Combat PTSD and KAATSU with John Doolittle, Shots from the Winchester Podcast

Episode Description

Our host Jon talks to John Doolittle about life, PTSD, where John was when 911 happened and the often fatal struggle combat veterans are going through while dealing with combat PTSD.

KAATSU® automatically and safely optimizes blood circulation for health, fitness, rehabilitation, and recovery.

John Doolittle is a former Navy officer who benefited from KAATSU for rapid rehabilitation. Using the second-generation KAATSU device to rehab from both a bicep tendon surgery and a total knee replacement surgery. After experiencing unprecedented recovery after 3 surgeries, he decided to join KAATSU Global to bring the industry-leading technology to his fellow tactical athletes in the military and in all federal and government entities.

When he returned from the military, John took a senior role with KAATSU Global, the company that improved his life.

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Transcript

All right. Captain John Doolittle. Good to see you, my friend. Hey, it has been a long time, brother. It has been a long time. Your backdrop there kind of captures what was really sort of fascinating for me to bring you on the podcast is everything, I can see everything going on behind you there. Lots of awards and just memorabilia that kind of capture your 25 years and five months. Is that what I saw? Right? Yeah. Yeah. A little over 25 years, yeah.

Before I dig into that, I want to tell because I’ve told your stories more times than I can count about and you set the tone for me as a young enlisted guy. You set the tone for me and I’m not blown smoke here, for what a good leader looks like. And I did 11 years in before I got my commission. And when I became an officer in the teams, I was like, “There’s only a few handful of guys that I want to emulate myself after.” And John Doolittle was definitely one of them. So it was really cool for me to have an opportunity to get in here and kind of pick your brain about some leadership. One of the things is that it’s always stood out to me and I talked to another guy earlier, John Timar, who’s the CEO of Kill Cliff. John was saying like we place too much emphasis on academic and pedigree and stuff like that. And if I recall, so for those who don’t know, you spent your college years at the Air Force Academy and then got an interservice transfer.

But if I recall correctly, during your BUD speech, you said that you spent seven of eight semesters at the Air Force Academy on academic probation. Six, but yes. Oh, six, yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to exaggerate. Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sound like worse than you were. I struggled, man. I struggled so much at that place. Yeah, it was hard for me. And that’s such an interesting question because here you are, you want to have a fantastic career. And I think, you know, now you’re in a in a corporate role with, with KAATSU. And I think that’s an interesting point to bring up is we, we look at guys and go, “Oh, well, let me look at your, your resume.” And the resume doesn’t really tell you anything. If you looked at my resume, it would say, “I dropped out of college to go become an enlisted sailor.” You were on academic probation, but you went on to have a story career. How do hiring managers reconcile that? How do they look past like, “Hey, you got to look past what’s just in the resume.” We’re going to start really deep. A lot of them don’t. They just won’t even go there. A lot of them. But I think the good ones will dig a little deeper. If you get turned down by an organization that hasn’t done a face-to-face chat with you, you don’t want to work there anyway, man. You know. That’s a good point. Yeah.

But yeah, it’s not all about it’s not all about academics, that’s for sure. Yeah I mean, it is some about academics, but you know academics is a loose term. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll take a guy that is academically average or even below average if he does things. And let’s say he’s only okay, only okay grades and with all that kind of stuff. And let’s say he did things, failed, but learned from his mistakes along the way. I think a guy like that is more valuable than a straight A student, never gets anything wrong. Maybe hasn’t learned very many lessons the hard way because he didn’t make any mistakes early on. And then when the cards are really all down and he makes a mistake and he doesn’t kind of know how to deal with it. You know Different guys have different perspectives on it.

My perspective is, obviously, academics is pretty low on the priority of the values you want to put on guys you bring into the organization. That’s just my perspective. A lot of guys would argue with that, but you know whatever. Yeah. Give me a guy who struggled to get C’s at Harvard over a guy who got maybe straight A’s at some elite school. A guy who was just he knows what it means to grind and get after it, right? I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, some guys are just naturally gifted at academics. Let me for our listeners who i-we’re already well into it. But for our listeners who don’t know, let me let me just read a, just a, a snapshot. John is a retired SEAL captain. That’s a that’s a Colonel equivalent for you, Army, and Marine and Air Force Bubbas. Retired SEAL Captain of twenty-five plus years, including a last stint as a director of the SOCOM Preservation of the Force and Family Initiative. Co-founder of the National Frogman Swim Series.

You’re a public speaker. You’re an advisor to the National Foundation of Integrative Medicine on Veteran Health Issues. And and you are the chief revenue officer at KAATSU as well. Yes, sir. Have you ever thought about trying to be successful in life? Maybe taking on a challenge every now and again? Just surround yourself with good dudes like you, man. Just surround yourself with good guys and amazing stuff happens. You know Take me back a little bit through the journey. I want to because I mean, I’ve been following you for 25 years since you come in. But again, we we go our separate ways. And I just hear your name pop up every now and again. So you leave BUDS. You and I, we graduated pre-9/11. The first couple years we’re in. We’re we’re trying to kind of figure out what the, the purpose of the of the teams is. 9/11 hits, where are you? And then sort of what happened to your career from there?

And did it just did it change night and day from one week to the next? I’m sure every team guy that you ask that question to, you get a completely different answer. But it changed. In my opinion, it just changed everything, man. It was SEAL Team 2 platoon. We were split in half. So we had half a platoon. Call it a platoon plus in Kosovo. So we were at Camp Bond Steel. President Bush had just been out there. So we had done a kind of counter-sniper, counter saw, you know helped the Secret Service. Yeah. Great, great gig. You know A bunch of special agents came out, and we just hung out with those guys for two weeks before he got there.

And just such a gracious leader and great, great, great, great deal. And then so he left. So we went back to you know reconnaissance missions. It was a confirmed deny movement of people and/or weapons across mostly the Serbian border. This is in the fall of 2001? Yes. Yeah. So yeah, President Bush left, and then we went back into the Reki mode, and we were doing stuff. Macedonia border, Albania border, but most of our focus seemed to be the Serbian border at that time. And we were on a three-day op. Came back. We’re all tired. And I’m out cold, man. You know I’m just in my rack and I’m in the chew there. And I guess Tiny I’ll leave his name out, but you know exactly who I’m talking about. I guess Tiny came in, banged on my door, and no answer. No answer. Comes in, yelling at me. I’m out. I’m out. Picks up my bed, you know picks up the head of my bed like three feet off the ground. And he’s just like, “Rock!” Drops it. And he’s like, “Sir, get up. We’re going to war.” And he walks out.

And I was like, “What?” No shit. I get up. I walk into the bond steal. You know There was a CNN feed delayed on AFN, like aluminum foil antennas going out the door. I mean, it was a mess. But we did have a little TV, and I walk in and guys were just starting to filter in. And everybody’s standing around this little TV watching what was happening. It wasn’t even live. It was probably delayed like a half hour or something. And the tower was burning. Yeah And as we’re all kind of gathering around watching, going, “Whoa. Okay. So there was an accident. A plane went into and then there were about 15 of us all watching at the same time when the second plane hit. And it was like, “Okay. Game on.” And everything changed then.

But it’s actually a funny story. You know At Bond Steel, it’s an army base, right? Yeah And so the towers come down. And you know it’s coming up on lunch and the announcement goes out. You know Everybody on base anywhere will have a primary secondary, at least a secondary, but they wanted everybody to have primary secondary everywhere they go to include the chow hall. Yeah So the chow hall at Camp Bond Steel, the chairs on the Chow Hall are these rounded plastic thing. There’s no hooks. There’s nowhere to lean a weapon, like a rifle. So all these Joe’s are walking in with loaded weapons, right? I mean, chambered rounds, loaded. Some of these guys have never carried or barely ever carried a loaded weapon, right? So we’re all in there at lunch. The towers just came down. Everybody’s just chatting.

Nobody knows what it all means. Yeah All the entry control points, you’re like you know quadruple guarded. Everybody’s on edge. And I remember I’m standing in line getting like a piece of pizza or something. And I’m standing right behind Eric, and we’re just chatting away, chatting away. And all of a sudden, crack. Everybody hits the deck. It’s like, “What the fuck?” Everybody’s guns are up and everybody’s like guys are moving to the door and all that. And then you hear across the chow hall, “AD! AD!” Like, “What?” Guy who dropped his rifle, wasn’t on safe, and cracked a round off in the Chow Hall. Holy shit. Yeah. So then we’re like, “Oh, okay. That was exciting. All right. He watched too many what was it? Blackhawk Down. This is my safety.” Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Watch too many episodes. Well, at dinner that night, same thing.

Same thing. Another Joe’s rifle falls on the ground, cracks off around. Or he hit it when he was getting his fruit juice or you know whatever. All right. That’s it. To be clear, no more chambered rounds. These are Army Bubbas who just you know might be working Intel or something and have never been like carried a rifle like on a day-to-day basis. And now they’ve just been in the span of 30 minutes. They went from being an Army like just an Army intel guy or supply guy to now being strapped with a weapon everywhere they go. Is that right? Yeah. But to be fair, I don’t know if it was an Army guy. I mean, it’s an Army base. I mean, it could have been a Navy Intel guy for all I know. The point being that nobody was thinking like that. Nobody was walking around with loaded weapons and stuff. I mean, it was Kosovo. It was Bond steel. You could jump in the Jeep and drive up to Pristina and go hang out with the Norwegians and have good vodka or something. I mean, it was an operational deployment, but very little shooting going on. It was just wrecky stuff, watching people and stuff. So it was immediately a big wake-up call. Very little shooting going on outside of the chow hall. Oh, yeah. Good one, Jonathan. Yeah.

Yeah. Outside the chow hall, there was very little shooting going. Perfect. That’s perfect. But that’s where I was, man. Where were you? I had just gotten out off of active duty, and I had just started back to college. And I was going back to finish up school. It started in late August. And then I had just finished terminal leave and like just finished terminal leave like 30 days before. And my buddy up in New York calls me. He’s like, “Dude, I’m okay.” And I was like, “All right. Sounds good.” He’s like, “No. Do you not know what’s going on?” I was like, “No, man. I don’t have class for like another half hour. It’s kind of my own world.” And he’s like, “Holy shit, you got to turn on the TV.” And I turned it on. And then you know I’m going back. Whatever my old flip phone was, I started texting guys and the same thing. Team guys were just getting wrapped around the axe like, “Holy shit, we’re going to war.” It’s interesting how quickly we became very aware of the fact that we’re going to war.

And if we had more time, I’d go back and talk about Tiny stories because your description of Tiny coming in. And so for those of you who are listening in who don’t know who Tiny is, he earned the name Tiny for obvious irony reasons. And the guy was just a monster of a human being. Still is. Still is. Yeah, I haven’t seen him. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen him. But yeah, coming in and flipping over his lieutenant out of bed is probably with one arm while he had a beer in the others.

That’s probably a Tiny kind of story. But so that happens. You finish up the deployment. Take us through like not in 30 seconds, but you had a story career which finally led you to the preservation of force and family, which I really want to talk about a little bit as well and also talk about what you’re doing with KAATSU and the Tampa Bay swim. But there’s so much we could unpack in just what you did in the 20 years from there till when you ultimately retired. You come back from that deployment, and did you guys stay on that deployment? We did. We did. And you know looking back on it, it all made sense, but it all makes sense. But back at the time, you know we were excited is not the right word, but you know everybody was just fired up. Everybody wanted to go and be part of it.

And we were on a predetermined op schedule out of deployment with Exercise Bright Star. I like to call it DimStar out in Egypt. And I was like, “Hey, there’s no way they’re going to send us to DimStar. I mean, we’re going to war. Let’s go.” And you know I realize now how much goes into one of these multinational giant exercises. But you know back then, I was really frustrated.
I was like, “Come on. Send us. We’re here. We’re overseas. Yeah We’re in the Middle East. Basically, I mean, we’re in Egypt. But it didn’t work out that way. So we finished our deployment on schedule. Went back to yeah, went back to team two. And at this point, other guys are already boots on ground in Afghanistan. And you guys are like, “We’re doing fucking exercises while our brothers are getting after it.” Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That was a tough pill to swallow collectively. Yeah. Trying to keep morale up, I suspect, was a challenge, right? Yeah. Well, we had Tiny for that, so that was fine. Jack of all trades. I think you got unique insight. Was it two or three years you did at SOCOM? Mm-hmm. In the POTFAF role? Yeah. So correct me if I’m wrong, the preservation of the force and family exists because SOCOM at some point recognize, “Hey, our guys are suffering from a lot of wear and tear, not just physically, but emotionally, socially, mentally, right, psychologically, physiologically, they’re suffering.” And the families are suffering too. So SOCOM creates this initiative. Now you’re coming as a director and that was like what, like ’15, ’16, ’17? 2015, 2016?

Yeah. Yeah. ’15 through ’17. That’s about right because I retired ’17. And I was in there a little over, yeah, a little under three years. So you come in at a point where we’ve been at war for 15 years. In fact, we’ve morphed from al-Qaeda to now to an ISIS fight. So you’ve seen sort of two different adversaries, but the op tempo. You said you know we’re kind of a bad place. And I don’t think it’s I think the SEAL teams are suffering or at least we are aware of it because of our connection there. But I think the veteran community writ large is really suffering. The 22 a day, we’re at lots of issues. I think we’ve seen a little bit more of an uptick since we left Afghanistan. At least that’s been my anecdotal observation. Having been in the preservation of the Force and Family Initiative, why is that? Why are we seeing an uptick? Is it a loss of sense of purpose?

Is it just is it all coming to bear because we’re not at war anymore? Why do you think that is? Well, first of all, I think we’ve never, as a country, been in this scenario. We’ve never been in a combat, sustained combat operations. And I would argue we are still today in sustained combat operations, especially in SOF, in special operations force. But we’ve never done anything remotely near this, getting after it for over two decades. And when you look at this 22 a day and you talk to guys that are senior guys in the VA, they’ll tell you that if you look at the average number a lot of that number comes from Vietnam veterans, actually. And you look at the average number of deployments in Vietnam, and it was two. So you had the guys that did the draft, and that was one.

But then you had guys that did Mike Troy, one of my mentors growing up, Team Guy, he did three tours in Vietnam. And the average is somewhere in the twos, right? And then you look at what we have now. And I mean, my buddy Joe, when he died by suicide in 2012, he was on his 14th deployment, right? 14 deployments. And that was 11 years ago, and we’re still going. So there’s definitely an argument that we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg on all of this. And you ask why? I don’t know. But what I do know is we have collectively had some success with helping make it incrementally better. And that’s what the POTFAF program did.

We took an Admiral Olsen, Eric Olson, and Admiral McCraven, Bill McCraven, between the two of them succeeded in getting congressional support for money to hire people resources. So think of a giant, giant personal services contract, right? It was with Booz Allen initially. And hiring licensed clinical social workers, operational psychologists, counselors, strength and conditioning coaches, trainers, operational psych, sports psychs, nutritionists, sports nutrition, all this capability and then strategically dropping these resources into operational commands. Almost immediately what started happening because if you were going to go see if you had somebody working for you and you knew they needed help, yeah how did you get them help? You encouraged them to go to the clinic or to go to the base hospital or whatever medical treatment facility was on your base or near your base or if you didn’t have an MTF, then encouraging them to please go and go see a professional outside the base.

That shit doesn’t work. It’s just plain doesn’t work. It might work in certain elements of the military. In special operations… Didn’t work. Guys wouldn’t do it. I mean, you had a couple of guys do it. Guys, for the most part, they wouldn’t do it. And the idea was, “Well, let’s start embedding these resources immediately into the commands.” So think of a guy at a soft command. He’s walking down the hall, and he sees, I don’t know, senior enlisted advisor, the command master chief, let’s say, talking to a counselor in the hall, where they see one of the senior TU commanders going into an office where the counselor’s office and shutting the door, right? Or counselors and psychologists using the same chow hall or using the same gym and sharing space, right?

Almost immediately this trust gets built and the stigma, you know that word yeah yeah stigma of seeking care and all of that, it becomes a different conversation. And then it really helped, man, when we had somebody like General Votel come into the overall SOCOM Enterprise and say, “Hey, you know what? You break a leg, you go and see a doc.” yeah You are exposed to a lot of trauma. You go and see somebody. It’s apples and apples, man. Parts of you get broken. You got to go get fixed. And so a lot of the leadership embraced that, and we started seeing improved outcomes. I’m real careful to say improved outcome because it’s still everywhere, brother. And it’s bad, man. It is bad.

You mentioned Joe Price. So commanding officer of SEAL Team Four, Bobby Ramirez, recent commanding officer of SEAL Team One, Jack Keller, who was another officer, not to trivialize the deaths of anybody else enlisted or otherwise. But when you have senior officers who everybody else thinks has it together, and when those guys hit a wall where they take their own lives, it’s not that their deaths are any more tragic, but does that speak volumes about where we are in terms of the stress that the community or just the veteran community at writ large must be feeling?

If the guys that we expect to have it all together, or am I putting too much? No, I think you’re exactly right. Exactly, man. I mean, think okay, so Joe. Joe Price, inner service transfer, just like me, ’93 USAFA Air Force grad. I was a ’92 guy. We knew each other in school. I didn’t know that. I was just an old, old brother. So he’s an old friend of mine. And he was kind of known in the community as the firsthand to go up in the room when they were looking for somebody to volunteer to, “you know Hey, we need an augment for this JSOC thing. This guy can’t go.” I’ll go. He would do it all the time. He was an incredible leader, incredibly hard worker, maybe too hard sometimes.

And my takeaway from his situation is and this is getting to your point, I think, if it can happen to him, yeah arguably one of the most resilient guys I knew or so I thought. But if it could happen to him, it can happen to freaking anybody. And I think about this a lot because I go and I talk to these ROTC units. I go to the service academies. I talk to these cadets and midshipmen and stuff. And it’s just the realization that everybody’s got a breaking point. If you think you’re so tough and you’ll never break, that was Joe, man. I’m sure it was the same with Bobby. I’m sure it was the same with a lot of these guys.

But you take the cumulative subconcussive concussion TBI stuff. You take the blast exposure. You take the repetitive stress events and not giving the human body the time to recover from all those cumulative events. Because Jonathan, when you and I came in, it used to be 18 months workup, six-month deployment, right? In general, like a three to one. Yeah yeah The 9/11 happens in that 18 months of professional development, leave, personal time, unit training, collaboration training with the Marines or whoever you’re working, all that 18 months gets squeezed into like six months, really. Yeah In that six months, the guys were gone a lot because we didn’t have training venues near the teams and stuff. And so what was a 24-month cycle became a 12-month cycle. And of that 12 months, six months of it was, in a lot of cases, combat a lot. And in the other six months, they weren’t home a whole lot. And when they were home, they were just stressed out of their minds because they had so much shit going on. So I think everybody can handle that once, twice, twice. You know Joe did it 14 times. Guys have done it more.

But at some point, the wheels come off the bus, man. I don’t care who you are. And I mean, look at Bobby, man. I mean, man, that was just it’s crazy. It’s crazy, man. Yeah And then Mike, just recently, I don’t know when this will come out, but I mean, you know Mike Day, April 2007, I mean, what an amazing, amazing man that he survived through and just an American hero, dude.
And then the hero that it ended with him this week with him dying by suicide. Everybody can’t wrap their head around it. Yeah So everybody’s got an opinion. My opinion is blast exposure, TBI, disrupted sleep, getting stuck in hypervigilance, getting stuck. You know You got your parasympathetic and you’re sympathetic. A lot of guys and I was one of them. I had to go get treated for it.

I did this inpatient thing and dah dah dah but a lot of guys, it’s very normal. You get exposed. So for me, I came back from a Gazani deployment in Afghanistan. That was a one-year deployment. And I don’t think I had PTSD from the one-year deployment. I think I had PTSD from the Army training to go on that deployment. But anyway, yeah. So I’m gone from my family for 15 months. You know My middle son, he always reminds me, “You missed my birthday twice on one deployment.” I was like, “Okay.” But you come off these kind of I think hypervigilance is a good term. That kind of makes sense, right? You come back from that, and it’s just really hard to get out of that cycle. So you’ll hear a lot of guys, and I was one of them, 3 o’clock in the morning, and you’re up. Boom. Yeah And then the wheels are turned and you can’t go back down.

And you do all the sleep hygiene stuff. You do everything that you can to get into recovery sleep, stage three, stage four sleep. And a lot of times, it’s just physically impossible to do it without some help. And I needed help. And I didn’t see nearly the combat that 90% of the guys in the teams that were in the same time saw. Yeah And I had some problems with it. I had to get professional help to come out of that mode. I couldn’t sleep past three in the morning. And that’s physical torture over time, right? I can’t help but think that that is all over the place. I think a lot of guys are struggling with that. I know it. I know it. For sure. For sure. How’s your sleep, man?

It sucks. It sucks. Yeah. Hypervigilance and it’s funny. I went to see a therapist, and I’m very open about it with you know my PTSD diagnosis and stuff. But I went to see a sleep specialist and just a behavioral therapist about what and she’s asking me about my things. She’s like, “Well, she’s like, “you know Are you hyper-aware?” I was like, “No, I don’t think so.” And then she asked me these very pointed questions, “Do you do this? Do you do this?” And I was like, “Well, yeah, of course I do that.” yeah And she was like, “Well, when you think about going into a crowd, do you get concerns about?” I’m like, “Well, of course I do. Doesn’t everybody?” And she’s like, “No, not everybody does.” I’m like, “Wait, what?” Yeah, exactly. And so it was almost comical how I had this epiphany. I was like, “Wait a minute.

You mean the rest of the world doesn’t operate like this?” She’s like, “When you go to bed at night, you lock the doors and you wake up, do you go check the locks again?” I was like, “Well, yeah, for sure.” She’s like, “But you already checked them.” I was like, “Yeah, you can never be too safe, I guess.” She’s like, “How many times a week do you do?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I guess every night.” yeah And she’s like, “That’s not normal.” I’m like, “It’s not?!” It’s normal when you spend a career in that world, but it’s not normal. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You mentioned mental well-being, but it’s sort of embedded in a lot of the stuff you talked about was that physical well-being and, and keeping in physical shape and what kind of benefit has. And I know that’s what you’re doing with, with KAATSU. Can you talk a little bit about how you ended up there and sort of like, I, I know you’re a big believer. I follow your stuff on LinkedIn. And I know it’s a pretty innovative approach to, to physical fitness stuff. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. Well, I think I think the mental and physical is very, very closely tied together. I spent a lot of time at SOCOM with really smart guys in that world, you know, PHD researchers. And there’s plenty of research showing direct correlations, cause and effect with the behavioral health and the physical health and how they affect each other. But I had 13 orthopedic surgeries.

And the last two that I had at SOCOM, the PTs, used this thing called KAATSU on me. And that was my introduction to it. I had no idea what it was. They looked like tourniquets. And I was like, what? Why am I going to put a tourniquet on? What’s that going to do? Isn’t that what we use for surgery? No, no, no, man. This is different. And it is different. They’re elastic pneumatic bands. The guys wear them up high on their arms. They wear them up high on their legs. I just happen to have one of the devices. Total coincidence. Yeah. Total coincidence. But I mean, the controller is pretty small, right? I mean, and you wear this thing on your shorts or whatever, and it creates 30 seconds of pressure on the elastic airband. And during the pressure phase, you’re creating a hypoxic environment for the limb when it’s moving like that. But you’re also creating improved blood flow, systemic blood flow everywhere else. So think about this for a second. If you have these if you have these bands on and the heart is having to pump harder to get the blood to move past the band, it’s not just pumping there harder.

It’s pumping everywhere harder. So while you’re doing KAATSU, think of blood-brain barrier. Think of blast exposure, TBI, and all this stuff now. So while the perfusion goes up and the heart is pumping so much harder to get blood to the extremities, you’re getting improved blood flow, retina, forehead, blood-brain barrier. And you know we’ve shown this in EKGs and functional MRIs and all this. And so from a wounded warrior perspective, it has the ability to help. And you can get good metabolic outcome, like a good workout pump or feel, and the science will show a hormonal response. Like If you right now did you know just did heavy deadlifts right there at the bar, by the way. I love that. At your bar. If you had a bar right there and you did, I don’t know, just called 225 deadlifts and then you went to failure, right? I would imagine you know whatever.

Let’s say you get the 12 of them. You’re completely smoke-checked, right? With KAATSU, you would put the leg bands on and you would let it run through these cycles of pressure. So 30 seconds of pressure, five seconds of nothing. 30 seconds, a little higher pressure, five seconds of nothing. And instead of deadlifting 225, you deadlift just the bar, like 45 pounds. And instead of doing 12, you do 20 or 30, maybe as many as 40. But you’re going really, really light. Yeah But it feels very quickly after you get to about number 15, it feels like you’re doing that 225, if not more. And you’re getting that hormonal response as if you’re going heavy. So it’s crazy. You’re tricking the brain into thinking you’re working harder than you are. That’s why the PTs like it. Because a guy like me, a guy like you, you have a shoulder rotator cuff repair.

After two weeks, you feel pretty good. You’re ready to go. And they’re like, “No, no, no, man. You’re not ready to go. Don’t go too heavy on it.” Well, this is a way to not go heavy, but still get a good metabolic outcome. So the guys love it because they feel like they’re getting after it, but they’re actually saving their bodies from injury. Or if you’re in rehab mode, you can get a great workout with very low weight. And so my last two surgeries, they used it on me. I fell in love with it. I was getting ready to get out anyway. Went out to Tokyo where the founder lives. And he’s been developing this stuff for decades since the early ’70s. And I met him. I met our CEO. And long story longer, I’ve been working there ever since, man. I absolutely love it. It’s something that I use on myself every day, multiple times a day. And you don’t have to be working out with it.

Like When I get up and do more emails in the morning, I got it on, and I’m doing stuff. Really? Because even in a passive mode, you’re still creating what’s called nitric oxide. So every time you dilate tissue and relax it, every time that happens, your body is naturally releasing nitric oxide. It’s endothelial nitric oxide synthase or something like that. It’s crazy. But it improves vascular health or elasticity of your veins and arteries. So it’s good for you. Your blood pressure over time goes down. If you’re diabetic, it helps with that. There’s a lot of cool stuff. But I think for me, the best part is working with the wounded guys, especially the residual limb pain and discomfort and phantom limb pain and guys that have amputations. Yeah, it’s helping those guys a lot. That’s awesome. That’s incredible work, man. All right. So K-A-A-T-S-U.com, right? Yep. KAATSU.com. And what I’ll also say is if you’re listening to this and you’re a member of the special operations community, a veteran member of the or active, if you ever were or are currently a member of Special Operations Community and you’re struggling with neuropathic pain or orthopedic issues or arthritic issues.

And there’s even a sleep piece that the Olympic committee is using this stuff for. We don’t need to go too deep and all that. But if you have disrupted sleep, you or any of that other stuff and there’s a way we can get units for you. We work very closely with an awesome, awesome nonprofit. Of course, we work with the Seal Foundation, but that’s just inside the teams. Operation is my little plug for these guys. Operation Healing Forces, OHF. What they do is they send couples on retreats. Yeah. Have you heard about this? I’ve only heard about them. Oh, my wife and I did one, and it was probably the best just one-on-one time we had ever since our and we got married in 2000. And this was in the middle of COVID.

So you know best thing we’ve done since our honeymoon, so over 20 years. And they cover everything, man. They fly ya at some cool place, and you’re in a cohort. So there’s four SFT guys and spouses, okay? And everything’s covered. It’s not all about counseling and all that. It’s about doing fun shit together. Stuff that you haven’t had a chance to do in a really long time. And there’s something that happens naturally when you have four spouses and four operators together for a week, it becomes its own kind of really powerful therapy, in a way. There’s no counseling. There’s no professional running it as a professional psych or something. So anyway, that’s incredible. It’s called OHF.

If you’ve never been on one, look those guys up and just get yourself on the ticker, man. It’s incredible. But we partnered with them. And when they have guys that are dealing with pretty bad sleep issues, neuropathic pain or whatever, they’ll work with us and they’ll get this stuff for the guys. So it’s pretty cool. I do want to ask you about because I know you were one of the co-founders of it, and I’ve been following it for a number of years, the Tampa Bay Frog Frogman Swim, which has now morphed into the, what is it, National Frogman swim series.

You started at this was just an idea that you and a buddy had to just swim across the Tampa Bay, right? Yes. And try and raise money for the Navy SEAL Foundation, right? So to be clear, because Dan will yell at me, I didn’t come up with the idea. But I was at the first one, and it was all about Dan Canason. You know Dan? I know who he is. I don’t know him. Yeah. Dual amputee above the knee. Olympian, right? Yeah. Afghanistan, ID, low order, loses both legs. Just incredible individual. His attitude you know we talk about attitude all the time. You got a bad attitude. You got a good attitude. It’s all contagious. That dude, I wish we could bottle him up and ship him to every single high school in America and just let him talk. And just let him run with it. Because, I mean, I want to say it was like he’s at Walter Reed and he’s there for, I don’t know, 10 days, two weeks, or something like that.

Apparently, they put a pull-up bar above his bed because he wanted to get after it after losing his legs. And then they released him from Walter Reed. He comes down to Florida. And this is within two months of losing both legs, and he does the Disney Half Marathon. And it was just like, “What?” And then he goes to Pyeongchang to Winter Olympics and medals and everything he enters in with little to no background and no sports. I mean, just amazing. Amazing. But the first swim was about him. It was about raising some resources to help the Canason family. And our goal was to just make a couple thousand dollars. There’s about 25 of us. We agreed to do something cool. I honestly don’t know who came up with the idea, okay? But it ended up being over beers. Let’s swim across Tampa Bay.

Like most good ideas to do like whatever, an eight mile swim. They just come across over beers. Yeah. And at the end of the swim, we’re at the American Legion on the Tampa side. And so start in St. Pete end on the Tampa Peninsula. Same Peninsula SOCOMs on. And we’re adding up all the checks and little wads of cash coming out of people’s pockets, little IOUs written on bar napkins and stuff. And we added it all up, and the number was like $30,000.

And we were shooting for like three to five. And we’re like, “Wait a minute. What the hell is going on here?” And then I left. I went on deployment, and then I was stationed over in Germany. And then when I came home, the swim had turned into a full-blown fundraiser for the Navy SEAL Foundation. And they asked me if I wanted to be part of it, like on the board and stuff. I was like, “Hell yeah.” But here’s the thing. I really feel strongly that this swim, just like it was for a specific cause on that first one, that we should really galvanize it for something, not just in general to one of the foundations, but how about the Gold Star surviving spouses and kids? I didn’t come up with that idea, but that was what was discussed when I was over.. when I was gone.

And so now the swam is it raises money for the Navy Seal Foundation. It’s all basically earmarked for the Gold Star famililies. So what happens is the Gold Star families, this last January, we had 25 families. About 75 people from 25 Gold Star families were there and each year it grows. And each year, the resources that we bring in for the foundation grows. And it’s incredible, man. And now we’ve expanded it out. There’s one in Boston now. There’ll be another one in New York. Annapolis is getting close, I think. And so it’s turned into this swim series. And the guy at the middle of it all, and he’s going to hate me for saying it. But I got it, man. Norm Ought’s son, Kurt Ought, is really the guy that has spearheaded this and made it something very special.

And when you get out of when you get out of the water and there’s a Gold Star family member, for me, this year, it was Joe Price’s sister standing there waiting for me. You know It’s a coin, puts it around my neck, big hug. But everybody that does the swim is swimming it for a fallen NSW since 9/11. To include the suicides. Because I firmly believe that the suicides are a natural or unnatural outcome of prolonged combat that the guys are being exposed to. So the swim is it’s just freaking incredible, man. It is one of the coolest things to be part of. If you ever want to swing down for it, yeah, it’ll be cool. I’ll get you in. You can swim with me or something. John, I have swam with you. I spent six months swimming with you. And we started in the water together and you usually finished, oh, I don’t know, 45 minutes ahead of me. And oh, that’s not true. It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that far off.

Can you explain it has been a long time. Can you explain what is happening in this photograph right here? I believe we’re hydrating right before hell week, maybe. You still have a full head of hair. When I knew I was going to be interviewing you…that must have been on the island, man. That was. Was that on the island? We had just finished. So we’re at the end of BUDS. We’re getting ready to come back and graduate a week later. So this is literally one week before we graduated from BUDS. And it’s Marco Signorello, you, me. Yeah. I grabbed the.. It almost looks like there might have been alcohol involved. I think there may have been. Yeah. Yeah. I grabbed a couple from the I had to go back into the Wayback Machine and grab a couple. Yeah, you’ll see. Oh, dude. Mikey Bearden. Holy Kobelo. Oh man. Yeah, yeah. Hey. There’s big Jack Carr on the far right there. I was just going to say I was going to say Jack Carr who’s going on to do good things, right? Yeah. There’s a bunch of guys that have gone on to do some pretty good things there. Danny, Rick Doggett. And then the final last one for the throwback machine is you giving a brief with with Ryan Clapper there before our.. So for anybody else tuning in going why the hell is he showing these things?

‘Cause this is this goes back twenty-five years. For those who don’t know BUD’s class two thirteen. The, the hardest class. At the then Lieutenant John Doolittle was my was my class officer for for my BUDs class. And this is the first time we’ve chatted in probably probably 20 years. It’s been two decades, man. Yeah. At least. It’s been a long time. Yeah. And you’ve got to dude, you got to scan me those pictures, man. That’s incredible. I don’t have it. Where’d you get those? I don’t have any. I know. I know. I had to go into the vault and I was looking at it. And honestly, when I found this one of you, me and SIG, I was like, ah, that’s perfect. That’s perfect of SIG, man. Yeah. I actually have photos. We all look the exact same, man. It’s identical. Almost identical. Minus a few pounds, a few gray hairs.

Yeah. But up here, I’m still the same guy. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve done awesome, man. It’s great to be linked back up with you. Likewise, bud. So. Hey, where can folks find you on the interweb? Well, I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably my I don’t know how effective LinkedIn is, but that seems to be where I interact the most with people. So I just use that. I have a website. Yeah, just John Doolittle. If you just type in John Doolittle on LinkedIn, you know Frogman Swim, Seal, NSW, you know it’ll come up. Yeah, there’s only a couple on there. And then I have a website. I do a fair amount of pro bono public speaking, JohnDoolittle.com. So just one word, JohnDoolittle.com.

And what I say on that thing is especially if you run an ROTC organization or you’re one of the service academies or you’re one of the I love talking to college-age kids, especially those that are going into a service of some sort. But I like talking to all colleges, man. And that’s pro bono stuff. Some of them insist on paying. And if that’s the case, I use it to cover my travel and the rest goes to the UDT Seal Association. The guys that do the reunion and the magazine and the blast and stuff. But yeah. Very cool, man. Well, hey, we appreciate all that you’re doing to give back to the veteran community and to take care of the guys. And thanks for sharing about the KAATSU with us, man. I think for those who are looking for ways to, to ease some of the pain, not just the emotional pain we talked about, but the physical pain I think it’s it’s worth checking out. I, I know I have a lot of clicking and a lot of actually tingling. And I’m gonna I’m actually gonna get in on I’m gonna get on the website here immediately after. So John, thanks so much for joining us, man. And thanks for sharing your story with us. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. It’s been a pleasure. Likewise, bud.