Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Jason Kander on the Journey to Post-traumatic Growth and Community Building EP 307

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

In this thought-provoking episode, Jason Kander, an Army veteran, lawyer, and former politician, joins me. We explore Kander's personal journey through PTSD and his advocacy for seeking help in dealing with trauma. Gain valuable insights from his memoir, Invisible Storm, as he shares his experiences of reintegrating into civilian life and finding purpose through post-traumatic growth. Join us for an enlightening discussion on PTSD, resilience, and the importance of supporting our veterans. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/jason-kander-journey-to-post-traumatic-growth/  Resilience and Recovery: Jason Kander's Story of Overcoming PTSD and Building Community Kander talks about the need for mental health services and community support for veterans and encourages them to seek help. The podcast offers insights into the struggles of returning veterans and highlights the importance of seeking help for PTSD and mental health struggles. Listen to Kander’s story to gain a better understanding of how we can all make a positive impact in our communities and help those in need. Several organizations provide valuable mental health resources and support to veterans and first responders experiencing PTSD, such as the Veterans Community Project, the Boulder Crest Foundation, and the War Angels Foundation.  Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion16 to get 16 free meals, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/4_gmVPf1rZY  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://youtu.be/QYehiUuX7zs  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Marshall Goldsmith on How You Create an Earned Life: https://passionstruck.com/marshall-goldsmith-create-your-earned-life/  Watch the solo episode I did on the topic of Chronic Loneliness: https://youtu.be/aFDRk0kcM40  Want to hear my best interviews from 2023? Check out my interview with Seth Godin on the Song of Significance and my interview with Gretchen Rubin on Life in Five Senses. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  Passion Struck is now on the AMFM247 broadcasting network every Monday and Friday from 5–6 PM. Step 1: Go to TuneIn, Apple Music (or any other app, mobile or computer) Step 2: Search for “AMFM247” Network

coming up next on PassionStruck. The military works very hard to ground into you the notion that what you're doing is no big deal. And this starts the moment you start basic training and it goes all the way through your service. It's a pretty necessary form of brainwashing because for me to do the job I did, you've got to believe that it's no big deal

compared to what other people are doing. Otherwise, you can't go out and do it. If you've bitten from the apple of knowledge and you understand that what you're doing is insane and that it's really dangerous, the problems that when you finish your deployment or you finish your service, nobody flips that switch off. Nobody explains to you, actually it was quite a big deal. You should expect to feel different because what you did is not normal for a human being. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armyles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom

into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 307, PassionStruck, ranked by Apple as a top 20 health podcast. Thank you to all who come back to the show every week

to listen and learn, at a live better, be better, and impact the world. PassionStruck is now on syndicated radio on the AMFM247 broadcast network, Catch us Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m. Links will be in the show notes. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here

or you simply wanna introduce this to a friend or family you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episodes starter packs which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com, it's the last starter packs to get started. And in case you missed it, earlier this week, I interviewed my friend Emily Morse, who's a doctor of human sexuality in the host, the award-winning, number one sexuality podcast Sex with Emily, which has been on air for nearly

two decades. We discuss her new book Smart Sex where she distills her knowledge as a human sexuality expert into a groundbreaking framework that will revolutionize your understanding of sex and pleasure. I also interviewed Mind Valley co-founder Christina Monlchiani about her new book, Become in Flossom, the keys to living an imperfectly authentic life, which exposes the hidden perils of perfectionalism and advices to reclaim our true selves, flaws, and all. I also want to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. If you love today's episodes, or either the other ones I mentioned,

we would appreciate you giving it a five star review and sharing it with your friends and family. I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners. Let's talk about today's episode, which is a sincere message braided out of suffering in real sacrifice. 2016 saw Jason Kander win a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives. Come the state, Secretary of State, and suffer a narrow loss in his bid for the U.S. Senate. As he gained popularity, several encouraged him to run for president in 2020, including

Barack Obama. However, as he candidly details in today's interview, is escalating mental illness in years of untreated PTSD, drove him to a low point of self-hatred. It had been sent to Afghanistan to gather intelligence, but when he got home, he was overcome with crippling symptoms like night terrors, obsessive anxiety that someone was going to hurt him or his family, raging fury and unrelenting remorse on his shame because he hadn't been in actual combat. He had suicide thoughts by the time he sought assistance. With the help of therapist and the veterans community project, Handler and his wife both

learned that his terrible hazardous experiences in Afghanistan, interviewing guys who would kill him or whom he might have to kill were no less traumatic than actual battle. Jason and I discuss his memoir and visible storm. His journey to recovery and why he must either deal with your trauma or your trauma deals with you. Jason Kander is a former army captain who served in Afghanistan, was the first millennial ever elected to state white office. Is the president of National Expansion at Veterans Community Project, nonprofit organization, and host a majority 54 popular political podcast. Jason's first book, Outside the Wire, was a New Year's Time Specialist. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me, be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an attentional life.

Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited today to welcome Jason Candor to the Passage Track. Welcome Jason. Thanks for having me. Well today we're going to be discussing your latest book, your memoir called Invisible Storm, a Soldier's memoir of politics. But before we dive into that, you got your bachelors in political science and government from American University, and then you went to law school at Georgetown. And while you were at Georgetown,

what got you interested in ROTC and eventually joining the Army? Yeah, well, it started before that, really, because my senior year in American was 2001 was the beginning. So 2001, 2002, my last year there on 9-11 happened. So it was in DC. And prior to that, the idea of serving my country existed very much in my mind, but it existed in a category of my mind that I would characterize as the maybe someday category, which is to say that it was like something I wanted to do. I'm 41. I was born in 1981. So I'm 41 now.

And I grew up on iron eagle and top gun and those action movies that were very military centric of the 80s and 90s. And in general, admired service. Like a lot of people, my grandfather and my great uncle and my great grandfather had all served in World War II or World War I. And I really admired the way that they had gone and served their country when it was a war and then gone back to their lives and gone on with their lives. It made a lot of sense to me. So I was in a place during college part in 911 where I looked at service as something I was gonna maybe do someday. And I think if I was on a trajectory to do it, then it was like a 50% chance

that I was gonna find my way into becoming like an Air Force-reserved Jag officer or something like that after a law school. Definitely what I was not thinking at that time was that I was gonna go become an Army intelligence officer and volunteer to deploy to a war. But then 9-11 happened and the whole equation flipped for me and it went from something maybe I will do someday when I have time to. I'm going to do what my grandfather and my great grandfather did. I just decided I'm going to go serve and then I'll go on with my life after that, but I'm going to go be a part of this. I know many of us wear different uniforms from being a fireman to a police officer to nurse

a doctor. Why did putting on the uniform make you feel like you had a place in the world and a mission to fulfill? Yeah, you're referencing that in the book, really, the first chapter is just called the uniform and it's about everything that meant to me. And I think for me, a lot of it had to do with, I had grown up without a lot of challenges to face down, right? My family was doing well financially.

I'm a white guy from Kansas City. Like the world was not full of hurdles for me to jump over. I was very conscious of the fact. In fact, I wrote a lot of emails home to my then girlfriend, then fiance now wife, while I was in college about the subject of whether I'd ever been tested. And to me, it was like, okay, what adversity have I faced? Travel baseball tournaments and trying to get guys out in pitching or hitting or debate tournaments. Like, those are the two things I had done with my life at that point. I'd been a decent baseball player in a very good debater.

I knew at 19, I was aware that did not amount to a character building exercise that therefore made me a man. And so prior to 9-11, I was thinking about all these things a lot. And then after 9-11 and after I decided to join, putting on the uniform made me feel two things initially. One, it made me feel deeply inadequate to the people who had earned the uniform because I was just putting it on for the first time to start ROTC training. But it also made me feel a part of something greater than myself. And it helped me realize that all that search that I'd been engaged in, that search for something that would really test me was only half a search for something that would test me,

but that the other half I hadn't realized was there, was a search for an opportunity to be engaged in something greater than myself. And I suddenly had both of those things when I started training to become an army officer. Yeah, and what caused you to go into army intelligence instead of what would have been another natural path, which would have been the Jaguar? Because I did ROTC while I was in law school. A lot of people are like, wait, what are you doing, right?

Because I was also enlisted in the garden and infantry unit and they were like, you don't actually have to go do these drill weekends where you get muddy and dirty and miss the opportunity study, you don't actually have to go to ROTC classes and go out into the woods and go running at PT every morning. And they were like, you could just finish your hot degree and then go to direct commission knife and fork school. And also, by the way, get paid more because you'd be a first lieutenant right away. And I was aware of that. I understood that certainly. There are times when I became very aware of it, and 10th mile of a Ruck March, for

instance. But I felt and it's, I'm in no way trying to gatekeep, I have friends who were Jags who were every bit the veteran that somebody who's not a Jag is, it just for me at that time is somebody who joined because of 9-11. My thinking was, well, I want to be a soldier first. That's what I was thinking. I want to go do this. And I also thought, okay, where can I make the most difference? And I just felt like Army probably has a lot of lawyers to be engaged in this conflict against at the time, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban. I wanted to feel like I was directly engaged in that. Initially, actually, and I didn't even put this in the book. The way you asked, I'll include this, initially my branch choice was field artillery. And so that's the direction I was headed in. And then just over time, it became clear to me that I just thought, well, I think I'm going to be better at military intelligence than artillery.

To be honest, I wasn't terrifically good at math. I'm still not. And I also was looking at the nature of that conflict at that time and thinking, I don't think it's going to involve a lot of artillery. Now, as it turned out, I could have made just as big of an impact if not more because they took all the artillery guys and they turned them in MPs and they were doing presence patrols. But I didn't know that then. So I was thinking, well, I think maybe military intelligence is direction I should go. And so that's what I did.

At first, when I enlisted, there were people who, non-military people who were like, why would you do that? Why would you join the army? My professors at college and stuff. And it was hard to explain it to them. And then after that, there were army people who were like, wait a minute, you're in law school. Why don't you just become a jag?

So I do explain to them. And I remember in particular, when I got to cutter on my way to Afghanistan, I volunteered to deploy. This is after I got my commission and went through Intel School. And a guy, he was like an E4, and he was just driving me around when you get to a new spot You do the little scavenger hunt thing where you got to go get your equipment here check off I did this and I get in all my equipment to go into theater

So I spent two days and cut her on the way into Afghanistan and this guy Was driving me around at one point. We're just talking about our backgrounds and we're from at one point He's a sir, I understand you're a lawyer at a corporate law firm in Kansas City. Like you're here as an intelligence officer. Sir, what are you doing here? And I remember I said to him, I said, serving my country same as you. And he was like, and that to me, like typified it that when I would explain it that way, people are like, Oh yeah, of course, we're just doing what I'm doing. But so that was my thought process on it. And in the book, you write that war is not only smoke and fire. It's the voltage of danger that seems to hum just under the surface of the whole terrain. And I love that quote.

And I thought maybe you could expand upon that just for someone who doesn't understand what it's like to go in these theaters. I know a lot of people probably ask you, ask me, what was Iraq or what was Afghanistan like, but it's so difficult to explain. In the book, I spend one chapter in Afghanistan because I went the majority of the book to be relatable to people whether they served or not, but you got to explain that deployment. And it literally starts with me saying a lot of people have asked me that question, and I struggle to answer it because like, how do

you summarize what is quite possibly the most formative experience of your life that lasted for months in a foreign place that the person you're talking to has never visited in a job that they probably never held. So it's very difficult to do. And so that's why what I wanted to do is go back to what my preconceived notions were before I entered the service. And in fact, really, even after I entered the service before I deployed, and those were conventional ideas about what being in a war was like. Going back to the only frame of reference I had, really, other than the training I received was movies, right? So to me, combat was black Hawk Down. It was band of brothers. It was bullets whizzing by your ears,

stuff blowing up a lot, and your friends dropping left and right around you. And in my mind, if it wasn't that, it wasn't combat. And I go into this job as a military intelligence officer tasked with analyzing intelligence, yes, but in my case, also collecting intelligence about individuals who were in the Afghan government or military or in other ways influential on things at a high level in Afghanistan, but we're also corrupt or committing espionage or using their position to commit narco trafficking. So my job was to go out and to build relationships, meet with people who were either engaged in those things or who had relationships with those people. And overall, we're pretty unsavory characters whose allegiance was questionable and who were

always more armed than me and always greater in number than me when I was doing this. So it was usually just me and my translator, Salam, but sometimes we travel in a small group. But either way, we were generally in a position where things went bad. It was not going to go well for us. And what didn't happen, even though I commanded Convoys and that sort of thing, I was fortunate. I didn't end up in a firefight. I didn't fire my weapon, my entire deployment. I was in a few situations where I thought I was about to have to take somebody's life or where I thought that I wasn't going to get out of a room that there was a

decent chance I was going to be taken and I could out safely. But what I told myself was, well, that wasn't combat because I've seen combat in the movies. So what I did not count. And so I went 10 years thinking that and it was wrong. So what I wanted to get across when I started to talk about Afghanistan and the book is that war is not just the firefight, it's not just that everything popping off. It's also just knowing that's beneath the terrain of everything all the time and living

in such a way where you are prepared not only prepared to defend yourself, but more importantly, mentally preparing yourself on a daily basis to take another human life, which is, which changes you. Yeah, for sure. Imagine being a drone pilot, where you're not actually there, but you definitely are feeling all the emotions from what you're carrying out, or even if you're on a ship and you're ordered to launch a missile strike, there are severe consequences when that happens. Exactly.

The other side of that is like what I experienced during the last year here, most presently, with the Afghan evacuation work that I've done is the proximity didn't actually matter in terms of experiencing trauma because I still felt proximate, though I was not physically proximate, to death, to desperation, to things being on the brink. But I guess with my deployment, the added element is I was in constant physical danger, right? Whether a bullet was whizzing by my ear or not, I was vulnerable for hours at a time out somewhere where nobody knew where I was, no one

used to come and to save me. And I just spent a very long time, a decade in my life, discounting that and telling myself that it didn't count because nobody shot a bullet past my ear. Yeah, and I think something that you experienced was similar to something I experienced and that is when I went on deployments It was always as if I was inserted into these roles where it was several levels above the training and pay a grade that I had Why was that the case also for you? That's such a common theme when I talk to people is that you have one thing you expect when you go over there because like in training you're told, well, you're not going to actually do this.

You'll work around people who do. You're not going to actually do that. You're not trained for this so you won't do it. And only when you get there, do you learn, oh, that's the army speak. That's the trade-doc, the training and doctrine command way of thinking about things. But in the real world, when you get to war, the job's gotta get done. And you get the job done with the people and the equipment you have.

And so when I showed up and the boss, my colonel, who is the director of intelligence for US forces at the time, he knew, okay, I got an army guy here. I'm gonna join unit. Here's an army guy who also is really the only intelligence officer that they're gonna send me for a while. And I got this intelligence that I'm not getting. I've got this information gap in all these people that we're dealing with. Like he, the ambassador, the general subordinate commanders all across the country are dealing with these Afghan officials. And they don't

have a clear enough picture as to what their level of corruption is as to what their specific extracurricular activities are, and they need it. They need it for security sake. They need it for the sake of being able to accomplish the mission and know who is a more honest actor than somebody else in Afghanistan in order to accomplish their goals. And so the reason I think I ended up with it,

is he actually said to me, he said, okay, there's two jobs that I need filled. You can choose. One was an analyst of intelligence on the night shift. And the other was this new job, which he referred to as the internal stability guy, which was to go out and to figure out who the bad guys were, who were pretended to be good guys and then come back and write it up. And I was 25 years old and pretty darn sure that I was bulletproof.

And that's what I thought I had signed up for. So I was like, I want that job. That sounds way cooler. And I remember I was in no way qualified for it. I was a second lieutenant. It was a lieutenant colonel position. And I remember the way he justified it to himself was he said, well, you have a law degree.

That's something which of course was totally relevant. Like it had nothing to do with having a law degree. But so there it was. Boom hired. And then just one final question on Afghanistan. You bring up this irony of the panimime of trust. And I remember feeling this as well in many of the countries I went to,

which is that you reminded almost on a daily basis how little you can trust anyone who's around you. And I think it was probably even worse in Afghanistan. Why was that the case? I started for me to say it was worse because I had one deployment. And I don't have other countries to compare it to. Although I could compare it to the 10 years

I spent in American politics, in which I would say it was deeply similar with the exception of of I never really worried that I was going to get my head cut off on YouTube as a result of any of the meetings I took as a candidate for office in the United States or as a legislator or secretary of state. And that way it was similar. I didn't know it at the time. I had not been in politics yet, but it turned out like it was decent training, the ability to sit across from somebody and figure out if they're full of it or not. The reason it was so important in the job is I guess the same reason it's important in anything else is that

if you need something from people, you need to establish trust. And as an intelligence officer, I was developing relationships in order to get information. And I needed people to feel a rapport with me. I needed them to like me, to want to work with me, and to feel that it was in their interest to do, which is to say that I would look out for them. For instance, if you were talking to me about narco trafficking, I wasn't going to turn around and make sure you got arrested for what you told me about you. That's all important, and that meant that I had to do things like go into a room, sit across from you and try

and adopt a rather casual, differential, respectful. Most of these people were very much my elders posture, but still cannot facing the door, removing my body armor. And not acting like I thought I was about to get shot at or blown up in the room, even though I thought that might happen. And then the whole turn of your back to the door thing like trusting that this is a safe place. Now, I in no way trusted that, but that's the irony of it is you have to constantly do this pantomime of trust in order to do your job, but like I wrote in the book, it only reminds you how

little you can trust anyone around you. Yeah, it's so true. Well, when I was in and I was in about a decade before you, when we came off of deployments, there was no mental debrief or counselor that you went to. In fact, kind of the feeling at that time was, especially if you're around special operators, was the last thing you want to do is talk about having PTSD. And for me, similar to you having very high clearance, you didn't want to tell anyone either because it was made very apparent to you that you would lose your clearance if certain mental conditions were found out. So you come off this deployment, your back, state side, what kind of debrief, if any, did you get it? Before I talk about mine, the caveat I want to put out there is that I was an individual

augmentee. So I don't know if other people at the time in 2007 when I came home, we're getting more of a process and not when they came home. They hopefully were, I don't think it was much more, but here's mine. And when I say individual argument to you, all that means is, which it sounds like you experienced this a little too, I didn't go over as a member of a unit that went over and then came home together.

I was sent in to Phillip's position and I did that job and then I came home. So I flew over by, essentially by myself, like not. I wasn't like in a private jet. It was a big group of us, but it wasn't like the unit I was going over with. And it was a bunch of people who were filling spots or returning from leave or whatever you went,

you did your job. And that's what I did. So when I came home and I was a reservist who had volunteered for active duty. So I come home and I fly straight to Kansas City where I'm from and where I still live. And I remember like all it was as I was expected to show back up at Fort Leavenworth, which is where my unit at the time was a few days later and signed

my forms that said, yeah, I completed my active duty. And that was that. And then a couple weeks later, I was sitting at the desk at my law firm again as a first year associate, just feeling like it was strange. And here I am. So it was literally just one day you're at war and the next day you're back at your jobs. Yeah, and I think one of the things I wanted to break here and talk about and at least inform the audience is, my experience and what's been relayed by many of the health and mental professionals that

I bring up right on is that everyone processes trauma completely differently. And so some people process it right away, some people, it can take a very long time and stay hidden beneath the layers. And so as we're going to evolve this discussion, I know one of the things for me was I was experiencing PTSD for a very long time, but I didn't recognize the signals that I was experiencing it or the telltale signs. Was that how you felt as well? I was very much in the business of convincing myself that I was fine. And that if I wasn't fine, it was my own fault and it wasn't connected to my service. And there were a lot of different reasons for that.

A big part of it was that I remained convinced that I was not technically a combat veteran. People at the VA have since disabused me of that notion, and I understand that I am a combat veteran, but I spend a lot of time being like, well, if I didn't get in a firefight, then I didn't experience trauma, and therefore I have no right to consider any of this connected to my service.

Now, looking back, it's amazing that I was able to convince myself of that, because like my nightmares were about the Taliban kidnapping, which didn't happen, but every day, that's what I was trying to convince myself of that because like my nightmares were about the Taliban kidnapping me, which didn't happen. But every day, that's what I was trying to control for and trying to avoid in my job. And it was the greatest risk in my job. And so as a result, like I had to go to pretty great lengths to convince myself that it wasn't PTSD.

And I had a lot of reasons to do that, right? And one, as you mentioned, it took about 10 years for the symptoms to get so bad that I had no choice, but to face it, I could try to outrun it. I used my professional life to do that, self-medicated with over functioning, because it's never portrayed in the media. I had no idea that if you went and treated PTSD, you could get better. I genuinely just didn't know. It turns out if you commit to the program, the vast majority of people do get better. It's not cured, but you get to a point where it doesn't disrupt your life.

So the idea of being diagnosed with PTSD didn't make any sense to me, because to me it was like a terminal diagnosis. See, they're all end up killing myself or at a minimum, it'll destroy my career. So like, why would I be in a hurry to get that diagnosis? And then the last part would be that the military works very hard to ground into you the notion

that what you're doing is no big deal. And this starts the moment you start basic training and it goes all the way through your service. I don't fault the military for that. It's a pretty necessary form of brainwashing because for you to do the job you did, for me to do the job I did, you've got to believe that it's no big deal

compared to what other people are doing. Otherwise, you can't go out and do it. If you've bitten from the apple of knowledge and you understand that what you're doing is insane and that it's really dangerous and that it's not necessarily what everyone is doing and it's not normal, well, how are you gonna do it? Like your legs physically wouldn't carry you into the next job and or into the next meeting into the next patrol, whatever it is.

The problem, so that's not a problem like that they do that because that's how you do the job. The problem is that when you finish your deployment or you finish your service, nobody flips that switch off. Nobody explains to you actually it was quite a big deal. And you should expect to feel different because what you did is not normal for a human being and it'd be normal if it affected you. Nobody did that and therefore I never gave myself license to go get help because I never gave myself permission to have experienced trauma. Thanks for going into that. And the other thing I just wanted to bring up, and I've covered

this on some episodes, but it's been a while is one of my Naval Academy classmates, Chuck Smith, former Marine, his exo took his own life years after they had both gotten out of the service. Chuck did this TED Talk that's now been viewed about 3 million times. What was shocking to me, and these figures are two years old, over the 20-year period of the war on terror, we talk about the fatalities that happened in combat, but I had never really understood the magnitude of the statistics of how many, both veterans and active duty members had taken their lives and his findings, which were validated by Ted, were that there were over 145,000. And you start thinking about that and the enormity of it and why we're not doing anything

about it. And it's just shocking to me. Yeah. And I'll throw another statistic at you. People have probably heard the stat that on average every day, 20 American veterans take their own lives. What people may not have heard is that out of those 20 on average, 16 of them are at the time that they take their own life, not connected to any veteran specific services of any kind. So 16 out of 20, which I'm not

trying to pivot into what I do now, but it has a lot to do with why I work at veterans community project because one of the things we work really hard at doing is lowering those barriers to entry so that it's really easy to get connected to veteran specific services. The narrative around this gets simplified to a place where people will say over and over again, we have to make sure people understand that getting help is not an active weakness, it's an active strength. And that's great. And it's true. And it's important. And it's pretty much agreed upon by most veterans at

this point. We keep saying it because it's really all we know how to say. And that's why I talk about what I spoke about a minute ago, which is the getting through the sense that what you didn't count, because I, when that almost 11 years after I came home that I didn't get help, I met a lot of veterans or served with other people. I was still in the garden reserve for a few years after that, who I thought needed help. And I would tell them as much. And I in no way judged them. And I in no way felt like they were weak or thought less of them at all. And didn't think that I would think less of much and I in no way judged them and I in no way felt like they were weak or thought less of them at all and didn't think that I would think less of myself.

If I needed it, I just didn't think that what I did counted and I've come to realize in speaking about this and writing about this, that's what happens. It's not that people are like, I'm not going to go get therapy. That's for people who are weak. It's that people go, I'm not going to go get therapy because I have an ungood authority from the US Army or from the Marine Corps, from the Navy or from the Air Force or Coast Guard or wherever they served, that what I didn't count. So it's not that it would be weak,

it's just it doesn't count. And that's what we, I think, we need to work on with people. The best time to treat your symptoms of trauma is as soon as you possibly can. Not doing so had some pretty severe consequences on both our career paths. And that's what I wanna jump into next is you are back at your law firm and then what caused you to have this interest in politics and decide to go on this journey as a politician?

Well, I was pretty interested in politics before. I was planning to run for office and that kind of thing. That was genuinely my interest. I'd grown up in a family where the message had been pretty clear for my parents not going to politics, but just if you have the opportunity to help you should. And my parents met while they were working together as juvenile probation officers.

My dad had been a police officer as well. And so that's the kind of home that I grew up in, just a very public service oriented home, or at least a doing good for others home. That was the values of it. And I think that was the trajectory for me, regardless when I was a nerd, right? I'd gone and done political science in American,

and then got the lottery from Georgetown. Like I was a politics nerd, that's what interested me. But what changed for me in Afghanistan was I went from your basic political science student slash interested in politics who saw all of it as a continuation of the competition I had been involved in baseball and in debate. And it was like, well, I know what I believe in. And now I can go compete in this to then I was in Afghanistan. I was on the receiving end for the first time in my life of decisions made by people in political office that were political decisions that negatively

affected my life. Like growing up, we were insulated. Politicians couldn't make decisions that took food off the table for our family or really created a hardship for us. But in Afghanistan, when you're doing a mission to Jalabad over the road instead of in a helicopter, whether it's right or not, the way it's explained to you is, well, most of those resources are in Iraq. Well, you see the politics at plane. You see how it put you at risk. And it makes you pretty mad.

Then when I came home, I saw everything through different lens. Now, when I looked at people who had been cut off Medicaid in my state at the time, I saw a direct through line from my experience of not having the equipment we needed or not having the resources we needed over there to my friends who had been sent to Iraq in a war of choice, again, without what they needed in order to do the job to people who had been sacrificed by politicians who wanted to brag about cutting a budget and did it not by cutting subsidies

for the wealthy for their businesses, but instead by cutting healthcare for the poor. So to me, there was no difference. And that gave me, it took what had been an interest in politics and turned it into a righteous indignation. And that really powered me in my initial years in my career. Yeah, it's interesting. I have a really good friend who recently, her name is Lindsay, but she recently won State House

seat here in Florida. And it was a very hotly contested seat because the incumbent had to serve their term. And Asian Florida, it's a very red state. And this was a seat that the Republicans did not want to lose, so they just poured a ton of money into this, so she was going up against very formidable force, and I just saw for two years the grind that she went through, and she ultimately won by over 10 points. It was a major blowout, but I don't think people realize at the state level how competitive some of these seats are and

how hard it is, especially in I think these larger cities to get one of these spots. So in your case, you started as the Secretary of State. Is that correct? I first ran for the state legislature. Got elected to that a couple of times. And then after two terms in the state legislature, I ran for Secretary of State. And one, actually became, it's funny. Now that I'm out of politics, I don't even know why I instinctually throw this resume line out there, but it's habit. I became the first millennial I've elected to a statewide office in America, which I guess is relevant and in the sense that it put me

in a higher profile position than maybe somebody just who got elected to a statewide office. It was just one of a few steps that really advanced my career quickly, quicker than maybe the normal pattern. Yeah, and so you and I have a similar trajectory. I in the business world was rising up at a very high climb rate compared to what my peer group was. You were doing this in politics, how did the larger politicians start to recognize the promise that they possibly saw on you to take on higher positions of responsibility? It's like anything else. It's funny because I think most people from the outside looking

in at politics, they assume that it's a matter of relationships exclusively and oh, you meet the right people and then they put the wrong around you. It doesn't work that way in politics because in politics, yeah. Sometimes there's mentorship and everything, but for the most part, it's like, how can you help me? There were senior politicians who liked me

and were kind to me, but at the end of the day, there are everybody's trying to get forward with their own goals and oftentimes policy goals, not just personal goals, but so it really comes down to, do you perform, right? So it actually in a lot of ways is a lot like business. And that for me, my first race, I ran for the state house. I nobody knew who the heck I was.

I was 26, I think when I started running and 27 when I was elected. Nobody knew who I was. I ran in a three way primary against people who were better known and better connected, but I outworked everybody and I got 68% of the vote in a three-way race. So right there, then people were like, oh, well, who is this guy? So then you start off the right way, then I got reelected with 70% of the vote in the general election the next time around. Then I run for Secretary of State. And again, people were like, well, I was, I think when I started running, I was 29 or 30 and I'm running for statewide office

as a pretty liberal Democrat who's Jewish, by the way, in Missouri from the city, which is not exactly like if you're going to run as a Democrat, they're not like, well, you need to be as from the city. I was running against the Speaker Proats him of the state house who was backed by a literal billionaire and there were no spending limits. They could write a blank check and nobody really thought I had a chance. But we won. It was very close, but we won. And then people are like, that really surprised people. Because now I'm the youngest state would elected official in the country. And I want to race. I wasn't supposed to be the other win.

So that made a big difference. But the big leap really that had people paying attention was actually a race I did not win. Four years later, 2016, I ran for the United States Senate against an incumbent Republican Senator who had been in office longer than I'd been alive and had was such an institution in the state that his son had already was already a former governor. By the time I was running against the senator. And I get into that race. Again, nobody's expecting it to be a race. And then two things happened. One, I made an ad that went viral, which is I was I backed, I backed background checks and gun safety legislation. And the NRA spent a lot of millions of dollars against me in that race. And they ran a

lot of ads against me. And we cut an ad that was basically me making my case for my policies on gun safety, but trying to do it in a way that demonstrated that I knew what I was talking about. It's a 30 second ad, there's no music or anything, it's all one take, and there's no cutaway. And it's just me blindfolded standing in front of a table. And I'm explaining my positions on guns,

while assembling an AR-15 blindfolded, which obviously is something I learned to do in the Army because it's functionally the same as NIM-4 or NIM-16. That ad just blew up as soon as we put it out there. It didn't actually make as big of a difference in the race as people think. We were running a good campaign already, and we're already in a really good position for lack of a better way to put in, made me famous. I mean, all of a sudden that ad was on every news program in the country and millions of people saw and then the second thing that happened was I came really close to winning that race. We lost by 2.8% on the same day that Donald Trump, who's not my party, won my state Missouri by 19 points. So we outperformed the rest of the Democratic ticket by over 16 points, which meant there were literally

hundreds of thousands of people in Missouri who had voted for Donald Trump and then voted for this liberal guy from Kansas City. And that really was the moment when they put me on the map because that's when 2016 it just happened and Democrats had gotten their clock cleaned everywhere and nobody understood why. And people were like, wait a second, he didn't win, but this guy seems to have overperformed the Democratic baseline by more than anybody in the country. Maybe he knows something about how to win in this environment. And all of a sudden, I was invited to the big kids table. And the next thing I knew, I was getting ready to run for presidents. That's a very long answer to your question. And so that's my life story. And

then I came here to talk to you. So sorry for the long answer. So by 2018, 2019, 2020, you've had one-on-one meetings with President Obama. You're talking on the phone with President Clinton and Hillary Clinton and probably Nancy Pelosi and other high-ranking officials. And you make the decision instead of running for President to run for mayor, which I'm sure was a curveball, but setting all that aside, the more important thing was you end up deciding to walk away from all of it. I think the important thing is to talk about what was going on inside of you to make that

decision and to take the path that you're on now. The whole time I was deteriorating, right? My career was going great. My general trajectory professionally was exactly what I wanted. And that actually in a lot of ways made it worse and more confusing. And you're probably very familiar with this feeling of, but wait a second, I'm getting everything I want.

Everything is going the way I wanted it to go. Why do I feel worse? Which then made me go, what's wrong with me? So to give people an idea around the time, early 2018, I've just had a one-on-one meeting with President Obama where he's been encouraging about the idea of me running for his old job, because at that point he was the former president. And I'm now, at the point where I'm giving speeches in 46 states, headlining democratic events. I'm openly talked about by most publications as a likely presidential

candidate. And I'm like getting ready to give this kind of zenith of my political career speech, which is keynoting this major dinner in New Hampshire. That's like kind of this might be the next guy or gal speech like it sets you up. Okay, we're going to pay attention to this guy because it might be the guy. Everything should have been great. Now the whole way what I've been having at that point was I had not had a good night's sleep since I got home really from Afghanistan. I was having nightmares every night which developed into night terrors which became eventually just a complete avoidance of sleep because it was so unpleasant. Combined with hypervigilance which is to say I felt like I was in danger all the time.

I was very uncomfortable sitting anywhere where I couldn't see the door except like in my own house. And then emotional numbness and a lot of self-loading and guilt and shame. And that all took such a toll on me that eventually I became depressed. I was high functioning because I was really all I was doing was functioning in my career. I wasn't present when I was with my wife or my son. I couldn't really be present in those moments. And I was stringing together in Dorfen hits,

whereas somebody else in a different position may have chosen like a substance. I don't judge that person at all, because I had the substance at my disposal. I had politics. I had giving speeches. I had that in Dorfen and adrenaline rush, and I could do it every day, sometimes many times a day.

And if I hadn't had that, I don't know what direction I would have gone. Probably a very different one, but just as damaging and probably a lot more. So I was fortunate that way. But that's what I was doing. I was stringing these in Dorfen hits together together and one would bridge me to the next. And then I got to the point where I gave this big speech that was really the, I'm running speech without technically saying it

because it causes all these legal things to happen. And it was like live on national television and it was a big moment. And it could not have gone better professionally. And by the next day, like I just felt completely empty. And I knew then I was like, something's really wrong because this should have lasted longer. And that's when I gradually over the next couple of weeks made the decision that what I needed to do was stop flying around the country, stay home in Kansas City, run for mayor, because in my mind,

my poorly conceived plan for saving myself was that I'm going to make a difference in my community that I can see. My kids are sixth generation Kansas City, and I love my hometown, and I was like, if I can curb violent crime, if I can improve people's lives, that's what's going to fill up the hole inside me, which was totally wrong-headed. What I needed was therapy, and I was on that campaign for 99 days. It was going really well. It's the only campaign I was ever in

where I was expected to win, other than my reelection to the state house once. And we were gonna win. We were gonna win, going to win, going away, which, it sounds like bragging, but if you go from running for president to running for mayor of your hometown, what the hell were you doing

if you're not the front runner in that race? And so it should have been a lot of fun, but it wasn't. I actually got aggressively worse quickly. It accelerated to the point where I was having pretty frequent suicidal thoughts. And that's what got me to the point where I was like, I got to stop everything and I got to address this. I think you and I both had the same thing that was going on underneath. I had something I was mispronounced, but a stymia, which is this low grade depression that you almost don't recognize when it comes on.

And then over time, because it's gradually building up, you don't realize you're getting worse and worse until you've gone from very mild depression into severe depression. What I would add to that is I agree. And the other aspect of it that's so confusing, at least for me was because it was so gradual and because I had been so long that I had chosen not to get treatment, I forgot that I didn't used to be like that. So for me, it was like, I guess this is just what I'm like as opposed to boy, it's been like this gradually worse since I deployed. It didn't make sense to me because it just lasted so long

that I was like, well, this is what my life is. And so then when you realize maybe it doesn't have to be, it's a big deal. Yeah, and for me, I went longer than you and the lightning strike for me was in 2017. I came home, found an armed intruder in the house, pointing a gun at me, and it basically in the ensuing months brought not only that event to the forefront, but everything that I'd experienced and combat and everything else.

And then I took the same step. You did. I had avoided for all these years going to the VA, I come from a family where my dad has had 25, 30 surgeries from his time in the Marine Corps, and we always had this belief that you don't go to the VA unless you're missing a limb or you have severe physical consequences from time served.

I finally showed up because I think similar to you, I didn't know where else to turn at this point because I wasn't getting answers from the civilian doctors. The one thing that I learned and thank goodness a psychiatrist taught me was that in the VA, and I'm sure it's in any medical system that you're in, the most important thing that you can do is advocate for yourself. I think for me, that was a huge turning point, because then similar to you,

I went through cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure therapy, which really sucks. It's very... And then I did EMDR after that, but I think we had a very similar type of path. Yeah, it sounds like it. And I'm glad you made that choice. And yeah, that's what it was. I remember my thinking at the time when I decided that I would go to the VA was,

and it's funny because I was a pretty well-known person, I got a lot of reaction to my announcement that I was gonna go to the VA, and a lot of people who were the same demographic of people who many years earlier had said to me, but why would you join the Army? There's so many other ways you could serve, it's a waste of your education, whatever. Those same sorts of people were like, why would you go

to the VA? Do you have insurance, right? And for me, I was like, I want to go where they just deal with people like me. And once I accepted the idea that I had PTSD from my deployment that had been 10 years prior, it was like, I just want to go somewhere where they know exactly how to handle it. And that's what happened. I'm sure this was your experience as well. There was never a moment where I said something to my therapist and he went, oh, that's weird. Or what?

That doesn't make any sense. Like never happened once. It was always like, yep, that tracks. And maybe that would have also been a case. And probably it would if I'd gone to a civilian trauma therapist, but there was something very comforting to me about going to the VA for that reason. And it turned out to be a very good choice. Yeah, so if a veteran is listening to this

and you're not getting treated by the VA, I would tell you that going into it to consume a bit intimidating because it is. I don't care who you are trying to understand how to navigate that beast and how to actually have the ability to get treated as complicated. But I will tell you that once you get into the system, I'm treated like a rock star. They bend over backwards to try to help you.

One thing I'd like to add to that though is that there's also probably could be veterans listening to this who for many possible reasons, because it's way more common than people realize are not VA eligible. And that could be anything from a discharge status to the amount of time they served or where they serve. There's it's a shoot some ladder system sometimes. How much money they make? Yeah, how much money they make. And so what I would say is if you encounter problems with that, two things I would say, one, don't stop advocating for yourself to get your VA benefits. Don't allow your pursuit of VA benefits to delay your pursuit of help because there are other organizations out there and if you need to go just for private therapy,

whatever you got to do, go get the help while you pursue your VA benefits because it's just really important. I mean, where I work now, one of the most common things we see is the danger of a veteran or anybody who's experienced trauma reaching out for help and not getting it because the chances that people will ask for help more than once, often are really slim. And so what I would say to anybody is, don't let that be you. Don't take no for an answer. And if you are getting no for an answer, go on to your contingency plan and pursue treatment, whether it be the VA or somewhere else, just pursue treatment. It's worth it. Well, Jason, kind of the last question I want to end on is a multi part one. So the first

part would be, would inspired you to write invisible storm and the timing of why now. But then secondly, maybe then branch into what you're doing now and how kind of the two coincide. Sure. Thanks. So it's now been a little over four years since I made my announcement that I was going to go to the VA and get help. And the first part of why do it now is frankly because before this, I just didn't feel like I knew how to tell the story, right? Like for one thing, for a long period of time, I didn't feel like the story had resolved itself and I'll never resolve itself, right?

But I didn't feel like I'd gotten to a point where I had the level of understanding of myself and of my own journey to tell the story. But I knew that someday I would probably want to, mostly because of the reason that I ultimately wrote the book, which is that, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there really aren't any portrayals of people who are in post-traumatic. You just never see it. When PTSD is to pick that on screen, it is usually a combat veteran. They're robbing a bank after shooting a pair of went immediately after beating their spouse. I'm not saying that never happens.

It certainly does not happen with the regularity that is portrayed. What happens far more common is people get treatment and they get to a point where PTSD no longer disrupts their life and they manage their symptoms and they are fully functioning, valuable and unlimited professionally a member of society. It actually happens all the time for veterans and non-veterans, but I didn't know that back then. And even after I was told that,

I didn't really have any examples in popular culture to point to or to emulate. And so ultimately, I decided that I would be that person. Once I felt like I had arrived at that point, I wanted to write a book that really was for me 14 years ago, because I knew that there were all sorts of cases of that version of me out there. And I just thought if I could write a book about what I know now and what I experienced and because I'm already a public person, be that person on the national stage that I jokingly

referred to, because this is how some guy in the Boston Globe referred to me right after my announcement that I was going to get help. I jokingly say I ended up becoming the poster boy for Post-traumatic growth. I'm okay with that. It's not exactly what I had in mind when I entered public life back in 2008. It is a role that I take very seriously. And I knew that this book could do that. I believed that it could save some people's lives and I've been really gratified to have a lot of people tell me that since it came out. As to what I'm doing now, I'm really enjoying my life and I'm making a great difference. I frequently, the other version of this question, which I'll just say it's our both, is,

are you going to run for something? And the things I, in the last four years, since I announced that I was going to drop out of a race for mayor and exit from political public life as a candidate, I'm still very active in politics, I've made a greater impact on the world by far than I did in the combined over a decade that I spent pursuing public office. In that time, I have really, I believe, made a real contribution to changing the conversation around mental health and around trauma, not just for veterans, but for others. I've been the president of a national expansion at Veterans Community Project for over three years now.

And in that period, I've taken amazing organization that focuses on preventing veterans to a side and also ending veteran homelessness and the team that I have the privilege of leading has expanded it beyond my hometown and into the Denver area and into St. Louis and Sioux Falls and soon Oklahoma City and Milwaukee. And so I'm really proud of that work. And then just by accident, I got really involved in this Afghan evacuation stuff to get some of my people that I served without, and I formed a nonprofit, and my buddies I served with ended up getting over 2000 people out of that country safely. And, you know, and then some other stuff. I still have this podcast, majority 54, that is a pretty popular political podcast that helps a lot of people talk about very difficult issues with people they're close to, And some other stuff, I wrote this book that did well, but I think most importantly,

I'm most proud of the difference I've made for myself and for my family, which is to say that I'm a really present father and husband. And I wasn't before. I'm a really huge part of my son and my daughter's lives. I'm my son's littlely coach, which is something I always wanted to be but never thought could happen, because my dad was mine, and my daughter's lives. I'm my son's little league coach, which is something I always wanted to be but never thought could happen because my dad was mine and his dad was his.

It's something we do in our family. And I actually, one of the things I'd take the most joy in and spend a lot of time on is I went back to playing baseball. I'm 41 years old and I play in the national men's adult baseball league, not softball, but baseball. And I'm playing center field for the Kansas City hustlers. And I take it really seriously. And we play like, but baseball. And I'm playing center field for the Kansas City hustlers. And I take it really seriously. And we play like 50 games every summer. I'm an eight or a nine hitter, but I'm hanging in against competition that played D1 College Ball, some guys who played pro.

And I have to exercise a lot to do it. I'm really enjoying life. And that's what I'm doing now. And well, such an inspiring story. And just for the veterans who are out there in first responders, I'm just gonna name a couple places that you can go in addition to Jason's organization. And one of those is the Boulder Crust Foundation,

which specializes in post-traumatic growth for veterans. There's the Warrr Angels Foundation, which helps with TBI and PTSD. There's Heroics Hearts Project and Vets, which are both using Silasibon and other things like that to treat PTSD and then there's the Comradery Fund, which is another organization that will pay for mental health services if you're a veteran or

first responder. All you've got to do is apply to any of these and they will help you and I'll make sure I put all of these in the show notes. Well Jason thank you so much for joining us today and sharing this story and it was a great read and I highly encourage people to read your memoir plus if they're into politics, your previous book, which was a New York Times bestseller. Oh, well, thanks. Yeah. No, I appreciate it. I'll put in one last plug for the book because I'm on a bachelor's about doing so. It too is landed on the New York Times bestseller list. And the plug that I'll put in for it for invisible storm is that the organization I just talked

about, a veterans community project, all of my royalties from invisible storm go to support a veteran community project. So it's one more reason for people to run out and buy the book and it makes it a lot easier for me to unabashed they hawk the book because the money goes to a good cause. So thank you for having me. Oh, thank you so much for being here. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Jason Canter and I wanted to thank Jason and Mariner Books for the privilege of having him appear today on the show. Links to all things Jason will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show.

All proceeds go to supporting the show. Everties or deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Videos are on YouTube, both at John Ar. Miles and Passion Struck clips. As I mentioned at the beginning, you can also catch us on the AMFM247 National Broadcast Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 pm. Links will be in the show notes. You can also find me on LinkedIn where you can subscribe to my newsletter or at John R. Miles on all the social platforms. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast in your view that I did with Joanna Grover,

a distinguished therapist and coach who has revolutionized the way that we approached personal growth in her groundbreaking book, The Chose Point, Joanna equips us with the ability to take control of the decisions that define our lives. We're not wired to accept change. Change is a bit of a threat to our system. So we really have to have a tool.

I believe that functional imagery training and the way that Jonathan Rhodes and I have adapted it for the public up until now, it's been an academic field of study. And we tried to, in the choice point, make it really like relatable to life. So this is a tool that you can use back by two decades of research that really does override the status quo. And the number one thread throughout all the research is that it builds resiliency. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something impactful or useful. If you know someone who is struggling to overcome PTSD or trauma, then please share today's episode

with them. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share it with family or friends. In the meantime, be your best, go apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and be passion struck. you