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Jason Kander on Treating PTSD in Veterans · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:00
  - Afghanistan veteran Jason Kander was the first millennial to be elected to be elected in statewide office.
• 0:05
  In 2018, in the midst of a high profile election, he stopped his campaign to seek treatment for PTSD.
• 0:12
  Now he's helping veterans fight suicide and homelessness, saving Afghans from Taliban retribution and more.
• 0:19
  His latest book is the bestseller
• 0:20
  'Invisible Storm: A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and PTSD.
• 0:25
  'Invisible Storm: Welcome to CareTalk America's home for incisive debate about healthcare, business and policy.
• 0:30
  'Invisible Storm: I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group.
• 0:34
  'Invisible Storm: - And I'm John Driscoll, the president of Walgreens Healthcare.
• 0:38
  'Invisible Storm: Jason, welcome.
• 0:39
  'Invisible Storm: We're excited to talk to you and congratulations on the book.
• 0:43
  'Invisible Storm: - Thank you very much, and thanks for having me.
• 0:45
  'Invisible Storm: I'm excited to be here.
• 0:47
  'Invisible Storm: - So how did you as a young lawyer end up in Afghanistan?
• 0:53
  'Invisible Storm: Tell us a little bit, maybe of the origin story before we get into the healthcare piece.
• 0:58
  'Invisible Storm: - Sure.
• 0:59
  'Invisible Storm: So I was going to American University in DC when 911 happened, I was in my last year of college.
• 1:05
  'Invisible Storm: And up until that point in my life, I'd always looked at military service as being in the, maybe someday category, right?
• 1:13
  'Invisible Storm: It was like, well, I really admire that and maybe someday I'll do it.
• 1:16
  'Invisible Storm: And then 911 and it just sort of flipped and I was like, well, I'm gonna do that and I'll just figure out the rest of my life around that because my country was going to war and it just made sense to me.
• 1:28
  'Invisible Storm: I decided that's what I was gonna do.
• 1:30
  'Invisible Storm: So I was getting ready to start law school.
• 1:33
  'Invisible Storm: So I started law school that following year at Georgetown, and I actually was gearing up to just start RCC right away, but then I played a pickup football game with a bunch of buddies, and I was the idiot who was like, no we should totally play tackle.
• 1:49
  'Invisible Storm: And one of my really good friends to this day was on the other team, and he and I were always rivals about everything.
• 1:55
  'Invisible Storm: But the thing was, I was a baseball player, he was a all-state free safety in Texas.
• 1:59
  'Invisible Storm: So anyway, I tore my ACL in that game, a nice tackle by him.
• 2:05
  'Invisible Storm: We still argue over whether I was in the end zone or not.
• 2:08
  'Invisible Storm: And then I had to get surgery and physical therapy, so I wasn't able to go in right away.
• 2:12
  'Invisible Storm: So when I started as a 1L at Georgetown Law, I also started at the very beginning of Army ROTC.
• 2:21
  'Invisible Storm: And so I did ROTC while I was in law school.
• 2:25
  'Invisible Storm: A lot of people were like, hey man, you could skip all this stuff and just become a jag.
• 2:30
  'Invisible Storm: And I was like yeah I just kinda felt like at the time it seemed to me the army probably had enough lawyers and I wanted to get in there, and I don't know I had aspirations of doing these big things in the army.
• 2:41
  'Invisible Storm: It was much more interesting to me at the time than law school.
• 2:43
  'Invisible Storm: Well, I say at the time as if there was ever a time when law school was more interesting than something else that didn't really happen.
• 2:48
  'Invisible Storm: And so I became, got my commission, became an army intelligence officer, and volunteered to deploy.
• 2:55
  'Invisible Storm: And that's how I ended up in Afghanistan in for the fall of 2006.
• 3:01
  'Invisible Storm: - So it sounds like a smooth interesting transition from civilian life to military life, but then talk about the transition on the other side.
• 3:11
  'Invisible Storm: How hard is it for veterans to transition to civilian life?
• 3:15
  'Invisible Storm: - It's very hard, I mean, my case is one you would, it's hard to imagine somebody being set up for a better or smoother transition, right?
• 3:25
  'Invisible Storm: When you think about a really soft landing, I mean I left Afghanistan and went back to a job that was totally unlike being a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
• 3:36
  'Invisible Storm: I went back to being a lawyer at a firm in Kansas City where they had bagels and donuts available in the conference room on Fridays.
• 3:44
  'Invisible Storm: It was completely different.
• 3:45
  'Invisible Storm: So, on paper it should have been great.
• 3:48
  'Invisible Storm: I was employed, I was married, my parents live here in Kansas City.
• 3:54
  'Invisible Storm: I had a career, I had a wife and I had my extended family all there.
• 3:59
  'Invisible Storm: And that didn't change the fact that being deployed to a combat zone, being in the situations that I was in changed my brain.
• 4:08
  'Invisible Storm: And so that's in the best possible example, right?
• 4:11
  'Invisible Storm: And with the work that I do now where I work a lot with homeless veterans and veterans who are struggling, in a lot of different ways, one of the things we work on most is restarting that military to civilian transition back at day one, even if folks have been out for a long time.
• 4:26
  'Invisible Storm: And when you think about it, let's say it wasn't somebody in my situation, let's say it's somebody who, they went into the military straight out of high school, which is the more common scenario, right?
• 4:35
  'Invisible Storm: And during that time they sustained some trauma or maybe they don't.
• 4:39
  'Invisible Storm: Maybe they don't deploy nothing like that happens.
• 4:41
  'Invisible Storm: But even then, after four years they come back home and they're not surrounded by people who did anything like they did over the four years previous.
• 4:50
  'Invisible Storm: They knew where most of their meals were coming from.
• 4:52
  'Invisible Storm: They never had to go, likely, they never had to go get a lease on an apartment.
• 4:55
  'Invisible Storm: They may have chosen to but they likely didn't have to.
• 4:59
  'Invisible Storm: They knew where most of their meals were coming from.
• 5:00
  'Invisible Storm: They never even had to go get like cable figured out.
• 5:03
  'Invisible Storm: So when you layer over that, the feeling of separateness in a society where less than 1% of the population now serves in the military and the possibility of having sustained some trauma during your time, now you're really complicating the ability to reenter civilian life.
• 5:23
  'Invisible Storm: - And when you think about that, Jason, how much of that is the trauma of combat versus the trauma also being in a high pressure situation all the time?
• 5:33
  'Invisible Storm: One of the things you sort of it's very evocative in your book, is just moving around in a combat zone in an alien place with a lot of threats, is pretty stressful.
• 5:43
  'Invisible Storm: You don't have to be shot at to be pretty stressed.
• 5:48
  'Invisible Storm: That's gotta be something that creates some invisible burdens that not particularly folks at home don't necessarily understand.
• 5:59
  'Invisible Storm: - Yeah. And that's one of the big things I tried to get across in the book, right?
• 6:01
  'Invisible Storm: Because that was my experience, the one you're describing.
• 6:04
  'Invisible Storm: I came home and was convinced for 10 years that whatever was going on with me could not be attributed to my deployment because I never fired my weapon over there.
• 6:14
  'Invisible Storm: And in my mind, that didn't count.
• 6:16
  'Invisible Storm: Now, what I had to do some work to finally accept was the idea that as an intelligence officer who was going out and gathering this information, I was spending hours at a time in the most dangerous place on the planet.
• 6:30
  'Invisible Storm: Just me and my translator most of the time, meeting with people who were unsavory characters of questionable allegiance.
• 6:37
  'Invisible Storm: So nearly every day there was the reasonable possibility of walking into a trap and getting killed.
• 6:44
  'Invisible Storm: And so it took me a long time to accept the idea that even though I didn't fire my weapon, that as a clinical social worker at the VA put it to me, that didn't make me less of a combat veteran.
• 6:54
  'Invisible Storm: That I had been exposed to all this danger every single day.
• 6:58
  'Invisible Storm: And that changed my brain.
• 7:00
  'Invisible Storm: And toward the end of the book, one of the things I come to is the idea that I have experienced something, I know what something is like that most Americans thankfully don't know what it's like.
• 7:12
  'Invisible Storm: And one is the raw physical fear of being killed violently, like a reasonable this might actually happen fear.
• 7:22
  'Invisible Storm: You don't process it as fear at the time because you're too busy doing your job, but it's in there.
• 7:28
  'Invisible Storm: And then the other--- Also and not getting killed.
• 7:31
  'Invisible Storm: I mean, there's that, I remember very vividly the scene where you're looking at the door behind the person, you put your armor down, you're in an uncertain place, you've got a side arm, other folks don't, there are other people with AK-47s.
• 7:49
  'Invisible Storm: Just 'cause you don't fire the weapon, and that's, you're processing not just fear but challenge at a very high level of stress.
• 7:59
  'Invisible Storm: That's gotta have a long tail.
• 8:01
  'Invisible Storm: - Yeah and that's the other piece.
• 8:02
  'Invisible Storm: The first is that that raw physical fear of a reasonable chance of being killed.
• 8:08
  'Invisible Storm: But the second is what you're talking about, and which we always underestimate, which is several times a week and sometimes more than once a day, preparing your mind to take another human life.
• 8:19
  'Invisible Storm: Whether you do or not it doesn't leave you completely unchanged, right?
• 8:25
  'Invisible Storm: I mean to just go right back to like, I'm gonna write a legal memo.
• 8:30
  'Invisible Storm: Turns out not a reasonable expectation for me to make of myself.
• 8:35
  'Invisible Storm: - So it sounds like I was gonna ask about when did you figure out you had PTSD and why did it take so long?
• 8:40
  'Invisible Storm: I think you've really laid out what happened there and given your own situation, which you kind of described is almost like the ideal situation and you can see where you still ended up.
• 8:49
  'Invisible Storm: I wonder, how common is PTSD in veterans overall based on your experience?
• 8:56
  'Invisible Storm: - I've seen some statistics that say that veterans over the last several years, folks who deployed, they think it's as high as 20%.
• 9:04
  'Invisible Storm: I think it's much higher than that.
• 9:07
  'Invisible Storm: Just because, you know I read somewhere where somebody had said, if you can go to war and come back unchanged, you should maybe see somebody'cause there might be something wrong with you.
• 9:18
  'Invisible Storm: You know its like--- No, that's absolutely right.
• 9:22
  'Invisible Storm: Nobody who's been in a combat situation doesn't think it doesn't change subjects.
• 9:27
  'Invisible Storm: I think that's really powerful.
• 9:29
  'Invisible Storm: I also think there is you're really, you've called out two different types of stress.
• 9:34
  'Invisible Storm: One is just the stress of being in a threatening situation all the time, working at a very high rate of threat not threat, threat not threat.
• 9:45
  'Invisible Storm: And your brain does change.
• 9:47
  'Invisible Storm: I mean you don't choose to change your brain, your brain changes.
• 9:51
  'Invisible Storm: The other is the stress that comes from that transition from order and tribe, the way Sebastian Junger refers to it, of family order and community and then the loss of that.
• 10:03
  'Invisible Storm: And I think that affects, or I think we as a country probably have failed our brothers and sisters in uniform in kinda recognizing how traumatic that is based on the suicide and the PTSD statistics.
• 10:20
  'Invisible Storm: And I think that both of them matter.
• 10:23
  'Invisible Storm: - Yeah, and I'm glad you called that book out John,'cause that's one of my favorite books on the subject.
• 10:28
  'Invisible Storm: I mean when Sebastian read my book and liked it and decided to blurb it, it meant a ton to me because I had learned so much really about myself just from reading his book 'Tribe'.
• 10:38
  'Invisible Storm: And yeah, what we do is we like when a soldier, sailor, marine airman whatever, when you go in, I guess I can only speak for the army.
• 10:50
  'Invisible Storm: You were in the army, I think this will ring true to you.
• 10:54
  'Invisible Storm: What's gotten across to you very early, like the moment you step off the bus for your first round of training is what you're doing is no big deal compared to what other people are doing, right?
• 11:03
  'Invisible Storm: And I don't really fault the army for that because what I did over there, I was aware of the danger, but I kept going into these meetings'cause I was like, I know other people that are doing this or I know people who I felt like had it worse because that's what I was led to believe.
• 11:19
  'Invisible Storm: It was true.
• 11:20
  'Invisible Storm: And it's also ground into me.
• 11:22
  'Invisible Storm: But then I got my buddy Steven, who was in Fallujah in 2006.
• 11:29
  'Invisible Storm: He was seeing his friends get hurt and he was getting shot at every day.
• 11:35
  'Invisible Storm: So then a guy like me looks at him and goes,"Well see that's the guy who had it worse." And then he looks at other people and says,"Well, I know people who had it worse." And so as a result I can keep going into my meetings that I need to go to where I might get kidnapped.
• 11:46
  'Invisible Storm: He can keep going out on patrol.
• 11:48
  'Invisible Storm: And so I don't fault the military for that.
• 11:51
  'Invisible Storm: The problem is, when we come out, when we make that transition, nobody really ever does an adequate job of disabusing us of what was at one time that very necessary notion for us to do our job and says, actually it was kind of a big deal and it would be expected that you would have issues.
• 12:10
  'Invisible Storm: You should be on the lookout for them because it was important we tell you before that this was no big deal so that you could keep doing it so you didn't bite from that apple of knowledge and not be able to do your job.
• 12:20
  'Invisible Storm: But now you should know.
• 12:21
  'Invisible Storm: Because then what happens if you don't get disabused of it, you do what I did, which is you spend 10 years experiencing the symptoms but trying to dismiss them because you're like, I have it on good authority that what I did is no big deal.
• 12:33
  'Invisible Storm: Whereas if I had understood early on, oh, maybe it was a big deal, I probably the symptoms never would've gotten as bad as they did because I would've treated the injury closer to when it occurred.
• 12:43
  'Invisible Storm: - So overall, how can we help war veterans with PTSD?
• 12:48
  'Invisible Storm: - Yeah I mean there's a lot.
• 12:49
  'Invisible Storm: One, the military could do a much better job of something really simple, which is educating people about PTSD when they first come in.
• 12:59
  'Invisible Storm: When you think about all the things that we educate folks about, like in basic training, right?
• 13:04
  'Invisible Storm: We learn how to look out for heatstroke.
• 13:07
  'Invisible Storm: We learn how to look out for blisters, like I mean, John, I'm sure you and I are both basically amateur podiatrists like we know how to treat our feet.
• 13:17
  'Invisible Storm: - Trench foot, that stuff.
• 13:20
  'Invisible Storm: - I mean like, man, I can create a little donut hole blister thing like nobody's business.
• 13:26
  'Invisible Storm: Like and I can still do it in my sleep.
• 13:30
  'Invisible Storm: So they train us on stuff that's a lot more than fighting stuff.
• 13:34
  'Invisible Storm: They train us in all sorts of things and how to maintain our physical health and the physical health of our battle buddies.
• 13:40
  'Invisible Storm: And there's no reason in the world why the basically the block of instruction essentially that I got as the very beginning of my PTSD therapy, which was basically, here's how your brain works, here's how PTSD works.
• 13:54
  'Invisible Storm: Before they can give you any therapy, they gotta teach you about PTSD.
• 13:57
  'Invisible Storm: There's no reason that we can't take a day and a half in basic training or just a couple hours would be great and teach people what PTSD is, what it looks like when it happens, and the key is, why it happens, why it's a completely normal injury to have happened.
• 14:14
  'Invisible Storm: And if we did that we would normalize it a lot more and we would have a lot more veterans remembering that training and soldiers too and going like, Oh I think I know what this is in me or in my buddy.
• 14:26
  'Invisible Storm: That's the first thing.
• 14:29
  'Invisible Storm: And for the rest of us, I think what's really important is going back to that whole idea of that necessary brainwashing, is that I think that we've done as a society, whether it's for veterans or anybody else, we've done a pretty good job now of a steady drum beat that says it is not a sign of weakness to get health, it's an act of strength to the point where there's not that many veterans left who will act like going to get help is weak, right?
• 14:56
  'Invisible Storm: Like when they talk about their friends, right?
• 14:58
  'Invisible Storm: They'll encourage their friends to do it or always can look out for each other.
• 15:02
  'Invisible Storm: The key is, getting it across to more of us, A that you are likely to think that it is weak for you to do it because you think what you did didn't count but it does.
• 15:12
  'Invisible Storm: And B, getting it across that this works.
• 15:15
  'Invisible Storm: Because the way that our culture both in the news and like on screen depict PTSD typically is what I refer to as PTSD porn.
• 15:26
  'Invisible Storm: It is showing people in the grips of PTSD, they're spiraling, they're untreated.
• 15:32
  'Invisible Storm: And that's what we tend to show.
• 15:33
  'Invisible Storm: It's not all together inaccurate all the time, but what we never show is what's way common and happens all the time is that people get treatment, they move to post traumatic growth, it doesn't disrupt their life.
• 15:45
  'Invisible Storm: And because we don't show that a lot of veterans, and this was myself included, tend to work at PTSD before they've ever gotten any treatment and think it's a terminal diagnosis, whether at a minimum to their career and at a maximum to their life.
• 15:58
  'Invisible Storm: And who's in a hurry to go get diagnosed with something like that?
• 16:02
  'Invisible Storm: As opposed to if we make it clear, oh this is a thing and it's treatable.
• 16:06
  'Invisible Storm: And if we do a better job of that, a lot more people will take advantage of it.
• 16:10
  'Invisible Storm: - I think one of the challenges, Jason, is we don't actually, we train and we're constantly optimizing in the military and in other parts really.
• 16:18
  'Invisible Storm: How do you optimize around physical health and then how do you train the body?
• 16:22
  'Invisible Storm: You're not gonna brutally put someone on that that 10K run that you did with your bust that up knee every day 'cause you'll break your troops.
• 16:33
  'Invisible Storm: But we don't actually train people about the plasticity of the brain.
• 16:37
  'Invisible Storm: How you can get wired one way and then actually with help get wired a different way.
• 16:41
  'Invisible Storm: We don't make it and I think there is some natural challenge and fear of admitting that kinda being vulnerable, and it's actually something the marines have shown some openness around leadership, around battle stress and really just stress in general is one way to actually connect to troops and train them how to, how to manage it.
• 17:05
  'Invisible Storm: But I think if we had the same kind of training about brain plasticity, that it's a form of training, if you will, from injury as opposed to pride and some form sort of macho, I think we'd be in a much better place.
• 17:21
  'Invisible Storm: And I agree with you, the Hollywood versions of this don't show survival they just, and thriving.
• 17:29
  'Invisible Storm: They just show stress.
• 17:31
  'Invisible Storm: But is there something in there about kinda just teaching people about the plasticity of the brain?
• 17:37
  'Invisible Storm: 'Cause honestly that's relatively new in brain research, and it works and it's true.
• 17:42
  'Invisible Storm: - Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for it and I think what it comes down to is not underestimating the ability of what is the most professional military in the history of the world, to take information, distill it and put it to use, right?
• 17:57
  'Invisible Storm: And I'm talking E1, E2, E3, privates in the army and in the marines and throughout.
• 18:04
  'Invisible Storm: I think we underestimate their ability to take information like that and put it to good use.
• 18:10
  'Invisible Storm: I mean the kind of stuff that the modern military trains on, whether it's maintaining your yourself physically or just tactics and strategy.
• 18:20
  'Invisible Storm: I mean the stuff that in a war that went for 20 years and pushed responsibility to the lowest levels it's ever been in the chain of command with the greatest possible third order effects of decisions at the lowest levels.
• 18:37
  'Invisible Storm: If we were to educate people more on their brains, the way we're constantly educating them on their bodies and on their way they maintain their equipment, I think that, American Service Members would surprise us in what they would do with that information.
• 18:52
  'Invisible Storm: - Jason, you've done a lot with veterans and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the Veterans Community Project and a particular veterans homelessness, veterans suicide, and how you're helping to address those issues.
• 19:08
  'Invisible Storm: - Sure, thanks David, I appreciate you asking.
• 19:10
  'Invisible Storm: So, I'm the president of National Expansion at Veterans Community Project.
• 19:14
  'Invisible Storm: We are a Kansas City based nonprofit, but we are expanding throughout the country.
• 19:18
  'Invisible Storm: We are building our campuses in several cities around the country right now.
• 19:22
  'Invisible Storm: And we do a couple of things.
• 19:24
  'Invisible Storm: One on the veterans suicide front and just assisting veterans generally, we operate outreach centers where we connect veterans with any and all services in the community, whether they be veteran specific or not.
• 19:35
  'Invisible Storm: One of the well known statistics in this area is that on average 20 veterans every day take their life.
• 19:41
  'Invisible Storm: What is less known about that statistic is that on average out of the 2016 are not connected to any veteran specific services at the time that that happens.
• 19:50
  'Invisible Storm: So we have an extremely low barrier, we don't have a bunch of rules about what counts as a veteran, what doesn't, and we're able to connect a lot of people with the services they need.
• 19:59
  'Invisible Storm: What we're much better known for are the villages of tiny houses that we build with complete wraparound services for homeless veterans to transition them back into permanent housing and into being fully functional and vital members of society again.
• 20:16
  'Invisible Storm: And we do it at a really unprecedented rate of success.
• 20:19
  'Invisible Storm: It's the best civilian job I've ever had.
• 20:22
  'Invisible Storm: And folks can learn more about it at VCP, veteranscommunityproject.org.
• 20:28
  'Invisible Storm: - How big is the problem?
• 20:30
  'Invisible Storm: And what do you need to kinda scale that Jason?
• 20:37
  'Invisible Storm: - So most of the federal government statistics say that when it comes to homelessness, that there's about 38,000 homeless veterans in the United States.
• 20:45
  'Invisible Storm: That number, I believe is pretty low.
• 20:48
  'Invisible Storm: I would say it's roughly 30% higher than that for a couple reasons.
• 20:51
  'Invisible Storm: One, you get to that number by going out on a single night, usually in January and counting homeless people, which is pretty hard to do.
• 20:58
  'Invisible Storm: And second, because that only takes into account VA eligible veterans.
• 21:03
  'Invisible Storm: And so, there's a lot of veterans out there that aren't VA eligible.
• 21:07
  'Invisible Storm: So what it takes to scale it is, as we expand across the country, we need municipalities that are open to doing things like being open-minded about zoning, right?
• 21:19
  'Invisible Storm: Because there's not a lot of places that are zoned for a village of 50 tiny houses.
• 21:23
  'Invisible Storm: So we have to have a lot of support from the municipal level.
• 21:26
  'Invisible Storm: We need local champions who are interested in getting in there before we've hired any staff on the ground and really volunteering a lot of time.
• 21:32
  'Invisible Storm: We obviously need philanthropic resources.
• 21:34
  'Invisible Storm: And then we usually need a piece of land, well we always need a piece of land, but it doesn't always have to come first.
• 21:41
  'Invisible Storm: And it costs a few million dollars to build one of these and roughly around a couple million dollars a year to maintain one.
• 21:48
  'Invisible Storm: So it's actually quite affordable considering the enormous impact that it makes.
• 21:53
  'Invisible Storm: - John, you gonna give me the last question?
• 21:55
  'Invisible Storm: Or you can take it.
• 21:58
  'Invisible Storm: - I just really want to talk about the power of community, even when people are broken.
• 22:02
  'Invisible Storm: I just think it's incredibly tangible.
• 22:05
  'Invisible Storm: Well I just wanted to know David, whether we could go a little bit into politics before we let Jason go.
• 22:10
  'Invisible Storm: Why don't you take that?
• 22:12
  'Invisible Storm: - Okay. So why does President Obama think so highly of you?
• 22:16
  'Invisible Storm: (laughing)- Just a good judge of character, I guess.
• 22:20
  'Invisible Storm: (laughing) He's been very kind to me, I mean now you're gonna get a political sounding answer, but mostly 'cause I don't really know how to answer it the way you said it, I guess, which is, you know that's the guy who, I first ran for office in 2008, right?
• 22:38
  'Invisible Storm: And I remember in 2004 when he gave the speech to the convention sitting on the floor next to the couch in my apartment that I had with my wife in DC when we were in law school and we were just blown away by him.
• 22:53
  'Invisible Storm: And so he's been a political hero of mine, now for 18 years.
• 22:58
  'Invisible Storm: And so when I did have the opportunity and when I was thinking about running for president, to sit down with him and have him tell me that that was not a crazy idea, yeah, that meant a lot to me.
• 23:12
  'Invisible Storm: I think he and I and maybe it's'cause we're both Midwestern and me and my roots all the way, him and his political roots, we maybe have a similar sensibility I guess about some of this stuff.
• 23:24
  'Invisible Storm: But it means a lot to me that the admiration, I mean it's not equal.
• 23:30
  'Invisible Storm: I think I admire him a lot more than he admires me, but that it's at least mutual.
• 23:35
  'Invisible Storm: - So you gonna be, you think you'll find a place in your life to get back into politics Jason?
• 23:42
  'Invisible Storm: - Maybe.
• 23:45
  'Invisible Storm: I try and be pretty open about the fact that like I have no idea and I'm fine with it.
• 23:52
  'Invisible Storm: Right now my kids are young, they're so fun.
• 23:55
  'Invisible Storm: I'm doing things I really enjoy, making an impact.
• 23:58
  'Invisible Storm: I mean look I have made, there's no question in my mind that in the six years since I got out of elected office or in the four years since I stopped pursuing elected office, I have made a much greater impact on the world.
• 24:14
  'Invisible Storm: And I don't just mean my family, like the things I've been able to do than I did in office or pursue in office.
• 24:19
  'Invisible Storm: So that doesn't gimme a lot of motivation to jump back in right now'cause I feel like I'm making a difference.
• 24:24
  'Invisible Storm: But I'm also able to make a difference while I get to do things like play baseball for actual baseball, not softball for a men's baseball team that's a bunch of guys I love and coach my son's baseball team, and all the stuff I didn't think I was gonna get to do.
• 24:38
  'Invisible Storm: But the reason even though I have no idea if I'll run, the reason I always answer, yeah, I might run for president one day.
• 24:46
  'Invisible Storm: The biggest reason is because I figure that anytime I'm asked that there might be somebody listening who is thinking about how they hire or what it means to have somebody involved in your organization who is a veteran with PTSD or not a veteran, but with PTSD.
• 25:04
  'Invisible Storm: I feel like it's important for me to say, yeah, I might run for president and yeah, I could be president.
• 25:10
  'Invisible Storm: Nothing would stop me from doing that because if I don't answer honestly in that way, is that gonna be in the back of their mind when they're looking to hire somebody for any job who they think might have PTSD?
• 25:22
  'Invisible Storm: Like I wanna make sure that people understand that if you treat this and if you maintain what you need to do to keep it from disrupting your life, it doesn't limit you at all.
• 25:36
  'Invisible Storm: - Well that's it for another episode of CareTalk.
• 25:38
  'Invisible Storm: Our guests today has been Jason Kander.
• 25:40
  'Invisible Storm: We've been discussing PTSD in veterans, housing for homeless veterans, the Veterans Community Project and whether and when Jason will be running for president.
• 25:49
  'Invisible Storm: I'm David Williams, President of Health Business Group.
• 25:52
  'Invisible Storm: - And I'm John Driscoll, the President of Walgreen's Health.
• 25:55
  'Invisible Storm: If you like what you heard or you didn't, please subscribe on your favorite service.
• 25:58
  'Invisible Storm: And thank you Jason.
• 26:00
  'Invisible Storm: - Thank you. Thanks for having me.
• 26:01
  'Invisible Storm: (upbeat music)