John’s conversation with James Geering on Behind the Shield Podcast!

Episode Description

Welcome to the Behind the Shield Podcast! This Podcast will bring some of the greatest minds on the planet to you, the men and women who protect our communities. The topics will range from exercise and nutrition to PTSD and sleep deprivation. Listen John on James Geering Podcast in his Episode 739.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Behind the Shield Podcast. As always, my name is James Geering, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, former Navy SEAL and Chief Operating Officer for KAATSU, John Doolittle. So, we discuss a host of topics from John’s early life, his journey into the Navy, the physical and mental toughness that took him through BUDS, his perspective on war, the Tampa Bay Frogman swim, blood flow restriction training, and so much more.

Now, before we get to this incredibly powerful conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback, and leave a rating. Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of well over 700 episodes now. So, all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women’s stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them. So, with that being said, I introduce to you John Doolittle. Enjoy.

Well, John, I want to start by saying firstly, thank you to Alex Racy for connecting us. And secondly, welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Hey, James, thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here and hopefully we will get into some good Alex Racy stories too. Excellent. So very first question, where on planet Earth are we finding you today? Oh, man. I’m in my home office, St. Petersburg, Florida. When I got out of the Navy, this is where my wife and I decided to stay.

And so, yeah, God, we’ve been here for like nine years now, which, yeah, St. Pete, Florida. Beautiful. How about you? So, I’m in Ocala, so I’m just two hours away from you at the moment. Oh, yeah. Okay. A little less ocean around me though. Get together and have a coffee or lunch or something. Absolutely. Absolutely. On the back end of 7X, I’ll come down to you. Definitely. Nice. All right. Well, I would love to start at the very beginning chronologically.

So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, and how many siblings. Okay. Well, I’m from, I guess, technically, I’m from Texas. My dad was Air Force. I was born at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Wilford Hall. About two weeks later, my mom and dad threw me in the back of the VW bug and drove across Texas and into California.

And I spent the majority of my life in California. My dad worked for Pacific Telephone, later became Southwest Bell. Then my sister and I, we went to high school and we were swimmers. And that was in the ’80s. And so yeah, born Texas but raised in California and ended up going into the military, but that’s a whole another story.

Yeah. Beautiful. Well, I want to start staying in that childhood for a while. So correct me if I’m wrong. Your dad was a Vietnam vet. Yeah, he was in the Air Force during Vietnam. He was an air traffic controller and worked on an island almost exactly in between Okinawa and Vietnam and helped guide tankers and bombers in country there and lived on this little tiny island.

He was a dead OIC out there and was active duty for a while, came home from that pretty long deployment, decided to get out of the Air Force and almost immediately decided he missed it and wanted to get back in. And as you well know, after Vietnam with the drawdowns, it’s almost impossible to get back in, but he missed the camaraderie.

He missed the fellowship, the team aspect. And he didn’t really enjoy the business world initially. So he tried getting back in over and over and kept getting shut down, shut down. And eventually they let him back in in the reserves. And that’s what he did for the next 30 or so years. He was in Air Force Reserves. He had a day job in San Francisco and San Jose.

So you know we were a Bay Area family. And my mom worked for Mare Island and then for the Port of Oakland, kind of on the Navy side. But yeah, it’s funny. My dad, he was the Air Force, but he never really pushed for me to go into the military, which I thought was interesting. So we’re going to get later in your timeline working with veterans that are transitioning out and it’s known now.

It’s a struggle, whether it’s in the military or first responder professions. But the Vietnam veterans I’ve had on the show, it’s one thing if you came home to some sort of thank you for your service mentality. That particular era, a lot of these men and women returned to almost hatred from the people that they were supposedly fighting for. What was your dad’s transition like and what was his kind of homecoming like if you’ve ever had that conversation with him? Well, his homecoming, you know, he never talked about experiencing some of the things that you talk about, you know, that kind of vitriol, that hatred being spit on. And I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but he’s never brought it up. And honestly, I’ve never asked about it, but I will definitely talk with him about it.

But, you know, he came back from that time and then he just kind of went right into industry and into business, got out and started. It was like that chapter of his life was over and he started something new. And it wasn’t until he was well into that chapter that he realized he missed the brotherhood. Yeah, which I think a lot of people do.

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve witnessed it, but one of the things that in my kind of white belt perspective has is if you transition out, but that purpose is still embedded in what you’re doing next. So for example, you come out, you were in the military, you become a first responder, or you were a first responder, and now you’re in a nonprofit or working with special needs people or something that’s still giving, something that’s still making the world better. That’s where I see not a seamless transition, but when people realize, okay, I have tribe, I have purpose, I have you know this thing that I had in the military or in fire is still existing in this new space. And where I see people struggle is they become a realtor or an investment banker. And in the heart of them, they’re like, “Okay, this doesn’t feel like it’s truly making the world better. It’s making people money.” I couldn’t agree with you more, man.

I feel very fortunate that I fell into the work that I’m in now, and we can talk about that later. But I agree, when you’re talking about first responders, fire, police, EMT, when you’re talking about DOD, when you’re talking about just a life of service and being part of something bigger than yourself, it’s very hard once you leave that team to find that elsewhere.

It’s very difficult. And I think a lot of guys struggle with it. Yeah, I agree with you. Especially on the first responder piece, like I’ve talked with the chief of police here in St. Pete, Anthony Holloway. Great guy, great guy. But it’s crazy when you think about our community police forces across the country.

And when those guys walk out the door every morning, it’s like they are deploying every single day. And it’s a very different perspective for a military guy you know before 9/11. We were 18 months of workup, six-month deployment. Then after 9/11, it was six months of workup and six months deployment. But no matter how busy it got, you always had home time. And when you were home, you were home.

You didn’t have to deal with all the things you were dealing with on deployment. And then I look at a police officer or a firefighter and these guys, when they walk out, they’re kind of deploying every day. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Well, the big thing that the military guests have said as far as the trauma as well, like we saw, maybe had to do some horrible things, but the landscape is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and we came home.

What I think a lot of people don’t understand, especially in the volunteer fire service, is some of these men and women live in these very communities. So they run on their friends, their kids’ teachers. You know And then every time, because I always worked at least out of the city where I was a firefighter, so I didn’t see it all the time. But I have observed it. You know If I go to Orlando, so many intersections, okay, that was where you know these three people were killed. That was that house fire. The guy came out on fire.

And you know these are definitely vivid remembers, excuse me, memories, but the military have those memories overseas more often than not. But as you said, police, fire, EMS,,Those are in the very towns that they work every day, every third day, or in some cases where they actually live. And think about that for a second. You know We talk about triggers for military guys that are dealing with behavioral health things and hypervigilance, PTSD, and what have you. But it’s usually triggers that are not necessarily at every turn in everyday life. The triggers you’re talking about, you see them every day. So you know I appreciate the outpouring of support that our military has. I really, really do.

I thank God that we’re not dealing with the stuff our Vietnam era parents were dealing with as far as the support from the community and whatnot. But I think our first responders in many ways have it actually harder. Yeah, I mean, certainly as bad in a different way, a 100%. Yeah. Well, back to your early life then. I know you ended up becoming an elite swimmer in college.
Was that something that you got into when you were young? Were there other sports involved as well? So I thought I was going to be a basketball player. Sorry for the background noise. I guess somebody’s mowing the lawn. But my freshman year, I came down on my ankle and I tore the growth plate and it was a mess. And they told me, “Hey, you can’t play basketball anymore. And oh, by the way, you’ll probably never run again.

If you want to be active, you’re going to have to find something that’s non-load bearing.” And I was a kind of high school, middle school, summer league swimmer. And that’s kind of what I knew. And so I started swimming and come to find out, swimming is actually one of the best rehabs you can do when you have that kind of injury on your lower leg and your ankle.

So long story longer, I just start swimming all the time through high school. That became my sport. I wasn’t great in high school, but I was good enough to kind of get noticed by some colleges and whatnot. And it helped me get into school, yeah. When you were in the high school era still before you chose a specific college, were you thinking of the military at that point, or were there other things on your mind?

Oh, you had to go there, Dave. You’re going to call me out. You’re going to call me out on being one of those guys, the Top Gun generation. But I was, man. I frickin’ loved that movie. I don’t know what it was, but that was the best recruiting tool the Navy ever did, man. ‘Cause here I am, God, I don’t know, I guess I was a sophomore, junior in high school. I don’t know when it came out, like ’86, ’86, ’87.

But when that movie came out, hook, line, and sinker, man. I wanted to go to Naval Academy. I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be Goose or Maverick or whatever. And that’s the direction I started going. Yeah, it all kind of started with Top Gun. That and the fact that a guy, a friend of mine that I swam with, went to one of the service academies. And that’s when I really started considering the military.

Not when I was younger, because my dad was reserved. So he would come home from work like everybody else’s dad. And then occasionally, he would just kind of disappear for a weekend, do his thing, and come back. I rarely, if ever, saw him in uniform. And so yeah, I blame it on Top Gun. It’s funny, I just took my son to see the new Top Gun, and he had the same exact reaction.
So it was kind of cool to see from a fresh set of eyes. And I remember seeing that when I was probably exactly his age. And now he’s like, you know because he’s already in the ROTC program, JROTC. And you know I was like, that’s one of the things you could potentially do, like put it in your little toolbox. How old is he, James? He is 15, so. Oh, yeah. See, that’s the age. That’s when they grab him. Yep, exactly. So, I mean, he was, you know, he’s all in on a multitude of things. He got into track and cross-country.

He’s in the JROTC program. And I’m just sitting back going, let these other mentors help guide my child. I’m here as a parent, but I think it’s so important to have the humility to step back and go, all right, I’m not an expert in the military. I’m not an elite, you know, collegiate or high school coach. So it’s so cool just to watch his growth and then maybe, you know, nudge him a little bit, some of the strength and conditioning that he’s being told. I’m like, well, let’s talk about this particular thing.

Yeah, maybe you know life doesn’t revolve around bench press, but you know kind of put him back on track. But it is. It’s incredible just to see the potential because I think this is something that’s lost. It was very absent in my upbringing in my school, but I see it now as well. I don’t know how it was when you were younger, but my parents really instilled that you can be anything mentality. And my school, you know some teachers in my school told me you can’t be anything. You’re a piece of shit, which is not the best way to teach.

But I love that, that you know put that belief back in kids’ minds. Like if you work at it, if you take it seriously, if you have a burning desire, you literally can be anything you want to be. And even if you’re an amputee or whatever, you can find a version of that and chase that as well. I agree. I agree. And you touched on something there that I think is so important to talk with young people about today, and that’s the mentor aspect.

And I mean, don’t get me wrong, my dad was, of course, my number one mentor and hero growing up, but I think it’s important to have mentors as a kid outside the family and to help give different perspective. I mean, that’s what your son’s experiencing right now at 15. Our youngest kid is Meg. She’s 15.

And you know my mentor growing up was, I never get on a podcast and not mention Mike Troy. So Guy was a 1960 gold medalist in the Rome Olympics. He was a swimmer and held the world record in the 200 meter fly, comes out of the Olympics, you know cover of Sports Illustrated. I’m looking at a picture of him right now.

He comes out of the Olympics, joins the Navy, goes through a commissioning program, goes into the teams, into the SEAL teams, does three tours in Vietnam, comes home from that, becomes an instructor at BUDS, and then realizes that the world of kind of mid-grade staff officer work is not for him. Gets out of the Navy and starts coaching. He started the swim team down on the strand in Coronado.

And he eventually moved north and he was my coach growing up, my swim coach. And he was a mentor for me in so many, so many different ways. And I feel like he, between my parents and my grandparents, of course, but in so many ways, he also guided where my life went. And I feel like that’s an important aspect for young people today, and a lot of people don’t have it.

I was just given a talk to ROTC unit at UCF day before yesterday, University of Central Florida. And I asked, so this is all the sophomore Air Force ROTC students. And I asked, “How many people have a non-family mentor in their life?” Less than a third of the hands went up. And that’s something that’s missing today in a lot of ways, in my opinion.

Absolutely. Well, two things. Firstly, after hearing you talk about Mike on the Kill Cliff podcast, I was like, “Oh, that’s someone I need to try and get on the show.” And then when I did my research, I know you lost him in 2019. So I’m sorry to hear that, but he would have been an amazing person to have on here as well. He has influenced so many people, so many people. And he came out of the swimming world and decided that a friend of his lost a kid in a drowning accident.

And so he shifted his whole effort in life to teaching young kids how to swim to help with the drowning epidemic, specifically at that time in the state of Arizona. And just an amazing, amazing, amazing man. Well, with that mentorship element, the other, you know, flipping it around, we talked about, you know, you, my son receiving mentorship.

And mine was a martial arts coaches and my PE teacher who I’m actually going to get on. My high school PE teacher, I’m going to get him on the podcast. Oh, nice. So those were my out-of-family mentors. But when I look at what I would describe as the problem today, and this goes all the way up, sadly, to the, you know, the commanders in chief that we’ve had the last few years, plural, left and right, you know, that are acting like petulant children rather than leaders, we have such a divisive element to the media, to, you know, the COVID epidemic, all these things. And it’s driven wedges into friendships and families. And therefore, people are quick to criticize. And my thing is this, you know, to make sure your family is good to take care of your home, but then step outside your front door and find a way to mentor. You may be a computer programmer or a chess guru or one of my friends, Chris, started a firefighter mentorship program, so they removed the barrier to entry as far as socioeconomic background, to find the best young men and women to become great firefighters and give them all the tools to be successful.

That is one thing I don’t hear from the ground all the way up to the White House is where is that conversation of saying, look, think of like a village again. You know, it takes a village to raise. So what can you offer your community? Stop tweeting and, you know, throwing hate on social media and instead look at yourself and go, what am I good at? Which group of people can I positively affect? If all of us did that, we would raise this entire nation back up.

Yeah, that would be incredible. And there’s other ways that we could kind of foster that, but have you ever been to Israel? Not yet, no. It’s interesting that the vast majority of young people in Israel, they have to serve. And they don’t all have to go in the military.

There’s other ways that they can serve. But I look at that model and when you’re walking around the streets of Tel Aviv, just about everybody has served that country in some way, shape, or form. And you know of course we don’t have that here, but can you imagine if everybody was mandated? And I don’t mean just military.

What about USAID, Peace Corps, you know volunteer fire, police, what if every young person had to spend a year of their life doing some kind of service? It would change so much. And the mentorship piece that you’re talking about, it would just naturally be fallout from that, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree. I agree completely.

Sebastian Jung has been on here a couple of times and he wrote about that in Tribe. You know And it’s that very concept. It doesn’t have to be military service. I just had one of my guests recently was in AmeriCorps and that was a huge shift in his own you know life path. So yeah, it doesn’t, you know whether it’s, like you said, mentorship or helping with youth sports or environmental projects in your city, whatever it is, I agree 100%. Selfless service, unpaid service for a year.

And when you’re young enough to still hopefully be at home with your parents, or like you said, military service where you’re at a base that would just reset. I think the damage that I would say probably was done in the ’80s where it became super consumerism and that whole yuppie mentality where success was measured in wealth rather than service. Yeah, the yuppie mentality. I like that. Well, speaking of education, you wanted to be a Top Gun pilot.

Talk to me about your journey into Air Force education and then the transition out into the Navy. Well, I tried to go to the Naval Academy and they shot me down. First of all, my grades sucked. I barely had the absolute minimum to even apply to a Service Academy. Naval Academy guys just laughed me out the door.

Air Force Academy, on the other hand, they needed a swimmer that specialized in the 200 IM, 200, you know, those were my events. Breast IM, fly, mid-distance. And so they said, “Well, go ahead and submit it, but you know we’ll make you what they call a blue chip athlete,” which helps move you up in the pile a little bit, but still my grades were just the bare, bare minimum.

So it didn’t look good. So I applied to other schools. My grandfather was a Jayhawk. He went to University of Kansas, and Gary Kemp paid for me to come out and did a great athlete tour there. And that’s where I was going to go. I was going to swim at Kansas, be a Jayhawk. And the very last possible day that they could have notified us.

I was out with friends, got a phone call at the house, and my mom got in touch with me. She was like, “Hey, you gotta get home and call this guy from the Air Force Academy.” I was like, “What? I’d already committed to Kansas at this time. It was a done deal. I was going to school there.” And so I called the guy and yeah, I got in by the skin of my teeth. Had to call Gary Kemp back, tail between my legs, but he understood, you know, “Hey, go do good things.

Serve your country. Serve your nation. It’s awesome, John. I support that 100%.” So I ended up going there. I struggled big time at the Air Force Academy. Because remember, even though my dad was a Reserve Air Force, we weren’t a military family. I didn’t know the first thing about going into the military. There was no pre-visit to the Academy to see if it was a good fit, to see if it was something I wanted.

It was just put the application in. The odds are I’m not getting in and I would go and do something else. So I ended up getting in, flew out there as a freshman and just struggled. I mean, I was a California surfer, skater, swimmer, hair was all bleached, long hair. And I show up at that place. It’s kind of a funny story.

And so we’re all on the bus and we’re all coking a joke. ‘Cause this whole bus, a bunch of us are from Northern California. It was like a California crew on the bus. So we show up. I’m sitting up near the front and the guy gets on the bus, one of the upperclassmen, Cadre, as soon as we show up at the academy, and he starts screaming at us, just yelling at us.

And the guy came up to like here on me. For your listeners I have my hand like at my chest. And I look at this guy, I’m like, “Hey, dude, relax. We’re all right here. We can hear you.” And he says How’d that go down? Yeah, “did you just call me dude?” And that was the beginning of my hell for four years at the Air Force Academy.

I struggled academically. I was on academic probation six of the eight semesters. They had this thing called MPA, your military performance average. That was rock bottom as well. And so anyway, our junior year, they came out and told us that if you were not in the top third of your class, you were not going to UPT, undergraduate pilot training.

So I was like, “Well, shit, I’m definitely not in the top third. I’m not even in the top two-thirds. I’m like in the bottom 2%.” So I called Mike, my mentor, right? And I said, “Hey, Mike, what do you think? I mean, I’m not sure what I’m going to do in the Air Force.

I can’t fly because my grades are in the tank.” And without skipping a beat in true Mike Troy fashion, he said, “John, get out of the Air Force, join the Navy, go into SEAL teams.” And I’m like, Mike, I’m at the Air Force Academy. I’m not the naval guy. I’m at the Air Force Academy. And he’s like, oh, I don’t know. I’ve heard some guys doing it, talk to some people. I’m pretty sure you can do it. Just look into it.

And turns out he was right with Title 10 authorities and all that. If you go to a Service Academy, technically you can serve in any of the sister services and armed forces. So after a bunch of paperwork and meeting the liaison officer that the Air Force Academy had, I ended up graduating.

And on the same day I graduated from the Air Force Academy, I put on choker whites and got commissioned as an Ensign in the Navy and started my Navy career 27 May, 1992. So walk me through your journey into EOD. Well, the pipeline, so they initially gave me orders to BUDS, class 186.

Once the Navy realized that they had four Air Force Academy grads going into Class 186, they immediately cut two right off the top and I was one of the two. So they put me in the EOD pipeline of training, which meant go to San Diego for Ship Driving School, Surface Warfare Officer School, learn how the power plant works on diesel ships, then go to hard hat diving school, then go to salvage school.

And this was the pipeline of training to ultimately go to explosive ordinance disposal EOD. But I never made it to EOD because once I got to the ship, I just started applying to go to BUDS. And every time I applied, I got shot down over and over again. So it ended up being six times I got denied to go to BUDS, this SEAL training, you know basic underwater demolition school.

And it’s a whole ‘nother story how it actually happened. But finally, they said, “Yeah, okay, let the lieutenant go to BUDS.” So I had been in the Navy at that point for almost four years trying to get the BUDS. So I ended up going with Class 213. So it was going to be 186. I ended up finally getting there in Class 213.

I was the officer for the OIC, the officer in charge for Class 213. Made it there, made it through there. And there’s all kinds of rabbit holes on that, but then ended up going to SEAL Team 2 after BUDS. So on this journey toward EOD, I heard you sound like you really enjoyed that experience.

I was a straight C student in high school, in university, but the moment I found fire and paramedicine, I was a straight A student because it made sense to me. It was hands-on, it was real world. What was your experience? Was the Air Force Academy very academic and did you find yourself becoming a good student once it was a skill set that actually made sense to you? Such a loaded question.

I can tell you, I can tell you listen to that kill cliff. ‘Cause there’s a message to pull from that. If you’re not doing well academically, doesn’t mean you’re a turd. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so funny story. Our life is a series of sea stories. So I show up, first of all, I graduated. I wasn’t the last guy and it was hard to find out, but I think I was like eight graduates from the bottom in 1992 from the graduating class at the Air Force Academy. So then I go into Navy, I go to SWOS School in San Diego, Surface Warfare Officer School. And that is where you go to learn to drive ships. So I’m getting at your question, but it’s just a roundabout way. And the first test we had, I got like a D.

So I had to retake it. No biggie, didn’t raise too many red flags. The next test, I completely bombed. I failed it. And the thing is, it was a class in something called maneuvering boards, mow boards. And everybody that comes out of the Naval Academy can do that shit with their eyes closed. Mow boards, they just laugh at it. It’s no big deal. Well, I’ve never seen this stuff before in my life.

And the class I was in at SWOS was a Naval Academy class. So I failed that test. So the next morning, I get called down to the commanding officer’s office. And I was going to dive track. I was going to go be a diver, a salvage diver, EOD and all that. And I wish I could remember the commanding officer’s name, but man, the guy just starts screaming at me.

He’s like, “You think you don’t have to put out, you think you walk on water, you Naval Academy grads, you don’t think you have to do any of this shit and we just have to blah, blah, blah.” blah And I let him yell at me for a while and I said, “Hey, sir, I went to the Air Force academy.” He’s like, “I know you’re an academy grad. You’re a p.. What? Did you say Air Force Academy?” He had no idea, man. And he just starts howling…

Doolittle’s an air force academy. And he’s laughing. All the instructors are laughing. Guys had no idea. And so no, the Navy was not easy for me either. But what I found is once I finally got to BUDS, academically, it wasn’t that hard. And something about when you surround yourself with a lot of like-minded individuals, everything just seemed easier. I mean, I know physically it’s difficult. I know mentally it’s difficult, especially Hell Week and all that. You hear those stories all the time.

But being surrounded by teammates who were similar mindset, all goal-oriented, all type alphas, all going after the same freaking thing. I tell guys all the time, the most fun I’ve had since in all my military time was at BUDS. The friends I made there, I can call any one of them today and they give me a shirt off their back, fly out and help me if I was in trouble, and vice versa, any one of them.

And I had never experienced that. You know my nose was in the books at the Academy and I could barely pass anything. I struggled with SWOS. Navy guys are going to hear this, and they’re just going to roll their eyes like, oh my God, somebody that struggled with SWOS, what a turd. And then I went, you know after I went, I worked on a salvage boat, the USS Safeguard. I was on there for almost three years.

Hard work, but it wasn’t what I came in the Navy to do. And there’s something about you know when you’re doing something that isn’t really what you want to do, it’s not as easy. It’s more difficult. And then I got to BUDS and man, it was like everything started firing on all cylinders. I enjoyed it. Then I showed up as a new guy at SEAL Team 2 and you know it was like, “Oh, okay, great.

You graduate from BUDS. That doesn’t mean anything. Getting back the line and shut up and learn and absorb and be a new guy for a while. Be you know probation status and all that. But I learned so much as a new guy in the teams. And I have the greatest respect for guys in that line of work that take new guys under their wing and help them succeed. Mentorship again. Mentorship, mentorship, mentorship.

Yeah. So you were around very special kind of mentorship, by the way. Painful mentorship. So you were part of several teams as you’re progressing through this in the Air Force Academy, in the journey to EOD. When you look back, was there an element for the creation of such tight bonds that shared suffering? Oh, yeah.

And I think this applies to, I think just about anybody that works in the first responder world gets it, right? And I think this is you as a firefighter. I would imagine you’ve met very few military guys that you don’t automatically kind of bond with on some level. Same with police officers, same with EMT.

It’s just something about with the initial training that we all go, and I know it’s different throughout the different organizations, but that initial training is designed to be hard physically and psychologically. And when you go through that kind of shared suffering together, you build a bond that is incredibly, incredibly powerful. I agree with that 100%.

So that’s one of my observations is because life is so comfortable now and you know we’re all very, very well, I’d like to think we’re grateful for air conditioning and cars and MP3 players or even phones now. But I think the dark side of that is the more comfortable we are, the less we suffer. I feel that’s also the kind of opposition to tribalism as well.

And many of us that are listening to this are fortunate enough to have gone through crucibles in police and fire and military that bonded us, that gave us this incredible brother and sisterhood. But the average person out there hasn’t had that. So if they’re not in a CrossFit gym or jiu jitsu school or whatever environment they may be exposed to this suffering, GORUCK community, then you know this, I think, is why we don’t have as tight tribalism as maybe you know a village 200 years ago where they were chopping wood and hunting and gathering and doing things that were hard and cold and hot that was bringing them together because the purpose was to protect their village, keep them warm and keep their tummies full.

Yeah. Yeah. You just touched on something now with Jiu Jitsu, Karamaga, Judo, karate, CrossFit gyms, finding things in life that are not comfortable. I’m not saying pursuing misery necessarily, but finding a way to have some shared suffering in a group setting and a team setting.

‘Cause you might not go into the Marine Corps and go through the actual crucible, but there’s all kinds of things in life that you can sort of create that scenario. I agree with you. I think it’s really important that you put yourself through some hard times, even if it means taking off by yourself and going on a hike in the mountains with just a couple of things in your backpack. I mean, finding tough things to do and doing them and getting away from all the air conditioning and the Wi-Fi and the DVR and the HD. I mean, all that stuff that we’re just, you know, surrounded by now. Absolutely. That’s a good point, James. Well, something that really resonated me when you were told in your youth that you had this ankle injury, you could never run, jump, et cetera.

I’m assuming there was running and jumping in BUDS and you know the programs after. So talk to me about that. You know There’s so many people. The reason I didn’t become a firefighter for a long time is because someone in a white coat when I was in high school told me you’re colorblind. You could never be a pilot, firefighter, and they listed off all the cool things that I wanted to be. And I was left with, you know, like badger tamer and pizza maker. Badger tamer. So they really limited my, again, wasn’t exactly “Shoot for the Stars” mentality then.

You were told to the point where, you know, had you dreamed of becoming a SEAL, maybe you would have written that off at that point. Talk to me about you know that previous injury, the rehab part of your swimming, and how that held up during your BUDS training. It all came back to Mike, to Mike Troy. And he used to tell stories at the beginning of workouts, especially to Saturday morning workouts, ’cause those were the ones where he had us for like three hours and they’d be these 10,000 yard workouts. And he’d always talk to us ahead of time and tell stories. And in general, his stories always encapsulated the aspect of the mind, what you can think through, what you conceive, what you can imagine doing, your body will follow.

And he used to tell us stories all the time, mostly about BUDS, just about how physically you think your body is at the very end, but you can always take it another step. So that emotional perspective, that psychological perspective of achieving goals, he would just drill that into us. And when I told him that I couldn’t run anymore, he’s like, “Oh, that’s bullshit. Get in the pool. You’ll be running in no time.

This is the best rehab you can do.” And he was right. And it wasn’t that swimming was necessarily good rehab or whatever. It was just that mindset of what you said when somebody in a white coat says, “Hey, you’ll never be able to do this.” Maybe, they might be right. But more often than not, I think they’re maybe not right. Yeah, there’s all kinds of angles we could go with that.

But in my case, I had to get three different medical waivers during my early time in the military. I had to get a waiver to even come in the military. And I had to get a waiver to go to BUDS. I had to get a waiver to go to the Air Force Academy. I had to get a flight waiver. I had back stuff going on. I had my ankle, which was completely disqualifying for military service. And Mike used to say all the time, “Hey, every military instruction that’s out there has what they call an exception to policy.” And if you’re told you can’t do something, eventually you will get high enough in the organization. You will find somebody that will sign an exception to policy. So no matter what you’re told, never give up on what it is you want to do. Anything is achievable, especially in the military.

‘Cause there’s all kinds of instructions and rules and regulations, but you have a one star, two star, you have somebody that wants you bad enough and they’ll sign the paperwork and get you in. And that isn’t always the case. I mean, obviously, colorblind, let’s say, for being a pilot, okay, that’s a non-starter. But my medical stuff was, I was still fully functional. It’s just that I was disqualified per some instructions.

So, yeah, where there’s a will, there’s almost always a way, I think. Yeah. Well, with mine, I wasn’t colorblind. I was color deficient. But those books that they give you, it’s like, you know, pass or fail. Well, there’s, you know, pages and pages and pages, some of them I can see the numbers. So what it was was a red-green deficiency. So I can see traffic lights just fine. I would argue I could probably challenge and, you know, go the pilot route had I been you know on that path when I was young.

So I think questioning what you’re told and finding, okay, is there a way around it? I think it was Remy Adelaide, I think, who was a SEAL. I think if I got this right, he actually had a blip in his past as far as from the criminal side, and he had to get that address before he went in, if I’ve got the right person. Yeah I think that was Remy. I think you’re right. Yeah. So there we go, another thing. So I think it’s just important. So many of us look at someone who’s a figure of authority and well, they told me this, so therefore it’s gospel.

Well, if that’s derailing your life’s dream, take a step back, get a second opinion, and then find someone that circumnavigated and ask them how they did it. Yeah, there’s almost always a way. You know I like like talking to those kind of that senior in high school or even in college.

I love talking the guys in that age bracket, that kind of 18 to 24 range, because they’re told so much crap these days about what they can’t do with their life. And it just takes the wind right out of their sails and so much of it’s bullshit. Absolutely. Well, you make it through BUDS, you’re attached to SEAL team two.

I’m always curious for the operators that were pre 9/11 and then obviously their career spanned post 9/11 as well. So in the Fire Service, I think we have the very best departments truly are training for what if scenarios, the very worst departments of which I worked my very last one. If it hasn’t happened, it’s never going to happen. The worst fucking mindset you can have. So what was the training like pre 9/11? And then, you know if you want, kind of walk me through your 9/11 experience and then how everything shifted from there. Okay. Well, on the surface, that’s pretty easy.

In the Teams, and this is kind of a very broad statement, not 100% of the time for 100% of the organization, but for the most part, leading up to 9/11, you had an 18-month workup, and that would be your leave, your professional development, your unilateral training, your team training, all your training leave, personal time, everything, you had like a year and a half, and then you would go on a deployment. And the deployments were six months long. So kind of a two-year cycle. When 9/11 happened, again, very broad statement. There were exceptions, but for the most part, that 18 month long, call it pre-deployment training shrunk significantly to about six months.

So now think of taking all your personal time, all your professional development time, a lot of that just had to go away because you had to focus on the platoon team training to get out the door. And a lot of that training had to be away from home station. So now instead of being home for 18, you’re home for six, but you’re really not home for six because a lot of that training, you’re gone, you’re away from home.

And now the deployments are not your typical joint training environment. Your deployments in many cases now are combat deployments. So you go from a two-year cycle to a one-year cycle, and it’s a combat cycle, and you’re barely home at all during that 12 months. Very, very difficult on the force.

And you mentioned Alex earlier. We’ve had this conversation many times, Alex and I. Anybody in the, in my case, in the SEAL teams, just about anybody could handle that a few times. But what we started seeing, when I say that, I mean a one-year cycle versus a two-year cycle. But what started happening pretty quickly is the wheels started to kind of come off the bus a little bit.
We saw alcohol related incidents go up. We saw spousal abuse, child abuse, suicide ideology, or what’s it called when you think about suicide? What’s that called? Ideation. Ideation, thank you, not ideations. Actual suicides on both active duty members and family members, all these markers just started going up, and we can talk about that more later.

But essentially, to me, that was the biggest change from pre-9/11 to post 9/11. And before 9/11, when you would come home, you’d have all this time to decompress. You’d take care of all the immediate stuff at the team right away. Then everybody went off on leave and everybody approached leave differently, but it essentially was kind of a forced decompression for the guys.

A lot of that went away. And you can imagine the second and third order effects of taking that decompressed time away from somebody. You asked where I was, I was on a Kosovo deployment when 9/11 happened. We were at Camp Bond Steel in Kosovo.

It’s kind of southern portion of Kosovo. Soon after President Bush, 43, had come out for a visit. That was a high point in that deployment. That was great because we provided his counter assault team, his counter sniper team. We worked with the Secret Service. Great, great opportunity, great, just great part of that deployment.

We were doing a lot of reconnaissance along the Albanian Serbian borders, that kind of stuff, you know confirm or deny different things that were happening at border regions. We had come back from one of those missions. We had been gone for three days, not much sleep during those three days, so everybody was kind of crashed out. I was asleep and I’ll never forget.

I won’t use his real name, but Tiny comes barging into my hooch and I didn’t hear him come in. And apparently he was yelling. He was yelling at me and I didn’t hear anything. I was just out cold. I was exhausted. So he picks up the head of my bed like three feet off the ground and drops it. Boom! What the fuck? And he’s like, “Sir, get the fuck up.

We’re going to war.” And he runs out. And I was like, “What the hell is he talking about?” And so I went into the TOC, the Tactical Operations Center, and it was like everybody else was already up. I was like the last one to know. And I walk in and they have AFN Armed Forces Network playing and there’s a delay, there’s a shitty picture, it’s all grainy.

And when I walked in, it was the CNN feed. I’ll never forget it. I had no idea what was going on. Everybody was chattering, chattering, and then it got deathly quiet in the room and I saw the second plane go through the second tower. And yeah, that was the 9/11 moment for me.

And then, of course, after that, everything changed. Just going back to your point about the compression of your deployment and training, that I think is what’s happening in the first responder professions now. This county that I live in, we just had our second firefighter suicide in three weeks. Another young, fit, healthy young man with a family and two kids.

And this department, they’re working 56 hours a week and they’re short staffed like so many law enforcement agencies are too and dispatch centers as well. And so more often than not, they’re told, right, you can’t go home tomorrow. So now that’s an 80-hour work week that these men and women are working. And we’re seeing the same exact thing that you described you know as from 20 years ago onwards in the first responder professions today because they’re cutting staff, they’re shutting down fire stations.

But who does it fall on? The people in the uniform. So it just takes 80 hours. 80 hours a week. The typical work week now? Yeah. So the typical one is 56, which is insane in itself because the people making those decisions are in an office working 40, the people that you’re going to wake up at 3:00 in the morning, ask to drive emergency to a burning building, go search, pull someone out, and then do paramedic interventions. You’re fine with them working 56 hours a week and being awake every third day.

But then what happens and I experience this for a majority of my career, you get to 7:00 a.m., maybe it’s your kid’s birthday that day, maybe it’s Christmas Day, you know whatever, and you’re told, “No, we don’t have enough people. You’ve got to stay for another 24 hours.” So that’s, as you said, about three days with no sleep, the number of people that are working two, three days with no sleep that are behind the wheel of these emergency vehicles that are weaving through traffic, you know it’s pure, pure insanity. So we’ve seen that compression, but there’s no real voice out there.

I mean, I’m trying to bring all these experts on through this particular medium, but as far as our union or you know the bigwigs in our profession, no one is saying we’re killing our people, but we’re killing our people. Brother, man, that’s rough. 80 hours in that line of work. You know It’s kind of the same conversation, right?

The guys are resilient, right? They can handle that once, twice, maybe three times, but you make that week after week. And this gets into a whole ‘nother topic, but man, I don’t care how resilient you are, or you think you are, how resilient you think your teammate is. Everybody’s got a freaking breaking point. Everybody’s got a breaking point.

And it’s almost criminal that that’s happening. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I know that the first SEAL that was killed post 9/11 was someone near and dear to you. So I’m not extremely familiar with the story, so I’d love for you to share Neil’s story with everyone listening and obviously we’ll get to why that became the nucleus of something else that you did as well.

Yeah, okay. So Fifi or Neil Roberts, when I showed up at Team 2 and I was a brand new guy, I’m in my khakis railroad track lieutenant walking in to SEAL Team 2. I walk across the quarter deck and there’s three people standing there. And one of them was Neil, Pay Officer Second Class E5, Pay Officer Second Class Neil Roberts.

And they proceeded to take care of me as the newest officer at the team. No, seriously, they took great care of me. Yeah, one of the first guys I met at the team and then jumped forward and he went to one of our National Mission Force units.

And after 9/11, the first SEAL to fall in combat was Neil. Tucker Gar, guys call it Roberts Ridge now. And a lot of things happened there. A lot of good things happened. There’s a lot of stories of heroism that came out of that event. But we lost some good people and Neil was one of them.

That was my first, that was the first guy that I knew really well that had died, not just post 9/11, not just the combat scenario, but that was the first friend that my first experience with death, which you know all my grandparents, you know they lived pretty late.

Both my parents still alive. But at that point, that was my first memorial ceremony, celebration of life, you know all that stuff. So anyway, jump forward from when Neil died. And I was at the Naval Postgraduate School’s early 2004. And I was struggling in that scenario.

First of all, I was struggling academically, of course, because I suck at school. But I was really having a hard time with the fact that I was in a school environment, and a lot of my teammates and friends were overseas doing what SEALs do, right? So I called Mike, back to the mentor.

And I said, “Mike, I have a lot of dead time at Monterey. I’m going through the postgraduate school program, and I don’t really know what to do with all the extra time. I mean, it’s great that I’m around more for my family. And our second kid was born there and I got to really kind of help repair some relationship stuff.

Because you know up to that point, I was on the road all the time. I was just going, going, going, going, going. So Monterey was a great time for my wife and I to have kind of some downtime. But the flip side of that was I was struggling with the downtime. So anyway, I called Mike and he’s like, “Don’t you have a friend that died?” And at that point, we had had a couple guys. But I said, “Yeah, yeah, I lost Neil.

You know We lost Neil.” And without skipping a beat, he goes, “John, you should do something badass in memory of that guy.” And I said, “Okay, well, what do you got in mind?” He said, “Why don’t you swim across the English channel?” And I mentioned it earlier, I was a middle distance guy. I wasn’t a distance swimmer. I certainly had never done a marathon swim in cold water.

And so I reflected on it for about five seconds and I said, “Well, I don’t know. Mike, let me call Patty, Neil’s wife.” And I said, “Mike, I’ll call you back.” And so I called Patty and within 10 seconds, she’s like, “Oh my God, you got to do it. You got a deal.” Neil would love that. And oh, by the way, Nathan will think it is so cool.” Nathan is Neil’s son.

I said, “Oh, okay, Patty, I’m going to do it.” So I called Mike back. I said, “Well, I’m going to do it. I don’t know how I’m going to do it being at school, but I’m going to do it.” And he said, “Well, look into it because you can’t wear rubber.” And I said, “What? It’s cold.” And he goes, “Yeah, well, look into it. I’m pretty sure you can’t wear a wetsuit.” And he was right. Again, for a swim, the count, you know, be recognized by the Channel Association and all that.

You can’t wear any Neoprene, you just wear swim cap and all this stuff. So then it became a function of when to do it, finding the time to train, et cetera, et cetera. And I like telling people this piece of the story because I wasn’t used to cold water with no wetsuit, but in Monterey, the water temperature is just about perfect because in Dover, the water temp kind of oscillates between 56 and 59 during the time of year in the summer when you swim, Fahrenheit. And the temperature in Monterey, the average is about 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Perfect training venue, right? So what I started doing is after class, I’d go down to the beach, put on my Speedo, swim cap, get in the water, 58 degrees, start training. So the first time I get in the water, how long do you think I lasted? As soon as you can stop the hyperventilation.

Just take a guess, brother. I mean, based on the fact that you did cold water training in the SEAL teams, I would imagine like an hour. Oh, dude. Five minutes. Five minutes. Now, as a boy who my quote unquote summer vacations were in a Speedo in the same temperature water on shingle because we don’t have sand in the beaches that I used to go to, I remember taking a hot bath after swimming so that my balls would come back from my stomach back into my sack.

So I know exactly what you’re talking about. Oh yeah, man, smuggling grapes. And so I came out of the water after five minutes. I was so depressed. I was like, what the hell did I just sign up for? I’m never going to make it. And then I thought of the reason I was doing it. I was like, nope, nope, gotta just keep going, keep acclimating. And your body’s amazing, man. Your mind is amazing. I had to take those thoughts, get rid of them, and get back in the water the next day. And then the next day I stayed in seven minutes, next day, nine minutes, next day 15, and you just mentally build up over time. You know The swims we did in BUDS, we always had on rubber. And even the pictures you see of like surf torture and all that, it was a very controlled environment. And yeah, you’re jackhammering and stuff, but there’s docs walking up and down the line.

And once they see somebody starting to hype out, they pull them offline. It’s much more controlled than you might think when you’re going through it. But anyway, to be allowed to go across and do the swim, you have to prove that you can do a 10-hour immersion swim in water under 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

So I worked my way up to 10 hours, did that in San Francisco, and ended up going over there, got permission to attempt it, went over there. And the way this swim works is you start in Dover. This was in August. You start in Dover and you shoot for this south of Calais, France. There’s a point of land, Cape Grenade, and it sticks out like a good, like almost a mile, sticks out into the channel.

So the goal is to leave from Dover and hit Cape Grenade. And as the crow flies, that’s 21 miles. But what happens is you’re with a pilot boat and a pilot boat navigates the current change because you go through two tidal shifts. So you might be swimming, let’s just say, 1.5 knots this direction, but the current might be going five knots this direction.

So your track for that 21 miles as the crow flies, your track ends up looking like a big S. So you got to have a pilot boat. Anyway, ended up making it across. And there’s all kinds of deep dives on that experience, but just phenomenal, phenomenal experience.

And I like talking to, you know, back to talking to college kids about things that seem overwhelming. I remember on that swim, a little past the halfway mark, we were getting into the second shift in the tides, but the second shift was going against the wind. So when the tides go in one direction, currents go in one direction and the winds go in the other direction, you no longer have swells.

You now have kind of the chop of the waves and the wind hitting each other. So it becomes kind of a washing machine. So we had 20 knots of wind going one direction and we had current going the other direction. I was having shoulder issues. My stroke count was falling, which is bad, by the way. I’m in my Speedo. And my dad was on the support crew on the pilot boat with another family friend.

And they could tell I was struggling. I was starting to fall apart. And unbeknownst to me, my dad had snuck on board a three by five American flag. And I look over, I breathe to my right and I look over, I’ll never forget, and they’re standing in 20 knots of wind is my dad and Joe Walsh holding this American flag. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, oh shit, get out of your own way, John. You’re not doing this for you.

You’re doing this in memory of Neil, and you’re doing it to raise money for Gold Star families like Patty and Nathan. And this ain’t about you. This is much bigger than you. And I like telling people that because when things get hard, if you’re going to embark on something or on a journey that’s really difficult and you know it’s difficult, do it for a reason bigger than yourself because then it makes it much more bearable.

As soon as I saw the flag, all the pain and discomfort melted away. Stroke count came back up and ended up making it. So cool, cool experience. But the coolest part about going to Monterey was getting to do that. Beautiful. Well, two things. I used to lifeguard in Hampstead Heath, which is in London. And the beginning of the season, it was one year and it was still freezing in April.

And we had to do lifeguard, almost like a test, annual test. And I think the water was 48 degrees that day. And you had to dive in and get you know soil from the bottom and all that stuff. And again, I’m sure my balls were back in my throat. But in that same experience, I remember there was this gentleman who literally looked like a bear, one of the hairiest men I’ve ever seen, kind of barrel chested. And he was a channel swimmer as well. And he would put his cap on and his speedos and his goggles.

And he would be able to do, and it was a small-ish pond compared to the main one that we lifeguarded on, but he had it perfectly where no matter how many laps in he was, it was the exact same time, every single lap. And this is a pond. It’s not like he’s following lines or doing laps. It was a circle that he was swimming. So you’re a 200 meter swimmer, then you end up, you know, going through BUDS and becoming a SEAL.

How did you train for the not just the cold exposure, but the actual exertion of swimming. I mean, it was 21 miles as the crow flies. It was probably, what, 30 miles that you actually swam in the ocean? Yeah, the course over ground, our GPS track was 37 miles, but you’re not really swimming 37 miles, right? Because if the currents move in five knots one direction, you know you’re crabbing.

The pilot boat takes care of all the navigation. But you know getting the distance was not the issue. It was the temperature was the issue for me. So, you know, I think any endurance athlete out there that’s listening has experienced that mapping out your training plan so you slowly increase the mileage, slowly, incrementally increase the mileage over time.

And then at a certain point before the event, you back the mileage off and you kind of taper off to save your body from injury and whatnot. The cold water exposure was similar, but it was just a very, very small incremental. It was all by time.

So I was less worried about getting in shape for the distance and more worried about being immersed in cold water for two and a half hours and not hyping out. But I put on 25 pounds with lots of Guinness and lots of King Arthur’s Supreme Pizzas in Monterey, California, and that certainly helped.

But I grew up, or when I was swimming at the Air Force Academy, one of our coaches, Karen Burton, she was a channel swimmer. And she’s one of the ones I called. And she helped me map out the mileage, but she was the one that told me it’s less about the duration, the distance, ’cause you’ll make the distance, no problem. It’s the temperature, it’s the cold water that’ll get you.
That and the rough, you know, it’s kind of craps you what weather scenario you get with wind and whatnot. So we got pretty fortunate. I mean, yeah, we got a blast of wind out in the middle, but it subsided after a couple hours. Beautiful. There’s a guy, Ross Edgley, who swam around the entire British Isles, who I still want to get on here one day because he’s a human performance, you know, mad scientist as well, self-experimentation.

He’s done all kinds of other crazy things like the triathlon dragging a log around. It’s just insane. But again, he talked, of course, the endurance. But I mean, you know like you said, just because you’re swimming doesn’t mean you’re not going to get ill. He had GI problems. You talked about the drying out of the mouth. Well, he was in a wetsuit, so his skin started sloughing off as he’s swimming around. So these are all the other factors that people don’t think about you know when you guys are swimming in the ocean like that.

Edgley, isn’t that Chris Hemsworth’s trainer? Is it the same guy? Yes, that’s right. Exactly. Yes, yep. That’s exactly right. Yeah. Wasn’t he in “Limitless”, that guy? He probably is. I haven’t seen that show yet, but I’m sure he is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, he’s a stud, man. I like that dude. Crazy. Well, I want to ask you one question that I ask anyone who saw combat before we go to the transition and the Human Performance Program and some of the things you did at the end of the career.

The average civilian gets a very polarized view of war through their very divided media. Either very pro-war, kill them all, stack bodies, let God sort them out, or very anti-war they’re all a bunch of baby killers. And then you have the men and women who would argue, more often than not, boys and girls that we send overseas to fight for our country and protect people in theirs. The first is a two-part question. The first part, and it might be pre-9/11 for you, I’m not sure.

Was there a point where you found yourself amidst combat where regardless of the politics that sent you there, you realized there were some atrocities, some horrible people that needed to be taken care of. Yeah, yeah. When you see people in the medical tent after an IED strike that the previous night you were having chow with that are friends of yours and you witness that and you live that, the anger that boils up in you is almost hard to describe.

So yes, I definitely experienced that. But you know when you’re with a team of like-minded guys and you’re going after and you both have the same mission set that you’re pursuing, you end up leaning on each other in so many different ways and you’re there for your teammates to lean on and you get exposed to some really ugly, the ugly side of humanity.

And yeah, it’s hard to reflect back and think about. It’s hard to talk about. But incredibly, it’s also where you, and this is my opinion, but it’s also where you see some of the best aspects of humanity with those that you’re working with. And I don’t just mean Americans.
Some of the most courageous stuff I’ve witnessed in my life was Iraqi teammates and Afghan teammates working with us. And so, yes, it’s bad, it’s hard, but you realize that what you’re doing is so much, it’s about so much more than just yourself. There’s such a bigger picture. And when you’re working with the Afghan National Police, I have this one example in mind.

And these guys, all they want, all they wanted was the Hakani network Taliban and the local Taliban. They just wanted them gone. They just wanted to protect their kids from that. And of course, our mission was more take care of the problem set over there so we don’t have it at home. But when you see the host nation guys that just and what’s happening to their kids and the suicide bombers and the kids they use, it was horrible.

It was horrible. And being part of making that go away was one of the greatest honors of my life. And in a weird sort of way, I’m grateful for it because I feel like it’s exposed me to a part of humanity that shouldn’t be there.

And I think one of the cool things about America and our NATO partners and our non-NATO partners is on that topic, we are in lockstep. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t agree on, but on making people go away that were responsible for something like 9/11, we are in lockstep. And that is really, really powerful to be part of something like that.

Well, thank you for that perspective. I think the things that our men and women do has got a two-sided element to it. We need to share the stories of the courage and even the loss and highlight what was done for this country. But also, there needs to be a cautionary tale like, hey, this is the cost of sending our young men and women out there.

So if you’re in a government building somewhere and poken the bear because you think it’s going to help with your votes, these are the voices of the men and women that came home with physical issues with mental issues, maybe came home in a coffin. And so if there’s no option but to send them, okay, that’s a universal acceptance then and off you go.

But all these other conflicts that you’re starting to try to send everyone to, we have to be reminded as Americans, as British, as everyone in their home country that this is something that we send as a last resort, not a continuing thing, especially, God forbid, if a part of the reason is that your friends in high places are making a lot of money when we are at war. And so now, you know, that kind of checks and balances is kind of skewed.

So I think it’s so important that we hear from the boots on the ground itself. Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy, James. When you think about how long we’ve been in sustained combat operations after 9/11. I mean, it’s never happened before in this country. We’ve never been down this road before.

So you know the second and third order effects of that type of lifestyle, we don’t even know what it means now. We’re seeing some of it with the suicide numbers. I was having a great talk with the guy in the VA and he was walking through mapping out some of the numbers. Remember you would hear all the time, 22 day, 22 day, 22 day.

And what he said was a lot of that 22 a day is actually not post 9/11 veterans, but a lot of that is either homeless population or Vietnam veterans or a combination thereof. And his point was, if we’re seeing 22 a day now, and I think the number’s even higher now, if we’re seeing that now and that’s the majority from Vietnam era in Vietnam involved an average of two deployments per person.

Some of them were, most of them were one deployment, right? ‘Cause you get drafted in, but some guys did multiple deployments. So the average deployment during Vietnam was two. When you look at what this country has asked of our military now, I mean, I’ll use a friend of mine, Job and I, we went to the Air Force Academy.

I was at 92 grad. Job Price was a ’93 grad, and we were both at SEAL team two together. Believe it or not, two Air Force Academy guys, the same SEAL team. Jump forward to December 22nd, December 22nd, 2012. And I get, I’m taking my son to a birthday party.

I’m a commanding officer at our unit in Germany. We had all three of our kids. Meg was really, really young and our oldest, I’m taking him to a birthday party. And I get this call, old friend of mine, and I could tell in his voice right away that he had some really bad news.

And I said, “Okay, man, who was it?” And he said, “Hey, man, it was Job.” I was like, “Fuck, okay.” And you know if you’re in this game, and you see it in the fire department, right? If you’re in this, not game, sorry, but if you’re in this world long enough, you will go to memorial services, sometimes a lot of them.

And everybody I know in the teams has gotten these calls. Everyone I know in the teams has gotten these calls. So I took a deep breath and Job at the time was the commanding officer of SEAL Team Four in Afghanistan. He had guys working for us in Germany. I had guys working for him in Afghanistan.

But commanding officer, SEAL team, the pinnacle, I would say, the pinnacle of a Naval Special Warfare Officer career is not just being a commanding officer, but leading troops downrange in combat. It’s the pinnacle. And this was Job’s 14th deployment. I don’t know if all 14 were combat, but it was his 14th deployment, 14.

So the guy, I’m leaving names out here, but the guy that called me from Virginia Beach, he said, “Hey, hey, JD, what you need to know is it appears that Job died by his own hand, self-inflicted gunshot wound.” It’s hard to talk about it still.

This is a story that I feel is important to get out there because Job was seen in our community in the Naval Special. He was seen as one of the most resilient guys we had. He never said no. He always was raising his hand, “Send me, send me, I want to go.” And the point I like to really hammer home with his story is that, and I said it earlier, it doesn’t matter how fricking resilient you are, everybody’s got a breaking point.

And in Job’s case, he had lost, at that point, three guys on his deployment and he was blaming himself, he wasn’t sleeping, he was on some meds, he stopped working out, you know, all this stuff. And he reached his breaking point. And, you know, that’s just one example.

But back to your original point, with what we’re asking the young adults of this country and a very small minority of the young adults in this country, that what we’re asking them to do in support of their nation going forward and doing great things. We got to be careful, man. We gotta be careful because especially in special operations in general, guys will not say, “Hey, I need a break.

I need to back off.” They don’t do that. You see the same thing in the fire service. You have guys doing 80-hour weeks. None of them are going to stand up in front of their teammates and say, “Hey, I’ve had enough. Can you pull me off the line for a week? I need some downtime.” And so it’s a whole different ball of wax now.

The leadership, there’s so much, it’s so much more important for leaders to be a little more intrusive with how they’re leading thier formations and how they’re taking care of their people and recognizing that maybe after 13 deployments, you need a break. And in Job’s case, I’m not saying anything, anybody did necessarily anything wrong.

It’s just that for me personally, that example really highlighted for me for where I was in my career at the time. It really highlighted for me the importance of, “Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are we doing?” Taking a step back and trying to see the whole picture. And it’s what drove me to pursue the last job I did in the Navy at SOCOM Headquarters.

Well, firstly, thank you for sharing that story. I think this raw emotion that I hear over and over again, especially from respected high performers, you know, alpha, to use a very cheesy term, is needed because as you know, a lot of the population, especially the men that were raised kind of in our generation, were brought up on this Stallone, Schwarzenegger, John Wayne bullshit of, you know, this is the superhero that is the man. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

And I always tell people, “You want to see a real hero? Watch the Band of Brothers series and listen to the real men who are now in their 80s still in tears because of what they saw and what they had to do.” So that is, you know, that vulnerability is so important. But with Job, you know I would argue as well. I mean, obviously, we’ve got Chad Wilkinson, we’ve got David Metcalfe, who’s the nucleus of 7X, which we’ll get to in a little bit. There’s the TBI element. 14 deployments. How many concussions was he exposed to on top of sleep deprivation and all these other things?

So even if we go to war, like I said, I have nothing to do with the military. I’m a first responder, but so many people, especially the Green Beret community, kind of have the same thing. Yes, Afghanistan was necessary, but we should have been in. We should have shut down the training camps, killed the key figures, and then you know trained up the local militia and then left. So even if you have to go overseas and take care of something, there’s a responsibility to bring our men and women home as soon as we can.

So 14 deployments wouldn’t even exist. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, when we should have come out of Afghanistan versus how long we should have stayed, that’s a whole ‘nother podcast. And I actually don’t want to go down that road, but you know there’s always another side of the coin. I mean, we’re still in Japan. We’re still in Korea. We’re still in Germany. And that’s just another aspect to keep in mind. But the TBI piece, holy crap.

Cumulative subconcussive issues, MTBI, TBI, blast exposure, sleep, disrupted sleep, guys stuck in hypervigilance, not being able to get into the parasympathetic state, which is absolutely key and essential to your health and well-being. I cannot tell you how many friends of mine have struggled in that world.

And I did too. I mean, I went and got treatment for it and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, it’s real. And when we get back to what we were talking about before, when you had a year and a half to kind of rest and recover, that also helped with all the MTBI and concussive events and blast exposure. The rotation’s gotten a little better now than it was in those immediate years after 9/11.

But yeah, it’s still an issue, 100%. And one of the really cool things I think you guys are doing with the 7X project is really amplifying that talking point with the documentary that you’re going to make and where you’re going with human performance and baselining and not just baselining HP stuff, you know strength, agility, power, but baselining neurocognitive capability on these guys because a lot of the people that were struggling with, let’s just say TBI symptoms.

If there had been a neurocognitive baseline from when they initially came through assessment and selection, it would be so much easier for the medical community to identify, hey, whoa, that guy needs a break because here’s where he was and here’s where he is now. And we need to adjust that. We need to give him some downtime. We need to force him, if need be, to come off the line.
And there’s ways to do that, I think, that the military community would 100% support. And I can’t speak for all the military, but I know that U.S. SOCOM, Special Operations Command, has moved in the direction of neurocognitive baselining in addition to the human performance baseline. And to me, that’s great news. And I hope that is spreading throughout the military because it’s so, so important.

Well, I think that’s how you also have the conversation of mental health to the naysayer, to the guy that still buys into, you know, I’m Superman. And I mean that in a, you know, in a kind way, but a lot of us do buy into that superhero mentality of the first responder or the military. But when you understand from a human performance lens that a quiet mind is what is going to allow you to enter the flow state and therefore be a high performer on the battleground in a structure fire.

That, I think, is another kind of foot in the door for that conversation. So, okay, you don’t believe that, you know, you’re ever going to have any mental health issues. All right, well, beautiful. Like you said, especially if you’ve got a way of baselining, to get in that flow state, you have to have a calm mind. So let’s use these same tools that we would address from the mental health side. Let’s reframe it as human performance. All right, we’re going to do meditation. We’re going to do breath work because I want you in the shoot house or whatever kind of scenario you have, we’re going to try and take you up 10%. So that way, you kind of get to access the same thing, but you’re calling it something else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The strides that we’ve made with the human performance in the human performance world.

Gosh, I wish so much of that had been in place you know 30 years ago because myself and my teammates would be in a totally different place physically, maybe even emotionally because when you train, when you appropriately, and I’m not taking anything away from assessment selection, I firmly believe that needs to be freaking hard. And that’s how you wean out those that probably shouldn’t be there.

So I’m not talking about Green Beret initial training, assessment selection SEALS, Mar observators, AFSOC, all that. But the way we train inside the teams after assessment selection, once you’re in that organization, what we’re seeing now is so different than what we were doing 20, 30 years ago.

And it’s smart. It’s really helping the guys out. And back to the 7X thing, I think that’s part of your mission is to help take that to the next level and promulgate that throughout not just the military, but the first responder world too. I would imagine you’re seeing some of the same issues in Fire, Police, EMT as well. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And like you said, the docu-series and the manual is going to be amazing. That’s why the 7X itself is going to be incredible, but it’s the breakdown piece. It’s a shiny object as well.

Obviously, there’s going to be some amazing footage of these guys. You know I mean, we’re going to be in Antarctica two weeks tomorrow, so that’s going to be pretty epic. But really, the real takeaway is going to be after we get back. These guys are physically, mentally, and spiritually beat down. Now, how do we put them back together again? What part of the preparation worked?

Where were some failures? And then you know what does the rehab look like? And now we have the on-ramp, the event, and then the transition to really pull all that data from. That podcast on Rich Roll, kind of walking through everything that’s gonna happen for the event, that was great. That was great. I pushed that thing everywhere, man, ’cause nobody really knew. We kind of knew like second, third hand, something was going on, it was going to be cool, marathon on seven continents, jumping seven continents.

But I think that podcast put it on the map. That was really, that was well done. I don’t know how you guys got on there, but good job. All right, well, the other half of that question I’m going to quickly throw at you, and then we’ll talk about that last position you held, and that’ll take us to KAATSU as well. We talked about the worst and you touched on it. Another voice that’s not heard is kindness and compassion on the battlefield. So often, you know we’re told, or we’re at war with Iraq, or we’re at war with Afghanistan.

When the reality is there’s some extremists in those countries that are terrorizing the people of those nations. And I hear so many stories on here of kindness and compassion, whether it’s the people, the native people, whether it’s, you know, our military. So whether, I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot, but are there any kind of stories that really stuck out to you of kindness and compassion amongst some of this misery and horror that you were working? Thousands, thousands. The negative, the ugliness, the part that maybe you hear the most about, a fraction of the kindness, the compassion, the helping your fellow man out. One of my deployments was a provincial reconstruction team deployment in Afghanistan.

And, you know, as American military guys, we are not supposed to have any interaction with the Afghan local females, right? And we’re supposed to try and avoid interactions with the kids. But when you hire a bunch of Afghan males, military-age males, by the way, and you hire those guys and you help walk the Afghan contracting process through the entirety of a piece of ground with nothing on it, all the way up to building a school and manning the school with teachers and getting supplies into school and dah dah dah dah dah dah dah you’re probably thinking, what, Navy SEAL?

But yeah, provincial reconstruction, we helped with that. And then to have ladies, you know, covered up in nursery doors and stuff, and come up in tears hugging you and falling at your feet. Thank you, thank you, thank you in their broken English and you know us in our broken poshto saying, “you know That’s why we’re here to help, to help.” And those stories, tons of those stories, tons of them.

And you know for every 10 of those, there’s one with ugliness. It’s hard to talk about. But yeah, I’ll send you a great picture taken. It was in Ramadi in 2006, and we were helping the Marines with some security. And it was right after school had been built, and we were leaving, and I turned around and there were all these kids, and I had some extra candy or whatever, you know, in my pocket.

And I go over there and they just surrounded me. And it’s one of my favorite pictures from all my deployments. I’ll send it to you. You know We did some really good stuff over there. Yeah. Does that answer your question? Oh, it does completely because like I said, this is the problem. We don’t hear that voice either. It’s this extreme either very pro-anti, but this is the voice of the battlefield.

And a lot of the voice of the battlefield are, I mean, one of my favorite ones is that you know military veterinarians are taking care of local dogs and horses. And you know I mean, we hear so much, you know some of the kindness is coming from our uniform people. Some of them, I mean, my favorite part of the Lone Survivor Story, which was a lot more prominent in the book than the film, sadly. But the courage and sacrifice and selflessness of that village that protected him, you know that’s another one.

I mean, they risked their lives, everything just to protect this American SEAL that was finding refuge in their village. So these are the other, you know it’s the other piece of the coin, the other piece of the puzzle where I feel like you know the entire nation was vilified when actually you know our own military are doing beautiful things, but the courage that I hear from the Afghani and the Iraqi interpreters and commanders that I’ve had on here as well, like people aren’t told the whole story and the whole story is beautiful and the whole story is a cautionary tale.

But if you just get these clickbait sound bites, the people at home are going to have no understanding of not only what our men and women did for this other country, but the incredible heroism of the people in that nation itself. Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more, James. And cautionary tales. Good way to put it. But yeah, our armed forces did some really great, great things over there and helped a lot of people.

And we made some bad people go away that had to go away. Absolutely. Well, speaking of taking care of people, talk to me about the role that you held at the end of your career and then the human performance side as well as the kind of the wellness side. So my last job in the Navy, I was the director of the POTFF program.

POTFF stands for Preservation of the Force and Family. It’s a program that SOCOM started, really started under Admiral Olsen when they started peeling the onion back across the Special Operations Force to see what was truly going on with families, the guys, predictability or unpredictability of deployment cycles, and just seeing what all was going on out there. ‘Cause as I was talking about before, the wheel started coming off the bus and it was making its way all the way up to the headquarters. Anyway, when Admiral McCraven, Bill McCraven followed Admiral Olsen, he took all the data that Admiral Olsen had gathered and saw the pressure on the force. Initially, it was POTFF, pressure on the force and family.

And then Admiral McRaven said, “Hey, let’s build a program to address all those pressure points.” And that was the beginning of POTFF. And POTFF, initially, we had four domains. We had a spiritual domain, a human performance domain, a family, social domain, and a psychological domain. And if you thought of each of those domains, think of like a Venn diagram with overlapping circles. And where all four of those circles overlapped, that was kind of the focal point, what we were after, to try and improve all of that for our operators, for our personnel, but for the families as well.

What we found back to that 24-month cycle versus 12-month cycle, early on before 9/11, I mean, yeah, every command had an ombudsman, and there was communication with the families, but it was just through this one person that would support the commander at the command. After 9/11, so before, there wasn’t a whole lot of focus on the family, okay?

After 9/11, when things started really going south and Admiral Olsen pushed these people out to all the commands across the world, all the soft commands, what they were coming back with were one of the key pieces that they were kind of illuminating was the family was suffering in ways that the family never had dealt with in the past. And there’s a lot to this conversation, but the ultimate big change was we, as a community, decided to start taking contracted resources, people, personal service contracts, and taking these people and embedding them in operational units in all four domains.

So having a family readiness coordinator working inside an operational command. Having a, maybe not a psychologist, but like a licensed clinical social worker or counselor working inside the command. An HP professional, it could be a physical therapist, it could be a trainer, it could be a strength, conditioning coach, dietitian, taking those people and embedding them in the operational command.

Spiritual chaplains, get more access to chaplains and taking all these helping resources, but we didn’t have money for it. So I, you know, my hat’s off to Admiral McCraven for doing this. I know he broke some glass to pull it all together, but he went to Congress and he basically laid out why the deployment cycles, the unpredictability, a lot of what Special Operations was dealing with, why we needed some resources to help and what his plan was.

And the plan was take these helping resources and embed them into commands. And what ended up happening, let’s just talk specifically, behavioral health, right, from the psychology perspective. You have this stigma out there of seeking any kind of counseling or behavioral health assistance. And it’s seen as a bad stigma.

You know Guys, back then, guys didn’t want anything to do with it. They would be, they saw people going to visit psychologists, going to see the shrink as being mentally broken. What happened was we took some of these, we took these, let’s just say licensed clinical social workers, LCSWs, embedded them in the commands. And what happens is they start building relationships inside the command. They start going to the gym with the guys.

They start eating at the same chow hall. They start interacting with all the senior enlisted leadership, the officers, and the guys see that. The command sees that. And then you see the command master chief going in to see the counselor and shutting the door. Same with the XO, same with the CO. So you started this relationship built on trust inside of the operational command, and then everything just incrementally started slowly getting better.

And we still have a long ways to go, I know, but embedding, helping resources inside the operational commands was the best thing that came out of POTFF. So that parallels something that I’ve talked about for a while. I had a unique perspective because I’ve worked for four fire departments and then volunteered for a fifth one for just a heartbeat, a very short time.

But of those four, that’s four hiring practices, four times doing these crazy psych tests, three times doing polygraphs, which, you know, tongue in cheek tell basically is smoke and mirrors. It’s bullshit. Complete waste of money. Yeah And then I’ve asked the people in the psychology world, to me, the psych test that they give us is kind of ridiculed within the world of psychology. It’s not a well respected test at all.

And it is insane. It’s a bunch of questions. You know do you like dogs? Do you like driving cars? Do you like music? Do you like touching kids? Do you like flowers? Ooh, wait a second. What was that? You know And it’s almost like trying to catch you with these bizarre phrases. And then the polygraph, like I said, is really just to smoke and mirrors you to confess to something that you did you know when you were younger. But the reality is your background check is really going to show if you’re a good boy you know largely and you’re worthy of becoming whatever position.

What I feel, having heard over 700 stories now, you know and not everyone has a more powerful early story, but more often than not, the men and women in uniform have a certain amount of childhood trauma, which is probably what drove them into service in the first place, to either stop the vicious circle that they are in maybe generationally, more often than not also to fill that void with adrenaline and excitement and then that search for community and tribe as well. So if we know that there is going to be a certain level of trauma in someone’s past, that potentially can be an absolute asset in our profession. I don’t understand why we do this box checking psychological testing, but we take the same exact budget. And I’m talking, obviously, first responders here and give them X amount of counselling sessions at the front door.

Not only now are you giving them an opportunity to process some of the things that happened before they ever put the uniform on, but as you said, you’ve now embedded, embedded, embedded a counselor from day one and normalize the mental health discussion. So the moment they start going through some things and it can be internal, it can be external with family. You know immediately I’m going to go talk to, you know, Sarah or Steve, my counselor.

And in my opinion, I’m sure the cost of these psych tests and the polygraph would equate five counseling sessions and then therefore justify having someone, as you said, permanently employed by a fire department or a police department or a dispatch. So you wouldn’t even have to come up with the money. But rather than the CYA box checking, you proactively allow these men and women to process what they brought in, which in turn will become resilience within the profession. Yeah, I mean, that whole, totally, totally. And we’ve made some progress on that, you know that idea that if you break an arm, you go and see a doc and you get it fixed. If you break something upstairs, you go and see a doc, you get it fixed.

And you know with all the resources, though, that are available now, I firmly believe that the best resource that we have is each other and our teammates. Doesn’t matter what kind of organization you’re talking about. I talk about this a lot.

It’s really important to step out of your comfort zone when you think you might need some help and to ask for it. But more importantly, because a lot of guys won’t do that, I would argue 99% will not do it. It’s too uncomfortable to ask for help. But the flip side of that conversation is when you see somebody that you think might be struggling, being that teammate, being that wingman, being that buddy for them to lean on.

And I think the hardest thing that guys struggle with, I struggled with it with Job. I wish I could go back in time because we would have these face phones just like this. We’d have these VTC video teleconferences every week, just he and I because he had guys working for me and I had guys working for him. So we would talk to each other all the time. And I wish I could go back in time and I saw he wasn’t sleeping, he looked like shit, and I wish I’d go back and just be like, “Hey, bro, not only, hey, bro, are you okay, but are you okay?

Are you thinking of hurting yourself?” And I’m not saying that would have made any difference in his scenario, but I wish more people would do that now when they see a teammate that they think is struggling, even if it’s just kind of like that sixth sense, you’re not sure. Something seems off. There are so many people out there struggling, man. I wish more people would do that.

One thing, again, I’ve observed, and I think this is another piece of the puzzle that people need to understand, is the best way to create an environment for people to talk is to be vulnerable yourself. So, for example, you know in that conversation with Job, say, “Well, look, when I transitioned out into the educational portion, here’s what I was going through. You know Here’s the thoughts I had. Here’s the depression I found myself because I was away from my team and I had this guilt because you know I was losing people that were overseas.

And I think that’s the other part is rather than simply saying, “Are you okay?” Almost starting with sharing a story. Like for me, you know when I went through paramedic school, I was going through a divorce, I was a single dad, that was probably one of the lowest points I had. I never got to that suicide ideation point, but another one is a back injury. I mean, you take a firefighter who has purpose and physicality and you put them where they can’t even put their shoes on or pick up their child anymore. Another emotionally crippling part of my life.

So by opening the door with that, it’s almost like you’re not just looking down and saying, “Are you okay?” You’re actually squatting down next to them and saying, “Let me tell you about my pain.” And then that, in turn, I find opens the door for a conversation because you were the one that initiated the vulnerability. Yeah. And so much of it starts with, a lot of it starts with physical injuries, especially guys that work in a job that’s very focused on physicality.

And then you get an injury, you mentioned your back. And I mean, my guy, you can’t do anything in the firefighter world without your back being at least 90%. You got so much weight, you’re demanding so much of your body. Sorry about that. Get rid of that thing. A lot of the behavioral health issues start with physical issues. And I went through that myself, man.

13 orthopedic surgeries over my career. I mean, I was an orthopedic mess, man. No, I agree completely. I actually found a thing called foundation training, which I interviewed one of their head coaches yesterday, who was a good friend of mine now, but it saved my career. And this is the other side is, sadly, in the workman’s comp world, a lot of these men and women are told, well, you know we’ll cut you open. Here’s a bunch of pills, you know and then you know we’ll fuse your bones together or whatever it is.

And more often than not, they come out and they’re never going to get back to that 100. You know I think then we’ll get to KAATSU next. There are some amazing movement practices and tools that people can use. You know I’m not talking about a completely broken femur. You can’t just rub some herbs in and do some jumping jacks and it’ll be good again. But there’s so many musculoskeletal injuries that you can rehab with movement practices. And therefore, you know the other benefit of that is you’re far less likely to be going down the opiate road, which can be a vicious circle for so many.

Yeah, yeah. Beyond these two weeks, you’ll be with MJ and a few other guys that have the KAATSU machines. And so you’ll get to experience that yourself, how some of this new science and technology that’s out there can really help guys. So let’s get to that topic. I know we’ve been chatting two hours. We haven’t got to KAATSU yet. I know, man.

I just looked at the clock. Are you okay on time? I wiped the afternoon, man. So we can go as long as you want. Brilliant. I’m just thinking of the regular Joe listeners playing and be like, “My God, land a freaking plane, dude.” Nope, nope. The regular Joe listener knows, okay, this is going to be a longer one. There’s from 30 minutes to four and a half hours on my library, so there we go. We know you said about the struggle in Monterey, you know when you were kind of taken from the tribe for a bit.

And I think that’s an important point. People talk about this with the transition out as far as retirement, but this can happen with promotion. This can happen with injury where you’re simply taken. You know I never wanted to leave the back seat the fire engine because I adored that position. So to go from a lieutenant in the front seat to a battalion chief and now you’re doing staffing and you know you’re not around the people. That in itself can be an unseen you know loss of tribe. So talk to me about your transition. What made you finally pull the trigger? And you know were there any struggles in that final transition out of the uniform? I don’t know, Jay. I feel like everybody has a different kind of threshold for how much they and their families can handle. For me, it’s funny. My family, they were totally good with the military.

They loved moving every two years and going to live in Germany, going to live in Guam and going on leave to go to New Zealand. I mean, they loved seeing the world. So it wasn’t them. And I always be real clear on why I got out when I did. It wasn’t them. It was all me. I came back from a deployment where I was gone just over 12 months and I missed one of my son’s birthday twice on one deployment.

And there were some other things that happened on that one, but that one little nugget right there. So we have three kids, but missing one of their birthday twice. I just had the hardest time getting past that. So I knew you know right away. And I was still years out from transitioning out. You know I still did two more jobs after that, but when I came back from that deployment, I was like, “Yeah, I’m done.” I mean, I’ll pay it forward as much as I need to. You know I’ll do staff work and all that, but I need to start setting conditions to get out. Some guys hit that at four years. Some guys at 30 years, they still have another 10 in them. So you know for me, yeah, 25 was it, man.

That’s all I had to give. So what was that transition? So you were obviously mentally ready. Did you transition into KAATSU or what did that look like from the SEAL teams onwards? Well, first of all, I felt like I was really fortunate because I fell into something that already was helping me when I was active duty. So I mentioned all the orthopedic drama that I had. My last two surgeries, the PTs used KAATSU for my rehab. And you know I’m sure a lot of your listeners are like, “KAATSU, what the hell is that?” It sounds like Shiatsu. Well, kind of atsu in Japanese means pressure. Ka means increase of pressure.

Guy in Japan, and we don’t need to go too deep on it all, but for decades, he’s been perfecting this way of taking elastic pneumatic bands and putting them high on your arms or the leg bands high on your legs and perfecting a pressure sequence where the bands have, say, 30 seconds of pressure on the setting, right?

So 30 seconds of pressure and then five seconds of none. And then 30 seconds, a little higher, 10 millimeters mercury higher pressure, and then none. And doing that over and over again. And when you do that, and you dilate tissue like that, and then relax it, let new blood in, and then dilate the tissue again and again and again. It’s a form of recovery for flushing metabolic waste.

It’s also a great way to work out if you want to go very low load. But for me, what I fell in love with was on the rehab piece, you know the PTs, they want you to exercise. They want to create metabolic stress, but they don’t want to overly tax the skeletal system if you just had surgery. Well, this is a way to do that. So you’re essentially tricking the brain into thinking you’re working much harder than you are.

So you’ll use KAATSU in conjunction with these rehab movements and it just feels much, much different. And you get a hormonal response as if you were doing heavy work or heavy weights. But in reality, you’re doing, by definition, light intensity movement, but you’re not straining the skeletal system. So you end up healing a lot faster. And so they did the guys at SOC, they did that for my rehab for two surgeries.

I fell in love with it. Ended up going out during my retirement leave to Japan with my family, met Dr. Sato, got more training, just went into a full-blown learning mode about how this methodology can help systemically.

So think about somebody that is dealing with TBI or somebody that you know has blast injury and just somebody that you don’t want putting a heavy, heavy strain on their body. When you’re doing KAATSU, that pressure on period of time, your perfusion goes up because they’re not tourniquets. Your heart has to pump harder to keep the blood moving past the band. And this is the beauty. Well, when your heart’s pumping harder, when your perfusion goes up, it goes up everywhere. So think blood-brain barrier, think retina, think subcutaneous, forehead, blood flow, everywhere blood flow improves in the whole body. So you might be having chronic pain, you might be having neuropathic pain, even residual limb pain, think like amputee, phantom limb pain, things like that.

This is a way without drugs and non-invasive to help a lot of people pass those pain kind of thresholds. So I love it. Been with the company now five and a half years and just steady growth each year. And we’re pumped to be part of your project and what you guys are doing at 7X. You guys are going to use it primarily as a recovery modality.

So when guys are sitting on the plane, they can just be passive. And every time those bands release, you get that flushing sensation. So you got all this dilated tissue full of metabolic waste. Flush it out. So I had Dr. James Stray Gunderson on the show, and I know he’s kind of like a spin-off of Dr. Sato’s early work. It used to work for us. Yes. So I got to demo their bands. It was quite interesting because I would do a CrossFit working out at the end.

I would put them on my legs and then do, I think it was jumping air squats that you had to do. And it was incredible. And it was very powerful to see that you could have the same exertion, but as you said, with far decreased weight. So if you’ve got someone rehabbing an injury or you’ve got someone who’s older or, you know as you said, maybe you don’t want to have that kind of spike in blood pressure that might go to the head. It was a great way of doing more with less, but also that systemic kind of inflammatory process after flushing through the entire body.

That made perfect sense to me. But I know as you mentioned, there’s a kind of a pulse element to the actual KAATSU machine. So talk to me versus just a pump and having a steady blood flow restriction. What are the benefits of the kind of undulation of your machines? So the devices you guys will have with you are this.

I don’t know most people be listening, but anybody that’s watching or anybody that’s listening, it’s about the size of a deck of cards and it can run in constant mode, which is what you’re talking about with the bands that Dr. Jim Stray Gunderson would use. But KAATSU is all about the release. So in Japanese, it’s actually KAATSU jiatsu. Jia is release.

Increase of pressure, release of pressure. And that’s what this device does. You can run it in constant, but the way Dr. Sato works it almost exclusively is in the cycle mode. So what happens is during the pressure phase, all the tissue distal of the bands dilates. Or I like to think of it as all the way down to the capillary tissue and the capillary beds.

Imagine all that venous tissue, all those little millions and millions of balloons stretching open for 30 seconds and then letting it go and stretch them open a little further and let it go. And if you think about a brand new balloon, the more you stretch it, the more elasticity you’re developing in that balloon. We’re talking about some rubber. But in your veins and arteries, vascular elasticity is key and essential.

And the more nitric oxide you create in your body, which is what KAATSU does, you get a lot of hormonal responses. But one of the big biomarkers we see go up significantly is NO or endothelial nitric oxide synthase, but NO numbers go up through the roof. NO, nitric oxide is key for creating that pliability, stretchiness, vascular elasticity.

So after you do these cycles of pressure where you’re dilating, stretching open tissue, and letting it go over and over and over, what happens is the blood flow, they call it your perfusion index, your PI, the blood flows much easier through that limb. And over time, your blood pressure, your blood pressure numbers will go down.

But again, for how you guys are really going to use it, you won’t even be exercising with it. You’ll be using it in a passive mode because each time the pressure releases, your heart is still pumping hard and that flushes that lactate and metabolic waste out of the tissue that’s in your leg. The guys will be using it on their legs almost exclusively. But yeah, fascinating stuff.

There’s a sleep component. The International Olympic Committee has done some cool research on this stuff. When you’re doing those cycles of pressure, the closer you do it to bedtime, the more you can slide the body into that parasympathetic state.

You can get the body to go parasympathetic faster, which gets stage three, stage four, recovery sleep happens sooner in an athlete that does a KAATSU cycles, just passive use, really relaxed right before going to bed. So lots of cool things that it’s used for. But yeah, I got introduced through orthopedic rehab. It’s probably more than you wanted to know. No, no, I wanted to know all about that. Especially the sleep side.

I mean, firstly, I’m going to probably use the bands in a pseudo workout because I’m there from a support. I’m a documentarian, partly paramedic, and then kind of like the sports science assistant as well with all their gear. So they’re going to be running. They’re going to be skydiving. They’re going to be well, we’ll probably all jump in water, but I’m not technically going to be getting around. You’re not getting out of that piece. Yeah. Especially in Antarctica. I don’t know how we’re going to do that. Probably just roll around in the ice.

But no, so I still technically am going to want to move, want to want to work out. So I’m thinking, all right, how can I find somewhere to hang off that can do pull-ups and push-ups and some air squats that I can put the bands on, get a pseudo workout whilst they’re doing their thing. We’re going to be doing jiu-jitsu as well, which would be another, not with the bands on, but another exercise. But yeah, I mean, if we’re going to be sat in this plane for hours at a time between continents, how can I use it when it’s available to create a body weight workout that will be more challenging because of the bands?

Yeah, you’ll love it, man. And when you guys are rolling, when you do a jiu-jitsu workout, do the KAATSU cycles before the workout. So just think about this for a second. This is how a lot of Olympians were using it in Tokyo. In the ready room, without jumping around and using all that ATP energy, sitting in a chair, nice and relaxed, working on breathing techniques with the bands on running through those automated cycles, you’re essentially warming up muscle tissue. You’re stretching muscle tissue from the inside out because all your connected tissue, all your muscle tissue is made up of capillaries and very, very small micro blood vessels. So the more you can stretch and relax that, the more warmed up you’re getting the limbs. So it’s cool seeing some of the Olympians using KAATSU in the ready room right before they go to do an event.

Michael Andrew is a perfect example, had the name drop there. Well, also with the sleep, I mean, the entire, you know I’m sure most of the people listening are on some sort of shift work, whether it’s fire, police, dispatch, you know doctor, nurse, et cetera. And so having a tool that will help deregulate, because I mean, I know the things like you know cold water immersion and that kind of thing, it’s great. But I live in Florida.

It’s very, very hard for me to get a bucket full of ice. I see all my northern Instagram friends, “Oh, I’m breaking the ice off my tub.” They’re like, “Dude, I can’t get ice here. My fridge only makes so much.” So having some other options that you can put on, you know I mean, as soon as you get home, it might be you did half a shift and now it’s 11:00 p.m., but you can sit there in your living room and just kind of do some breath work while that’s working as well to help the shift worker deregulate and try and get better sleep.

Yeah, what the IOC researchers call it is flight dysrhythmia. So you can affect flight dysrhythmia, otherwise known as jet lag. And I’ll actually send you the research paper they did on it because there’s actual protocols to use in the plane. So after takeoff, mid-flight, before landing, and what to do before you want the body to go full parasympathetic so that you can get into that sleep state faster.

So jet lag leading up to the Tokyo, after the Olympics moved to the right one year, about three months, three or four months before the opening ceremonies, the government of Japan told the IOC, “Hey, we are not letting any athletes come into the Olympic village until five days before opening ceremonies.” So think about that for a second.

It used to be five weeks. So trainers would bring their athletes in and they would have these acclimation periods, get used to the temperature, get used to humidity. Most importantly, get used to the circadian rhythm, getting their body set up. So taking it from five weeks and compressing it to five days, the trainers and coaches were losing their minds.

They reached out to the IOC, “Hey, what have you seen out there that’s non-drug and non-invasive?” These are Olympic athletes. They’re all getting tested. What have you guys seen out there that helps get the athlete into their circadian rhythm as quickly as possible? And they already were doing KAATSU research anyway, so it was a natural win. So all these articles came out during Tokyo Summer Games, you know we got a lot of good press out of the Olympics in Tokyo. But yeah, it absolutely helps with sleep. Absolutely. Beautiful.

Well, for people listening, where can they learn more about KAATSU and even order one for themselves? KAATSU.com K-A-A-T-S-U.com, kilo, alpha, alpha, tango, Sierra, uniform. And if you’re watching us, you can see down my email address right there, JD@KAATSU.com, JD@KAATSU.com. And anybody that listens to the show, we got a discount for you. Just reach out to me and we’ll give it to you. I actually don’t have it made right now, sorry. Well, we’ll discuss that. And just so you know, we can see each other, but this is an audio-only recording just because there’s only me.

This is it. And I realize that most people don’t watch the podcast anyway. So we’ll have all this stuff on the show notes, which will be the webpage attached to this episode. We didn’t talk about the Frogman swim. Oh, God, the Frogman Swim. One of the coolest things that I’m involved with, I think. Short story back in, ooh, I think it was December 2009, a guy named Dan Knaussen stepped on a pressure plate ID in Afghanistan.

The ID went low order, which means the whole charge did not go off, but he took the brunt of the low-order explosion and lost both legs above the knees. At the time, I was at SOCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, and there were, gosh, I want to say it was about 25 of us that got together to try and simply raise some money for Dan’s family.

So we did that in January 2010, coldest day of the year. It was 37 degrees outside. Water temp was 55. I remember it like it was yesterday because I skinned it and I suffered as a result of that. But what we did is we all agreed to try and reach out to friends and family, kind of like our Christmas card lists, if you will, and get people to donate something, you know 20 bucks or whatever to help this family out.

And we did that. And afterwards, we were at the American Legion on the other side of the swim in Tampa Bay. We did this in Tampa Bay, starting on the St. Petersburg side and then 5K across ended on the Tampa Bay side. And so cool swim. 25, 30 of us did it. Totally under the radar. Didn’t run it through the Coast Guard or local police or anything.

So anyway, we end up back at the American Legion after the swim, having beers and chit chatting, and we add up all the we added up all the money and we were hoping, honestly, to get somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 to help Dan Canason’s family. And we added it all up and it was crazy, man. I mean, picture, if you will.

So everybody’s got beers. We got this table at the American Legion and people are pulling up like wadded checks and dollar bills and IOUs written on bar napkins, whatever they had, and they’re putting it on this one table. And one of the guys, Dan, starts adding up all the IOUs and checks and stuff, and it added up to $30,000.

And we were like, “Whoa, that is freaking awesome.” And we kind of all walked away from that realizing that we were onto something that people wanted to help in any way they could. And money’s one way that can help with foundations and whatnot. So anyway, that was back in 2010. Now the swim, we just did our 14th iteration of the swim. And what we’ve done is we’ve made a partnership with the Navy SEAL Foundation and all the proceeds from the swim go to the foundation. And each year, the foundation has agreed to earmark those funds specifically for the Gold Star families.

So the surviving spouses, kids left behind after a tragedy of losing one of our own. And so what’s happened is each year, more and more Gold Star family members come to this event because what happens is we allow 150 swimmers in.

Each swimmer now agrees to raise at least $2,000 to the Navy SEAL Foundation to ultimately help with Gold Star family programs. And each swimmer swims for one of our fallen. So like this last January, I swam for Job Price, an old friend of mine. And the minimum is $2,000. But what happens is people reach out across their network saying, “Hey, this is all about helping Gold Star families.” And people reach deep into their pockets, and it’s really cool.

So each year, the swim has made more and more and more. And we just got the numbers back from this last January for the 14th time we did the Swim. And we made over a million dollars for the foundation, which is pretty amazing considering you’re talking about 150 guys and 150 kayakers working together to raise resources for that effort.

And so yeah, I love it. It’s become kind of a passion project for me. I’ve been invited to be on the board, so I’m on the board for the swim. And now that swim is also in Boston, and it looks like we’re going to be starting one in Annapolis, in New York, and it’s turning into its own incredible effort. And it’s really helping our fallen teammates out, or more specifically, their families. Because if you’re not familiar with what happens when we lose one of our own, the foundation covers everything, really. So all the family and extended family being flown to the memorial ceremony, the rental cars, the hotels, the food, the kids are folded into incredible scholarship opportunities.

And all that stuff takes, as you can imagine, takes a lot of money, but it is super, super cool. Beautiful. Well, thank you for telling me. I believe, and please correct me if I’m wrong, Sarah Wilkinson, Chad’s widow. We saw each other at Sandlot Jacks last year, and I don’t know if it was Tampa or Boston, but I know she was about to go to one of the events. Yes, you’re exactly right. Yeah, you know we have this party at this bar called Hula Bay afterwards.

The swim ends at the American Legion on the Tampa side. Then after everybody gets back, as an example, I’m coming out of the water. Job Price’s sister is standing there waiting for me. She has a coin, and she puts it around my neck. And you get a big hug from one of these Gold Star family members that’s there. You wait for everybody to finish.

We even have a platoon wave, bunch of veteran team guys swimming with all their kit. Yeah, Chris the Gov organizes that. It’s just incredible. And then everybody gets back to the Legion and we all move up to Hula Bay for an after party. And this year, we had 25 Gold Star families represented with about almost 70 family members from 25 Gold Star families mixing with guys that worked and lived and deployed and interacted with their sons or their husbands or their dads.

And seeing all that interaction is just, God, man, it’s one of the coolest, coolest things I’ve ever been part of. And yeah, I’m really, really proud of what we’ve achieved with that. That’s amazing. Yeah, I got to have Mama Lee on the show, Mark Lee’s mother. You know So I’ve had so many Gold Star family members just had one who lost and they were a sibling. And so you get all these different perspectives of what it’s like if you’re the parent, if you’re the children of, if you’re the brother or sister who I’m learning now are kind of the forgotten ones.

You think about the parents and how sad it was, but the siblings of this grown warfighter still have their own issue, especially if they were a younger sibling. You know, their brother or sister was 18 or 19, they might be 12. So, it’s so important for us to kind of wrap our arms around them. People listening, how can they help? How can they contribute if they happen to be the kind of person that would want to swim or support on that side? What are the best places or where can we direct these people to go?

Well, the best way to get involved is to go to Tampa, TampaBayFrogman.com, TampaBayFrogman.com. And all the donations go to a great cause. And the foundation does a lot of different stuff, but we’ve really worked closely with them to earmark the funds that come out of this swim to help the Gold Star families. And it’s freaking awesome.

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for what you’ve done and for letting people know how they can help. So, I want to throw a quick closing questions at you if you have time. Oh, I got time. Brilliant. All right. The first one I love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend? It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.

You know, as a guy transitioning that transitioned out of the military, I recently read a book that my wife asked me to read, and I wish I’d read it, not that it would have necessarily changed my glide slope, but it’s a great book to read in between chapters in life. And it’s called “From Strength to Strength,” I believe, by Arthur Clark from Strength to Strength. That is a good one. And the other one is the Israeli man, what is that one called? I’m looking on my bookshelf right now and I don’t see it here right now. But anyway, I think it’s called Startup Nation, the Israeli Economic Miracle or something like that.

You might have to look up the details, but I believe it’s called Startup Nation, and it’s about Israel, and it’s about startups. And it is the reason I ended up going with KAATSU. It’s so funny, man. I had it down to two organizations. One was massive and one was tiny, almost basically a startup. One was an executive recruiter for Amazon.

I was well on my way in that direction. And the other was KAATSU, and I was torn. And a mentor of mine, and if you’re listening to this and you don’t have a mentor, please get a mentor outside your family. That’s a whole ‘nother podcast. But a mentor of mine sat down with me and said, “Hey, before you make your decision, read this book. It’s short. Take a couple of sittings. You can read it.

Read this book.” And I read it and I never looked back. And the premise, the very, very basics are, if I had gone to a big organization like Amazon Executive Recruiting, and you look at the organization of Amazon as this giant pie chart, executive recruiting is this tiny, tiny wedge. And his point was, they’re bringing you in to work inside that wedge.

And you may promote, you probably will, but you, no matter how long you’re at that organization, the odds of you leaving that tiny, tiny wedge inside that giant organization are very small, as opposed to going to a startup where walking in the door, you’re going to be essentially one of the executives, you’re going to be exposed to marketing, you’re going to be exposed to research and development, sales, of course, everything that the company touches, you’re going to be involved in.

Packaging, unboxing videos, everything. You’re going to be involved with everything. And if you go into a small organization where you’re touching just about everything, let’s say the organization fails, or let’s say they let you go, you actually are now more valuable to the marketplace because now you’re not just a retired military guy.

You’re now a retired military guy with a background in business development, marketing, and da-da-da-da-da, dah dah dah dah dah dah dah dah And when you go to another startup, they’re now going to want you more. And he said, “You can play this game for decades where you go to an organization and they flatline or fail, and then you step up and go to another organization, eventually becoming your own boss.” And I thought, “Shit, that makes so much sense to me.” And of course, KAATSU never failed.

So I’ve been at KAATSU the whole time. Honestly, you know I could not have asked for a better outcome because you know I touched on it earlier very quickly, but when you look at some of the teammates that I have that are on opioids or drinking themselves to sleep every night because of neuropathic pain or residual limb pain, if you can introduce something to those guys, gender-neutral guys, I mean, guys and girls.

If you can introduce something to them that is not a drug and is non-invasive and it can improve their quality of life, you know game on, man. That’s exponential stuff versus an athlete that you’re just making little improvements to. When you really can help change somebody’s life, that’s pretty cool. Well, I love that pie chart analogy as well because that’s how I felt in the fire service.

One thing we’re told over and over again is, oh, if you want to make a difference, you got to promote. And I feel like all the way up to basically chief, you’re still in that tiny sliver of that pie. And I kind of had this insight and I had a slightly different lens because I worked for East Coast, West Coast, four different departments. I would argue probably one of the best departments in America and one of the worst. So pretty diverse kind of perspective. But the ultimate, and even Jocko Willink, like I posed this question to him and my frustrations and this is where I’m at.

And you know I’d like to like say that I had pretty decent ownership of my place in the fire service. And ultimately, it was. It was step outside that pie chart completely, make a difference from the outside pushing in. So I can totally understand from a slightly different perspective. But yeah, sometimes you know being the tiny fish in the giant pond is not the way that you affect change. And you know it doesn’t matter how fast you swim, you know maybe you need to find a different pond completely. Yeah, yeah.

Small fish in a giant pond. Yeah, exactly. And so you go the opposite extreme, big giant fish in a tiny pond. Absolutely. You just dig your own. All right. Well, then the next question, what about a movie and/or documentary that you love? Oh, man. Apart from Top Gun. Ah! Did you see the second one?

I did. It was brilliant. Cheesy as hell. I mean, the first one was in the ’80s. So, I mean, I think they replicate.. the only thing that I didn’t like a little bit. They almost did exactly the same scene with the piano. And I’m like, that could have been a little bit more imaginative rather than singing the same song with the same, you know. But apart from that, I thought it was amazing. Almost felt like they were taking shortcuts, right? Yes, exactly. Like copy and paste. Well, it’s not a movie.

It’s the series, but the series my wife and I are watching right now, The Chosen, is you know I mean, it’s definitely on the religious side, but I am absolutely enamored by that, as is my wife, truly enjoying that. Brilliant. Any documentaries at all? Well, I know yours is going to be really good. It certainly will. It certainly will. Let’s see.

I’m trying to think of one I’ve seen recently that jumps right out. You know Did you ever see the, I guess, yeah, it’s a documentary by National Geographic about the climber, Free Solo? Yes, Alex Honnold. Alex Honnold. Yeah. That documentary changed me.

That was a whole that was kind of a very well-done documentary. Before I saw it, when I saw what the subject matter was, I was like, “Are you kidding me? Idiots climbing without ropes. Dude deserves to fly.” You know what I mean? Like That was my initial reaction. And then I watched it. I was on the plane and I found myself continuously rewinding parts of it to watch them again and listen to what he had to say.

And just fascinating that perspective that there are some things in this life worth doing, even if they mean potentially tragic, catastrophic consequences. I really enjoyed it. So Free Solo, that’s a good one. If you haven’t seen Free Solo, do yourself a favor and watch it. Absolutely. Yeah.

I want to get Alex on one day because again, you talk about ownership and mastery of your skill set because it’s not irresponsible. The same with a lot of the BASE jumpers I’ve had on. They’re kind of the way they say, you know normally in a profession, well, as long as you’re 90% safe, well, if you’re a free climber or a BASE jumper, you can only have 100% safe because anything else is death. So, actually, the diligence that these men and women have and the mastery of their craft would be an amazing insight to bring over to the first responder of military professions listening.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Because he would tell you he was 100% safe. He would not have ever taken on that challenge if he was not 100% sure that he could do it. And that was just, yeah, great analogy and carryover to BASE jumping too. So, have you seen it’s a similar documentary? It’s called The Alpinist. I’ve heard about it. I haven’t seen it. You got to watch it.

I can’t say anything about it because it will take you on another journey. But I would say it parallels it. And I believe the quote was that I forget the gentleman’s name now, but the subject of the alpinist was Alex Honnold’s hero. So I don’t need to say any more than that. Yeah, phenomenal climber. All right. All right. Well, speaking of amazing people, is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military, and associated professions of the world?

Somebody that I personally know. It doesn’t have to be. I worked for a guy after Admiral McRaven. Actually, Admiral McRaven would be good as well. But I worked very closely with General Joe Votel and he left SOCOM. He became CENTCOM commander. He’s now retired ranger guy, four-star. And the reason I bring up his name is back to that stress on the force in the behavioral health piece. One of the things he did when he was the SOCOM commander is he met, I’m forgetting the lady’s name on CNN, but he did an interview with her and he was total open kimono about his and his wife’s, but primarily his struggles that he dealt with throughout his career and how he and his wife dealt with them.

And I’m telling you, it was gold because just about everybody in the command and outside the command in the special operations community, which is now like 73,000 people. But a lot of people saw that interview and saw that as, oh my gosh, not only is it okay to seek care when you need it, but the commander of all of our commander is really leaning forward and encouraging it to please, please do it.

I think General retired Joe Votel would be an awesome guy to have on your show because he influenced it in a positive way, a lot of people, and he’s still doing it so today. Beautiful. Well, thank you. So, the very last question that I have before we make sure everyone knows where to find you over and above the website. What do you do to decompress? So it’s funny. A lot of people in my world that I came from are extroverts. I am a deep, deep, far right, maybe far left, I don’t know, but introvert. Meaning the way I re-energize is not amongst and around other people. So being on a surfboard in a lineup is one of my favorite things.

Being on a paddleboard all by myself, out on the Gulf, one of my favorite things. Here recently with all three kids, we’ve started kiteboarding and I absolutely love that. But again, active by myself in nature, just about anything in nature. That’s about my favorite way to decompress. And then my favorite things to do are things with my family outside. So skiing, skateboarding, that kind of stuff. So it’s interesting you said you know most of the community is extrovert. I think that’s what a lot of us think in the first responder professions as well. You go on the dinner table and you know there’s the guys you know spinning yarns and you know the firehouse clown and all that kind of stuff.

I had a guy on who wrote The Introverts Edge and it was recommended to me by a friend of mine who went through Green Beret selection. He don’t think he ever deployed. He actually had his own kind of downward spiral, had horrendous childhood trauma, pre-military. But when he came on, he said the definition of an introvert is you can be in groups of people, but he said, “Where do you get your energy from?” So just like your definition, I think a lot of us, I assumed I wasn’t like the center of attention or anything, but you know I was kind of in the middle.

But I realized, no, I’m the dude where I can be in a party or whatever, but you’ll turn around and I’m gone. That’s when I’m like, all right, I’m done. Out. So I re-energize either on my own with my dog or you know with an intimate relationship. My wife, you know just a person with a coffee. And I think a lot of us do. And what’s interesting is if you look at how many people drink to socialize, especially the pregame, there’s probably a lot more of the population that is actually introvert than we think because if you believe it, I believe it.

How many of you people do you know that I need to be in a crowd to energize? I think most of us would admit there’s an element of anxiety going out and that that’s okay. But I think when you look at the other guys, you think, oh, they’re all you know life of the party. What’s wrong with me? That’s a skew perspective. I think most of us are actually introvert. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree with that.

And you kind of brought up something. Going back to the book, I got another book for you. ADHD 2.0. ADHD, the number two decimal zero. So I’m an ADD, ADHD guy. And I used to joke about it. My parents would joke about it. I joke about it, would joke about with each other, you know squirrel. You know That was me. I was the guy constantly getting distracted. And then when I got out and I went through this, it was like a TBI blast treatment protocol counseling and stuff. One of the things they did is they did this battery, these various batteries of tests. And one of them was an ADHD test. And I tested on a scale of one to 10, I was like a 9.93 or something all the way over.

And they’re like, “Oh yeah, you’re clinical ADHD.” And I was like, “What?” ‘Cause you know I grew up, that’s seen as like a bad thing, right? And what I learned in the docs I was working with, they’re like, “Actually, you would be pleasantly surprised how many people in your line of work are actually clinically ADHD.

If you think about the ability, because no brain can do two things simultaneous, but an ADHD brain has the ability to bounce back and forth through various modes of information flow. And I would argue it’s probably the same in EMT and police and fire. In the SEAL teams, I mean, think of you got one radio freak in this ear. You got another radio freak in this ear.

You’re speaking, you’re giving orders, you’re tracking fast movers, helos, this, that, whatever. You’re in a patrol, you’re moving, you’re doing all this shit seemingly at the same time, but you’re not. Nobody can do it all at the same time. And what they’ve found is a lot of guys that spent a lot of time in special operations, they actually grow more into the ADHD world.
And then when they get out, it’s a process that kind of slowly kind of come out of it. But anyway, the book is fascinating. It’s written by two docs. They’re both ADHD, grew up with it. And their perspective, and they talk diet, they talk activity, they talk good fits in society, bad fits in society.

All this stuff coming from these two docs are both ADHD guys. And it’s a great book. I did it on audiobook, and it’s fine on audiobooks. It’s probably more effective if you read it. But as an ADHD guy, I do a lot more audiobooks, man. Brilliant. Well, thank you. I’ve never heard that one mentioned before, but it’s amazing.

This onion gets more and more skins, you know but it’s incredible because the more things I hear like this, the more you can bring to that multi-dimensional problem that each individual human being is experiencing and then hone in some things that maybe aren’t obvious. And the perfect example in mental health is, well, you know you were in Afghanistan, so it was what you saw. And we both know that there’s so many other layers that if you just focus on that, it’s no wonder that person feels like they’re not getting better because we’re not addressing childhood trauma and TBIs and sleep deprivation and psych meds and alcohol and you know even the personality type.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, very last question then. If people want to reach out to you specifically, you talked about KAATSU.com. Are there any areas on social media or other sites they can get hold of you? Yeah, LinkedIn’s the best one for me. If you just do LinkedIn and type in John J-O-H-N Doolittle, D-O-O-L-I-T-T-L-E. If there’s a bunch of John Doolittles, which I doubt, but if there is, just type in the word KAATSU and you’ll get me.

I’m wearing sunglasses with a hat on. Well, John, I want to say thank you so much. I mean, as I talk about so often, when we hear stories, firstly, like I said, of combat, you know the horrors and the beautiful humanity, that is an imperative conversation, but also the courageous vulnerability of the mental health issue that we have as well.

And so Between all that, your career, you know what you’re doing now with KAATSU, it’s been a phenomenal conversation. So I want to thank you so much for being so generous, almost three hours of conversation. James, it’s my pleasure, my honor. Thank you very much for you making the time. And thank you to Alex, of course, for introducing us. And thank you for what you guys are doing with the 7X project.

You guys are going to help a lot of people with what you’re doing, and that’s pretty damn cool.