it is catering to those of you who are trying to figure things out. When our new members come in, they're put through an eight week development program. So the first step is we outline your vision, your goals, we bring some clarity to what your purpose is here on this earth.

And then from there, we're working on specifics. We're working on your fitness. We're working on your personal finance. We're working on your business and career goals, we're working on your relationships, all to get you to prepare so that you can take that journey toward those giant goals that you have. And the thing about this group that I love the most is the daily conversations we get into.

We have a private forum that's not run on social media. It's run on a Slack workspace because number one, I don't want our members going on a social media all the time and getting distracted by the 10 different alerts they're gonna get. Number two, I don't want anybody looking over anybody's shoulders. So the the Slack channel is where it's at with the conversation. We also have a voice channel on Voxer that we also communicate through, and each week we're getting on live calls.

Once you're through that eight week development program, the work just starts. That's when we are holding you accountable toward those goals, making sure that you're getting things accomplished each week that are gonna add up to your vision. So if that's something you're going to be interested in, if something that you think you want to take part in, let me know. Send me an email over at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com, or you can message me over on Instagram at Warrior Soul Agoge. I am really, really looking forward to taking you guys through this program and to working with you to make those visions happen.

And beyond that, if you like the show, please let us know about it. Please head over to iTunes, write us a written rating and review. That doesn't cost you anything at all, and that's the biggest thing that's gonna help us right now. I'm always getting notes from people asking how they could support support the show. Writing us a review is the biggest thing you could do for us right now.

We're trying to get all of this information to the hands of veterans and everyday people so that we can shape this country for the better. So please do that. And with that, I don't have anything else. I hope you enjoyed this, and we'll be back at you later on this week with some more awesome content. And get ready because we have some awesome episodes coming up for you.

Be talking to you soon, and I am out.