You're listening to This Naked Mind with Annie Grace.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to This Naked Mind Podcast.

And today is a special, somewhat different podcast.

And I'm really excited because I was actually invited on to Dr. Lee Warren's podcast,

and we had just an incredible conversation and Lee is a neurosurgeon and his experience sort of with the brain and with all things brain related was fascinating to me, especially with some of your actual experiences in different like specifics that you won't get into yet.

But I'd love to start with, yeah, well, first of all, just welcome. So glad that you're here.

Thanks, Annie. It's really good to talk to you again. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, and you've written a bunch of books and you have anyone coming out soon, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Hope is the first dose is my new book and it comes out July 25th.

It's all about sort of a treatment plan for what you do when life knocks you out. So when you go through hard things, we lost a son 10 years ago.

And it's sort of like the path back to how do you find hope and happiness again after these big things in life happen.

Yeah. And what a cool thing to be able to do it with your your knowledge and understanding and the book of yours, I have is I've seen the end of you with, you know, Dr.

Dr. Amen, who I really admire endorsed and it's, it's just so incredible to look at the reality of like who we are through this neuroscience perspective.

So let's get into it with why don't you just introduce yourself and tell a little of of your backstory and how you got into this important work.

Well, sure. So I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and for some reason had this desire to be a physician from the time I was born really.

My parents say I never talked about anything else and didn't have any medical people in my family, but I just felt it was a calling and grew up and went to med school.

And I went to medical school on a scholarship from the Air Force. So when I got out of my residency training as a neurosurgeon, they sent me to Iraq.

So I spent half of 2005 in a combat tent hospital that we got murdered every day and that kind of formed me as a, I was just sort of prototype control freak neurosurgeon type person, you know.

And so I went to Iraq and got caught outside in a mortar attack one day and that was when really I figured out that you can't really control a lot of things that happen in your life.

And like is this bomb going to blow me up or not, you know.

And so I came home, I think from the war, it's kind of a different person than I went to the war as obviously I had some post-traumatic stress and all that, but just in a bigger sense.

I had a loss of this sense that I was able to or should try to control everything in my own life.

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