WHOOP Podcast - Jason Kander: A Story of Service, Mental Health, PTSD, and Recovery

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

On this week’s episode, Will Ahmed, the Founder and CEO of WHOOP, is joined by former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander. Before being elected Secretary of State in 2012, he was a member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Jason is also a veteran of the United States Army achieving the rank of Captain during his service as a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan. Will and Jason will discuss Jason’s decision to join the military (3:12), life in Afghanistan (5:10), Jason’s daily routine in the service (13:25), dealing with and talking about PTSD (15:50), what led him to take the first step and get help (25:10), dealing with suicidal thoughts and therapy (30:10), using meditation (36:45), how Jason uses WHOOP (38:28), Jason’s political career and life today (46:55), and Jason’s book and podcast (56:55).Resources:Jason’s WebsiteInvisible Storm: A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and PtsdSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more. To learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will. I'm a founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, I am joined by former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, Before being elected Secretary of State in 2012, he was a member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Jason is also a veteran of the United States Army achieving the rank of captain during his service as a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan.

Jason has written two New York Times bestselling books, Outside the Wire, Ten Lessons I've Learned in Everyday Courage, and Invisible Storm, a soldier's memoir of politics and PTSD, in which he writes candidly about his years battling, diagnosed PTSD. Jason and I discuss his decision to join the army in his time in Afghanistan, some really amazing stories of his time investigating war criminals. Jason's battle with PTSD dive deep into his decision to pull out of the presidential race in 2020 and the Kansas City mayoral race, how Jason deals with his mental health today, working with the veteran community, Jason is involved with multiple organizations, Jason's time on Whoop and how he uses it in his daily life, a longtime Whoop member,

and a look into Jason's political career. If you're thinking about joining Whoop, you can visit our website to sign up for a 30-day free trial membership and take the first step to unlock your own best performance today. New members can use the code will to get $60 credit on Whoop accessories when you enter the code at checkout of your new membership. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, please email us, podcast at whoop.com, or call us 508-443-49-5-2. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Jason Cady. Jason, welcome to the Woof Podcast.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me at Whoop. Yeah, well, I'm grateful to have you here. I pronounce it, by the way, in a very Kansas City way, which is embarrassing. As soon as I got here and heard everybody pronouncing it, I realized I've been pronouncing the thing that I wear the wrong way for several years,

because it's Whoop, not, it should be Whoop? Whoop. Yeah, I guess. It rhymes with a loop. Yeah. I'll do my best. Well, I appreciate having you here. This is, it's funny because you reached out to me on Instagram with a customer support issue.

Which was pretty boozy of me, really. Yeah. And I think fortunately we got that resolved. But in the process, you know, I had followed your career and I was flattered that you were on whoop. So I said, hey, let's do this podcast. Yeah, well, I'm glad you did. My son's very impressed because it was like, I made a customer service request and now we're in Boston. now we're in Boston.

Yeah, there's a lot to learn from that. Yeah. So I find it fascinating that, you know, you saw 9-11 and then you immediately enroll essentially in the U.S. Army. Take me back to that moment in time and your thought process. You know, I grew up like on the same, we're around the same age. So I grew up on the same 80s and 90s military action movies, right? So I think that seed was in there, you know, Iron Eagle and Top Gun and all that stuff.

And also, you know, my grandfather and my great-grandfather had served in the military when a war had broken out. And it was, I always thought that made a lot of sense, the idea of like, when a war starts, you go, you serve, and then you get back and you live the rest of your life. And that always just made sense to me. So I was going to school in D.C. when 9-11 happened, and I just decided right then that I was going to join. And, you know, I was going to school on the East Coast. So folks back home, where I'm from in Kansas City, like, that wasn't that surprising to them because back home, it's sort of a choice on par with college going into the military. But, you know, my professors were, like, came out of the Vietnam draft era, and they all thought

I was nuts. But it just made a lot of sense to me, the idea of, like, the country's going to war, and I'm not going to, I'm not going to not go. You know, it just seemed like that's what I'm supposed to do now. Did you have a number of friends that were going as well, or it was really just a person? I had a, you know, there were a couple of guys like from my baseball team growing up back home, stuff like that, but it was very much a personal decision. I mean, it was just, I had always really admired service and I think where my head was like, well, one day maybe, like before 9-11, it was like, one day maybe I'll become like a reserve JAG officer or something, but I don't know if I ever would have done it. And then 9-11 happened and it was like, no, I'm going to go into the army. I'm going to become an intelligence officer.

it just changed it changed it in my mind from the maybe someday category to I'm going to do this and then I'll figure out the rest of my life around it. Now I ended up with a lot of great friends from it but nobody that I like went in with. So you get deployed into Afghanistan. What were some of your first impressions? I remember thinking it was like the moon with mountains. I mean it was barren but also I guess first impression is like when you get there you know you've been through a fair amount of training and also like you're geeked up for it you're this is like what you've been training for and and maybe it sounds it sounds odd but like I was very excited for it you know I knew it was dangerous but I was excited for it because that was the point of joining

that was the point of all the training and so I thought I was pretty tough right like I had all my battle rattle on and I remember the very first day like catching my reflection and thinking man, I look pretty cool, right? And feeling really good. And then we were going on a convoy to the base where I was going to be stationed. And I was expecting, like, armored humbys and the stuff that we'd had, like, in training. And what pulled up were unarmored Mitsubishi Pajeros, which is basically just Mitsubishi's version of a Fortescape, like no armor or anything like that. And that was when I immediately did not feel cool or tough or anything.

I actually started to feel sick to my stomach. So my first impression was, or my first thoughts, really, in country were mostly, I really hope I don't throw up on these people around me because I'm probably going to spend this deployment with them. And that would be a bad way to earn a nickname. And luckily, my stomach held. And after the first few times, you get pretty used to it. But it was, the realism set in rather quickly. And you were investigating corruption, espionage, drug trafficking. What was that like?

Oftentimes, it was just really exciting. The way I've described it in the past is when you go to the military and you get a uniform, there's an aspect of that that, like, you can kind of, you can feel your place in the world. And it really, it helps you get a sense of yourself and how you belong and it gives you a sense of mission. And then if you deploy and you're in a job where you frequently don't wear the uniform, that's the next level where you feel like a cowboy. And that was often how I felt, right? It was like myself and my translator and maybe sometimes a small team going out and figuring stuff out, you know, meeting with the people we need to meet with, trying to bring the information back.

And there were times where it felt like a movie, right? But then other times where it was like, did I really do? You know, you would question like, okay, nothing really significant happened today. I went, we snuck around, we met with these people. It was very dangerous, but like I didn't have a bullet whizzing by my ear or anything like that. And so sometimes it was just confusing. It was just like, am I really accomplishing anything? Am I really doing anything?

Because it wasn't Black Hawk down. It wasn't a conventional version of combat. And then years later, that was confusing for me, right? Because it wasn't what I had seen in the movies, but it still had the same effect on me. So the job was exciting. I learned a lot from it. They changed the job a lot after I left, it turned out, because we weren't necessarily doing it in the safest way. But I think we were doing it the most effective way.

Well, what did they change about it? And they quit letting people just go out and be like, I'm taking this vehicle and we're going to meet with this guy in Kabul. It was like myself and my translator or sometimes myself and another guy from like the tactical human intelligence team. We would just, you just go tool around. You just go meet. I kind of thought of myself as like a gossip columnist in Kevlar. It was like just. That's a good way to put it.

Yeah, it was like my commander referred to it as thug int, which is short for thug intelligence, which is a term that I think he made up. which is to say he defined it as it is your job to develop relationships with thugs so that they will give us information on other thugs which meant you're frequently in situations where you're like is this guy my friend or am i at a high risk of kidnapping right that kind of thing so and you're traveling around in an unarmored vehicle right that's your point about going from wearing the the uniform to not yeah and you've got your translator with you and if you're looking around paint that picture a little But are you seeing a lot of people with guns? Are you seeing a lot of people you don't, obviously you don't know?

Yeah. You get really adept very quickly at sort of assessing each situation, right? Like how many, like when you go into an infirm meeting, it's like, okay, how many entrances and exits are there to this place? How many, how many armed people that I see on the way in? How many armed people are in the room?

How many armed people between the building and my vehicle? You know, where is the door, you know, in relation to my back, all that kind of stuff. What are the doors that are open or closed to rooms that I haven't seen in yet, all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, stuff you'd expect, watching people's hands, you know, it gets kind of difficult because you're usually

working through a translator. So you're really working hard to sort of assess people's, assess people, you know, through the textured glass of translation, that can be kind of difficult. So it's interesting to think about, you know, being in a room where, you're listening to the voices, but you don't know what's being said. And so you're probably just hyper-focused on everything else,

like the body language and the cues and the head nods. It's where, you know, I think everybody's become very aware of how a lot of us who served in Afghanistan and Iraq feel about our translators, and they see in the news how we're so many of us have worked hard to get our translators and the other people we work with back. But a big part of it that people don't get to hear about it, is really why those relationships are so strong. And a lot of it is because your translator,

they're not just translating the words. I mean, they're your partner out there. And on top of that, they're a cultural translator. They're a guide. So like, you know, my translator kept me from making cultural or worse, full pause on numerous occasions by either translating my words differently than I said them,

or when translating to me, telling me in English what he thinks this guy really means or what this guy is at. actually not telling us, that kind of thing. So they play an enormous role. You can't do it without them. Yeah, and it's also interesting to wonder whether the translator knows when he's speaking English back to you,

whether he knows whether the opposition or the person he's communicating with also speaks English or not. And it's way more often than they let all. Yeah, and it's way more often than they let on. And you learn to figure that out by when you're speaking English and your translator is looking at you, you do try and catch a glance

them because you can oftentimes notice that they have figured out and they're already formulating their response. And then every once in a while, they'll trip up and they'll start responding in Dari or Pashto before the translator has actually finished translating. And then you get a lot more careful. It's actually a funny story about that. I was meeting once with a high-ranking government official, the Attorney General of Afghanistan, and he was talking to me a lot about.

corruption and that kind of thing. And it was myself and actually, somebody from the FBI who had tagged along for the meeting. And he, at the end of it, well, so during the meeting, he is telling us about this other person who was in the meeting, he was like a local prosecutor. And he's telling us in English because he had gone to George Washington for law school. So he's telling us in English that, you know, this gentleman to my right, he is very corrupt. And he has been a part of trying to assassinate me on numerous occasions. And the guy is sitting there and we're laughing.

uncomfortably and the guy is sitting there and he is doing a very good job of doing that laugh that people do when they don't understand the language but they know a joke has been told yeah right you know and so and so then the FBI person I was with went out to smoke a cigarette and that actually that guy left the other guy and the corrupt guy and then she went out to smoke a cigarette and then we get ready to leave she comes back up and she just looks like white and shocked and we get in the vehicle to leave and I'm like what is wrong and she's He's like, I went out to smoke a cigarette. That guy was out there.

He bummed a cigarette off me. And in perfect English, he was like, where are you from? I own some land in Nebraska. So that's the kind of thing that happens. What was your daily routine like in Afghanistan? You know, if there was a daily routine, it was like the, what he was called the J2, the director of intelligence for Afghanistan, might come to me and say like, hey, the ambassador or the general needs to know more about this person, right?

like we're dealing with this person, maybe it's a high-ranking Afghan general or more likely it'd be like a minister in the government. We need to know more about like his activities in this province. And that would be basically the entire instruction. And then my translator and I or sometimes I'd tag along with some of the team in their translator would just go out and I'd take two or three days and I'd sort of meet with some of the same people I would typically meet with. They might mention somebody new and I might go meet with them. And then I come back and I write it up. And then that it would be like a two-page, here's the extracurricular activities of this fella. Usually I wasn't in a position to make a recommendation, but if it was, it would be something

like perhaps we move him to a different province because maybe get him away from the bad influence of like his, either drug trafficking world or if he was double dealing or that kind thing. But usually they didn't ask the intelligence folks for recommendations. They just asked us for assessments. And so that's what I would do. It's like, go out, learn as much as you can. meet with people of questionable, unsavory character in order to do it, and then write it up

and then the people who get paid more make decisions based on that information. And were you working out almost every day? Did you find you were getting fitter over there or less fit? I could see it either way. You're working out just because one of the great things about being in the Army is, you know, unlike a lot of jobs, you can just build an hour into your day for physical fitness and nobody cares. Whereas if you're like in a lot of units, it's like everybody shows up in the morning for it. But like it was a small camp.

So it was like you were kind of on your own to do it. So it was a small camp. So I would go and I would like do treadmill work and a little bit of weightlifting most days. But really, I guess I wouldn't say I got more fit because I had basically come almost directly from intelligence school where I'd been really fit. But what I did do is I inadvertently lost like 15 pounds. Just because you don't sleep, you know, you don't sleep. you're under more stress than you realize. And so you just lose a lot of weight.

And so I was pretty underweight when I got home. Well, you've talked openly about PTSD and maybe we'll get to that. I just, I wonder like how much, how often you think back to different activities that you did when you're in Afghanistan or deployed. Every, every day. Almost every day. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, and before I got therapy for PTSD, it was like most parts of the day. parts of the day, you know, and not like in a nostalgic good way, usually, unfortunately.

Now I'm in a much better place with it, right? But I mean, you know, it's a very formative experience in my life. So I think about it often. And if not, Afghanistan, at least the army, because it's such a formative experience. But the difference now, post-therapy is, it's the difference between thinking about it, recalling it, and, you know, re-experiencing it, which is more what was happening when I had undiagnosed untreated PTSD. Now that I've treated PTSD and I maintain some things for that treatment, like, you know, I have nightmares occasionally and that kind of thing. But it's the best way to describe it is is that I consider myself to be in a post-traumatic growth phase of life.

And that to me means that it no longer disrupts my life on a daily basis. times when things happen, things are triggering, that kind of stuff. But the difference is now I really know what to do with that. And for over 10 years, I didn't even know that's what was happening. I just thought I was messed up. I just thought I was crazy. So for about 10 years, you had undiagnosed PTSD. And to the extent you're comfortable talking about it, like what? Totally comfortable so what would be the extent to which you would, you know, feel these? Like the symptoms. Yeah. Yeah, so it takes me a second, but I'll let me go through sort of the, it's important to talk about it, and I appreciate the question, because I find that the more I talk about this, the more people who might be experiencing it, whether it's from the military or something else, can hear it and go, oh, that actually sounds familiar. Yeah, and like, and so like when I wrote the book, it was about, I kind of wrote it for me many years earlier, right?

So when I first came home, it started with small stuff. It was like I had like a twitch in my eyelid that like didn't go away for six months, right? And then I started to get nightmares. And at first, actually even before the nightmares, it was little stuff like I would get in a vehicle and my heart would race. But that one I understood right away because I was like, okay, it just came from a place where every time I got in a vehicle to go outside the wire. The adrenaline kicks in. Yeah, because you're like, you're preparing your mind and your mind. your body to take a life if necessary, right?

Which thankfully I never had to do, but like just, it's not a natural act to prepare yourself to take human life. So that much I understood. And then over time, that gradually went away. Now I learned years later in therapy that that's called prolonged exposure therapy. You just go make yourself do something

that you didn't want to do. And eventually you become accustomed to doing it, which I ended up doing with lots of other things. But at that time, I didn't know that. I just knew, oh, I'm getting better, right? So that made me think, I must be fine. I'm getting better. Then the nightmares started.

And the nightmares were basically everything that I feared happening in Afghanistan and was protecting against what happened in the nightmares. So the Taliban would rush in and throw a bag over my head and take me away, that kind of thing. It was a lot of kidnapping-centric nightmares. And then I always had a reason to try to tell myself, oh, I must be getting better, right?

Which was based in nothing other than I had just decided that was important. So then over time, the nightmares evolved. And now eventually they were rarely set in Afghanistan. They were often even not a military setting at all. They would be like my house in the middle of the night. And sometimes it wouldn't be the Taliban, it'd just be some stranger. And they'd be coming after my family.

Now I told myself, look, it's clearly not PTSD, does nothing to do with my service. I learned later in therapy. That's actually really bad when that happens because when your modern environs become the subject your nightmares, then what happens is it contributes to this other symptom I had called hypervigilance, which was like the way I was describing earlier, always knowing where the doors are, that never stopped when I came home. My brain didn't accept the idea that now I was home and I was safe. And so I was constantly, I wouldn't ever let my back face the door, stuff like that.

And my subconscious was reminding me every night that, oh, you're in this incredible danger and so is your family. And then that graduated to something called night terrors with sleep paralysis. which I really don't recommend and that was terrible and then eventually after years and years of this what happened was is I became emotionally numb because and I can explain all this in this really clinical way now because I had the therapy at the time I didn't talk about any of this I just secretly thought I was losing my mind emotional numbness came from I had all these negative emotions and intrusive thoughts and so it was like my brain

would deploy countermeasures against them, right, to just suppress the emotions. But the countermeasures, they're not like smart bombs, right? They're like area bombs. So they just suppress all the emotions. So eventually, like you have experiences that you know, like at one point my son was potty training and he peed in the toilet and it was a big deal and he came out and he raised his hands in the air to celebrate and then he pooped on the floor. Obviously, this was hilarious and I could kind of feel that this was really funny, but it was like the joy and the emotions of it were like just behind a thin wall. Yeah, you're numb to a lot of that.

That was the numbness. And so it kind of robbed me of the good emotions too. And then after about a decade of not being able to get a full night's sleep ever, hardly ever, and then the numbness and all that, eventually you get depressed. And then if you're depressed long enough, you get suicidal ideation. And I explain all of it that way because I thought, before I ever learned anything about, PTSD that it was like why would I want to be diagnosed with PTSD it's like a it seemed like a terminal diagnosis to me you get PTSD and either your career ends

at the least or your life ends at the most but what I learned through therapy and getting sort of a master's degree in my own brain is that no I became depressed because I had untreated PTSD for so long and I became suicidal because I was depressed for so long and and so that meant that those two things were really the first things to lift after a couple months of therapy because once I started to address the underlying trauma, those symptoms that grew out of the original symptoms subsided first. Did you find that for this period where you were barely getting sleep and nightmares, like did you find any degradation in your performance or had your body gotten

so good at masking all of this that you had almost an adrenaline that could just keep you running? In retrospect, it definitely degraded my performance. Degraded? Degraded my performance. It did both. It was so bad it degraded it. In retrospect, it definitely degraded my performance, but I didn't know that, right? I knew I felt terrible and I was in pain, like literal physical pain all the time because I wasn't sleeping and my mental health was affecting. Like I have a lower back issues anyway, but it made it way worse. But I thought, and I think a lot of people do this, I told myself, you know, I just don't need as much sleep as other people. Right. Right. And I had a context.

I've heard that a lot, by the way. Right. Like other CEOs, I mean, like anybody in high-performing anything. Actually, that's not true. Anybody. Like, people working 9 to 5 who also have kids, like, they're all telling themselves, I just don't need as much sleep. And I had a reason to tell myself that story, which was, you know, I'm a soldier, right?

Like, I never stopped seeing myself as a soldier. So, like, I don't need as much sleep. Now that I'm in the post-traumatic growth phase of my life, and thanks to what I track my sleep and that kind of, I know exactly how much sleep I need, and it's way more than I was getting. So I was, actually somebody used the term with me once that I really liked, which is I was overfunctioning. That was my coping mechanism, was I threw myself into my career because that's what was in front of me and available, and that's what provided adrenaline, which is why I don't ever judge or separate myself from anyone

who chose any other vice, right, like substance or alcohol or anything like that, because like had I not had this ambitious political career in front of me that I could use to push myself forward and to create a coping mechanism and self-medicate, clearly I would have turned something else. It's so interesting you talking about this whole progression. And I wonder just from the process of taking on therapy, what led you to taking that step and then what were some of the moments in that process where you started to see this wall as you described at the thin wall that was blocking your emotions start to kind of tear down yeah

well so there were two events that led me to finally saying like okay it's it's time to get a therapy it was sort of a two-step process step one was I was really at the zenith of my political career I was getting ready to run for president I was basically running for president, doing everything except saying the words, yeah, because of the legal implications, right? But I'd been to Iowa and New Hampshire a dozen times. I've been to 47 states to give speeches inside of a year. Wow. You know, had barely been home at all. And, and then I gave the keynote address at like the largest Democratic fundraiser, annual fundraiser in New Hampshire. And it was like, I think the year before me, the keynote speaker was like Elizabeth Warren. And the year

after me it was Biden and something like that sure so it was like this was the moment right like my parents watched it on national television right and the speech went great and at that point I was really coping by chasing by going endorphine high to endorphine high so it was like I would go from big performance to big performance to media interview to whatever and that would bridge me to the next one that the endorphance from it and this was the biggest one and it's just worth pausing to appreciate like you were at this point maybe eight years or something into undiagnosed PTSD yeah like eight or nine yeah yeah and here you are on a national stage giving a speech in front of you know millions of people theoretically

watching this projecting the image of somebody who's got it all together and telling myself I've got it all figured out telling myself yeah you know I have these sleep problems but like whatever you know it's no big deal and minimizing it all for myself and and the speech went really really well and and then the next morning, the TSA guy in the Manchester airport looks at my ID and says, oh, it's the next president. Like, I should be, I'm just, should be right up here, right? And I'm feeling great. And usually that sort of a high would last me a few days. And by the time my butt hit the seat in the plane, I just felt empty. And I remember being like, well, that seems this is new. This is

serious. And so within a very short period of time, I decided I wasn't going to run for president. I was going to run for mayor of my hometown, Kansas City, which was a race I was extremely likely to win, but it was also, mostly for me, it was me trying to find something to fill the hole. I didn't know what to do, so I was like, I know what I need to do. I need to go home. That's what a lot of us do when we don't know what to do. I need to stop flying around the country. I need to go home, and I need to be able to see progress in my own community, because if I can see the change I'm making, that'll make a difference. So that was step one. Step two was that campaign about three months in was going great you know it was the first campaign I'd ever

been in where it was like I was supposed to win which sounds like bragging but like if you go from running for president to running to mayor your hometown like you if you if you're not the front runner like what were you doing in the first place and and I should have I knew I should have been feeling great because it should have been a lot of fun this is 2018 2018 2018 and and so but I started getting aggressively worse like I started it was alarming because suddenly I was getting worse a lot faster. And the suicidal ideation became a lot more frequent. And I just ran out of ideas and I called the Veterans Crisis Line, which is now just the same number for everybody. Now it's I think 988 for everybody, but at the time it was a special line. And I remember I called and I was

really timid and I felt like an imposter. Like I had always told myself that I didn't earn PTSD so I can't have PTSD and that just comes out of a I think we all do that to some degree but like in the military they there's a necessary form of brainwashing where they teach you hey what you're doing is no big deal and I say necessary because like if they didn't teach us that like I couldn't go into meetings with guys you might want to cut my head off over and over again unless I thought like this is no big deal but when you get out nobody disabuses you of that nobody's like actually it was kind of a big deal so I still believe that right and so I called the Veterans Crisis line thinking, okay, I want some kind of help, but like they're

probably going to tell me, hey, keep this channel clear. Like, this is for people who have real problems. And one of the first questions the woman asked me was, have you had suicidal thoughts? And the only person up until that point I'd ever said that out loud to is my wife. And as soon as I said it out loud, I got very emotional. But the thing that really mattered for me was the sound of her voice when she was talking to me was it became clear to me right away that I sounded exactly like everybody else she was talking to. Right. And that was the big realization for me

that, like, I'm not different, I'm not special, I'm just like any other vet. And I remember saying to my wife, I got hurt over there all those years ago and I had no idea. And that's when I made the decision to save my own life and to stop everything and to go get help.

This is maybe a naive question, but I think it might be useful for the broader audience. What does it mean to have suicidal thoughts? Sure. I think it's a really important question. Well, for me, so I can only speak of my own experience, right? And mine, I addressed it, I think, early in the process relative to suicidal thoughts, as explained to me by my therapist, which is to say that he said to me at one point when I was trying to explain what it felt like, he asked me, said, did it just feel like you'd be better off dead?

And I was like, yes, that's what it felt like. And there were a couple of reasons. One, I was just tired of feeling the way I felt. It wasn't just I was unhappy, like it was painful all the time. But then the other part of it for me was I felt like a terrible burdened all the people around me because I felt like so many people had aligned their life around mine and I just felt like I was disappointing them all the time. And I got to a point where I genuinely believed or was really really bad.

beginning to believe that my wife and my son, this before my daughter was born, that my wife and my son would be better off without me. And that's a really dangerous place. Now, I went and got help before I got to the point where I had a plan or where I started to give things away or anything like that. But remember my therapist telling me,

like, it's good that you came in when you did because that's the beginning of it. It's when you just feel like you'd be better off death. For people that's familiar with therapy, what does that process look like in the first, A few weeks or months, how often are you going? So not to overly plug the book, but one of the things I'm really proud of in Invisible Storm is that basically act three of the book, and I will answer the question in a second, but act

three of the book, I really take the reader inside the therapy sessions because I went and I got, from the VA, I got my therapist notes. And so I build the third part of the book around the therapy sessions because I thought it was really important to make therapy more accessible for people because I didn't know anything about it before I did it and I think that made it intimidating. What it was like was, you know, I went into it, I think with the preconceived notion that it would be like what I also imagine like chemo to be like, like it's almost as if you were going to be hooked up to something and just gradually sit there and wait for this very painful thing to hopefully cure you, you know.

So I thought of it as very passive. And that's probably because of the movies where somebody goes in and they sit on a couch and they just talk. But it was actually much more like physical therapy or like grad school because I went in and with my therapist, the VA, we did two kinds of therapy. We did prolonged exposure, which I referenced earlier, which for me was a combination of retelling to him some of my more traumatic or scary experiences overseas. and then he would have me record myself on my phone. And then I went to weekly therapy. So then between the sessions, each day, they were like 45-minute recordings,

I would have to put in headphones, and I wasn't allowed to multitask. I had to close my eyes and listen to myself where you tell the story. And what it did is it forced me to re-experience it and prolonging the exposure to the point where I remember we did the first story we did. After a few weeks, I went into my therapist's name is Nick,

And I said, Nick, I'm bored of this one. Can we do another one? And he was like, great. That's the goal. Like when you, when you experience boredom listening to it, we can move on to the next door. The other part of prolonged exposure was homework and tasks during the week, like going to a restaurant and trying to spend 45 minutes with my back to the door without turning around and stuff like that. And then the other part was cognitive processing therapy, which was much more like going to school. It was like I would talk about how it was feeling. my thoughts, my symptoms, and then he would literally go to the whiteboard, and he would like draw out how PTSD works and basically explain to me how my brain works, and then he would like just draw lines to the symptoms. And it was very analytical, and the two of them together worked very well for me. There's a lot of different kinds of trauma therapy, but those two worked well for me. It's really interesting this idea of prolonged exposure, and I'm less familiar with it, but, you know, thinking about how every time you got in the car you would have this flashback to to being in a

combat situation or preparing for a combat situation and then this idea of re-listening to a recording of an experience and the more you did that and the more actually likely you were to get bored of that the more that would create a release the other thing that's interesting and listening to you talk about it is going through the process takes work yeah lots and for some people that might be something to overcome but there's also a huge category of people that find themselves the situation you were in because they are hard driving people right right and so in a way to be able to work through it as a positive i imagine my first session with my therapist nick he said to me he was like you know there's three ways that this therapy work works he's like there's in residence

where you just like move in here he's like and then uh there's like daily outpatient and there's weekly outpatient and i was like i didn't want to move in there so i was like i'll do daily and he's like why and I was like well because that's what I'm good at like I let's attack it yeah and he goes yeah I'm gonna put you on weekly and I was like why and he goes because I think what you need is to be forced to slow down and to go home and do the homework and and not to try and like do this fast and so it's really funny that you say that that's good advice did you ever get into meditating yeah I did I'm not as good about it as I used to be my wife is really really good about it but the the the

long exposure therapy was sort of like a gateway to meditation for me because it forced me to close your eyes listen yeah and when every time i don't know about you but every time i get in a groove with it i'm very happy i have and then i can quickly get out of that groove yeah i mean i i was under a lot of stress building this company especially very early on when i was around so i started whoop when i was 22 years old and then when i was around 24 i had this team of maybe 40 people or so and I'd raised tens of millions of dollars and the whole thing felt totally overwhelming. Yeah. And launching the business. Yeah. And so I had a panic attack around then and I just realized I needed a reset, like something to help me recalibrate. I was drinking

too much alcohol, I was drinking too much coffee. I wasn't sleeping enough. And so I did a four-day meditation program called Transcendental Meditation. Okay. And, you know, from then on, it's been like 10 years now I've done it every day so like how long do you do it I do it for about 20 minutes a morning I used to do it 20 in the morning 20 in the afternoon okay I probably did that for the first five years and then it got to a place where I felt like I got most of the bang from the morning and are you at the point where like you're not using an app for it or anything you're just you can just sit and do it yeah I never used an app for it it was it was always single player and I've found that I've found it's evolved a lot over the years, you know, in the, you know, first months or years

of doing it, it was more about finding a mechanism to reset or to prepare for the day, whereas now, for me, it actually is more about evolving into who I am throughout the whole day. And I have moments in the day which feel similar to the meditation. And so the, yeah, it's almost like the walls of meditating and blurred. That's great. Yeah, which is, I think, I think it's just something that happens if you do it for a long time.

But I do feel like there's levels to it. Yeah, and I do think it's a bit of a superpower. Yeah, no, for sure it is. It for sure is, like, all right, you've inspired me. I'm gonna try and get better about it. Yeah, get back into it. Let's talk a little bit about whoop because I'm always intrigued when super fit,

hard driving people, working through PTSD. Like you've got a lot of interesting characteristics for whoop data. Yeah. How did you first get onto it? So when I started therapy and started to kind of hit a good glide path with therapy, that's when I started to get really curious about like, okay, I'm starting to address my mental health.

I'd like to address my physical health now, which I had completely ignored ever since I've gotten out of the Army because it was just sort of like, and I'm sure you've seen this temptation was like, well, nothing is as important as this thing I'm doing professionally. So I'm just going to drive hard at that. And then it was like, okay, I'm feeling better. I want to go try to feel better physically. And so one of the first things I did, I had a really good friend who I'm sure listens to this. So I'm going to name check, Jesse Jacob, because she'll be thrilled.

What up, Jesse? Yeah, there you go. Now you're really going to make her day. She was using what. And so she was like, she said to my wife and she was like, you got to try this. And it was right when I was like on the kick of like, I want to start. working out again getting healthy and so I did and for me as a person who is like very naturally competitive and I mean just the gamification of each day of like can I beat

yesterday can I oh it gives me like a strain score can I hit it was like I mean what you created was like made for a dude like me and and it just it just made it so much easier like and and then at the end of the month I could go back and like how did I do you know because the monthly assessments or the weekly assessments and then I ended up for a long time pairing that with meal tracking and I got to the point where it was like too much like I would I had a spreadsheet where I would enter like my caloric intake and burn but what's funny is I literally never once went back and like used any of the data in that spreadsheet I created but I loved entering it and and at the in the middle of the week

when I was tempted to eat something I shouldn't or not do a workout I would think of the moment where I was going to enter the final numbers into that spreadsheet and it would drive me and it worked for three years and then I just got tired of entering my food all the time but and it sort of I got to the point where it was like you know those uh like when you watch the world series of poker and it will show you the percentage chance of the winning hand and then it's so impressive because you know that each of the players have all those percentages memorized that's like me with calories and macros right I'm like I don't you built the muscle Yeah, like it's overkill to write it down.

But that was the big thing is it really, it allowed me to see progress somewhere other than the mirror. And that was, you know, then it was before I started playing baseball competitively again. So I had for a while, I think, like an unhealthy thing where the only place I could see progress was in the mirror. And so whoop kind of gave me an alternative to that so that I wasn't like obsessing over like how many abs could I see or whatever. And I think also being able, again, for a hard-driving person like yourself, probably to be able to see how much you slept and compete on that dimension. That was huge. Right? Because it's easy to compete on the dimension of bigger, faster, stronger, work out more.

But having recovery as well as a story. That was huge, particularly from a PTSD perspective, because even when I got through therapy and the nightmares became much less frequent, I still had sort of this built-in, like, muscle memory of fearing sleep because a big part of the reason that I in addition to being woken up my nightmares all night for the 11 years before I got therapy I just wouldn't go to sleep because it was like sleep was just a hellscape right so like I would do anything to keep myself awake until I just you know would basically pass out and that is a thing that I still deal with is that even though sleep is much more pleasant for me now there is a muscle memory for me that like fights sleep and having like the sleep coach that's like no seriously dude like

tonight you miss a lot of sleep right like 937 you got to go to sleep tonight combined with like waking up in the morning and seeing the bad sleep score what was however discouraging about it was my wife is like the most champion sleeper right ever and I would wake up next to her and she was 100% every morning right and she is also one of those people she falls asleep in a position and then she wakes up eight and a half hours later in the same position. Yeah. She says, you know, I'm like sleeping next to a rotissory chicken. So like, so that was sometimes discouraging, but it also gave me something to strive for. Have you seen that, I mean, with all the therapy you've done, all the work you've done on PTSD and it sounds like

you've been on loop for a few years now, have you seen just sort of a general progress up into the right or do you notice setbacks in your data? No, I've seen a general progress. Now, the thing is, is like, I work out much differently than I used to. So, you know, when I first started, I was, I was basically working out like an endurance athlete. But all I did is I did the Murph Challenge once a year. But I treated that as if I was like doing an Iron Man or something. I wasn't. And so that created one kind of data.

And then three years ago, I joined this like competitive men's baseball team, like not softball, but like baseball team. And for the first year, I kept working out that way and I kept getting hurt because I was so, lean and then i realized like oh baseball players aren't that's not how baseball players are built so i've switched over to much more of like a weight training flexibility a lot i still do cardio but it's a lot less cardio because i'm 42 years old and i've realized like no i've got to focus on the movements that keep me from getting hurt you know so i can keep playing and so that i would say like the sleep data has improved a lot uh and that kind of thing but then the other data is just much different. I think the biggest thing probably is that now I can wake up and I can

pretty much guess what my recovery is before I see it. And I think that's just internalizing the data. Yeah, that's probably, you've probably gotten to a place like that probably 75% of the time. And then the 25% is where something's going on that you can't even feel like you're getting sick. That was the whole COVID moment for a lot of people too, where every, everyone realized they had COVID-on-WOOB. Yeah, no, I remember that. And a few weeks ago, I actually told me I was getting sick the day before my body told me I was getting sick.

Yeah, I, and it was like, you know, whatever the metrics, the five out of five, like, I was like three out of five, and the respiratory, and I was like, what is it? The health monitor, yeah. Yeah, and I ignored it. And I went and I played it, I played a double header, baseball double header that night. And then I was, and then I was sick, like really sick for two weeks, probably would have been like four days if I'd have just pay attention to what it was telling. Are there specific things you track in the Whoop Journal, like around supplements or behaviors or therapy? Like, I'm curious what you might be trying to dial

in. I haven't been using it as much lately, but I was using it for a long period of time to track, I'm sure I remember what I was using the most, whether or not I would wear the blue light glasses. And a lot of the reason I haven't been using it as much is because I got the answers for a lot of stuff. I used to use it for how alcohol affected it, but honestly, since COVID, I don't know. People went in one direction or the other during COVID. I was always, I would drink socially,

and I just wasn't as social during COVID. So, like, I have like two beers a year at this point. So that also because. Alcohol's out. Well, and also because whoop was like, this doesn't work for you. I'm just not good at it. You know, like, it wasn't working for me.

And then also, it got me to stop eating so late. That's a big one. Yeah, because it was definitely affecting my sleep. And there's others too, but I don't remember what all of them are. But there was a point where, honestly, I got so into the journal that it was like, it was like a good five minutes in the morning of just answering questions. And I was like, probably, and I knew all the answers anyway, you know, and I was like, I could probably dial back from this. But again, I just love data, and I love the gamification of it. So I had to kind of quit the journal Cold Turkey for a while.

But now you've got all this new stuff in there, so I'll probably go back to it. Well, very appreciative to have you on Wolf. And so it's always good to hear how people use it. Let's talk a little bit about your political career. Sure. So what was the moment where you said, okay, I want to run. You know, look, I grew up. My family had not been in politics, but it was a public service-oriented family.

So, like, my folks were juvenile probation officers. my dad had been a cop and and so nobody ever said like you got to be in public service but they kind of modeled it and and then I did debate you know baseball and debate in high school that was my life and I found that I thought I was this great baseball player and I was pretty good but I realized like I was better at debate than I wasn't baseball right also I'm 511 and I was 511 in like ninth grade and I really thought I was going to keep getting bigger but I did right and so debate became the big thing. And I thought it was just debating that I liked, but I realized at some point toward the end of high school, no, I like the policy stuff. That's what I'm really into.

So then I go to, you know, D.C. for school. I'd study political science. And I became like most of those kids who were like, I'm going to run for office, but I didn't really know what the heck that meant. And then I think I'd already decided I was going to run for the state legislature. That was even before I deployed. But it was still, I think, at that point, point kind of like an extension of baseball for me. It was it was another competitive thing. It was a game. I knew what I believed in, but it was really a competitive outlet. And then when I was deployed, you know, that was the first time in my life that I'd ever been on the receiving end of politically driven decisions that negatively affected my life. Like I grew up

with enough privilege that there were no politicians that could make decisions that was going to take food off our table or anything like that. And then I'm overseas and like, I'm enviated. vehicles without armor. I remember there was like a mission where we were supposed to have helicopters to go a very dangerous route and we ended up going over the road and I don't know whether this was true or right but the way it was explained to me was well a lot of those resources were being moved to Iraq and that to me felt like you know Iraq felt like a politically driven decision versus Afghanistan and all of that shaped up to really having the experience for the first time that a lot of

people don't need to go to war to experience because they grow up differently than me in America, which is being on the receiving end of politically driven decisions that affected me negatively. And then I just started to see a through line from that to people getting cut off Medicaid for political reasons or whatever. And I'm not saying that that caused me to run, but I think it imbued me with the righteous anger at which I ran. And it helped me really understand why I was doing it.

Yeah, I like this idea that you saw the, competitive nature of it. You were good at debate. And so you planted this scene of this is, this could be an intellectual baseball. Yeah. And then I imagine as you felt the experiences that you had and you saw how political decisions really influence your life directly, you realize how many people in America that happens for. And it became a real cause. I guess a shorter way of saying it would be, I grew up a little, right? Yeah. You know, I went from like, maturation. Yeah, a political science kid. and then eventually law student to like someone who had experienced something

and being like, oh, it's not a game. Yeah. And that's, I think of that is when I really chose it as a line of work. And I think it was President Obama, who at one point said you were the future of the Democratic Party, which is pretty high praise. It was very nice of them. Yeah. So where is politics for you today?

You know, I think of it as, I still feel like I'm in politics. It's just not what I do for a living. Sure. You know, I still have the podcast and I do things in politics. I obviously have a lot of friends who are still running, and I get involved in campaigns. I don't get heavily involved. It's not my profession.

But I still feel like I'm in public service because, and I'm sure we'll talk around a second, what I do on the nonprofit side. But usually when people ask, obviously what they mean is, are you going to run for something? And the thing is, is that. One, I'm really enjoying my life right now. And I used to think about the future obsessively because the present was like unbearable for me, right? So it was like much easier to think, well, I'll do this and I'll do this.

And I would plan it to great detail. And now I'm just really enjoying my life. And so I have no need to plan it, which sounds like a politician being like, I have no current plans, but I genuinely have no current plans to do that. And the other piece of it is I know for certain that I have made a great impact in the last few years since I stopped holding or running for office a greater impact on the world than I did the entire time I was in office between you know my day job I'm president national expansion for Veterans Community Project I literally

my job is to build campuses around the country that are meant to you know prevent veteran suicide and in veteran homelessness which is the best a million job I've ever had just on that point what what are a few what are a few what are a few key learnings from that? Like, what are the ways to really help our veterans? So at the policy level, it starts with not starting with the premise that Congress always starts with, which is, and it's not an advocacy organization, but just for whatever reason, I give you a policy answer first. The premise that it always starts with is, how do we make sure this or that veterans benefit doesn't go to someone who doesn't deserve it? And the problem

with that premise is, I don't believe there are veterans who don't deserve those benefits. And the federal government actually has a pretty limiting definition of what a veteran is. At our organization, we don't. Anybody who raised their right hand to serve, they get 100% of our services. That's a big lesson for me, but I think one of the others is just that, you know, I think a lot of times when people talk about veterans, and particularly veterans from a charity perspective, we talk about them as if they're solely victims.

And the truth is that veterans, including homeless, veterans have a ton of service left to give and they have a desire to give it in most cases. And particularly this generation of veterans is so uniquely skilled and has such a unique experience set because, you know, this conflict over the last 20 years is so different than any of the ones before it. Like the decisions that shaped history over the last several years were largely not decisions made by generals who were looking at big sand tables moving to They were decisions made by like corporals who were on street corners trying to decide how to handle an inflamed situation, meaning responsibility has been pushed down to the lowest possible level because it's this asymmetric street by street, house by house conflict. And that means that, you know, if you give me like an Ivy League MBA applicant and like an E5 sergeant with four years and one deployment for a management,

position, I'm going to take the E5 sergeant because they've managed millions of dollars worth of equipment and, you know, people's lives. And I think that that is a big misunderstanding as to how much potential veterans have, particularly in an age where this is the longest consecutive period in American history without some form of mandatory service. So as a result, the scarcity of those veterans in that experience, in my mind, should drive up the value. Seems like really powerful work that you've gotten to over the last few years. That's the best. It's the best.

And then the other stuff, like, just on a lark, you know, my translator's family was stuck in Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out, and they had done things for American forces, and they were under threat. And I kind of, by accident, started a 501C3, was able to get them out. We did, like, this, we faked a wedding, and Mouserich, got them and a bunch of other people out. That became a 501C3 that has gotten 2,000 people out of the country. that's amazing and it was all going to my point of like thank you and going to my point of like

if i had been in office i wouldn't have done any of that i don't know that i would have been able to save anybody you know but instead i was able to just grind away for two years of this thing i cared about and now my translator's family they live six minutes from our house they're on our cell phone plan how cool is that how good did you feel when the translator got out so my translator had been out but it was, his family was still there, but like, yeah, when the plane went up, when we finally got that plane in the air and when it crossed out of Afghan airspace, yeah, like I just collapsed in tears. I also hadn't slept in weeks, but it wasn't just euphoric. It was like, it wasn't supposed to happen. And it's hard to explain, but that experience, it's the most important

thing I've ever done other than, you know, marrying my wife and raising our kids. And had I been I'm going back to your original question. Had I been trying to pursue office at that time, I think I would have been so preoccupied with defending the Biden administration on cable news that I never would have even thought that maybe I have the power to like or the capacity to marshal enough people and a coalition to rescue people. I'm really proud of that, but I'd never could have done it if I ran office. Well, that's well said. So Kansas City, are the chiefs going to win another Super Bowl here? The Chiefs are going to win every Super Bowl. We have gone from a town with a sports inferiority complex to the cool kids to to Patriot fan level obnoxious and

proud of it. We are proudly insufferable at this point. Invisible Storm coming out soon. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about it. So the full title is Invisible. storm, a soldier's memoir of politics and PTSD. The hardcover came out last year as a New York Times bestseller. It is basically, it is my memoir about what it's like to, you know, the age-old tale of running for president while secretly suffering from a psychological disorder, while holding nothing back from the reader, but then also the story of reaching post-traumatic growth and how I did that and what it means for me.

I'm really proud of the book. All of my proceeds from it go to Veterans Community Project. Amazing. Yeah, thanks. And so the paperback comes out in September. Amazing. And it sounds like you also touched upon some of the therapy that we spoke about earlier. Yeah, I go pretty far into it in the book.

I am very proud of it. So, yeah, thanks. And people can also find you on your podcast, Majority 54. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for mentioning. Majority 54 is our podcast where anybody who's coming from a progressive perspective or is just progressive curious. What's different about it is, is it is my co-host, Ravi Gupta and I, helping people not lose relationships in their life by helping them have conversations with like conservative friends and family members, maybe bring them over to their

side, but at least not lose the relationship. Well, you're doing a lot of amazing things in this country and thank you again for your service and for being on woof hey thanks will thanks for the conversation and for bringing my son and i out here we're having an amazing time awesome thank you to jason for joining the show to share his military and political experience as well as his battle with PTSD if you enjoy this episode of the woo podcast be sure to leave a rating or review check us out on social at woup at will ahmed if you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast email us, podcastofoop.com, or call us 508443-4952. If you're thinking about joining whoop, you can visit our website to sign up for a 30-day free trial membership. New members can

use the code will to get a $60 credit on loop accessories. And that's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Woop podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.