The Joe Rogan Experience - #1056 - Dr. Mark Gordon & Andrew Marr

Episode Date: December 27, 2017

Dr. Mark Gordon is the Medical Director of Education at Access Medical Laboratory and is recognized as a top leader world wide in Interventional Endocrinology (Anti Aging Medicine). Andrew Marr is a former Green Beret and founder of the Warrior Angels Foundation. http://waftbi.org/

Three two we need like a digital counter Three two one whoo if you're gonna drink that Andrew be very careful. It's 270 milligrams of caffeine that Donated is that allowed Brendan drank one of those yesterday and a cup of coffee. And then on top of that, he drank a, what did he have? Something, a venti with a shot of espresso in it from Starbucks. All doing it while he was fasting. So halfway into the podcast, he starts hurling.

Runs into the bathroom, throws up. Then comes back and then throws up in a bucket at the end of the podcast. Literally didn't make it out of the room. So there you go. He could have had a heated seat if he had to take a shit. Yeah. We have a heated seat. That would have been awesome.

He got it. Yeah. 270? 270 milligrams. 270 milligrams. Yeah. Caveman coffee. Nitrogenated.

It's basically like espresso with nitrogen in it. It's good stuff. You get used to it. Good. I'll take it before bed. Yeah. That's a good move. You'll have some weird dreams. I stuff. You get used to it. Good, I'll take it before bed. Yeah, that's a good move. You'll have some weird dreams. I take espresso before I go to bed.

Andrew, I'm not used to this clean-shaven Andrew. You're like a different human. You could sneak up on people. That's the point, man. My daughters, about a year ago, said they had enough of the beard, so it had to go. Oh, when I was, well, when my daughter was one,

a friend of mine died, we on the internet we'd all had this guy evan tanner who was a former ufc champion and we had decided that we were all going to grow beards for him because he had this crazy giant beard and so a bunch of us in the internet did it and i just grew this fucking werewolf beard and then it got to a point where i was like you know know, time was up. I was going to shave it off. And my daughter had no idea what I really looked like. So I shaved my face. She started screaming.

She thought I was somebody else. And she started crying. And I'm like, touch it. This is my normal face. And then she's confused. She's like, I know that voice. Like, who are you? That's what it looks like.

Oh, nice. Yeah, same that happened with my boys. They were young, too. So they had never seen me without it. So they thought you were a stranger, right? That's trim, too. You see that? That's because we're on TV.

I trim the cheek areas because it'll creep up my nose. GQ it up. Got it. I GQ'd it. Yeah, I'm trying to look fresh. Well, I have to admit the fact that after 30 years of not having a beard, meeting you, I ended up with that beard and then started speaking Arabic. Right.

Out of nowhere? Out of nowhere. How weird. It's more academic, too, you know, when you're lecturing on the lecture circuit. Of course. But for a guy with your experience, that kind of beard, it's normal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, guys who have lived your line of work? I don't know, man. It's like counterculture, so anti-establishment in the establishment. Yeah. And it's part of it, you know? And like anything else, you get into, I don't know, it felt normal, right? So it was probably a crutch a little bit and something that felt right for a long time. I don't think it's a crutch, but I think it's definitely like a mark of the occupation.

Yeah. I remember I read Dick Marchenko's book. Am I saying his name right? Yeah. Marchenko? Marchenko? Mm-hmm. I read one of his books way, way back in the day.

Like Rogue Warriors. Yeah, yeah. And they were talking about guys who would dress, just how they didn't fit in with like regular military guys. Yeah, yeah. And they were talking about guys who would dress just how they didn't fit in with, like, regular military guys. Yeah. No, totally, totally, like, unconventional would probably be the way to say it. You know what I mean? So not in with authority, not in with, you know, everybody being the same way, not down with uniforms, not down with, you know, using name and rank. You know, we called everybody by their first name. Yeah our hair long grew our beards wrong it was just kind of a

uh you had to earn that right you know what i mean so that's part of it like hey i earned the right to be able to be autonomous so so to speak and so that's kind of the uh some of it it is interesting you know that that's the the i, I don't want to make distinctions, but the baddest motherfuckers in the military are the ones who dress like, like just regular savages. There's something, there's something odd about that, right? I don't know, man. There's just, uh.

I like the idea though that you had to earn it. Yeah. Yeah. You got to earn it. And, um, you know, it's like you get so tired of doing what you're told and you have to earn it yeah yeah you got to earn it and um you know it's like you get so tired of doing what you're told and you want to do what you think you need to do for the job right you know what i mean so like what what is it how how do i see that i need to accomplish this task whatever it is i don't need to be dictated from somebody who's not going to be there

telling me how to do it and so that goes all the way down to even like okay well what kind of boots am i going to wear what kind of what what kind of uniform do I need to accomplish this mission or do these things? And I just kind of, that's the way those guys are. They're always thinking about, you know, not, not how to, not how to, not how to fall in line, man, but like, how can we think differently to solve problems? And, uh, you know, the uniform is just one of those things. It is very interesting. Now, just so this is a standalone podcast so people don't have to go back and listen to the first one that we did, we have Dr. Mark Gordon here, a good friend of mine, and

Andrew Marr, who is the founder of the Warrior Angels Foundation. Yeah, co-founder. Me and my brother, Adam Marr, who was also in the Army. And we did a podcast a while back, but for the people that didn't hear, explain what the Warrior Angels Foundation is and what you guys do. Yeah, can I get some context to that first, Joe? So like we talked about, I was Special Forces Green Beret for a better part of a decade. So I would say somebody defined by my vision of the future.

And so that always led me to doing what I wanted to do in life. And so, you know, special forces, spec ops type dudes, they're in life and death situations pretty regularly and perform. Otherwise, they don't live. You know what I mean? And so that was kind of life for the better part of 10 years, being in life and death situations on a regular basis. And so going from that, you know, I would say a high performer by, you know, by every metric to one day after my last deployment, I woke up and I was on 13 different medications. You know, I couldn't remember how to drive home from the same route that I've been driving home every day. I was just in chronic pain all the time.

I had these balance issues where I couldn't walk in a straight line. Blurry vision would go into double vision, and I had these horrible migraine headaches. So just debilitating that way and then started to have become depressed. And this was like this was just mind boggling to me because I was living, I thought my life's purpose, right? Doing the job I wanted to do with the people I wanted to be with, married to the woman of my dreams, had the family that we always wanted. But yet here I am, I have all these physical problems. Now I'm starting to be depressed, and I don't have a reason to be depressed. And then I started having panic attacks in public, in our weight room, at home, in front of my kids, you know, like just breaking down crying

and not knowing why and not being able to do anything about it. And then I started to have, you know, and that was, again, like the structure of reality was fracturing around me. And I didn't know why or what was going on. And the first thing you can think to do in something like that was to drink. I was like, I got to stop this. And I don't know what to do. I think I have some screws loose or what's going on.

But all I know is this is so disastrous. Maybe if I just drink, I can put the brakes on this a little bit. And things just continue to get worse. And then my behavior just continued to skyrocket out of control. And it wasn't like I was making conscious decisions to be fucked up. Like I'm drinking and driving on a regular basis. And I never even crossed my mind like that was a wrong thing to do. It was just like, hey, man, I can't function unless I drink and I got to drive.

So that's what we're going to do, you know, and then start producing just horrible effects on my family with that line of behavior. And it got to the point. And as a special forces operator, man, all you want to do is operate. All you want to do is be on the team and go and do the things that we signed up to do. Didn't have any problem with that. It wasn't like, oh, you know, all these combat scenarios are weighing on me and it's been too much and I just can't handle it. Like that's the only thing I felt comfortable doing. I wanted to get back to it. And but again, like I'd never had any of these symptoms before. So life is just spiraling out of control and not sleeping and everything else. And so finally, you know, you sit on it till you can't sit on any longer.

And it got to the point where I was like, not only am I a detriment to myself and probably society, like I can't go out and operate right now. Like these guys can't depend on me. And so at that point, I was like, I got to raise my hand and I got to get some help. And, you know, that well-intended people wanted to offer as much help and find answers as they possibly could. But again, all it got me was 13 different medications. And I was told, hey, you've had so many head injuries, you can't afford to take another blow to the head. And this is probably going to be the new you.

You're going to be on these medications, take a pen and a pad everywhere you go, and learn how to live within these new parameters and schedule out your meds. And this is going to be that. And so it was a medical retirement. It got so bad, Joe, that my wife was nine months pregnant with our fifth child. And she had to ask me, hey, Andrew, can you keep your drinking down today in case I go into labor so I don't have to drive myself to the hospital? So that's how bad it was getting. And that wasn't enough to stop me.

And so she actually, our son had a genetic lymphatic malformation in his neck. And he got sick. He's like in his neck, and he got sick. He's like 13 months old, and he got infected, and it blew up to like the size of a softball. And this is when she's nine months pregnant. So we have to take him to the emergency room, and my calf had been killing me for about three days at this point. I didn't think anything of it. I just wrote it off. But we're in there in the emergency room like he's having trouble trouble breathing. Like it's, it's bad, like a softball on his neck. Well, he turns out he has to go into emergency surgery.

And then Becky goes into labor. So he's up on like the fifth floor getting emergency surgery. Becky's given labor to our youngest son on the second floor. So I'm going back and forth between the fifth floor and the second floor. And I'm like dragging my leg at this point because it just stopped working. But, you know, I was all in and refused any care until I could get these two taken care of. Well, we get Jace out of surgery. You know, he's on the road to recovery. Get down for the birth. We have our son, Jojo. He's good to go. And then it turns out they finally rushed me to imaging and I have a blood clot in my leg and it's broken off into both lungs. So now I have a bilateral pulmonary embolism. And at this point they're like, Hey man, like we have a very small window here. This is very

high mortality rate. And I'm like laughing at him. Cause like, you know, I was drunk at the time. No bullshit. And I'm like, you guys think this is going to kill me get in line this is just a long line of offenders here that i want a shot at that but um so anyway so i'm sitting there in the hospital room and i'm just wondering and waiting for somebody to come explain to me like how life is spiraled out of control like this and like somebody's going to say hey this is a reason that you have these blood clots you know here's what's going on with your head and all these things. And it just it never happens. And I remember like, I got to go down and visit my son, who was in emergency recovery. And I was there at his hospital bed. And I had a bottle of whiskey, or airplane bottle

of whiskey, and I popped the last pain pill I ever took and I shot down the whiskey. That was just normal 24-7 how I operated at that time, tried just to cope. And I had this epiphany, you know, that, hey, if I continue on this same track and I continue to just wholesale buy everything the medical system is telling me, it's going to kill me and it's going to ruin everything that I love. So I can stay on that route or I can decide to act and to change what I don't like. And at that point, it was everything. And so I made the promise to my son right then and there that I was going to do some things. One, I was going to get off all medication, and I was going to return to the man of my pre-injury status. Two, I was going to find a way to heal myself. And then three, I was going to turn around and do that same thing for somebody else. And so right then and there in that hospital's

bed, and I mean, this is honest to God, true story. I said, I don't care how, I don't know how, but I've had enough. I've had enough of people telling me that my life is over. And at that time, you know, my identity was in special forces. And that was taken away because of the medical injuries. And I said, I don't care anymore. I'm still a husband. I'm still a father, and I'm gonna get better. And that was enough to pull me out of there, out of that negative spiral that I was in and to start being proactive again and start being defined by a vision of the future. And my vision of the future was just what I said. And I didn't know it was going to lead to where we're at today, but that was the catalyst. And so I started going and looking for alternative therapies and it turned out out the government didn't want to pay for anything that wasn't covered by their insurance.

Well, that's fine. I'll charge it. I'll max it on credit cards. That's fine. I'll get more credit cards. I don't care. I don't care if it's a million dollars. I will get the money, and I will get better, and I will solve this problem.

And then I started getting objective about it. And I was talking to everybody out there who was having head head problems like, hey, what's working for you guys? And I got real interested in why did some things work for some people and then not work for others? You know, you know, precursor to meeting Mark, but I'm starting to get really scientific minded or, you know, want objective data to be able to support things. And so there's all this these other treatment modalities out there, and I did every single one of them. And some of them were a little bit of benefit in the short term. Some of them, you know, reversed or made symptoms worse.

But it was leading toward that that we got some publicity out of it. Mark read about it and just contacted me. And he didn't know anything else about me at that point. But he said, hey, you know, we've been treating TBI for a number of years now. Here's my credentials. Here's the background story on it. Here's some media that I'd done. And it was a podcast that you guys had done a couple back with uh when uh you had matt gosney on and i'm listening to matt tell his story and for the first time ever through hearing him i was like holy shit this is this isn't specific to me like i got so wrapped up in myself like i thought like the whole world's on pause and this is this is just my problem and i realized oh my god this is a my problem. And I realized, oh my God, this is a much bigger problem that has

wide reaching repercussions that doesn't just deal with me specifically. And so as I'm hearing Matt talk about all the problems that he's having, it's like, he's like telling my story to the T. And then I hear Mark say, well, not only that, but we can identify an underlying condition for all of the things that we were just talking about, and we can measure it objectively. And, like, that just blew my mind because I was like, here I am on 13 medications, and there wasn't one objective measurement where somebody said, let's put them on an antidepressant. Let's put them on another antidepressant. Let's put them on an anti-anxiety. I was like, there was nothing objective about that.

I was like, wait a minute. So there was nothing you're saying. There was nothing they were measuring. Somebody's subjective call. There's a level of this that we need to move up. There's a level of that we need to diminish. Right. Yeah, based off the symptoms and the complaints I had.

They were just throwing darts. Like I said, 13 medications from a person who had never had any issue before. And to all the guys that have served, that have gone through this kind of thing, and not just guys that have served, but also when you're dealing with TBI, we're talking about athletes, we're talking about former fighters. A lot of guys that I've been in contact with on a regular basis have these issues. And what Mark has done, which has been just phenomenal, was open up a new door for treatment to these people.

And I have talked to so many people. I've been in contact with so many people that heard about you through the podcast that we've done together and heard about your work and have gone on to completely remove these medications from their life. Correct. You know, that's the problem in psychiatry is there are no real biological markers. They're trying to or a blast trauma like Andrew had, or a slip and fall, or someone coming up and hitting you behind the head, or MMA, or boxers, or Muay Thai. And there's absolutely zero that they use to regulate what they're doing. It says, okay, today's Thursday, let's try this drug, or this is Friday, or else this month, we're giving you this satchel of meds, as many of the vets have come up and told me, depending upon the day of the week, dictated what groupings of medications they were given.

But let's break it down for people. What do you feel is the underlying cause of all this that's related to TBI? Okay. Great question. And the answer is, number one, from the head trauma, it elicits chemical changes in the brain that we call inflammation. And this inflammation leads to disruption of chemical processes. It's like, you know, the old alkaline batteries or the car batteries where we used to put distilled water into it. Well, if you put Coca-Cola in it, it

totally changes the ability of electrons to be conducted, just like in the brain. So the chemistry of the brain is altered by the inflammation, and it starts shutting down systems so that the nerves in the left side of the brain can't talk to the right side, or the frontal lobe of the brain can't talk to the temporal lobe of the brain. So you have disruption of executive function, which is your ability to make correct decisions about things right and wrong. Why do we have over a million veterans incarcerated? That's because they can't make the right, correct decisions about how to respond to an innocuous approach by an individual that they don't know. And they respond by assault or with physical or anger or yelling at people,

and that leads them into jail or into incarceration. So anyway, the inflammation leads to hormonal deficiencies in the brain. And what we found is that there's, since 1986, Dr. Beilou out of Paris found that we have enzyme systems that take cholesterol and convert it into hormones that actuate and regulate our brain function, from schizophrenia to ALS to Parkinson's disease to bipolar to all the different disorders. There was a recent article that I sent out to our journal group, and Andrew's in it, and it was about management of neuroinflammation, brain inflammation, to treat psychiatric diseases. And in the past six months, we've been starting to see a lot of

articles talking specifically about inflammation, creating all these things that we're trying to treat with medications that are ineffective. Last month, I had a class in Arizona, and I presented a group of articles, and one of the key articles was the fact that they found people with atypical depression. That's depression that doesn't respond to traditional medication. So you're on a whole bunch, 13 medications, and you're still depressed. So they found in 61% of these people who were still depressed with atypical depression that they had growth hormone deficiency. And then when they replaced the growth hormone, within one to two months, their depression disappeared and they had some beneficial side effects.

They slept better. They had more mental energy. They were socially more adaptable. And their reactive scores that creates an you know, an assault situation, they were calm. Someone said boo to them and they said, oh, who do you? As opposed to getting into their face. So it's a very clear and it's becoming clearer and clearer in the literature around the world now. We've been doing this since 2004. And the inflammation is really the problem. and the inflammation is really the problem. So unfortunately, there is no specific medication.

They talk about use of aspirin and ibuprofen in things like Alzheimer's disease, which is an inflammatory disease. I know I shared it with you in the past that if a football player has one major concussion on the field, he's 19 times at greater risk of developing Alzheimer's between 30 and 49 years of age because it's an inflammatory illness. It's not genetics by itself. There are people with genetic predisposition to it because they generate this thing called beta amyloid. But trauma, any kind of trauma to the head can elicit increased production of beta amyloid and lead to these problems. So the traumatic brain injury causes this inflammation, and there's a process that goes on when the brain is dealing with this inflammation, and that's what's disrupting all of these normal functions, executive functions.

Absolutely. And, you know, we have different relay centers in our brain that regulate whether or not you're going to be calm or you're going to be hyper, have anxiety. One of the products that we use is 100% natural. About 80% of our treatment is all natural products with 10% to 20% being pharmaceutical products but no psychotropic or brain-altering medications. So what kind of products do you use to reduce? Pregnenolone. Pregnenolone, there's 6,160 articles talking about its beneficial effect on anxiety. So we have people who come in on a multitude of anxiety medications.

Within three months, they're off all their medication. And what is pregnenolone? Pregnenolone is called the mother of all hormones. It's the precursor. It comes right off of cholesterol. The first change to cholesterol becomes pregnenolone, which goes down one pathway to become testosterone and then down another pathway to become cortisol, which is the anti-inflammatory product. So we get benefits of anti-inflammatory effect by having pregnenolone. But if you're on any kind

of statin drug that decreases the availability of cholesterol in the brain or the body, you lose. I've heard nothing but bad things about statin drugs. Don't get me going. I want to get you going because there's so many people that have this very meager understanding of cholesterol and a meager understanding of like, what is the difference between having, you know, high cholesterol, low cholesterol? You know, what's healthy, what's not healthy? What's your cholesterol, Mark? My cholesterol is 350.

My LDL is, and it should be, according to the present standards, less than 200. My LDL cholesterol is 273, which is the LDL is the lousy kind. And my HDL, which is the happy to have the healthy one, is like 23 to 40. How did the numbers change over time? They're all the same. No, for the standard of where they used to measure from the 70s till now. In my infancy in medicine, back in the late 80s, it was 349 and then went to 329, then 279, then 249, 229, and less than 200 now. And we would expect our nutrition is changing, the quality of foods that we eat, and the fact that we have since 1986 statin drugs, which are $36 billion a year, we would anticipate that the rate

of cardiovascular disease should be diving, getting lower. It's not. It's going up. So what does it tell us? It tells us, like a SmithKline-Beacham study that was done, 50% of all heart attacks happen in people with normal or low levels of cholesterol. So the question is, then what's causing it? Well, it turns out inflammation. You start looking at inflammatory chemistry,

there's a group of inflammatory markers that we have, which SDLDL, homocysteine, LP little a, there's a whole group of them that can predict better than cholesterol your risk for heart disease. And what we do in the office is we have a biomarker panel for cardiac inflammation. A person comes in, they've got a history of elevated cholesterol. cardiac inflammation. Person comes in, they've got a history of elevated cholesterol. One of my closest buddies, Keith, ex-fighter pilot, his cholesterol 140, 150. My cholesterol 300, 350. We went and had an ultra-fast CT scan that looks at the heart. And his calcium score was greater than 2,000, which if it's 100 or less is good, greater than 400, horrible. Mine was zero.

And I had cholesterol that was three times his. So after he had his open heart surgery and his new arteries put in, we went and had this panel called an LP6. My cholesterol is sky high, but all these inflammatory markers low. In Keith's situation, his inflammatory markers were sky high, even though his cholesterol was very low. Yeah, there's a simplistic understanding of what's causing these issues, and people peg it on cholesterol. And you hear it so often, so many times, and you're like, boy, how do I even begin having this conversation with people? I would like to, if anybody's listening and you want to really get into this, Dr. Rhonda Patrick went pretty deep on it in the last podcast that we did, and the newly found connections between refined sugars and refined carbohydrates and saturated fats,

the combination of the two seems to be a gigantic issue, whereas saturated fats on their own are not an issue. The small particle versus large particle, LDL, small particles are the dangerous ones, right? SDLDL is dangerous, but it's at greater risk when you have an enzyme called the PLA2 in the blood, which causes the SDLDL, the small density LDL, to fracture into two parts that cause the immune system to be called in. And once the immune system gets there, it creates all this inflammation. And there's something that happens with LDL when you combine it with refined sugars that's extremely bad for you.

Makes it worse. Yeah, extremely bad. Sugars, corn syrup, things that people are drinking, sodas and cake and bullshit, all the refined bread and wheat products products all that stuff is fucking terrible for you well it's just adding more inflammation on top of it and it's being conflated with saturated fats and with cholesterol and it's it's not what the issue is correct so think about if you have a brain injury and you're eating like that you know what i mean it's like you're pouring gasoline on a fire and having no idea about it like that's an issue that we face a lot of the time.

So there's the inflammation response, and then there's also the issues with the pituitary gland and the hormonal deficiencies. Well, it's not only the pituitary gland, which generates the signals to the thyroid gland or the testicles or the ovaries to make their hormones or the adrenal glands. But it's the fact that we call them glial cells, which are astrocytes and neurocells, which generate their own hormones. And it turns out that the hormones produced below the neck have a genomic effect on the body, which is slow. It means it turns on genetic switches to do things. But the hormones produced in the brain called the neurosteroids, they have immediate effect because they influence the membranes of neurons to do things. So our ability to be rational,

because you're taking different parts of the brain and they're all working in unison, as opposed to having this section that deals with how you respond to someone talking in a high voice to you or pointing a gun at you or pointing a pencil at you. So you lose that integration of the different parts of the brain. That's what each of the lobes is responsible for is how we integrate signals coming in. The whole thing is so fascinating because it seems like there's so much to understand. And for the average person that goes to your general practitioner and the general practitioner says, oh, I've got high cholesterol. You need to be on a statin drug. And then you find out about all this. People get extremely angry. I've talked to so many people that were

on statin drugs and suffered all sorts of health consequences because of that and then realize, oh, what about cutting all the fucking sugar out of my diet? What about doing all the stuff that has been shown in all these more recent studies to have a significant effect on your health? It's unfortunate that when science comes out, and it's really good science, that it takes another 20 or 30 years before it gets into the medical community. And there's no obligation for your general practitioner to be up on this stuff? No, absolutely not, because it's status quo. And it's changing constantly.

Yes. And that's what has me in frustrated state all the time is because the science that's been sitting on the bench, what I do, what I've been told I do, is called translational medicine, where I take the research that's on the bench that's already been done, and I look at it in large groups and then apply it into the clinical practice. And that's how we've had our success is because we've taken the stuff that's sitting there ready to be used that's not being used because we're in the paradigm of don't do anything for 30 years. I mean, every generation, a little bit something better happens. But it takes 30 years.

It's incredibly frustrating. So, Andrew, please go back to how you found out about Mark and what changes you made and what happened. Yeah. Well, because I've only known you since you've been happy. That's been a good run, man. That's a great run. But if you lower cholesterol, Mark, it ruins all the hormonal production. Correct.

Right? So that's not understood. But so Mark found me. I looked into everything I was just saying, went over, listened to that research, did my own research, found out about the neuroendocrine system and ran it by my own people. And so I went and saw an endocrinologist. I was still in the army at this time. And I was saying, hey, do you think that any of these problems were based off of the hundreds or thousands of explosions that we've around on a routine basis? He's like, no, I don't, I don't think so. And he was like, I was like, Well, can we test and replace any hormones that I'm missing? Because

I mean, at that time, we had done some tests, and I knew that I was deficient in things. And he's like, I'm going to test you for anabolic steroids, because I think the reason you're having these problems is you're abusing anabolic steroids. And if you pass the test, and you prove that you're not on anabolic steroids, which will take about four to six weeks then we'll talk about a replacement treatment program and i was fucking irate man like i told him he accused you accused me of being going to him a fucking doctor because his levels were so low yeah he's like the only way he's like i've never seen levels this low unless somebody was abusing anabolic steroids. And so you must be abusing anabolic steroids. And you're here essentially trying to score drugs.

So he thought, people don't understand what you're saying. When you take anabolic steroids, your natural testosterone shuts down. A lot of times when people get off steroids, then they'll go to a doctor, their natural testosterone is shut down, and they'll go to a doctor to try to get hormone replacement therapy. Because the only way a doctor is going to give you hormone replacement therapy is if your levels are low. And so one of the reasons for having low levels is that you've put all this exogenous shit in there, and it's, you know, your whole body is all confused. Yeah, so thanks for clarifying that, Mark. Like, I was like, hey, man, do you think I'm coming in here putting all this personal stuff on you? Right.

Because I like to make things up. Just because you want steroids. Because I want steroids. Or you want testosterone. Like, you think my life's a disaster and I think this is funny? But it's just crazy that he would accuse you. You know what I mean? It happened.

It happened twice, Joe. Twice. Well, it's... Back to back. Don't they understand that there's other issues that cause your body to have low testosterone? That's what's crazy. So this is what pushed us in this direction, man. So I was like, well – at that point, I started reading some of the literature and I was like, it's not even black.

I mean, it's not even in the gray area. This is black and white. There's like blast trauma can, through inflammation, affect the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and downregulate all these hormones. And so anyways, so I finally, I link up with Mark in Southern California. We run the labs, but we don't get the results back for like two or three weeks. But he gives me what he calls a provocative testosterone injection just to see how I react. And like up until this point, man, like my life has just been a complete disaster. I mean, I've put a gun in my mouth several times and actually had thought about like,

if this is how life is going to continue and I continue to have this type of negative effect on my family, I think I'll just end it, man. You know what I mean? And I got to the point where I was just like, I can't do it for my family alone and just kept driving. So found Mark, Mark found me, got the information, actually was there to see him in his office in Encino, get that injection. I'm driving south on the 405. I'm in bumper to bumper traffic like two hours later. And usually, man, like me and traffic just didn't mix um and to say that i had a hostile temper was like the understatement of the year and i realized like hey i'm all of a

sudden i'm cool i'm calm i'm collected i'm not having any issues i'm like whoa i i don't feel any anxiety like for the last year and a half i like had this fist like coming out of my stomach man like at all times 24 7 it was horrible and it was gone and i was like if this fist coming out of my stomach, man, at all times, 24-7. It was horrible. And it was gone. And I was like, if this is any taste of what could be, this is incredible. And I call my wife, and we have a conversation for like an hour. And that's the first time that we had talked more than two minutes in like a year, and I didn't just say yes or no because I just wasn't capable of anything else at that time.

And so fast forward for a few weeks from there, you know, he gets the report back and he's like, hey, man, you're deficient and everything, you know, but we can we can fix this. And so we get on anti inflammatory protocol, and we replace, replace the and replenish the hormones that are deficient or insufficient. replace and replenish the hormones that are deficient or insufficient. And life slowly and surely started to turn back on, little by little by little by little, to where I'm at today. I'm off all medication. I'm clean. I'm sober, performing as good, if not better than my pre-injury status. We started up an organization called the Warrior Angels Foundation to deliver this same level of healing to other people who are in the exact same predicament and situation.

And now I'm excited to say, man, three years later, we've delivered it to over 200 people with incredible results. So it meets with the scientific criteria. We can predict, we can measure, and we can replicate. And now it's not just my story. It's not just Matt Gosney's story. Mark's done this like 1,400 times. We've done it 200 times through our organization where somebody, like we did a three-year TBI study cohort. We took 58 of those 200 people, just the ones that attempted suicide, 58 individuals attempted suicide. 58 individuals attempted suicide. We showed that within three months, what was it, 91% had a 50% improvement.

So almost everybody had at least a 50%, this is in their subjective analysis, improvement. After one year, let's see, 73% of that population was off all medication. This is unheard of. This is unheard of. And this is people that actually attempted to take their own life, I think a minimum of two times in our study. So we're producing results that have never been annotated before. You know what I mean? And it's through the scientific model that Mark's come up with his protocols. It's unbelievable.

That's on our website. We got all that research on our website, too. Give the website a chance. W-A-F-T-B-I dot O-R-G. But I got Mark's presentation. It's on my Twitter as well. Yeah, I got Mark's presentation. We got an incredible media page, a library of all this information that didn't exist three years ago.

It's now all in one location. And all the stuff that I'm saying here, please don't take my word for it. You guys can go out and fact check it. And I can't tell you how many guys have come up to me after shows that have either been in contact with you or have been in contact with other doctors because of the information that you've given out. And we're so thankful. And so, and they're like, you're changing people's future. You're literally giving them an option that they didn't know existed.

They thought, they thought their world was black. And then you open the door and like, oh, you can be okay. When Andrew first came to me, Andrew wasn't the first veteran that I had seen. First guy that I took care of was in 2009. He was active Green Beret in North Carolina at Bragg. And his wife, I knew she was emergency room doc. And she called me up and told me about her husband getting ready to get less than honorable discharge after four or five tours of duty in Afghanistan. And she explained it to me. I said, let me send you a kit.

So I sent a kit out, and we got the results back. I told her what to do. She put him on to treatment. He lasted another two sign-up tours or two tours of duty, and was doing phenomenally well. But the key that drives me on this is guys getting back into life, going to Pepperdine Business School now, a guy who has attempted school five times, and the fifth time he was on our protocol for two or three months. He ends up getting honors, and now he wants to go back and give back to the VA for them not having treated him optimally

by going into sociology to try and help them to understand what he had gone through with us. We have guys who are in Wall Street now. All over. I mean, Harvard, business school. I mean, just all kinds of very prestigious things. They've got their life back. They've got their family back. They're recalling their parents.

And this has only been going on for a couple of years. Yeah, we didn't give them a self-help book. We didn't give them any spiritual teachings, anything else. Just fix what was deficient. And they were able to come back and make their own choices to get their life back on track. That is such a giant factor in this whole equation that people need to understand. It's not just about motivational speeches. It's not about memes that you put on your Instagram page

that make you feel better about life. It's literally about the chemical balance in your physical vehicle. And if it's off, you're going to be off. And if it's off because of diet, if it's off because of injury, whatever the factors are, you've got to figure out what those factors are

and you've got to correct them. You've got to correct them before self-help, before all that bullshit. Correct your diet. Correct whatever is deficient in your hormone levels, whatever is deficient in your nutrient levels. It's so goddamn important. Absolutely. And I don't mean to focus only on the neurosteroids and the inflammation, as you just said. Physical fitness and nutrition.

You know, my daughter Allison is a naturopathic, and she works with us with the Warrior Angel Foundation to help with getting the gut brain in sync so that you don't have the glutens, you don't have all the junk we talked about because they generate, the poor nutrition generates more inflammation that passes through the gut into the blood into the brain. And they've actually, there was a study that came out of, it was on the BBC's last week, where they were talking about, oh, we finally figured out that if you have peripheral inflammation,

like disease like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, that the inflammation goes into the brain and can cause depression. Well, it's been in the literature for 30 years. goes into the brain and can cause depression. Well, it's been in the literature for 30 years. They finally are starting to understand that things that happen on the periphery can affect our brain's functioning. So nutrition, very important. It's part of what's going on.

It's just the human body is so insanely complex and there's so much to understand and so much to be, you have to kind of be like you are. You have to be obsessed with all this stuff. I didn't think I was obsessed. You're obsessed, buddy. Okay. Pull that microphone up to your face a little bit more okay but you're you what you're you're doing though is just it's it's so important and and so it there's just so little of it out there for people this is part of the problem correct it's like you have to really

go looking for these solutions i mean you got to go through every door and every channel and try to find out. And so many times they want to offer you some sort of a pill, some sort of a pharmaceutical drug, some sort of an antidepressant, anti-anxiety medication. And if that one doesn't take, they give you an anti-anxiety medication on top of the anti-anxiety medication. Fuck. We had lunch or dinner with Admiral in Virginia Beach at the beginning of this year.

And one of the stories that he was sharing was the fact that his wife was diagnosed at a VA as having a thyroid-related issue. So they started treating it. And in the course of treating it, she felt worse because they weren't giving her the ample amount of replacement hormones. So the next thing that the doctor offers her is an antidepressant, saying the reason why you're still not feeling well is because of the antidepressant.

And when we got to her and checked out her hormone levels, her hormone levels were off. And did they even check her hormone levels? No, of course not. You know, they hand those goddamn antidepressants out like fucking candy. That's what was crazy with me. So I was like, there's got to be an underlying condition. Like, can somebody tell me what that is? I know we're managing symptoms, but can we do that?

And can we do it objectively or scientifically? And that's the beauty of the protocol. Because, again, to break it down for everybody out there, TBI, it's a two-phase injury. Phase one is that physical trauma or assault. It could be explosive blast wave, blunt force trauma, acceleration, deacceleration, slip, fall, roller coaster, anything that causes that anti-inflammatory cascade to start. A roller coaster can cause it? According to Mark, it can in the literature. But just think, man. Mark calls it the neuro-issive environment. So if you don't have a good internal environment, like you're eating a bunch of processed foods, sugar, you're leaving just a low quality of life, making poor lifestyle decisions.

Those things are like compounding interest over time are being like low level blast waves. And it could be something as simple as one of those 300 mile per hour moving roller coasters going to rock your head back and forth. That could be enough to be, you know, hey, that's enough. That could cause the inflammation, the inflammatory cascade. And then that causes the hormones to become deficient or insufficient. That's what we found through our research, at least. That's what our research suggests is that's the process. And if you don't get rid of the inflammation or bring the body back to a balance, if you

don't replenish or replace those hormones that are lost, you're going to have all the physical and psychological manifestations that we all know about and talked about. And so that's the deal. Can we be objective? Yes, we can. Can we measure it? Yes, we can. Can we predict and replicate? Well, we've done it 1400 times, so we can. So now it's like, okay, well, how do we continue to take this to the next level to make sure this goes mainstream? It's disseminating information on platforms like this. We're working projects with the government. Like right now, we think we might be able to actually affect change on a real level here in the next few years. It's so incredible that there is finally some sort of a resource, that there's something that people can turn to.

But we need to lay it out. Like, it's got to be every point, right? It's got to be nutrition. It's got to be exercise. It's got to be reducing the inflammation. It's got to be replacing the hormones. All those things together. When an individual is suffering with symptoms, I call it symptomatic TBI. I don't really agree

with the term PTSD or PTSS, especially when there's a history of trauma, trauma to the body or trauma to the brain. Yeah, it's not necessarily, I think people think of it as like stressful situations that guys have been through. And one of the things that I've found in talking to a lot of guys who are operators is they don't have like a high stress level because of what they've seen. Like they're the, they're the actors. They were the ones who were doing the things. There weren't, there's a lot of the stress level comes from a lot of the guys that were

not being proactive. They're waiting around for something to happen to them. And those are the guys that are the most affected by stress disorders the guys who are wondering when they were going to be attacked whereas guys who are operators who are out there aggressive out there being proactive actually correct doing it they had less of a situation with that less stress meditation for them going out and killing people you're on the offensive all right so I mean I can speak from experience here you're you're on the offensive, right? So, I mean, I can speak from experience here.

You're on the offensive. You're not waiting to get on there. So when you're stuck in this, what it is is a fight or flight mechanism. You know what I mean? You're on security mode in a non-combat environment. And so these guys get stuck in these fight or flight modes, and they can't figure out why. Why am I in fight or flight?

Like, this situation does not call for that type of response and then you look at it like if you're deficient in these things what's the body going to do if he's got these mixed electrical signals or their shearing of neurons it's going to come out as a fight or flight mechanism and that's why they're stuck in this and that's it's called post-traumatic stress but when we've treat these so-called psychological issues as a physical injury and replace and replenish lower the uh inflammatory cascades guess what those symptoms resolve themselves whether they were whether they were on the defensive or offensive you know what i mean that's fascinating but there's definitely a psychological difference between someone who becomes

a SEAL or a Ranger or a Green Beret. Oh yeah, there's no doubt. That's well documented. Yes. There's a difference in the mindset. And you know, those people are some of the most important people we have on the planet. Correct. You have to have them.

You want to have a safe world? You have to have the elite of the elite. You have to. And people who don't understand a safe world? You have to have the elite of the elite. You have to. And people who don't understand that, you need to go to some really terrible places in the world and understand what's out there. You know, looking across the spectrum of special ops and then the regular army, we've talked about this in the past. The pattern that I've been seeing also in civilian population is those people who are more a type get better faster they want to get better as opposed to the people who really don't want to get better or we've had time and time and again it's like if you have a clear vision of the future and it's like hey i'm gonna get better like i don't care what anybody else says like they like we're like the 10th stop that they've come to they're like we've tried everything we just found out you guys we're gonna do something

let's get this going. Those guys get better. Not to mention, of course, objectively, we can look at it. But people come to us and they're like, I don't know. Life doesn't work out and everything goes my way. I hope this goes, but I'm not getting my hopes

up, anything else. Those people will talk themselves out of getting better. And I wouldn't have believed that unless I've seen it time and time and time again. Those people will mentally fuck themselves out of life every step of the way. Joe, we've watched them put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger. You know what I mean? Unfortunately, we've lost people to doing that. And it wasn't like, hey, we got you the help.

And then it was like, well, it's such a hassle to take the medication at the prescribed times. And I'm like, what? What? And then I looked into that and like, that's a thing called noncompliance. Like the glaucoma research Institute put out a study, like 60% of glaucoma patients don't take their medication on time, knowing that that will cause them to go blind. Cause I, I had needed to, I needed to justify losing some people that I couldn't wrap my head around. And, like, why won't they be compliant?

People get in this rut and they memorize these emotions and they get in this negative fucking place, man, and they talk themselves right out of life. We've seen it. And people become super comfortable with repeating these really negative patterns. They get comfortable because they know those patterns. It's very disturbing when you see someone who's, you know, I grew up with a lot of guys that had drug problems. And when you would see they would get hooked on Coke or something like that and get off of it and know that they're on a better path, but it's pulling them back in, and not even physically. Like, the process of doing something that's fucked up and ruining your life somehow or another becomes more comfortable than the process of the unknown, which is improving

your life. It's scary to people. It's the devil they know, opposed to the devil they don't, you know what I mean? And I think at a neuroscience level, right, they can memorize an emotion because, right, those thoughts will – They can fake you. Yeah. Yeah. The thought will restructure the brain through neuroplasticity, and that can be their new status quo, right?

How do you get people that are in that mindset? How do you get them free of that? I mean, how do you get someone who's this, whoa, it's me, it never works out? Is there a way? I mean, is there a tried and true way? Man, I wrecked my health, kind – I wrecked my health trying to – There isn't. But we've had a couple of guys who had stopped their protocol because they didn't feel that anything was happening from it.

And they send me an email after they've been off for maybe a month. It says, geez, I don't feel as well. Maybe it was working. Or they say that we're working with the devil and go all kinds of weird. Oh, boy. Those weird. They've lost. I stopped January accepting PI cases, you know, legal cases, because what's the impetus

for them to get better? Yeah, zero. What is PI? Personal injury, like motor vehicle accidents. They're wanting a disability check. Yeah. So I stopped taking PI cases. That's unfortunate. Well.

Because there's got to be some people. But that have real personal injuries that would like to get better. I talk to everybody. Yeah. So I filter them. But generally speaking, I've cut down. I've just come to the conclusion, you know, like, hey, I can't make the decision. I can't make anybody get better.

Right. You know what I mean? Like, all we can do is give out the information. You can't put someone's shoes on and make them go to the gym. Like, I literally made myself sick, like, worrying about people. Like, oh, my God, you know, we're going to lose. And I can't, like, man, I can't do anything. All I can do is I can control my attitude and my effort.

And I can push out this information to the best of my ability. And people have got to meet us halfway. You know what I mean? Like there's nothing we can do to make somebody want to get themselves better. Talking with the guy tomorrow, his brother's at wit's end, and just wrecking everything that he comes in and out of every rehab program just is a horrible place. I don't see it ending well.

And I'm going to talk to him tomorrow because he wants to know, how can I make my brother want to get better? And I'm like, brother, I love you, man, but we can't. You can't force somebody, you know, to do that. And the disaster, I don't know, the tragic part of that, I think, is, you know, the person's not thinking right because their judgment's clouded because of a head injury. You know, serving the country. It's a bummer. One of the battles that we have also is that people, relationships.

I speak to wives that are estranged, husbands that are estranged when we take on a new veteran or patient, to let them know that the person that they've been dealing with post-traumatic brain injury is not really the person they want to be. That's an effect of the hormonal dysfunctioning. So they're depressed, they're angry, they're, you know, they're difficult to be around. So I try to get them to help in the protocol to get them better. And what we've seen are couples getting back together. We have a 77-year-old Vietnam veteran who lost everything. He's back with his kids now. He's out and back chopping wood in Boston. You know, just that's the reward. That really is the reward.

But people have to understand that if they've had traumatic brain injury, anticipate within one year's time total change in the person, total change. They're no longer the person that you anticipated. how long did it take you for that transition well it was uh i started first having symptoms like six months after i got home you know what i mean so that's the difficult part like you're not missing a limb so you don't think anything like we were rocking and rolling come back good to go happy to be alive let's get ready for the next one and then boom stuff starts happening and it's like oh my gosh what's going on you know um but you can't see anything and you just keep going you keep seeing this low quality of life and then you want help and you can't get help uh you ask for help

you're getting medication start drinking sleep gets drinking. Sleep gets messed up. Nutrition gets messed up. Start wrecking relationships. Then start thinking about I'll never be able to do what I thought I was supposed to do. Nobody understands me. What's the future going to be like like this? And that's how you get trapped into these memorizing these negative states because you get stuck in that for you you heard mark on the podcast how long did it take you to act and how long did it take after there to for you to become who you are now so i made that decision at my son's bedside and that was several months before i met mark what year is this? How many years ago? This is 2014.

Yeah, I was on your show January 2014. This is September of 2014 and I didn't meet him until December 2014. Right? So it was all of 2014 was just a disaster, right?

Leading up to the hospital scene. So I made the decision like, hey, at that point, it was like, you know what? I've always been defined by my future. But all of a sudden, like, you know what? I've always been defined by my future. But all of a sudden, like, you know, like being a special forces Green Beret was my mask. We all wear our masks.

And that's how I that was my identity, or at least I thought it was. And so when that got taken away from me, it was like, well, what I'm going to do now? And now I'm sick and now my children are sick. And now they're telling me like I have a brain injury like what does that mean like that this is like just getting rocked so like being rocked by circumstances knocked me you know for a year and a half just it knocked me and like I wasn't prepared I wasn't ready I didn't know how to deal with it and it wasn't until I made that decision that I was like no I've always been defined by going after the future

that I want to create. I'm going back to that. And it was like, so there was like a will, you know, that was to it. Like, I don't know where it came from, but like I could observe my thoughts. And I was like, these thoughts that are being produced now are not me. I don't know where they're coming from, but there's a will inside me that says we're going to fight this and we're going to, we're going to find a way to come out on the other side so that happened in september you know uh fast forward to finding mark so it was like quick like after three months of the protocol like physiologically i felt like myself again i was off all medication everything else yeah how long did it take you to get off the medication did you quit turkey quit tall turkey and they say you should never do that should never do that

i was just i was at a place in my life doctors no time no i was at a place in my life that i was like hey i i accept whatever fallout could happen but whatever i'm going to feel it's not going to be artificial i'm just going to feel whatever it is and i'm going to and i'm going to deal with it on on my terms i'm not going to be zombied out it was rough bro it was rough um so i i was off all medication before i got to mark you know what i mean and so uh i didn't like i didn't have control of like my mind the way I wanted to, like the way I do now. So I had to work very hard not just to lose it on people. For instance, like, we were, I was with my wife. We were in a fast food restaurant picking up some food for my youngest daughter. And so I'm going there grabbing some food.

I see this kid, teenager, in the parking lot. And he, I don't know, this kid throws his cup down. He's cussing. He's causing a scene. I felt like I needed to intervene. I don't know, this kid throws his cup down. He's cussing. He's causing a scene. I felt like I needed to intervene. I don't know why. So I'm like, Hey man, pick your cup up, throw it in the trash, quit yelling cuss words everywhere. Families are here. And he tells me to go fuck myself. And I'm like, dude, go pick up your stuff and put it in the trash. And he said the same thing. And before I knew it, I just backhanded this kid across the face, dropped

him on the ground. And then I picked him up and I threw him into oncoming traffic. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Well, the parking lot took offense to that, rightly so. You know what I mean? And so I got people swarming me. Next thing I know, like, I dropped, like, three dudes in the parking lot. And I look up after dropping the last guy, and, like, my wife's breastfeeding, and three

of my children are looking at me. And, like, they're in, like, horror is on their face. Just horror struck. And I'm like, my God, man, if I don't get control of myself, like, not only is this going to possibly kill me, I'm going to kill somebody else. You know what I mean? Like, I felt like I just didn't know what happened. Something happened. Boom, I came to.

And it was like, dear God, I just dropped the parking lot. And I'm doing evasive maneuvers in my fucking minivan trying to get out of the parking lot. Oh, my God. Funny but not funny. Right. You know what I mean? And so, you know, it was this process of – so it was rough, man. It was rough coming off medication.

I don't recommend it for anybody else. But it was like, hey, man, like I went off of that because that just made me a zombie just like drooling on myself zombie what steps did you take as far as your diet and exercise and then mark's protocol i eat a you know basically try to anti-inflammatory diet you know what i mean um and that's just based off my individual needs. At that time, I was just remaining active. What did that mean by anti-inflammatory diet? What did you do differently? Well, just learning what causes inflammation, right?

So what we talk about, like refined sugars, refined carbohydrates, getting away from things that were packaged for me. You know what I mean? Going back to more wholesome, whole foods. And this is before Mark's protocol or? No, this is, this is, this is after I'm on it, you know what I mean? So I didn't make any changes until I got anything until I got into Mark's protocol, started to like return to, to normalcy. And then when you get to that level, you start feeling really good again. You're like, well, what else can I do? You know what I mean? And that's, that's like been the steps that we've seen in so many people, like we don't have to make any lifestyle changes initially, like they'll make them on their own.

So get them back to a homeostasis, a balance, a neuro permissive environment at Mark, as Mark calls it. And then you start looking at like, well, what else do I need to do in my life to optimize it? And for me, man, it was like, I'm going to take a look at water. I'm going to be take a look at light, sound, EMF, like every external, you know, stimulus I want to optimize and make sure like it's as optimized as possible. Wow. So did you do any changes to the way you exercise? Let me think about that. Not really, man. I was kind of into Olympic lifting at the time and stayed with that.

Always remained physically active through the whole thing. Which is probably the only thing that probably kept you sane. Yeah, absolutely. And another reason they said that I lived through the blood clots was the level of cardiovascular fitness that I was in at the time. You know what I mean? So yeah, but yeah, that was like, you know, one go to like, I just always worked out. I always been, that's always been a part of my life. And so that was always there. So stuck with that. So three months in, how did you feel? And what was the difference? I felt night and day different. No more anxiety. No more depression. No more balance issues.

No more double vision. No more blurry vision. No more migraine headaches. No more memory problems. Like, back on. Like, I could go back to operating. You know what I mean? And, hey, 33 disabilities according to the VA.

100% service-related disabled is what 33 what were they? dude, it's like a name like Everything every kind of psychological disorder that you could think of like double-digit like I was given you know what I mean depressed anxiety Insomnia, so like psychotic. Yeah, just all these different things. And then just a whole host of physical injuries as well that have been documented over time. But they're just like 33 disabilities, 100 percent disabled. I'm not missing a beat, man. I'm not in any chronic pain. I don't have any symptomology of any of those things. And we've that's not specific or special to me. Right. Like, Mark, how come we've been able to take so many dudes come off of their pain medication without going into withdrawals? Absolutely. You need to talk about that. That's crazy.

Matthew was here. Matthew was on 16 medications. One of the medications was OxyContin. He was on 80 milligrams a day. He was on morphine sulfate, 240 milligrams a day. He was on fentanyl patches. And in six weeks, he's on fentanyl patches on top of it, every anesthesiologist that I run by with what he was on said, the guy shouldn't be walking.

Well, he flew down from Washington to come in. His tolerance must have just been off the charts. Tolerance, tolerance. And, you know, he had six pins in his jaw, shrapnel out of the left side of his head and his right leg was shot. And, um, that's the reason why they justified all his medications. Six weeks after starting the protocol unique for him based on the biomarkers, he was on two medications. A year later, he's off all his medications and he moves to Hollywood to become an actor and a screenwriter. Fully functioning, no pain. That's going to fuck him up more than anything else.

He'll need to go back on 17 medications, right? No, but the question was, I started seeing this pattern, as Andrew brought up, where guys were getting off of their medications and no withdrawal. So I went back to the literature and started seeing the things about cannabinol A and B receptors, the opioid receptor alpha and beta, the mu receptors. And it turns out a lot of the things that we do modify it and modulate it. And then more recently, talking about pregnenolone, which is that mother of all hormones that comes off of cholesterol, where they're using it in people who are addicted to benzodiazepines, which are, you know, Valium and so forth, where they have side effects from being on such a high dose where they're sleeping all the time. They give them pregnenolone, and it decreases their fatigue during the day.

And it turns out that where Valium or benzodiazepines work on this thing called the GABA-A receptor, which is one of those relay stations, pregnenolone is what should be given instead of giving someone benzodiazepines. So that's how we've been able to get all our people off of anti-anxiety medication is with this pregnenolone because of how it functions. And it's all out there. I didn't invent anything. It's just reading the literature. That's incredible. I love reading. So it fits into the same cell receptor? The same receptor called the benzodiazepine receptor on the GABA-A.

That's crazy, man. Yeah. It is crazy. And, like, we've seen dudes that were, I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. And, like, they're on pain-free. Yeah. No pain. None.

And coming off the meds without withdrawals. What narcotics were you, did they put you on, Tramadol? Yeah. Yeah, it was, I mean, I don't even remember, but it was. It was a long time ago because you've been off of it. One of the things that disturbs me the most about this is what if someone like you wasn't around? Like, you're kind of an outlier in the medical community that you've really gravitated towards helping soldiers, helping people with TBI,

athletes, football players, fighters? What if you weren't around? I mean, I'm not hearing about this from a lot of guys. Right. Well, Andrew and I, in 2015, when my third book came out on traumatic brain injury, we started giving classes, very inexpensive classes for docs to come in and get trained. So to date, we've trained specifically on the technology about 400 docs, and they're going through a process of training and exams and so forth before they become part of our network. It's Wire Angel Foundation Network, so that we can disseminate the information and have more

people involved. Well, this is such an important thing, and it's such a common factor. There's so many people that are suffering from depression and anxiety and all these different issues that very easily could be attached to traumatic brain injuries. Correct. And people that don't even think they've had traumatic brain injuries, subconcussive trauma. There's a lot of people that have just done, they just had a knock and tumble, rough and tumble life, and they don't realize it, but they've caused damage to their brain.

We see, we have patients who come in under our wellness program, and when they're asked, have you ever had any traumatic brain injury, they say no. But you look at the biomarkersers and you see the pattern that they've had head trauma. And then they say, oh, yeah, when I was 18, they're 53 years of age or 47 years of age. Oh, yeah. When I was 18, I was in a car accident and I hit my left side of my head against the driver's side window. I didn't not wasn't knocked out, didn't have nausea, didn't have vomiting. And you think because of that, that you're immune. Well, it turns out that 85% of all traumatic brain injuries are called mild for a reason. You don't have any symptoms. Yeah, some people might have a little bit of a headache or feeling fatigued, but for the most part,

they feel nothing. And then there's 15% that make up the moderate to severe where they're in a coma for periods of time. And we've actually had people who are in coma. Some of our vets who have been in coma told Connors, who was told that he'll never walk. He'll never be able to, you know, take care of himself. He'll die young and so forth. The guy's married and he's walking. He's bicycle riding on, what is it, Facebook. He shows his pictures and so forth.

Listen, this guy couldn't walk. They told him he wouldn't walk again. We've got three guys like that. And what were they saying? They looked at the imaging, right, Mark? And still shows damage in the, what, the gray matter? Oh, the white matter. In the white matter.

But he's made new connections. And so now that's why he's able to do it, because protocols allowed him to go back into this neuro permissive environment. So what does that mean? That means that he can experience his new things. The brain's rewiring itself. Even though there's physical damage to certain lobes, because he can rewire itself, he can get better. He's walking. We've got three guys like that.

It's crazy. All the hormones that we talk about, the testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, we relate to them as gender hormones, male or female, reproductive hormones, sex hormones. It turns out that each one of them has a secondary function. Testosterone stimulates the immune system to increase the white blood cells, the CD4 and CD8, which are the protective kind of white blood cells. It also decreases the inflammation in our body called the Th1 section of the immune system and stimulates the anti-inflammatory estradiol, progesterone, pregnenolone, allopregnenolone. They all function to improve Alzheimer's conditions. So if you're an elderly male or female with low levels of hormones and you're starting to develop dementia, you need to have your hormones looked at because they regulate all these things and it's documented up to, you know,

kazoo or wazoo. What about the interpretation? That's also where your unconventional standard means. Well, I've looked at it from a shift. You know, hormone X, whatever it is, has a range of 10 to 90. So you go to your doctor and you get the blood test and it's 15. And you've got all the symptoms as though you're at below 10. And the doctor says, you shouldn't be having any symptoms because you're within that range that we call the reference range. But it turns out that not all of us are identical genetically and function very well at that specific level of 15. So what we do is we bring people up to what's called the median, 10 on the bottom, 90 on the top. You add it together, you get 100. You divide it by two, and that's the statistical median. So we move people from that 15 all the way up towards

that 50. And some people hit 20 and say, geez, I feel better, 25, 29. And then there's a population who have had the greatest amount of head trauma, traumatic brain injury, where they need to go up between 50 and 75%. And we still keep everybody within the normal physiological range as predictum by traditional medicine, classical medicine. And that's where we get the benefits. And that's the reason why a lot of these guys have had a missed opportunity by their primary care doc to improve them is because they are still functioning on the old paradigm, which in 1975, two major biostatisticians came out with these two books that are like eight pounds each. And all they talked about is how all this science, all this chemistry that we do for people,

that it doesn't apply to you and I. It applied to the people that were part of that study to set the standard range or the reference range. Because I wasn't part of that group. So my, what's normal for me, wasn't part of that. So what my what's normal for me wasn't part of that. So what the two guys said was what's best is to develop your own reference range based on your body. And he should do the same as I've been doing over the past 60 years. So a guy comes in and he's an 11, and they tell him what? He's normal in this hypothetical situation. And he still has all these symptoms right so what we do in a provocative testosterone testing in the guy and i also do it in females is we test the theory out okay if it is the case i'm going to

give you a shot what did you say uh you felt like for 60 hours cinderella yeah you felt like cinderella i got three daughters, so I know the Disney well. Okay, fine. Yeah. So he received his injection, and he drove on the 405, talked to Becky for an hour, and she told me this story like she was in amazement that this guy- Like, who's this guy? Yeah.

Totally. She didn't think it was me. That was good. But anyway, he sends back. What happens is after they get their injection, they send back five days later this questionnaire that says how well they did. And in big letters in the area that's for comments, he says, I felt like Cinderella after the ball. And for 60 hours, he was just cruising. And we're using physiological dosing of testosterone.

I don't believe in, you know, everybody who comes to the office is not a bodybuilder, so we give physiological dosing because if you give it more consistently, they get a better response. So he was given 60 milligrams of a blended testosterone and had a phenomenal. You had a good response? Good response. The crazy thing is we're talking about from 2014. We're in 2017, almost 2018 now. I mean, we're less than four years, and all this change has happened.

Correct. That's what's amazing, that you've started the Warrior Angels Foundation, that you have helped so many soldiers since then, that you've gotten the word out through your foundation. We're dealing with a very short amount of time, and so many people have been helped to this amazing extent. Correct. And, you know, we ask people how they hear about us and thank God that we started back

in 2014 on your show, the first one. So many people have commented to me, look, if you see Joe, would you thank him for us? We have list and list of people who would like to thank you for the fact that you believed in what I was doing enough to have us on the show the first time back in 2014. It's evergreen, man, and people keep hearing it for the first time. It never ceases to amaze me. Every week I get just a ton of mail from people who heard it for the first time. I didn't think there was any solution out there, man. Well, I think this is a really good time to do this again this is one of the reasons why I was excited about this is because

the podcast has grown exponentially since then so it's much much the the audience is much larger now so I think we're gonna be able to affect and help a lot more people so for people that are interested people that want to find out more information and then they want to try to help themselves, what's the best steps? Well, so we set up the organization. We had such an outpouring because of all the media, like it was an overwhelming almost to get to everybody. So basically what we do now is we grant Millennium Health Centers so much money and we help to subsidize costs like that.

So they'll go with our grants to Mark's facility. They'll go there. They'll fill out information through his website, which is tbimedlegal.com. That's tbimedlegal.com. They'll fill out a new patient information packet, put in all their information there Then they can be seen that way and let me tell you this about mark every time I go to treat you to visit him for a doctor's visit. He won't let me pay He made me pay for other soldiers. That's what he does He picks patients out and he goes let's pick some guys out you're gonna pay for them

Yeah, and that's how he does it and you have when they're appreciative absolutely what you do is beautiful right right our the corporation our corporation Millennium Health Centers Inc's has a fund and what it does is it underwrites a portion of the veterans and then warrior angel foundation underwrites another portion of it so So revenue that we get from some of the products we sell and so forth goes to help pay for it. So people have to pay for it, Joe, but we found that they need to have some skin in the game. Yep. You know what I mean? That enables us to be met halfway.

So again, we've subsidized the rate where we made it. It's affordable period, but now it's really affordable because because insurance not taken for a whole host of different reasons but so we made it that way and so now like we used to handle every case individually the war angels foundation and and fund them and and this is a hipa mess and everything else so now we fund them directly and work to subsidize these rates to make it affordable so we could help more people get treatment and talk about that about having skin in the game and how important that is just psychologically for and work to subsidize these rates to make it affordable so we can help more people get treatment. And talk about that, about having skin in the game and how important that is. Just psychologically for people, it seems like if you give people things for free, they just don't appreciate it as much as you make them work for it.

It's unfortunate because there's a lot of people that really will work hard for something. They just don't have the financial means. But there's so many that that applies to, that if you just give it to them, they don't appreciate it. It's too easy. It comes too easy. Yeah. Well, fortunately, very few people have responded that way. The vets have been really good. They've heard about us from either your show or from one of the shows or from their colleagues who are in the program. And they see how well it is and they look at how dismal their life is. And they have a choice. Make a choice. You want to live the life that Andrew had in the

past or the enjoyment and the love of life that he has now? And how can someone like me donate? It's on our website, waftbi.org. We're a 501c3, so it's tax deductible. And you can go in there. On top right is the donate. We have a film coming out called Quiet Explosions. Top, there you go. That's our trailer right there. So we've got an Emmy Award winning director. Here it is.

Can you play that, Jamie? Go full screen. an Emmy award-winning director here it is can you play that Jamie go full screen the average blast weight of travels at 163 miles per hour it says that's a great picture you got to see this video folks the people that are just listening to the podcast you got to see the impact of these blasts. I was supposed to listen to explosives, so any type of entry that we needed to get into a place that was denied for whatever reason, be it a door or whatever, I was the guy who would place those charges to get us in.

One, two, three. You're not the person that you used to be. I can't remember things, driving home, I don't know where I'm at. Five years I've driven that route every day, all of a sudden you look up and you don't know where you're at. I said to myself, you know, this is going to go one of two ways. I continue on this path and it's going to kill me or i can make a decision to quit blaming my circumstance and decide to act and it says in 2014 you met mark gordon hormone deficiency and suicide are connected Now, a lot of this is for the people listening.

It's something you need to see. It's just a lot of the text on the page talking about the benefits of this and how much it's helped Andrew. What is the name of this video, Jamie, so people can... Quiet Explosions. And we just started production this month. Right, Mark? Yeah.

Correct. This month. And so if you want to donate to that, you can donate there. That'll also be a tax-deductible donation. And this is a documentary that you guys are doing? And what are you going to do with it? So we're going to do three different stories, all people through the foundation. So we have two other incredible stories.

And then the top minds in science, in neuroendocrinology and neuroscience, neuropathology, are talking about traumatic brain injury and the protocol. So it's kind of a concussion, you know what I mean, identified a problem. We're identifying a solution. You know what I mean? Identified a problem. We're identifying a solution. So not only are we bringing out for the first time ever, you know, what is the real underlying condition behind traumatic brain injury? Here's a solution.

Here's all the science behind it. Here's the specialists in their field confirming, you know, what the literature has been saying. And so we hope to bring that out in 2019. And what are you going to do with it when you bring it out? We're just disseminate the information. I mean, are you going to release it online? Are you going to release it in movie theaters? Yeah, it'll go to movies. Yeah, all of that.

As many places as you can. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not sure how it's going to all be distributed. Yeah, the goal right now is to disseminate the information. That's it. As we have more potential individuals who are suffering listening to this, we've been training doctors, we've been getting through multiple avenues through the military,

through the different divisions, getting them on board, supporting us. The Navy SEAL Foundation has supported us. That's all we're trying to do. And we've got enough groundswell in our population to justify it. As Andrew has said multiple times, it's reproducible, predictable. And there's something that I want to impart here. There's a stigma with men in particular in this country when it comes to hormones and replacing hormones. They're very embarrassed by it. They don't like it. It disturbs them.

And they start to think of it as cheating.'t like it. It disturbs them. And they start to think of it as cheating. They start to think of it as steroids. They look at it in an illogical way. And that illogical way is connected to, I think, in my opinion, the stigmas in our culture that are attached to performance-enhancing drugs, like for cheating in sports and the Olympics. And you always hear about them in this sort of negative way.

So there's a lot of guys that they shy away. I've talked to many friends who are very smart. They talk to me about testosterone. I'm like, dude, I've been on testosterone for 10 years. I'm like, it changes your life. It changes the way you function. I'm 50 years old. My body functions like it did when I was 30.

And that's a fact. It really does. And I push that motherfucker all the time. So I'm not telling you this from just a theoretical standpoint. I'm talking about from a physical action perspective. And I tell this to people, and you see it go in one ear and out the other. I don't want to take any testosterone. I don't want to go to a doctor that's going to get me human growth hormone. I don't want to go to a doctor that's going to get me human growth hormone. I don't want to look at my hormone levels.

But you're depressed and you're tired all the time and you're trying all these different things. You're taking Zoloft. You're getting magnet therapy. I know people have gotten ketamine shots and all these different things to try to cure depression. I'm like, why don't you look at your

fucking hormones, man? Yeah, they can look at it doesn't mandate that they have to take it but they should know they should know absolutely what mark's talking about is your physiological optimal level right and so that hypothetical scenario that he gave earlier if you're at an 11 you know what i mean and you're just once you know point above normal well that guess what that's not normal you know what i mean you're on one point above normal. Well, guess what? That's not normal. You know what I mean? You're on the perceived lower end. So he has a completely different sliding scale to measure that.

But to me, it would be take an objective analysis and just get a snapshot of where that's at. And maybe just see what it would be like to push it up a little bit and see if life improved. And not at supraphysiological. Physiological, based on you. Normal, healthy levels. Yeah, you might find out that, hey, man, I went up 10 points and I'm great. Or you had to push it really high. Different strokes for different folks.

What I'm trying to figure out is why would someone rather take a psychotropic medication than fixing what God has given our body to manufacture that because of trauma, because of genetics or whatever, you're not producing it at the level. And another fallacy for me, a fallacy, is that as we get older, it's acceptable to have lower and lower levels of hormones. Well, how about this? The reason why they're getting lower and lower is because the shitty food you're eating, the fact that you had 60 years of traumatic brain injury, which have interrupted the brain's ability to regulate homeostasis, to regulate your hormone production, that's the reason why the levels are lower. So bringing it back to 25 to 35 years of age, which has been the dictum in our office for the past 27 years, has been key.

Yeah. One of the things that jumped my testosterone up a bunch is cutting out processed carbohydrates. All the refined carbohydrates, it just jumped it like 50%. It was like it doubled it. I was like, this is insane. Right. So it tells you how important the biochemistry is of the body to regulate other aspects of it.

Yeah. And the diet and exercise and sleep and all these different factors. But when I saw that my testosterone, it bumped up and then ultimately doubled, I was so confused as to why it took me so long to figure this out, that eating pasta and bread and pizza

and all the bullshit was having an effect not just on like body fat, but it's having an effect on your whole body being able to process all these chemicals. You got to think of yourself as a machine and people don't like to do that. But think of your body as a machine. If you have a machine or an engine or any, think of it as a vehicle, you're going to have, you need spark plugs, you need coolant, you need vehicle, you need spark plugs. You need coolant.

You need gasoline. You need all these different factors. And if you don't have the proper amount of engine oil, if the spark plugs aren't working right, the vehicle's not going to work right. Your body is far more complex than a car, but similar in that respect. An analogy. I like car analogies. You've got a brand- new Porsche 911 Carrera with

four flat tires. Choose one of them to fill up and drive. You're not going to be able to. The four cardinal hormones of our body, and I see colleagues of mine who only focus in on one hormone. How are you going to be able to have a nice level ride if you don't look at all four of the key hormones? And also the insanely complex way that all these different nutrient levels and hormone levels interact with each other and that they're all a part of this incredible system that takes forever to just scratch the surface of understanding. I mean, I read a lot.

I've just scratched the surface of understanding what's going on. And I'm not sure I understand it. It is so complex. But when you see the results, you know that at least you're down the right pathway. It's a symphony. You know, that's what we always say. It's a symphony. But how better did you feel, you know, after cutting out those things in your testosterone?

Way better. Right? Like almost immediately. Like the big one was the not needing a nap. Yeah. You know, like in the middle of the day, I just assumed that I would get up, I would eat breakfast. Then around three, I'd be like, fuck, I need to crash. Testosterone deficiency, three o'clock.

There's that. And then there's also the insulin dump, right? From the shitty processed foods and carbohydrates. I came off all protocols at 2017 for seven months for this year, because just because I wanted to see what would happen. One, I thought like, the brain and body went back to a neuro permissive environment and the hypothalamus, my pituitary gland would turn back on. But wasn't the case. We had, you know, two labs to follow it up. But I had to prove to myself, I guess, emotionally, spiritually, that, you know,

I could slay that dragon and I could live life without it. But it wasn't. It was no, by no means the imagination optimized. You know what I mean? And then when I went back on it, my body composition changed again and I noticed increased energy. And I thought I was doing well, but I was like, life is better. I'm a better person when this is optimized. And so, you know, I've proven to myself that I can do it without it, but life is not better. I mean, we might be looking at some time in the near future where they can do something genetically, where they can alter the way your pituitary gland functions or some of the different with CRISPR or with many of these genetic manipulation tools that they're working on

right now. But as of right now, that's not the case. No. You have to get tested and then replenish back to physiological levels all the hormones, not a select, all of them. Yeah, because if you just do one, you can mess up the whole thing, right? Is there a network of doctors that you've trained, that you trust their work, that you can recommend? Is there a way that people, so they don't have to travel to California to meet you? On the website, there's-

Give that website address again. TBI MedLegal, T-B-I-M-E-D-L-E-G-A-L.com has under TBI Network and training. It has a list of doctors. We've trained doctors in Spain, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. I'm going to Southeast Asia to train a group in Cambodia and Vietnam for a project, which is to establish centers in Southeast Asia because there's a lot of retired vets there. Pull it up again, Jamie. A lot of retired vets to set up centers so they can offer treatment. And if you look at the website, it's listed all in alphabetical order. We have California, there's Arizona there, Colorado, Florida. The ones without the names on it are

people who are in the process of getting their certification. So there's a four-hour exam they have to take and pass it with at least 70% and then present two cases showing they have the ability to utilize the information. So there's doctors available in many, many states. Correct. Yeah, that's been our goal to make this network of doctors where we can reach people at scale in the same way, like train trainers or train doctors. And that's what we're working on with the government right now. What's incredible is how much you've accomplished in such a short period of time. That's what's really incredible.

Obsessed. Yes. You're driven. I like driven better. There's nothing wrong with obsessed. I'm obsessed with everything. People have a hard time with that word. They think it's like, it's gotten away from them. How about passionate? Passionate's good. I like that as well.

I mean, we're taking action, but like for the right reasons and like opportunity just continues to present itself. I think that's just a by-product of a right way of doing things. You know what I mean? Like, Hey, let's be proactive. Let's go out there. Let's make things happen. Let's go do it. He said to me in the beginning, he said, we're going to be doing the right things for the right reason. And what will happen is things will shake out of the trees and land in front of us. And that's what basically has been happening. We just, you know, money, it's not the issue. Just get the work done and the response and the reaction of our vets.

Well, the reaction and the response has been incredible as far as what I've heard and what's come to me about it. And hopefully we're shaking that fucking tree today. Yo, man, dude, because of this show, because of you, this information has been widely disseminated, man. And you helped promote our book and give us a blurb for that. So thank you for that. Tales from the Blast Factory supports what we're doing.

That comes out next month if anybody's interested in that. Matter of fact, we did a thing on Amazon, Joe, where they can get it for 99 cents. So we want people to get that book. Wow, beautiful. Yeah. Beautiful. All right, so any closing thoughts

that we need to get out there for these people? Think we covered it all? I think we covered it all. You know, my last closing statement is thank you so much. Listen, thank you. I'm forever in your debt and I think that

what you guys are both doing is incredible and I'm honored that I could play a small part in getting this out there. It means everything. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Alright, fuckers. That's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Where's the scotch?

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