Joe Rogan interviews Dr. Mark Gordon and Andrew Marr, founder of the Warrior Angels Foundation, which offers $5,000/year hormone-based TBI treatments—like nanoliposome testosterone—to veterans, bypassing VA’s $15K–$16K medication/therapy model. Gordon’s research shows blast trauma disrupts neurosteroids (e.g., pregnenolone), causing treatment-resistant depression in 410,000 PTSD-diagnosed servicemen in 2012. Marr, a former explosive breacher, credits TBI for his post-military struggles, while Rogan slams systemic neglect. They link resilience to purpose—citing Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning—and debate innate vs. cultivated toughness, from Special Forces attrition rates (84%) to Wim Hof’s science-backed endurance feats, arguing discomfort fuels growth over fleeting comforts. [Automatically generated summary]
Before you take any of Dr. Gordon's advice, I just want you to know, folks, he's scared of shrimp, shellfish, pork, he's never had wild game, and he refuses to eat outside of a very narrow dietary discipline.
Our mission is to get no-cost traumatic brain injury treatment to veterans who need it.
So it's an alternative means to get guys treatment outside of the medical model, which is predicated on medication and psychotherapy, which does not improve quality of life.
So we're going to have a meeting next month with some top people on the active duty side of the house.
We're also meeting with our...
and works of getting with the Veterans Administration So we're going, they're going to know everything across the board about these protocols, why they work, why they're better, how they're cost efficient, how they're time efficient, how this can not only improve a soldier's life, but the life of the family, child, second order effects, go on and on and on.
So the evidence is out there.
The science is behind it.
This isn't false hope.
We're not offering any false hope.
Everything is science, evidence-based.
Reporting that we're doing and based off Dr. Gordon's clinical application of years and years of doing it.
So the short answer is yes, they're hearing about it and we have a five-year plan to overtake the system and have them implement these on both sides of the house, so to speak.
Now, for people who haven't heard any of our podcasts before and haven't heard your discussion about it, one of the biggest issues that we're experiencing with soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq is, if you hear my voice, I've got a little bit of a cold, ladies and gentlemen.
A lot of soldiers are coming back from these wars with injuries that may have been fatal in the past.
They're no longer because of all these advancements in medical technology.
They're still dealing with the ongoing effects of the war, the traumatic brain injury.
Now, what you have found, and many others have supported this, is that a lot of this is there's damage to the pituitary gland, it stops the production of hormones, this leads to deep depression, it leads to some pretty significant issues that soldiers are facing.
What we found is that because of the body armor being so efficient, a lot of the blast damage instead of killing someone is leaving them with trauma to the brain.
And any form of trauma to the brain, whether or not it's a blast trauma, being hit on the head, slip and fall, an automobile accident, turning upside down, or whatever the situation might be, The brain changes its chemistry because of inflammation, and that's from tearing of little nerves.
It's not only the pituitary, and that's been some of the problem that we've had, is focusing, as I focus on a narrow kind of diet, focusing in on just the pituitary.
But what we found is a group of chemistry in the brain called neurosteroids, which regulate our personality.
And some of those neurosteroids have names like testosterone or dihydrotestosterone, estrogen, pregnenolone.
And the literature has been around since about 1986 showing that these regulate our brain function.
So head trauma of any sort can cause it to decrease, number one.
Number two, with any form of damage to the brain you get inflammation.
And that inflammation expands, let's say, if there was a small area of tear in the brain or a bullet that penetrated a penetrating injury to the head, that area where the bullet or the foreign object diminished the amount of brain tissue, it grows larger because of inflammation.
It destroys more and more neurons.
And the more cells in the brain that are called neurons are destroyed, the greater the onset of cognitive impairment, your ability to use your brain in function, And then emotionality changes.
All I did was, in reading the literature as much as I read it, saw that people had already laid the pathway for me to follow.
And I followed it intensely for the past Well, 21 years doing endocrinology and the past 10 years doing specifically neuroendocrinology, which deals with the brain.
And it's in my population of patients.
I used to see them for hormone deficiency and then started going back asking them, those with the hormone deficiency, if they've had any kind of head trauma.
In the first book that I wrote, which had the first introduction for me to write about traumatic brain injury and hormone deficiency, was a young kid by the name of Michael who had come to me.
His parents brought him in and he had hormone deficiency and we corrected.
His personality improved.
His quality of life improved.
And then read an article, which I've shared with you in the past, which came out of Turkey, about pugilists who had this specific growth hormone deficiency, and that was my epiphany article, where I started looking further and further into literature, and Muhtay, they had hormone deficiency, and then Boom!
All the hormone deficiencies.
So this kid, I went back to him and said, have you ever had any trauma of any kind?
He said, well, when he was 17, he was 21 at the time.
When he was 17, he was in a motorcycle accident and was in a coma for three days.
He came out of the coma, and his neurologist said, oh, you'll be fine.
Well, he progressively got worse.
So that set the stage for me to start looking at this relationship between any kind of head trauma, and then in 2007, my first military was a Green Beret.
I met the wife, who was an emergency room doc in North Carolina, and she called me and told me about her husband, who was six tours of duty, was having some problems.
We donated the money for him to get the full testing and it turned out he was hormone deficient.
When we corrected his hormones, he was back in the good light with the military.
He was getting ready to get kicked out for insubordination.
And that progressed on in 2009 with opening up our practice to military.
And it just kept on repeating itself.
The same pattern, the same head trauma, blast injury, and hormone deficiency.
Well, this is an uphill battle because the way it's being treated presently, if you look at the literature from 2012, 410,000 servicemen came back as veterans and were diagnosed with PTSD. Now, post-traumatic stress disorder is usually perceived as being a psychologically precipitated event where they witnessed something that was horrifying to them.
Death of a friend, loss of a limb, or whatever the situation might have been to stimulate it.
And that immediately opened them up to simple treatment.
Here, take this packet of antidepressants and you'll get better.
Well, they didn't get better.
So they didn't get better because they were having what's called treatment-resistant depression, which now we find is due to hormonal deficiency.
If you look at the civilian population, people with treatment-resistant depression, you check them out and they're testosterone deficient or estrogen overdose or low progesterone.
Or low-pregnenolone, other chemicals that are in our brain.
And these individuals have been the foundation of what I do in trying to find a simple way to replenish them.
What you have to do is test them.
And that's not being done.
It's so much easier just to hand a packet and say you have PTSD when the majority of them are traumatic brain injury.
And I was on Dr. Drew's show with one of our patients who was an army corpsman and he didn't have a single scratch on his body.
But within two years of leaving, separating from the service, he started developing depression, mood swings, explosive personality.
He ends up coming into our program And we find out he has two and a half hormone deficiencies, and the pattern is indicative of having had head trauma.
Well, it turned out he would walk behind Abramson tanks as they were discharging their shells, and he said, man, my body would shudder.
And he was around javelin missiles, he was around repetitive gunfire.
N-acylcysteine, it's a precursor to glutathione, which is the number one anti-inflammatory, excuse me, anti-free radical antioxidant system in our brain.
Here's the thing about NAC, though, also that Mark told me, and I'm on that product, but if I was taking that while I was still operating, the problems that I had never would have happened.
They would have cut it off.
So we can essentially cut off these problems just by Being proactive and preventative in this way.
So if we were right now today to administer to all Special Operations Soldiers, NAC, a lot of these problems that we're having, out the window.
One of the more shocking things in working with the UFC is we got involved with, we do these events called Fight for the Troops.
We do them on bases.
And we got involved with the Intrepid Foundation, I believe it's called Intrepid Foundation for Excellence.
You find out how little money the government gives them, and how much they have to raise outside, and doing functions like these big UFC events, and that to me was one of the most disturbing things about those events.
I'm like, how is it possible that we can have all this money for all these different missions, all this money for all these different things, but we don't have money to take care of these guys when they come back home?
If you count on soldiers to do what you ask of them and put their body on the line to complete missions, and then you don't take care of them when they come back, how do you ever expect anybody to be patriotic?
I feel like the bureaucrats, the people that are in the air-conditioned offices that are, you know, deciding where money goes, they don't have a stake in it.
I was an explosive breacher, so I was in around explosions for my entire career.
You know what I mean?
I was only knocked unconscious one time in combat.
But the thing that Mark was saying, and this goes outside the veteran population, this goes with anybody, but the symptoms can come in months, Weeks, years, days, whatever.
Later, right?
So it wasn't attributed to any one thing.
So six months later after my last deployment, I'm starting to have these problems.
They're starting to manifest.
And when I'm bringing this up to the attention, you know, it's like, okay, well, this is a psychological issue.
And I'm like, well, I've been doing this for a long time.
This is what I want to be doing.
That's bullshit.
It's not a psychological issue.
And, you know, here's why.
I wouldn't be able to perform like this and all of a sudden I just can't do it.
And, and, um, So that was just very frustrating, you know, in that regard, trying to come out and try to find some real answers.
And only, like Mark said, what it takes is an individualized approach, right?
And that uses evidence-based diagnostics to pinpoint and treat the underlying condition.
But nobody was trying to figure out my whole, you know, story.
And when you don't do that, you just find out what the symptoms are and you treat those symptoms with medication, then you're not doing anything to fix it.
So that's kind of why it's hard for, I think, the medical community to understand it right now, because if you have a problem and you can't necessarily attribute that to a major accident or a major injury or a major explosion, then it's like, okay, well, we don't know what it is.
It's a psychological problem.
We're going to put him on packet A, and we'll see how he is in two weeks.
Yeah, that expression, psychological issue, is a real tricky one, isn't it?
Because your psychological makeup, a lot of times, is dependent upon your physical health.
And what's going on in your body can greatly affect your mind, but when someone says psychological issue, especially for a guy like you, what they're trying to say is that you're weak.
The integrity, it's called comorbid, and this is an argument that's going back between the psychiatric world and the non-psychiatric world.
Where in comorbid, which came first, the situation that precipitated depression or the depression that develops the situation?
In this particular instance relative to Andrew, his chemistry of his body was doing great until he had that group of insults to him, whether or not it was that huge truck that got blown up 100 feet in the air and you got the shockwave that knocked you out.
Or the repetitive gunfire that you had or the breaching that you were doing.
So what happens is as you start losing these hormones, I mean, one of the hormones that I've repeated a number of times and I'll repeat again, pregnenolone has been found to control the anxiety effect in the body, in the brain.
So morning anxiety or pregnenolone or social anxiety Can be affected and you know I have patients who have been in auto accidents who've never had anxiety attacks or panic attacks and they wake up six months after the injury and they've got morning anxiety.
Their pregnenolone levels instead of being average about 110 or down at six or seven you correct them back to 110 their anxiety disappears.
Pregnenolone is called the mother of all hormones.
It comes from cholesterol.
It's the first Hormone or steroid hormone, official steroid hormone that comes off of cholesterol.
So if we interrupt cholesterol in our body, we lose pregnenolone, which becomes the precursor to DHEA and testosterone on one side and progesterone and cortisol on another side.
With low pregnenolone, it can lead to all the hormones that help to regulate our brain function and our life.
Cortisol, if you don't have cortisol, you get a syndrome called Adson's disease, and you can die.
And, you know, everybody thinks it's emotional stress, but there are five stressors.
You know, there's Emotional or intellectual stress, emotional stress, physical stress, nutritional stress can precipitate high amounts of cortisol.
If you're fasting, cortisol goes up.
And then there's chemical stress like chemotherapy or certain medication that you take, alcohol too, certain drugs can do it.
And they can influence the adrenal glands production of cortisol, which is called an adaptogen, which allows you to go from one level of physical functioning, mental functioning to another.
You know, I gotta tell you, when I have these conversations with you about this issue, it's kind of frustrating to me because it seems like you're making all this sense and you're talking about this broad spectrum of different hormones and all these different variables that exist in the human mind and how important they are to maintain proper levels of them for health, for function.
But there's not a lot of people like you out there that are talking about this.
What you're saying is a fairly controversial treatment.
If for 30 plus years you've been told that you treat depression by giving this pill, that's either an SSRI or an ABCD or whatever it is, You're going to give that pill.
And if someone comes in, a kook comes in and says, look it, the literature for the past 35 years, even as far back as 1958 with DHEA showing that DHEA is antidepressant, you come in with these natural products that have no patents on it, That you can walk into a GNC, you can get it from Onnit, you can get it from any of these companies, and take it natural, 100% natural coming from Mexican wild yams, and it fixes your depression.
And it costs you 3 cents a day, 5 cents a day, 10 cents a day, as opposed to the cost for some of these other medication.
Who are you going to believe?
This kook who talks about over-the-counter product or the pharmaceutical rep who talks about this prescription medication?
But what I'm saying is, for someone like me that has zero science background, what I always assume is that the way things got better and the way people figured things out is that they just looked at the facts and then when new facts came in, they adjusted accordingly.
But it seems like there's resistance against that.
The status quo is very clearly we hand everybody this antidepressant.
We're not going to hand them this natural product that's been shown since 1986, 1958 on another large group of research to be beneficial, double-blind, washout studies for benefit and depression.
Natural product.
They don't want to use natural products because it's, in essence, as I see it, stating that, well, you don't really need the pharmaceutical.
So do you think there's just so much money involved in pushing the pharmaceutical drugs that these doctors are reluctant to go against it or not prescribe it or to step out on a limb?
Well, you know, the The medical community, the medical boards of every state, it's the standard of care in your community, which means that if there are 100 doctors in a community of physicians and the standard for 99% of them is to use SSRI,
the one doctor who uses a non-SSRI can be pulled into the medical board as practicing outside the scope of The medical community, as well as doctors in general don't want to be looked at as being that one person who is trying to introduce something new, revolutionary, something that's worked, something they worked very diligently at for 21 years to show the science and the clinical cases that it works.
It's a maverick, and our medical society doesn't work with mavericks.
It was found in 1986 by Dr. Blue out of Belou, out of Paris, France, that the brain has the Chemistry.
To take cholesterol and to make it into testosterone, make it into pregnenolone, make it into progesterone, allopregnanolone in the brain.
For many, many years, biopsies of the brain would find testosterone in it and they thought it came from, you know, your testicles or thyroid in the brain.
It came from your thyroid gland in the neck.
What we're finding is neurosteroids are made, what we call de novo, within the brain itself.
And when you have trauma or inflammation you lose that and that's why I believe based on reading the literature and my interpretation that's what could be faulted how I interpret it is that that is the cause for all the transitions in the brain but there are receptors in the brain that regulate how nerves conduct and what they found is these nerves have not only magnesium zinc there's a valium receptor and they found a pregnenolone receptor So they found a receptor which pregnenolone
works to regulate, to smooth out, to calm you down so that you're not having panic attacks or emotional turpitude and yelling, screaming, and picking up a gun and shooting someone or throwing something or yelling or beating someone up, getting assault charges.
So, in a sense, what you're saying is there's different types of testosterone, different types of hormones that are produced in different areas of the body that's not just your testicles that are doing it?
In studies that are done in Alzheimer's patients, they found the frontal lobes of the brain, which regulate executive function, making sure that you make the right decision, you're able to make the coffee in the right sequence, making sure the butter's at the end, is all regulated by the frontal part of the brain, which is the most common area that is damaged in to and fro kind of auto accidents or explosions throwing you back.
They found pregnenolone and allopregnenolone deficiency, the same thing we're finding in boxers, in pugilists, in MMA, in everybody.
There's a deficiency.
And I think I shared with you, NFL did a study where they found that 19 times faster, NFL players are 19 times more prone to develop Alzheimer's disease between 30 and 50 years of age.
Yeah, what Dr. Gordon was saying about all the different neurosteroids, for instance, like cholesterol, he's saying, is a precursor to testosterone.
But if you take a statin drug that lowers your cholesterol, guess what the byproduct of that is?
It messes up your testosterone.
So what we're understanding is our chemistry is all linked, man.
It's all together.
You can't just treat testosterone if the stuff above it...
Is affected and you're not treating that.
Well, guess what?
The military model doesn't even test for that.
And if you're not treating things below testosterone, that that produces at that level, if it's deficient or insufficient, then you're not going to get what you need.
So until you look at your body, your chemistry as a whole, and you interdict it accordingly, you're going to continue to have these mass problems across the board, and the ones that are manifesting and With soldiers, with fighters, with football players, but you know, and then if you take these drugs and alter it, then with the civilian population as well.
So it's not just like a niche market here.
It's everybody's affected by this.
So this is what's amazing about what Dr. Gordon's doing.
You know, when we were having this conversation at lunch, when we were talking about this, you were bringing up stem cells and the effect that stem cells are having and stem cell injections on people that have all sorts of serious traumatic injuries.
Is that with the brain as well?
Have they figured out how to squirt that shit into your dome?
In, let's see, 2012, I went to Germany, to Düsseldorf, Germany, to work for the doctors there, who was taking autologous stem cells.
He'd take out of the patient stem cells, send them to Israel to get them augmented, to increase the amount, and get them back in 48 hours.
And then this absolutely incredible three-dimensional positioning needle That used three dimensions, three axes, X, Y, and Z, and was able to go, we drilled a hole in the skull, and we put a needle in, directly into the fourth ventricle, which is that fluid compartment in the brain, and injected the stem cells, and it spread out to the brain stem, because this gentleman had A brainstem hemorrhage.
And within 48 hours to 72 hours, he started having these improvements.
Hearing improved, physical functioning.
He was in a wheelchair with a belt to hold him in place.
Three days later, he's not using a belt.
For 12 years, since he had his stroke, he wasn't able to pick up a coffee cup, a coffee mug, and hold it.
He can only use a straw.
He was picking up his coffee cup and drinking it.
So there are places around the planet that are using stem cells in people with Alzheimer's, with ALS, with traumatic brain injury, and it's getting benefits.
There are benefits.
In my projects in Beijing, China, the stem cells called mesenchymal stem cells, which are the ones that a lot of the organs come from, In diabetics, injecting one injection of 10 million mesenchymal cells into the patient through an IV, 30% of them lost their diabetes, 45% had a decrease in their insulin requirement, and 25% of them didn't have any effect.
Yeah, there's an orthopedic buddy of mine, Centaro, who was using autologous stem cells that he'd pull out a patient and inject it into the knees and get rebuilt of the knees without needing surgery.
There was one by Dr. Alan R. Dunn out of Miami, an orthopedic surgeon, who showed that if you go in with an arthroscopic scope and you use a burr, which is like a Sandpaper device and you rub the bone and then inject it with growth hormone, that he was able to get 5 to 10 millimeters of regeneration of cartilage.
Everybody was always worried that people were going to get it from fetuses and then somehow it was going to encourage abortions until they figured out how to get it from other means.
And once they figured out how to get it from other...
Now that debate's off the table.
But for the longest time, that was the big issue.
During the Bush administration, they held back stem cell research because of the right-wing Christians.
I think it's, what, 10 years that they put the moratorium on doing any research in stem cells, which is giving Switzerland, is giving China, is giving Russia...
And what they do in, I think it was Australia, they expose it to a special frequency of ultraviolet light to take care of any of the inflammatory chemistry that's in there through photo deactivation.
And the PRP works very well.
It's something that's more acceptable than doing autologous stem cell.
Yeah, and then they're turning that into stem cells, then shooting it into their knees and their shoulders and what have you, and having incredible results.
A lot of MMA fighters, a lot of grapplers are doing it.
It's just so frustrating when you hear about how much time they spent Banning stem cell research because of the new research they're doing now on regenerating things I mean they've just they've sequenced the gene of the flat worm and they think they're gonna be able to figure out within you know X amount of years how to regenerate limbs like what the fuck man I mean that we're getting into some really crazy area with innovative science and medicine so what do we do we stop using all the technology that can help people today waiting for the
You're looking at someone who has had a loss of a segment of their brain.
You want to try and regenerate it.
Is that possible?
We know from studies that were done back in 1911. There was Dr. Cajal, 1928. There's a doc up in McGill University, a guru, Arturo Aguro, who does regenerative research.
The only reason why nerves can't regenerate is because they're in a non-permissive environment, is what I call it, in the lecture I give on this specific topic.
Is that there are so many chemicals in the brain that are trying to foster regeneration of nerve.
Like for instance, UCLA is doing a study on a byproduct of progesterone called allopregnanolone, which is neuro-regenerative, A synaptogenic, which means that the connection from one nerve to another nerve is a synapse.
If it's damaged, it can regenerate it.
Also, allopregnanolone is a free radical scavenger.
As we age, as our biochemistry changes and the energy production in our brain through mitochondria changes, a lot more of oxidation occurs, or free radicals, and that's called oxidative stress.
And it's believed, especially in great articles by a gentleman at USC, Caleb Finch, talks about aging of the brain and loss of our functioning due to this oxidative stress.
And he believes that oxidative stress leads to hormone deficiency, leads to physical deficiency and death.
A recent group of articles showed we're seeing a lot of a type of diabetes called insulin-resistant diabetes where you're making too much insulin because it's not being recognized by the cells.
So they found in these group of articles came out that if there's inflammation of an area of the brain called the hypothalamus which regulates our energy use that it could predispose you to developing this situation called insulin-resistant diabetes or the metabolic syndrome.
So we've been tracking our patient population who have had significant head trauma, whether or not it's blast with physical injury or blunt head injury, someone who fell off a second story and hit their head, was unconscious for a month.
They're developed, they've developed or they came into the office already with this insulin resistance and it's easy to fix.
Chromate is a mineral, a metal, which is important for insulin recognition at the cell wall.
And it was called by C. Everett Koop the insulin-tolerant factor back in the late 90s.
So this chromium hooked up to a niacin called chromium polynicotinate.
Its trade name is called chromate.
We use it for our patients with this type 2 diabetes called insulin resistance, and they all reverse.
They all get better.
Their blood sugar's stabilized, their fats get better, and their insulin comes down.
So we had, in fact, one of our neighbors had an insulin level 117. It should be less than 25. Once we corrected his testosterone and his chromium, his levels dropped down below 30, which is where you'd like to have it.
Yeah, I haven't looked at it, but there are people you can buy it over the counter now, but lithium you can buy over the counter and it I haven't for what?
Yeah, because it seems like, for me, ignorantly, when I heard that, I was like, well, I thought lithium was some hardcore Prozac-type drug that, you know, they put people on when they're out of their fucking mind.
What started it was I would see patients coming in with bipolar and being on lithium and then started seeing patients who were coming in on it, you know, just taking it because of articles in Life Extension Magazine or one of those other science-based journals or magazines.
But I haven't had a chance to go and look at it closely.
So, in replenishing testosterone, you have to be careful with the balance you use.
Otherwise, you start throwing things in like anastrosol, which blocks estradiol, which is extremely important for generating growth hormone in the brain, helping blood flow, and keeping the immune system unique to the brain functional.
So, you know, everything we do, there's always a risk-to-benefit factor that needs to be looked at, and I think that some of the risk factors are being ignored.
It has toxicity, and it's dose-dependent toxicity, and then the uniqueness of a person's biochemistry can make a very low amount toxic for you, where another person, it's meaningless.
So for this woman, it was this massive conflict because this stuff was saving her.
I mean, it allowed her to be herself, and now all of a sudden they were telling her, you're going to have to get off of it, and she had been off of it before and just lost her marbles.
Testosterone is generally perceived as being a sex hormone or being a reproductive hormone.
What we're finding is that it's involved in an incredible array of different processes in the body.
Studies on the The emotional center of the brain, the limbic system, found that it helps to stabilize panic and also anger and aggression and reactiveness to our environment.
If it's low, you're hyperreactive.
They're finding that in anorexia nervosa.
Women who are, you know, starving themselves, who have psychological issues to it, if they don't respond to treatment, giving them testosterone improves it.
So what we're starting to see is these neurosteroids and neuroactive steroids have influence on an array of psychological or mood disorders.
And one of them is in bipolar, in the case that we're Just touching on a gentleman who was diagnosed with bipolar by the military and was put onto lithium and also ADD at the same time.
And then what happened was he was given a challenge test with a low dose of testosterone and within 32 hours or so, his symptoms disappeared.
The analogy that I use is, you know, brand new Corvettes are absolute bitchin' cars.
And it's like having a Corvette with four flat tires.
Now all we're going to do is we're going to fill up one of the tires with air and you're going to try and drive the car.
You're not going to be able to drive the car.
Let's fill up the front two tires and drive.
Okay, let's go and fill up three and a half tires and you're going to drive.
It's not going to happen.
The synergy is in all the hormones that we have in our body, all the chemistry.
Work together to give us a level of benefit of function that one by itself cannot do.
And if you look at the failure reports that are in traumatic brain injury since 1959, it's called a futility failure where these big pharmaceutical companies took these great drugs and gave one product to an individual with traumatic brain injury and they didn't get any benefit greater than 10%.
That's called failure or futility failure.
And it's because, and other people are writing, the because is because our system is so complex.
There's such an issue in this country when it comes to mental health, that mental health doesn't get looked at like the health of a bone or the health of a muscle.
If you have a torn muscle, you have to get an emergency operation to reattach it.
But if your brain is fucked, it's like, come on, don't be a pussy.
And also, you know, one of the things that's been fascinating to me over the last couple years is finding out all the different things that we do that change the hormone levels of our body.
Like all the different things you could do during the day that up your testosterone, including like just what they call peacocking.
Driving a nice car around a bunch of young ladies actually raises your testosterone.
Like, what the fuck is going on with our bodies?
Like, how weird is it that there's, like, moods, the changing in mood, like, happy moments, like, literally will change the chemical makeup.
Hey, Dr. Gordon, I wanted to touch on the, and Joe, you asked about it, the able to regrow anything in the brain.
It's called neuroplasticity, you know, right, Dr. Gordon?
And I wanted to dumb it down for the listeners or guys that maybe are like me that are listening.
Are we able to fix our brains?
And science has said yes.
And I found this out before I met Dr. Gordon and I was hearing about some of these things and treatments I was at about neuroplasticity and basically being able to regenerate the neuronal pathways, okay?
So we have shearing of the neurons in a traumatic brain injury.
And that causes some of the issues that we have.
But what we now know is we can form new neuronal pathways in the brain.
And we can stimulate that through a number of ways.
Learning something that you've never learned will stimulate that.
Treating it with what you're deficient in, you know, neurosteroid-wise.
We'll fix that.
So we thought, like, can you teach an old dog new tricks?
We thought the answer was no, but now we know that that's not correct.
We can regenerate neuronal pathways in the brain.
Anybody can do it, and you can keep yourself, you can continue to get sharper as your age through these treatments.
I think it was Fort Collins and a Dr. Twili who was doing just that, introducing to vets who had dramatic brain injury with Nintendo with certain type of gains to get the visual manual dexterity which would help to improve their cognitive ability because of doing just that, using learning something new.
Sudoku, which forces you to do intense thinking, which can help build new pathways.
In literature that I used to read in Alzheimer's, I have a lecture on it, they found that if you looked at the academic The academic experience of an individual when they get Alzheimer's, the people who have the highest academic achievements, meaning MDs, PhDs, and so forth, compared to people who just have a high school diploma, that those people with a higher education have a slower progression of Alzheimer's disease.
And that's because they've built parallel pathways, a lot of pathways.
So if you lose this pathway, you've got this one as an alternate backdoor or backup system.
Yeah, and that's also why people that are sort of adrenaline junkies, they kind of ramp it up all the time, more and more and more, until the other people around them are like, you're fucking getting a little crazy here, buddy.
But it's because it takes more for them to get that juice.
What more, you've already had that contrast from zero to 100. And the analogy I use is, you know, it's 100 degrees outside and you've got a pool that's 86 degrees.
When you jump into the pool, it's initially cold.
And then your body adapts and you don't feel that temperature difference.
Is the temperature any different?
No, it's the same thing.
You've adapted.
So what happens is we adapt.
To not feeling the contrast because there's no contrast.
I think it's chasing certain emotions and trying to run away from other ones when there's opportunity for growth and development and ultimately contribution in all of them.
And they all can produce that if you're able to, instead of run from it, maybe look at it and see what that can provide you.
And what can you do to provide that to somebody else?
It just seems to me that the way you approach life and the philosophy that you have that you take through life can either contribute or take away from your happiness.
And that it's all these things.
It's not just the hormonal balance, it's not just the health of the physical body, but it's also the approach that you have to life.
The way you look at things can sort of affect and balance all that stuff out in a way.
No, you know, my friend Steve Rinello has a really funny way of, uh, he talks about things that are really fun when you're doing them, and then things that are really fun after they're done.
He's like, some things are really fun while you're doing them, but after they're done, they don't give you any, like a roller coaster.
A roller coaster doesn't give you anything after it's over.
But, like, there's some miserable trips that you go on, well, afterwards you'll spend hours and hours laughing with your friends, like, dude, that sucks so hard!
It's also understanding that a lot of like what is good is very difficult to do and it becomes like your goal setting and then achieving those goals becomes this this feeling of pleasure and a good thing.
Whereas opposed to so many people just want comfort and quiet and peace, but with none of the hard work and that you don't appreciate it then.
Like, spoiled kids don't appreciate what they have in their life.
Someone who works really hard and, you know, they've gone through hard times, then when things turn well, they're like, God, this is so good to not have to worry about money now, to not have to worry about where my next meal's coming from, to have a nice home and, you know, a nice bed to sleep in.
I think you achieve that goal, that is kind of a pleasure you're talking about, Joe, but like when you look back and look at the journey that it took from where you started to get to that goal, that's where you can feel purposeful and proud of it.
That lasts longer than the feeling of accomplishing that goal, the journey.
Someone said that, I talk a lot and I tell them that because of having four women at home, three daughters and the wife, that the opportunity that I have to speak is always outside.
This last year, I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and it just changed my outlook on everything, and he went through the Holocaust, and basically the book was the premise of some people survive the Holocaust.
That's a very good way of putting it and it makes you feel better about your life, too And like cynical people will say well there is no purpose in the end You know you're gonna take a dirt nap and that's all the time that you have here is just bullshit But the reality is that bullshit is way better when you believe that you have a purpose And when you live for a purpose and when you work hard and you achieve things like goal setting They say that one of the most important things for people to achieve happiness is the setting and achieving of goals It's setting and achieving of goals,
whether it's simple, like completing a project.
I want to start a garden in my yard.
You know, you want to put up posts and grow plants, and then when you eat a salad from those plants, you go, I fucking did it.
Like, you get a feeling, a natural feeling of accomplishment from an art project, from anything you want to do.
Fixing the shed whatever it is like when you set a goal and you do your best and you achieve That's part of what made human beings what we are today in 2015 those those natural word systems are in our DNA And if you you follow those and you live by those you will have a more fulfilled life a happier life I agree.
I think simple is to get so wrapped up in the day-to-day rat race of life that they don't put their head up and say, man, I... I'm totally missing the boat, man.
There is no meaning.
There is no purpose to how I'm doing anything.
I would think people really thought about it.
They might not do what Joe Rogan wants to do or what Mark Gordon wants to do, but they're like, hey, I want to do something.
If it's not just tied around totally...
I just want to hang out and not give anything out to anybody.
You're not going to get anything in return.
I don't think anybody wants to do that in their right mind.
It's just so hard for people to find out what it is that they want to do and then how do I go about pursuing that and how do I go about pursuing that while avoiding the idea of choosing just a job that's going to give you security.
You know, a job that you don't want to do, but hey, you know, it's going to give me dental.
That's a big factor in a lot of people's lives.
The non-pursuing of dreams.
That somehow or another, these dreams are dangerous.
Talking about, you know, failure, one of the stories I keep on...
What I'm repeating and using as a goal for myself is, there was a PUP reporter that interviewed Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, before he passed away.
And he said to him, you know, Mr. Edison, your development of the incandescent bulb was what revolutionized.
It took us from the stone ages to modern living.
And, you know, but how do you feel about these over 1108 failures that you had with the bulbs?
Thomas Edison says, well, Sonny, I don't look at them as being failures, just as things that didn't work.
And it's by having that attitude of looking at what we do in our daily life as not failures, meaning that you're worthless and you're incapable and therefore you should stop what you're doing, but looking at it as just something that didn't work, Find another pathway.
And that feeling that you get from failure is awesome.
It sucks at the time, but it's like we were talking about things that are fun while you're doing them, and then things that are great years later.
When you fail at something, that feeling that you have afterwards is fucking horrible.
But that feeling will fuel you.
That feeling will get you to avoid that.
That's what it's there for.
But you have to rearrange the way you look at it.
People look at it like, oh, I'm a failure.
You can't define yourself by mistakes.
Who you are, you are the thinking thing.
You are the thing that can figure out what the problem is, how to form a solution.
You're not the results.
Like, you're not the failures.
And that's what a lot of people run into.
They define themselves by failures.
And people try to define you by failures.
Sure.
Like, how many times you run into someone from high...
Remember that time when you were in high school, you did this and that?
Like, hey, dickhead, that was 20 years ago.
You're still living there.
You know, I learned from that, and I moved past it.
That happens with a lot of people, right?
That people will try to drag you into.
Like, I had a friend of mine who...
He had to get a...
He had a breakup with this girl, because he was dating her, and they would talk about things, they would have a disagreement about something that she did, and she would bring up something that happened, like, fucking two years ago, that had nothing to do with it.
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Like, you did that, you did that, and then you said that, he's like, that was two fucking years ago, what are you talking about?
As a team guy, man, anybody, the guy I want on my team is a guy who's failed and failed and failed.
And every time he got back up and he said, I don't give a shit.
I'm going to keep going.
Because I know when both start flying and the day gets tough, We're gonna keep moving.
Show me somebody who's never failed or has won every time, and as soon as they have a perceived adversity or difficult situation, they don't know how to act.
I don't want that guy on my team, especially when it's life and death.
When you see a fighter that's capable of being hurt and on the brink of failure and then coming back and winning a fight, then you see a person with character.
And then there's other people that they're great when everything's going their way, but the moment things aren't going their way, they just fucking pack up their bag and go home.
Hey, how do you replicate that in the fight world and training for a guy to be able to be in that situation where, hey, this is what it's going to feel like and this is how you need to respond?
I mean, I think that kind of mental training, it's so difficult to try to replicate that.
There's certain drills you can do, like you do a drill where you take five fresh guys and you go in and you spar one guy for one round and then that guy goes out and you bring in a new fresh guy.
And you're tired, and that guy's friend, and they try to break you.
But there's also people that don't agree with that, because they think that that kind of, like, experiencing failure like that in the gym is actually a bad thing, because then you become comfortable with failure, and you understand it.
And some people think that it's just an attribute, that's a psychological attribute, either you're in shape, and you're prepared, and you're ready, and when adversity comes, you're going to be able to handle it, or you're not.
You know, it's really tough to put an answer to that.
It's really tough like think about like buds training I think about like how many people go through that that kind of training and just get to the point where Everybody's uncomfortable.
Everybody's miserable, but they get up and they quit And who doesn't quit the people that don't quit the people that you're gonna count on right like what why why this is their first time doing this Because they made the decision beforehand.
Like, I don't care what happens and how much it's going to suck.
In my mind, I've now embraced it.
And I've told myself that I'm going to enjoy it.
And no matter what, I'm not quitting.
I'll lose a leg before I quit.
But if you have even the slightest inkling of, this sucks, I can't believe I have to do another 20 miles and hump 100 pounds, then you're thinking, hmm, it's easy to step off to the side over there and be done.
But if you have a mental mind frame, and you can train it, if you have that mental mind frame of, I will not, they might not take me, but it won't be because I didn't finish this damn thing.
It won't be because I'm not physically and mentally here doing everything that's asked of me.
Yeah, and that's why, similarly, there's just a small percentage of people that ever get through that kind of training, right?
There's similarly a small percentage of people that ever get to the elite level of competition, and I think in any form, in any sport, in anything where you're trying to push yourself, anything that's difficult, Any really difficult endeavor reveals character.
So, through our initial Special Forces assessment and selection, only about 33% get through that.
Then you go through the training pipeline, which is anywhere for about a year and a half to two, two and a half years, and that's about 50% of the people, I think, you know, actually get through that.
See, you know, they might, like, some people can run a marathon.
Can they run an ultramarathon?
Can they do 100 miles in 24 hours?
A lot of people can't, but some people can.
So the people that run that ultramarathon, they'll look at other people that can't run a marathon, or the people that run a regular marathon, will look at people that can't run a marathon that'll quit at mile 16 or whatever, and they'll go, well, you just fucking don't have the mental toughness.
Maybe they don't have the mental toughness to go 100 miles.
You know, there's levels to everything in this life.
His mother was a wild boar hunting dog from Hawaii.
His dog was fucking crazy.
He was crazy.
But when he was a puppy, one of the reasons I realized he was crazy was he would always like to play bite and stuff.
He was really little.
He was only two months old.
I, you know, he would come up to me and bite my hands and I'd push him away.
And he'd run up and bite my hand again and I'd push him away.
And I'm like, how many fucking times can I do this?
I pushed him away 80 times before I got tired of doing it.
I go, one, I push him.
I'm a fucking human, okay?
I'm a grown man, and he's a baby dog, and I'm pushing him away from me.
And he never got discouraged.
Not once.
At number 80, I'm like, all right, buddy, bite my hand.
Let's just call this a loss.
But that was 100% nature.
This is not nurture.
I haven't taught this dog that.
All I've taught him to do is, you know, get pet and give him dog food, give him kisses, but in his makeup, and there's that question of epigenetics, like, how much of your character do you get from your parents, like, just in your DNA? How much can you mold on your own?
I mean, I think there's an untold number of variables, and nature and nurture, it's neither or, it's all the above, it's environment, there's so many different things that are So, you know, you can't really, you know, put these people down for not being able to succeed at the level that you've, like the analogy you did with the super marathon and the marathon person who does, like I do, a 5k and I'm wasted.
Like, tell yourself you're gonna do an hour and a half on an elliptical machine.
Well, it seems real easy for five minutes, and then ten minutes in, you're like, fuck, I got an hour and twenty more minutes of this bullshit?
And then, you know, as you're going, You know and not reduce the level keep the level at the same and just force yourself to do it That's not easy to do but that ain't shit compared to an ultra marathon So there's levels to everything and then how about these crazy fucks that do like there's there's people that do two ultra marathons in a row like they'll do an ultra marathon and they'll do an ultra marathon back Because a regular ultramarathon is not fucking crazy enough for these people.
So he's saying that he's come up with a method that he can teach you how to change your physiology to be able to adapt to these things, and it's with breathing techniques, commitment, And cold water immersion.
I bought his thing the other day, and me and Becky did the breathing thing, my wife, and the first day I did it, I held my breath for 2 minutes and 41 seconds.
So if you can get your physical performance up to the top level, then you're selling yourself short if you're not also having a mental aspect to your game.
The point is, though, like, I do it so often, it's nothing.
But the first time I did it, I was like, holy shit.
Now I do it, I just stand there.
Like, I literally, like, the timer goes off at three minutes, and I'm like, I can't.
I can keep going.
I can just keep going.
My body, it's so normal to me, I get used to it.
I wonder if that's what's going on with this Wim Hof guy, too.
It's like his mind has a category for these states, and he puts himself in these states, and he can slowly but surely increase the duration of these states, and the suffering, and his body understands how to mitigate whatever issues might come up from He's got a documentary on Vice, Joe.
Those people that are like that, those outliers, those real outliers, those people that, like I said, when you talk about doing an ultramarathon or something along those lines, for most people, the amount of mental toughness is involved in that is insane.
And then you hear about this guy, and you're like, well, fuck.
Well, there's always going to be someone who's taking it to the next place.
The next guy's going to do it fucking barefoot, you know?
But that's exactly what we're doing with Dr. Gordon and the foundation.
Hey, there's no false hope here.
You know what I mean?
So what he's doing, what I love about him, he's like, hey, no false hope.
What we're putting out to the guys out here, if you're listening, there's no false hope in Dr. Gordon's program and through the Warrior Angels Foundation.
It's all science-evidence-based, and we've set up a system that's so advanced that you don't even have to go to a doctor's office to be able to see Dr. Gordon.
Everything is paperless, done through Skype, so we've got personalized, individualized methods for medicine to see one of the world's most renowned people to treat traumatic brain injuries.
We're now bringing that to every veteran that signs up through our program.
Warrior Angels with the S. WarriorAngelsFoundation.org So you go through, you fill out your initial information, then you get started in our automated process.
You'll get Dr. Gordon's...
Patient intake form, you know, the long one.
And you'll fill that out.
Get it back to us through email.
Never have to print out anything.
No printing, no nothing, man.
It's all digitalized.
All done through the cloud.
So we get all that information.
Once we get all your information in, Dr. Gordon and his office check it.
They make sure you're a good candidate.
Once that's been decided, we'll go ahead and we'll start funding you.
And when we make the funds go through, you'll get your blood test.
We'll send, we have Access Labs in Florida.
All right, so they'll do your labs.
So they send the labs to you, to wherever you're at, and they will make plans for you to go to a lab that's the closest to your geographical location.
So that's the only time you're going to have to leave your house to do this thing.
So you'll go, you'll go to leave your house, go get your lab drawn.
They'll take it.
They'll take the labs.
They'll send that back to Florida.
Florida will get it.
They'll analyze the results.
They'll send the results to Dr. Gordon.
Dr. Gordon gets it.
He gets the results.
They schedule an appointment with you to do a one-on-one consultation, and he'll go over everything in complete detail and answer all your questions there, and then go over What your protocols, what he thinks your protocols should be.
Yeah, before we actually do a Skype, I write a four-page report which gets sent by email to the patient, and it has English in it, not just medicalese, and it explains some of the results, and it gives them a chart of what the suggested first group of Products or the first approach will be and then through FedEx we send a very comprehensive patient handbook that's put together specifically based upon their lab results.
It's about 80 pages in total and explains why we did every single one of the tests and how they interpret out and then supportive documentation from the general medical literature that's out there.
And then through the Skype, which is 45 minutes to an hour, we go through every single one of the lab tests and how it pertains to them after we, you know, discuss their traumas or whatever, their accidents that they had, or if they're a civilian, the lack of any accident, but here's what your results are.
And then we make arrangements for either their doctor to participate with us or one of our doctors, you know, since November 12th when I saw you last year, my new book on traumatic brain injury came out and a new lecture series came out and we did that in San Diego.
And part of the reason why there are now more doctors aware of what we do is because we train 45 docs from 5 different countries in the protocols that we've developed over the past 10 years and the results.
Andrew was there and spoke to them.
We had a night, a Friday night, which was a military night since we were so close to Coronado Island.
the military, anyone active or presently a veteran to come to the meeting and to hear Andrew talk about his own life's experience.
You know, I can be the egghead and tell you about the science that's behind it, it but what's really impacting on both the psychological emotional level is listening to someone as you did to matthew gosney when he was on the show and andrew telling his story of how he transitioned from this phenomenal life to this great military life that then the injuries and then what happened after it
and then having all these standardized medical procedures done which really didn't help to bring him to the level that he's at right now which is according to his mother father sister brother your dog also said that you were acting much better than you were in the past Yeah.
Right?
And his life has transitioned.
The emails he sends you about, you know, the quality that he's experiencing, that's what it's about.
Regardless of what we do, it's always about, unfortunately, the end point of the journey that we're taking right now.
Is that bringing you back to a functionality where you're enjoying life?
What happened, let's see, how Matthew Gosney got in is I take a percentage of my practice and put it into a separate fund.
And that's how I think I started funding the military is through our practice.
Because it's, you know, for a year, the first year, it's $5,000.
All inclusive.
Everything.
Because we've gotten donations from our laboratory.
The laboratory that we use, Access Medical Lab, has given us a lot of money to help offset the cost for the labs.
Our compounding pharmacy, University Compounding Pharmacy, gave us a $100,000 grant so that Testosterone is for free.
Any of the compounding products are free.
Another pharmacy, Ike's Pharmacy, gives us all our Clomid so that the first three months of product for the less than 40-year-old veterans, they get Clomid, which helps stimulate their own body to make testosterone.
We just got a $10,000 grant from Pure Encapsulations for the key antioxidants that we use for brain health.
But get this, Joe, the $5,000 in year one is compared to what the VA spends, which is $15,000 in the Congressional Budget Office report in 2012. For TBI and PTSD, $15,000 to $16,000 to treat that.
And all they use is medication and psychotherapy.
So it gets more as the years goes on, whereas we're fixing the underlying condition.
That's why we're getting listened to, because we're like, look at the difference and variations of these prices of what you guys are spending and the end result.
It's E-R-A-B-Y-R-G.com, and on there you'll see giving, and it actually shows what she's producing in her jewelry company and donating to Warrior Angel Foundation, so that they can hand it out to people who are donating money.
They're developing new testosterone that's animal-based.
Instead of using yams, they're using animals somehow or another, and they're avoiding detection with all these drug testing when they're doing these carbon isotope tests.
This is like the new...
Yeah, this is the new thing that the people on the fringe of the cheating movement.
And low dose, very well absorbable, like testosterone propionate, gets into the system, into the cells in three to four hours, and it's out of the blood.
We developed the vehicle that the compounding pharmacies can legally put the testosterone into this liquid and the liquids put under the tongue or put into the mouth and washed around and gets absorbed because the particle size is so small it gets absorbed rapidly.
This is one that, yeah, our testing showed that either once a day, ideally once a day is the best, but you get to regulate the responsiveness that you have, the response.
So if you want to have a nice, easy day, you take one squirt on the tongue.
If you want to have a really energetic day, you take two.
If you want to have a fun night for many hours, you take four squirts.
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That sounds like you're encouraging people to get fucking crazy.
I will say that Life Extension Magazine that in 2012 did the article on hormones to heal the brain in the military is doing a follow-up article where they've gone to six or eight of our patients,
four I think military and two or four non-military, and interviewed them to get their Experience over the past few years that since the 2012 article And I think it'll be important for those people who are thinking about maybe getting involved in what we're doing to read that I think it's coming out The end of the year to read it and listen to the experience or else go back to the Matthew Gosney Jason Hall November 12th of last year and listen to The podcast that was done
because I get a lot of calls of how many people exactly what he said was what I'm going through And I think listening to those that are interested and get onto the program is more important than anything I can say.
And also, Joe, because we're on here today, lives will be changed, man.
It's probably hard to comprehend that, but thank you for this opportunity because it's gonna have a ripple effect that you probably aren't gonna be able to understand.
But by being on here, things are things we're gonna affect people's lives in a positive, positive way.