On this week's episode, the boys are joined by their good friend and former co-worker Andrew to talk about a variety of topics, including: coffee, being in the military, and growing a beard. Also, the guys talk about what it's like to be in the Air Force and what it means to be a military man, and why it's important to have a good night's rest before going to sleep. Don't miss it! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. This episode was produced and edited by Mark Phillips. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Epitaph Records. Please rate and review our music on SoundCloud. Subscribe to our new music streaming service, SoundCloud, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, rate, and subscribe to our podcast on whatever you're listening to, and tell a friend about what you think of our music and what you're enjoying! Thank you for listening and reviewing our music, and we'll be looking out for you in the next episode! We'll see you next week for our next episode, next week! See ya soon! Timestamps: 5/27/28/29/30/31/3/32/3rd/4/8/9/5/6/9 Thanks for listening to this episode of This Week's Music: Music: "Good Morning Jawns" by Cassie's Song: "The Good Life" by The Good Life (feat. "The Bad Mother's Song (featuring: "Outtro" by Jeff Perla) "Goodbye" by Fergie ( ) "Outro: "Mr. Goodfellas ( ) by Mr. Goodness ( ) & "Passion ( ) and "Solo ( ) by Chacho ( ) ( ( ) & "Alfred ( ) , " " & , and "The Other Way ( ) . " " by Fergus ( )
00:00:36.000So 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.
00:00:45.000Literally didn't make it out of the room.
00:01:15.000My daughters, about a year ago, said they had enough of the beard, so it had to go.
00:01:20.000When my daughter was one, a friend of mine died, and on the internet we had 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.
00:01:38.000And so a bunch of us on the internet did it, and I just grew this fucking werewolf beard.
00:01:42.000And then I got to a point where I was like, you know, time was up.
00:02:22.000Well, 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.
00:02:50.000It's like counterculture, so anti-establishment in the establishment, so that's part of it, you know, and like anything else, you get into, I don't know, it felt normal, right?
00:03:01.000So it was like probably a crutch a little bit and something that felt right for a long time.
00:03:06.000I don't think it's a crutch, but I think it's definitely a mark of the occupation.
00:03:11.000I remember I read Dick Marchenko's book.
00:04:33.000How, 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.
00:04:41.000And so that goes all the way down to even like, okay, well, what kind of boots am I going to wear?
00:04:45.000What kind of What kind of uniform do I need to accomplish this mission or do these things?
00:05:05.000Now, 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.
00:05:19.000Yeah, me and my co-founder, me and my brother Adam Marr, who was also in the Army.
00:05:23.000And 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.
00:05:30.000Yeah, can I get some context to that first, Joe?
00:05:33.000So we talked about I was Special Forces Green Beret for a better part of a decade, you know, so I would say somebody defined by my vision of the future.
00:05:44.000And so that always led me to doing what I wanted to do in life.
00:05:48.000And so, you know, Special Forces, Spec Ops type dudes.
00:05:51.000They're in life and death situations pretty regularly and perform, otherwise they don't live.
00:05:58.000And so that was kind of life for the better part of 10 years, being in life and death situations on a regular basis.
00:06:05.000And so going from that, you know, I would say a high performer by every metric.
00:06:12.000To one day after my last deployment, I woke up and I was on 13 different medications.
00:06:19.000I couldn't remember how to drive home from the same route that I've been driving home every day.
00:06:25.000I was just in chronic pain all the time.
00:06:28.000I had these balance issues where I couldn't walk in a straight line.
00:06:32.000Blurry vision would go into double vision and I have these horrible migraine headaches.
00:06:36.000So 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,
00:07:05.000in 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.
00:07:15.000And then I started to have, you know, and that was, again, like my...
00:07:20.000The structure of reality was fracturing around me, and I didn't know why or what was going on.
00:07:26.000And the first thing you can think to do and something like that was to drink.
00:07:30.000I was like, I've got to stop this, and I don't know what to do.
00:07:34.000I think I have some screws loose or what's going on, but all I know is this is so disastrous.
00:07:39.000Maybe if I just drink, I can put the brakes on this a little bit.
00:07:44.000And things just continue to get worse, and then my behavior just continued to skyrocket out of control.
00:07:51.000And it wasn't like I was making conscious decisions to be fucked up.
00:07:55.000Like, I'm drinking and driving on a regular basis.
00:08:00.000And I never even crossed my mind like that was a wrong thing to do.
00:08:03.000It was just like, hey man, I can't function unless I drink.
00:08:07.000And I gotta drive, so that's what we're gonna do, you know?
00:08:11.000Start producing just horrible effects on my family with that line of behavior.
00:08:17.000And it got to the point, and as a special forces operator, man, all you want to do is operate.
00:08:21.000All you want to do is be on the team and go and do the things that we signed up to do.
00:09:02.000And so at that point, I was like, I got to raise my hand and I got to get some help.
00:09:06.000And, you know, that well-intended people wanted to offer as much help and find answers as they possibly could.
00:09:16.000But again, all that got me was 13 different medications.
00:09:20.000And I was told, hey, you've had so many head injuries, you can't afford to take another blow to the head.
00:09:26.000And this is probably going to be the new you.
00:09:28.000You'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.
00:09:42.000It got so bad, Joe, that my wife was nine months pregnant with our fifth child.
00:09:47.000And 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?
00:09:54.000You know, so that's how bad it was getting.
00:11:27.000This is a long line of offenders here that have won a shot at that.
00:11:31.000So anyway, so I'm sitting there in the hospital room, and I'm just wondering and waiting for somebody to come explain to me how life has spiraled out of control like this.
00:11:41.000And somebody's going to say, hey, this is a reason that you have these blood clots.
00:11:45.000You know, here's what's going on with your head and all these things and it just, it never happens.
00:11:49.000And 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.
00:12:06.000That was just normal 24-7 how I operated at that time.
00:12:10.000And 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.
00:12:27.000So I can stay on that route, or I can decide to act and to change what I don't like.
00:13:05.000I don't know how, but I've had enough.
00:13:07.000I'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.
00:13:18.000I'm still a husband, I'm still a father, and I'm gonna get better.
00:13:22.000And 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.
00:13:34.000And my vision of the future was just what I said.
00:13:37.000And I didn't know it was going to lead to where we're at today, but that was the catalyst.
00:13:41.000And so I started going and looking for alternative therapies.
00:13:44.000And it turned out, like, the government didn't want to pay for anything that wasn't covered by their insurance.
00:15:43.000An underlying condition for all of the things that we were just talking about and we can measure it objectively.
00:15:48.000And 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 anti-depressant.
00:15:58.000Let's put them on another antidepressant.
00:16:17.000Like I said, 13 medications, you know, from a person who never had any issue before.
00:16:22.000And 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.
00:16:33.000A lot of guys that I've been in contact with on a regular basis have these issues.
00:16:38.000And what Mark has done, which has been just phenomenal, was open up a new door for treatment to these people.
00:16:49.000I'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.
00:17:01.000You know, that's the problem in psychiatry.
00:17:04.000Is there are no real biological markers.
00:17:07.000They're trying to use radiographic studies like spec scans, MRIs, PET scans, and what have you, as rationale for starting people on medication.
00:17:16.000But there's absolutely, you know, in the biomarker or the biomarker panel that we have, there's a direct correlation between someone having had head trauma, regardless if it was mild or a blast trauma like Andrew had, Or a slip and fall, or someone coming up and hitting you behind the head,
00:17:36.000And there's absolutely zero that they use to regulate what they're doing.
00:17:39.000It 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.
00:18:03.000And the answer is, number one, from the head trauma, it elicits chemical changes in the brain that we call inflammation.
00:18:10.000And this inflammation leads to disruption of chemical processes.
00:18:15.000It's like, you know, the old alkaline batteries or the car batteries where we used to put distilled water into it.
00:18:20.000Well, if you put Coca-Cola in it, it totally changes the ability of electrons to be conducted, just like in the brain.
00:18:28.000So 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.
00:18:40.000So you have disruption of executive function, which is your ability to make correct decisions about things right and wrong.
00:18:48.000Why do we have over a million veterans incarcerated?
00:18:52.000That'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.
00:19:01.000And they respond by assault or with physical or anger or yelling at people.
00:19:07.000And that leads them into jail or into incarceration.
00:19:11.000So anyway, the inflammation leads to hormonal deficiencies in the brain.
00:19:16.000And what we found is that there's, since 1986, Dr. Beilou out of Paris found that we have enzyme systems that take cholesterol.
00:19:24.000And 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.
00:19:36.000There 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.
00:19:48.000In 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.
00:20:04.000And I presented a group of articles and one of the key articles was the fact that they found people with atypical depression.
00:20:11.000That's depression that doesn't respond to traditional medication.
00:20:15.000So you're on a whole bunch of 13 medications and you're still depressed.
00:20:20.000So they found in 61% of these people who were still depressed with atypical depression that they had growth hormone deficiency.
00:20:28.000And then when they replaced the growth hormone, within one to two months, their depression disappeared and they had some beneficial side effects.
00:20:41.000And their reactive scores that creates, you know, an assault situation, they were calm.
00:20:46.000Someone said boo to them, and they said, oh, who do you?
00:20:49.000As opposed to getting into their face.
00:20:51.000So it's a very clear, and it's becoming clearer and clearer in the literature around the world now.
00:20:58.000We've been doing this since 2004. The inflammation is really the problem.
00:21:04.000So unfortunately, there is no specific medication.
00:21:08.000They talk about use of aspirin and ibuprofen in things like Alzheimer's disease, which is an inflammatory disease.
00:21:15.000I 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.
00:21:32.000It's not, you know, genetics by itself.
00:21:34.000There are people with genetic predisposition to it because they generate this thing called beta amyloid.
00:21:38.000But trauma, any kind of trauma to the head can elicit increased production of beta amyloid and lead to these problems.
00:21:47.000Traumatic 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.
00:22:01.000And, 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.
00:22:11.000One of the products that we use is 100% natural, about 80% of our treatment is all natural products with 10-20% being pharmaceutical products but no psychotropic or brain altering medications.
00:22:44.000The 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.
00:22:55.000So we get benefits of anti-inflammatory effect by having pregnenolone.
00:23:01.000If you're on any kind of statin drug that decreases the availability of cholesterol in the brain or the body, you lose.
00:23:08.000I've heard nothing but bad things about statin drugs.
00:23:11.000I want to get you going because there's so many people that have this very meager understanding of cholesterol and a meager understanding of what is the difference between having high cholesterol, low cholesterol, what's healthy,
00:23:31.000My 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.
00:23:44.000And my HDL, which is the happy to have the healthy one, is like 23 to 40. How did the numbers change over time?
00:23:52.000No, for the standard of where they used to measure from the 70s till now.
00:23:56.000In 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.
00:24:09.000And 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.
00:24:27.000It tells us, like a SmithKline Beecham study that was done, 50% of all heart attacks happen in people with normal or low levels of cholesterol.
00:24:35.000So the question is, then what's causing it?
00:24:40.000If you start looking at inflammatory chemistry, there's a group of inflammatory markers that we have, which SDLDL, homocysteine, LpA, there's a whole group of them that can predict better than cholesterol your risk for heart disease.
00:24:56.000And what we do in the office is we have a biomarker panel for cardiac inflammation.
00:25:01.000Person 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,
00:25:16.000and his calcium score was greater than 2,000.
00:25:21.000Which if it's 100 or less is good, greater than 400, horrible.
00:25:25.000And I had cholesterol that was three times his.
00:25:28.000So after he had his open heart surgery and his new arteries put in, we went and had this panel called an LP6. My cholesterol sky high, but all these inflammatory markers low.
00:25:40.000In Keith's situation, his inflammatory markers were sky high, even though his cholesterol was very low.
00:25:47.000Yeah, there's a simplistic understanding of what's causing these issues, and people peg it on cholesterol.
00:25:55.000And you hear it so often, so many times, and you're like, boy, how do I even begin having this conversation with people?
00:26:01.000I 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,
00:26:18.000whereas saturated fats on their own are not an issue.
00:26:22.000The small particle versus large particle LDL, small particles are the dangerous ones.
00:26:27.000SDLDL 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.
00:26:42.000And once the immune system gets there, it creates all this inflammation.
00:26:46.000And there's something that happens with LDL when you combine it with refined sugars that's extremely bad for you.
00:26:56.000Sugars, corn syrup, things that people are drinking, you know, sodas and cake and bullshit, all the refined bread and wheat products, all that stuff is fucking terrible for you.
00:27:06.000Well, it's just adding more inflammation on top of it.
00:27:09.000Yeah, and it's being conflated with saturated fats and with cholesterol, and it's not what the issue is.
00:27:20.000You're pouring gasoline on a fire and having no idea about it.
00:27:24.000That's an issue that we face a lot of the time.
00:27:26.000So there's the inflammation response and then there's also the issues with the pituitary gland and the hormonal deficiencies.
00:27:36.000Well, it's not only the It's a pituitary gland which generates the signals to the thyroid gland or the testicles or the ovaries to make their hormones or the adrenal glands.
00:27:46.000But it's the fact that we call them glial cells which are astrocytes and neural cells which generate their own hormones.
00:27:55.000And it turns out that the hormones produced below the neck have a genomic effect on the body which is slow.
00:28:02.000It means it turns on genetic switches to do things.
00:28:05.000But the hormones produced in the brain called the neurosteroids, they have immediate effect because they influence the membranes of neurons to do things.
00:28:16.000So 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, you know, how you respond to someone talking in a high voice to you or pointing a gun at you or pointing a pencil at you.
00:28:32.000So you lose that integration of the different parts of the brain.
00:28:35.000That's what each of the lobes is responsible for is how we integrate signals coming in.
00:28:41.000The whole thing is so fascinating because it seems like there's so much to understand.
00:28:47.000And 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.
00:29:15.000It's unfortunate that when science comes out, and it's really good science, that it takes another 20 to 30 years before it gets into the medical community.
00:29:25.000And there's no obligation for your general practitioner to be up on this stuff.
00:29:28.000Absolutely not, because it's status quo.
00:29:33.000And 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.
00:29:53.000It's 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.
00:30:03.000I mean, every generation a little bit something better happens, but it takes 30 years.
00:30:53.000And I was saying, hey, do you think that any of these problems were based off of the hundreds or thousands of explosions that we are around on a routine basis?
00:31:04.000And I was like, well, can we test and replace any hormones that I'm missing?
00:31:10.000Because, I mean, at that time we had done some tests and I knew that I was deficient in things.
00:31:13.000And 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.
00:31:21.000And 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.
00:31:52.000So he thought, if people don't understand what you're saying, when you take antibiotic steroids, your natural testosterone shuts down.
00:32:00.000A 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.
00:32:08.000Because the only way a doctor is going to give you hormone replacement therapy is if your levels are low.
00:32:13.000And 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.
00:32:22.000Yeah, so thanks for clarifying that, Mark.
00:32:27.000I was like, hey man, you think I'm coming in here putting all this personal stuff on you?
00:34:26.000And I was like, if this is any taste of what could be, this is incredible.
00:34:31.000And I call my wife and we have a conversation for like an hour.
00:34:35.000And that's the first time that we had talked more than two minutes in like a year.
00:34:39.000And I didn't just say yes or no because I just wasn't capable of anything else at that time.
00:34:44.000And 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 in everything, you know, but we can fix this.
00:34:54.000And so we get on anti-inflammatory protocol and we replace and replenish the hormones that are deficient or insufficient.
00:35:04.000And life slowly and surely started to turn back on little by little by little by little to where I'm at today.
00:35:14.000You know, I'm clean, I'm sober, performing as good, if not better than my pre-injury status.
00:35:21.000We 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.
00:35:30.000And now I'm excited to say, man, three years later, we've delivered it to over 200 people with incredible results.
00:35:36.000So it meets with the scientific criteria.
00:35:38.000We can predict, we can measure, and we can replicate.
00:35:47.000We've done it 200 times through our organization where somebody, like we did a A three-year TBI study cohort, we took 58 of those 200 people, just the ones that attempted suicide, 58 individuals attempted suicide.
00:36:02.000We showed that within three months, what was it, 91% had a 50% improvement.
00:36:52.000We got an incredible media page, a library of all this information that didn't exist three years ago.
00:36:58.000It's now all in one location and all the stuff that I'm saying here, please don't take my word for it.
00:37:02.000You guys can go out and fact check it.
00:37:03.000And 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 like oh You can be okay.
00:37:27.000When Andrew first came to me, Andrew wasn't the first veteran that I had seen.
00:37:31.000The first guy that I took care of was in 2009. He was active Green Beret in North Carolina at Bragg.
00:37:38.000And his wife, I knew, she was an emergency room doc, and she called me up and told me about her husband getting ready to get a less than honorable discharge after four or five tours of duty.
00:38:16.000Attempted school five times, and the fifth time he was on our protocol for two or three months.
00:38:21.000He 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.
00:38:34.000We have guys who are in Wall Street now.
00:39:16.000And if it's off because of diet, if it's off because of injury, whatever the factors are, you gotta figure out what those factors are and you gotta correct them.
00:39:23.000You gotta correct them before self-help, before all that bullshit.
00:39:27.000Correct your diet, correct whatever is deficient in your hormone levels, whatever's deficient in your nutrient levels.
00:39:45.000You 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.
00:40:06.000And 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.
00:40:22.000Well, it's been in the literature for 30 years.
00:40:24.000They finally are starting to understand that things that happen on the periphery can affect our brain's functioning.
00:40:59.000It's like you have to really go looking for these solutions.
00:41:02.000I mean, you've got to go through every door and every channel and try to find out.
00:41:07.000And 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.
00:41:16.000And if that one doesn't take, they give you an anti-anxiety medication on top of the anti-anxiety medication.
00:41:23.000We had lunch or dinner with the Admiral in Virginia Beach in the beginning of this year.
00:41:29.000And 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.
00:41:40.000And in the course of treating it, she felt worse because they weren't giving her the ample amount of replacement hormones.
00:41:46.000So the next thing that the doctor offers her is an antidepressant.
00:41:50.000Saying the reason why you're still not feeling well is because of the antidepressant.
00:41:54.000And when we got to her and checked out her hormone levels, her hormone levels were off.
00:41:57.000And did they even check her hormone levels?
00:42:04.000So I was like, there's got to be an underlying condition.
00:42:07.000Like, can somebody tell me what that is?
00:42:08.000I know we're managing symptoms, but can we do that?
00:42:11.000And can we do it objectively or scientifically?
00:42:13.000And that's the beauty of the protocol.
00:42:15.000Because again, To break it down, for everybody out there, TBI, it's a two-phase injury.
00:42:20.000Phase one is that physical trauma or assault.
00:42:24.000You know, it could be explosive blast wave, blunt force trauma, acceleration, deacceleration, slip fall, roller coaster, anything that causes that anti-inflammatory cascade to start.
00:42:37.000According to Mark, you can in the literature.
00:42:39.000But just think, man, Mark calls it the neuro-permissive environment.
00:42:43.000So 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 that are compounding interest over time are being like low-level blast waves.
00:42:57.000And it could be something as simple as one of those woof.
00:43:00.000300-mile-per-hour moving roller coaster is going to rock your head back and forth.
00:43:05.000That could be enough to be, you know, hey, that's enough.
00:43:07.000That could cause the inflammatory cascade.
00:43:10.000And then that causes the hormones to become deficient or insufficient.
00:43:14.000That's what we found through our research, at least.
00:43:17.000That's what our research suggests, is that's the process.
00:43:20.000And if you don't get rid of the inflammation or bring the body back to a balance...
00:43:24.000If 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.
00:44:15.000It's got to be reducing the inflammation, it's got to be replacing the hormones, all those things together.
00:44:21.000When 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.
00:44:37.000I think people think of it as stressful situations that guys have been through.
00:44:40.000And one of the things that I've found in talking to a lot of guys who are operators is they don't have a high stress level because of what they've seen.
00:44:52.000They're the ones who are doing the things.
00:44:55.000A lot of the stress level comes from a lot of the guys that were not being proactive.
00:45:00.000They're waiting around for something to happen to them.
00:45:02.000And those are the guys who are the most affected by stress disorders.
00:45:07.000The guys who were wondering when they were going to be attacked.
00:45:09.000Whereas guys who are operating You know what I mean?
00:45:34.000You'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.
00:45:44.000Like, this situation does not call for that type of response.
00:45:49.000And 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?
00:45:58.000It's going to come out as a fight-or-flight mechanism.
00:46:01.000And that's why they're stuck in this, and it's called post-traumatic stress.
00:46:05.000But when we treat these so-called psychological issues as a physical injury and replace and replenish, lower the inflammatory cascades, guess what?
00:48:08.000And then I looked into that, and that's a thing called non-compliance.
00:48:12.000The 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.
00:48:20.000Because I needed to justify losing some people that I couldn't wrap my head around.
00:48:30.000People 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.
00:48:40.000And people become super comfortable with repeating these really negative patterns.
00:48:46.000They get comfortable because they know those patterns.
00:48:49.000It's very disturbing when you see someone who's...
00:50:43.000Like, all we can do is give out the information.
00:50:46.000You can't put someone's shoes on and make them go to the gym.
00:50:48.000I literally made myself sick, like, worrying about people, like, oh, my God, you know, we're going to lose.
00:50:52.000And I can't, like, man, I can't do anything.
00:50:54.000All I can do is I can control my attitude and my effort.
00:50:58.000And I can push out this information to the best of my ability.
00:51:02.000And people got to meet us halfway, you know what I mean?
00:51:05.000Like, there's nothing we can do to make somebody want to get themselves better.
00:51:08.000Talking 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.
00:51:21.000And I'm going to talk to him tomorrow because he wants to know, how can I make my brother want to get better?
00:51:24.000And I'm like, brother, I love you, man, but we can't.
00:51:28.000You can't make someone want to get better.
00:51:31.000And the disaster, I don't know, the tragic part of that, I think, is the person's not thinking right because their judgment's clouded because of a head injury, you know, serving the country.
00:51:50.000I 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.
00:52:05.000That's an effect of the hormonal dysfunctioning.
00:52:08.000So they're depressed, they're angry, they're, you know, they're difficult to be around.
00:52:13.000So I try to get them to help in the protocol to get them better.
00:52:16.000And what we've seen are couples getting back together.
00:52:18.000We have a 77-year-old Vietnam veteran who lost everything.
00:53:36.000What's the future gonna be like like this?
00:53:38.000You know and it doesn't get and that's how you get trapped into these memorizing these negative states because you know 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?
00:53:54.000So I made that decision at my son's bedside and that was Several months before I met Mark.
00:55:08.000And it was like, so there was like a will, you know, that was to it.
00:55:11.000Like, I don't know where it came from, but like, I could observe my thoughts.
00:55:15.000And I was like, these thoughts that are being produced now are not me.
00:55:17.000I don't know where they're coming from.
00:55:19.000But 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.
00:55:24.000So that happened in September, you know, fast forward to finding Mark.
00:55:52.000I was at a place in my life that I was like, hey, I accept whatever fallout could happen, but whatever I'm going to feel, it's not going to be artificial.
00:56:02.000I'm just going to feel whatever it is, and I'm going to deal with it on my terms.
00:56:58.000And 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.
00:57:44.000And it was like, dear God, I just dropped a parking lot and I'm doing evasive maneuvers in my fucking minivan trying to get out of the parking lot.
00:58:32.000Well, just learning what causes inflammation, right?
00:58:35.000So what we talk about like refined sugars, refined carbohydrates, getting away from things that were packaged for me, you know what I mean?
00:58:42.000Going back to more wholesome, whole foods.
00:58:44.000And this is before Mark's protocol or No, this is after I'm on it.
00:59:13.000So get them back to a homeostasis, a balance, a neuro-permissive environment, as Mark calls it.
00:59:19.000And then you start looking at, like, well, what else do I need to do in my life to optimize it?
00:59:23.000And for me, man, it was like, I'm going to take a look at water, I'm going to 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.
01:02:27.000That's going to fuck him up more than anything else.
01:02:29.000He'll need to go back on 17 medications, right?
01:02:33.000No, but the question was, I started seeing this pattern, as Andrew brought up, where guys were getting off of their medications and no withdrawal.
01:02:42.000So I went back to the literature and started seeing these things about cannibinol A and B receptors, the opioid receptor alpha and beta, the mu receptors.
01:02:51.000And it turns out a lot of the things that we do modify it and modulate it.
01:02:55.000And 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 Valium and so forth.
01:04:06.000Yeah, it was, man, I don't even remember, but it was.
01:04:09.000Yeah, it was a long time ago because you've been off of it.
01:04:11.000One of the things that disturbs me the most about this is What if someone like you wasn't around?
01:04:17.000You'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.
01:04:29.000I mean, I'm not hearing about this from a lot of guys.
01:04:34.000Andrew and I, in 2015 when my third book came out on traumatic brain injury, we started giving classes.
01:04:42.000Very inexpensive classes for docs to come in and get trained.
01:04:46.000So 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.
01:05:00.000So that we can disseminate the information and have more people involved.
01:05:06.000It's such an important thing and it's such a common factor.
01:05:10.000There'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.
01:05:18.000And people that don't even think they've had traumatic brain injuries, sub-concussive trauma.
01:05:24.000There's a lot of people that have just had a knock-and-tumble, rough-and-tumble life, and they don't realize it, but they've caused damage to their brain.
01:05:33.000We 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.
01:05:42.000But you look at the biomarkers and you see the pattern that they've had head trauma.
01:05:47.000And then they say, oh yeah, when I was 18, they're 53 years of age or 47 years of age.
01:05:53.000Oh 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.
01:06:00.000I wasn't knocked out, didn't have nausea, didn't have vomiting.
01:06:04.000And you think because of that, that You're immune.
01:06:07.000Well, it turns out that 85% of all traumatic brain injuries are called mild for a reason.
01:06:15.000Yeah, some people might have a little bit of a headache, you know, or feeling fatigue, but for the most part, they feel nothing.
01:06:21.000And then there's 15% that make up the moderate to severe where they're in a coma for periods of time.
01:06:26.000And 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.
01:07:21.000All the hormones that we talk about, the testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, we relate to them as gender hormones, male or female, reproductive hormones, sex hormones.
01:07:31.000It turns out that each one of them has a secondary function.
01:07:35.000Testosterone stimulates the immune system to increase the white blood cells to the We're good to go.
01:08:12.000That's also where your unconventional standard means.
01:08:16.000Well, I've looked at it from a shift, you know.
01:08:22.000Hormone 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.
01:08:41.000But 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.
01:08:54.000You add it together, you get 100. You divide it by 2 and that's the statistical median.
01:08:58.000So we move people from that 15 all the way up towards that 50. 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 percent.
01:09:15.000And we still keep everybody within the normal physiological range as per dictum by traditional medicine, classical medicine.
01:09:26.000And 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.
01:09:45.000And 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.
01:09:59.000Because I wasn't part of that group, so my what's normal for me wasn't part of that.
01:10:05.000So what the two guys said was, what's best is to develop your own reference range based on your body.
01:10:15.000And he should do the same as I've been doing over the past 60 years.
01:10:19.000So a guy comes in and he's an 11 and they tell him what?
01:10:23.000He's normal in this hypothetical situation.
01:10:59.000But 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.
01:11:08.000And in big letters in the area that's for comments, he says, I felt like Cinderella after the ball.
01:11:15.000And for 60 hours, he was just cruising.
01:11:18.000And we're using physiological dosing of testosterone.
01:11:22.000I don't believe in, you know, everybody who comes to the office is not a bodybuilder.
01:11:27.000So we give physiological dosing because if you give it more consistently, they get a better response.
01:11:32.000So he was given 60 milligrams of a blended testosterone.
01:11:39.000The crazy thing is we're talking about from 2014. We're in 2017, almost 2018 now, meaning we're less than four years, and all this change has happened.
01:11:50.000That'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.
01:11:58.000We're dealing with a very short amount of time, and so many people have been helped to this amazing extent.
01:12:06.000And, you know, we ask people how they hear about us, and thank God that we started back in 2014 on your show.
01:12:13.000The first one, so many people have commented to me, look, if you see Joe, would you thank him for us?
01:12:19.000We have list and list of people who would like to thank you for the fact that you...
01:12:24.000I 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.
01:12:36.000Every week I get just a ton of mail from people who heard it for the first time.
01:12:41.000I didn't think there was any solution out there, man.
01:12:44.000Well, I think this is a really good time to do this again.
01:12:47.000This is one of the reasons why I was excited about this is because the podcast has grown exponentially since then.
01:12:51.000So it's much, much, the audience is much larger now.
01:12:54.000So I think we're going to be able to affect and help a lot more people.
01:12:58.000So 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?
01:14:06.000The corporation, our corporation, Millennium Health Centers, Inc., 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.
01:14:21.000So, you know, revenue that we get from some of the products we sell and so forth goes to help pay for it.
01:14:29.000So people have to pay for it, Joe, but we found that they need to have some skin in the game.
01:14:49.000And so now, like we used to handle every case individually with the Warrior Angels Foundation and fund them.
01:14:55.000And this is a HIPAA mess and everything else.
01:14:58.000So now we fund them directly and work to subsidize these rates to make it affordable so we could help more people get treatment.
01:15:04.000And talk about that, about having skin in the game and how important that is.
01:15:08.000Just 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.
01:15:15.000It's unfortunate because there's a lot of people that really will work hard for something.
01:15:20.000They just don't have the financial means.
01:15:22.000But there's so many that that applies to, that if you just give it to them, they don't appreciate it.
01:16:39.000The people that are just listening to the podcast, you've got to see the impact of these blasts.
01:16:44.000Explosives, 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.
01:17:05.000You're not the person that you used to be.
01:17:07.000I can't remember things, driving home, I don't know where I'm at.
01:17:10.000Five years I've driven that route every day, all of a sudden I look up, you don't know where you're at.
01:17:17.000I said to myself, you know, this is going to go one of two ways.
01:17:21.000I'll continue on this path and it's going to kill me.
01:17:24.000Or I can make a decision to quit blaming my circumstance and decide to act.
01:17:53.000It's just a lot of the text on the page talking about the benefits of this and how much it's helped Andrew and What is the name of this video, Jamie?
01:18:20.000So we're going to do three different stories, all people through the foundation.
01:18:24.000So we have two other incredible stories.
01:18:27.000And then the top minds in science, in neuroendocrinology and neuroscience, neuropathology, are talking about traumatic brain injury and the protocol.
01:18:37.000So it's kind of a concussion, you know what I mean?
01:20:13.000And 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.
01:20:24.000And you always hear about them in this sort of negative way.
01:20:26.000So there's a lot of guys that, they shy away.
01:20:29.000I've talked to many friends who are very smart.
01:20:45.000I'm talking about from The 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 I don't want to go to a doctor that's gonna get me human growth hormone I don't want to look at my hormone levels and like but you're just you're depressed and you're tired all the time and You're you're trying all these different things.
01:21:14.000You'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 Yeah, they can look at it.
01:21:25.000It doesn't mandate that they have to take it.
01:21:35.000And so in that hypothetical scenario that he gave earlier, if you're at an 11, you know what I mean, and you're just one point above normal, well, guess what?
01:22:12.000Different strokes for different folks.
01:22:14.000What I'm trying to figure out is, why would someone rather take a psychotropic medication Then 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.
01:22:27.000Another fallacy for me, a fallacy is that as we get older, it's acceptable to have lower and lower levels of hormones.
01:22:37.000The 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.
01:23:22.000And the diet and exercise and sleep and all these different factors.
01:23:27.000But 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 And all the bullshit was having an effect not just on,
01:23:43.000like, body fat, but it's having an effect on your whole body being able to process all these chemicals.
01:23:50.000You've got to think of yourself as a machine, and people don't like to do that, but think of your body as a machine.
01:23:57.000If you have a machine, or an engine, or any, think of it as a vehicle.
01:24:09.000And if you don't have the proper amount of engine oil, if you don't have the spark plugs aren't working right, the vehicle's not going to work right.
01:24:15.000Your body is far more complex than a car, but similar in that respect.
01:24:34.000The 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?
01:24:46.000And 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.
01:25:36.000There's that, and then there's also the insulin dump from the shitty processed foods and carbohydrates.
01:25:42.000I came off all protocols at 2017 for seven months for this year, just because I wanted to see what would happen.
01:25:49.000One, I thought, like, the brain and body went back to a neuropromissive environment and the hypothalamus and my pituitary gland would turn back on.
01:25:58.000We had, you know, two labs to follow it up.
01:26:00.000But 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.
01:26:08.000But it wasn't, by no means of the imagination, optimized, you know what I mean?
01:26:13.000And then when I went back on it, man, my body composition changed again, and I noticed increased energy.
01:26:19.000And I thought I was doing well, but I was like, life is better.
01:26:22.000I'm a better person when this is optimized.
01:26:25.000And so I've proven to myself that I can do it without it, but life is not better.
01:26:30.000I 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 with CRISPR or with many of these genetic manipulation tools that they're working on right now.
01:26:44.000But as of right now, that's not the case.
01:28:20.000And 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.
01:28:29.000And that's what we're working on with the government right now.
01:28:31.000What's incredible is how much you've accomplished in such a short period of time.
01:30:12.000I'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.