Ep. 68 How To Overcome Your Demons With Jason Fox

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1:03Hi friends, Grace from the Working Hard podcast here. When you're stretching every dollar, a little goes a long way and Walmart Business is here to help. They make it easy to order what you need from tech and cleaning supplies to everyday essentials, all at low prices and with helpful tools like spend tracking and tax exempt purchasing for eligible organisations. Because when your operations are smooth, your impact can be bigger. Visit business.warmart.com to get started. I was like stood on top of a cliff and everything was falling apart. Royal Marine Commando Jason Fox. He spent 20 years in the Special Forces, but it's his journey after the military that is truly, truly fascinating.

1:37You might not care, but there are people that do care. Why put him for Special Forces selection? Now, we started with 350 and we finished with eight of us. What do you think those last eight people had that the others didn't? Yeah, you got me thinking now. We were outnumbered. One of our guys had already been killed within the first 20 seconds. I'm fucking scared. She was like, look, I would suggest that you are suffering from PTSD. and I'm like, what does that mean? I was in a spiral going down. People keep saying, oh, I understand why you've got PTSD because you were in the military. And I was like, I don't think it can be attributed to that.

2:09It's a whole life inflection point. I got married. We had a kid. The kid was ill. We start splitting up. It was an extremely vicious circle and I was at the centre of it. If you've got toxic relationships in your life, it is going to impact your mental health, which in turn is going to then impact everything else that you are connected to. the first thing you've got to do and the only thing that really works is. What would you say the biggest learnings that you have from the military have been? The one thing I learned post-military service was...

2:51What is up and welcome back to Working Hard Hardly Working. You are not ready for the podcast we have today. You are not ready because I have never heard this man speak in this way and be so open. I cannot wait for you to hear all of these stories and the behind the scenes. So without further ado, today I am so excited to have Jason Fox on the podcast. He spent 20 years in the Special Forces carrying out life-threatening missions in the most hazardous conditions. But it's his journey after the military that is truly, truly fascinating and one that he has been incredibly open about today. He left the military after being diagnosed with PTSD and today he speaks so, so openly about his mental health struggles, how much his life has changed and how he manages his mental health overall, but also when filming for huge shows like SAS Who Dares Wins.

3:44It's a long one and we get deep, but I promise you it's worth listening to. I'd go as far as to say it was quite a life changing conversation. getting guests like Jason is so so huge I am so grateful for everyone who listens to and shares and likes the podcast in order for us to be able to do this and have such incredible conversations I would appreciate so so much if you could like rate subscribe review whatever it is on the platform you're on wherever you are it helps us hugely and helps us to be able to have these really open behind the scenes conversations with people who we usually don't get to see this type of insight into.

4:21So thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me in. I'd like to go straight into your decision to join the Marines at 16. What made you take that step? There was a few things that made me take that pretty large step for someone that was very young, small, skinny. One, I didn't do very well at school. I didn't apply myself. I absolutely catastrophically destroyed my GCSEs by not working hard and being lazy and not really loving being in class I just loved being outdoors mucking around I didn't take life too seriously so there was there was one reason the other one was I grew up in Luton it's not an affluent area it wasn't where I was anyway and I was getting into trouble I was easily led I was a young lad and somehow at 16 I I had the consciousness to it's not an affluent area or it wasn't where I was anyway I was getting into trouble I was easily led I was a young lad somehow at 16 I had the consciousness to realize I needed to get away from there because I was going to get into trouble I was getting into trouble so I decided I was going to join the military now my dad had been in the marines like years before I don't remember he left you know when I was about one there was a direction as to if I was going to join the military, which way I was going to go.

5:49And yeah, I sort of took the leap, went to the careers office in Luton and signed up. You moved straight into base. Is that how it works? Yeah. So what happens is you go into the careers office. There's some huge, nasty looking Marine. Perfect. And I'm like this young, skinny little dweeb. I said, I'd like to join the Marines. And he's like, OK. He goes, get up onto that pull up bar and start doing pull ups. I probably like eked out two and a half and he was like right come back when you can do 10. So I disappeared disappointed. Well I guess I'm never going to be a Marine. Trained a little bit came back did it again he's like right okay fine filled out a few forms did a competency test which it isn't.

6:33It's basically like they'll show you a picture of like four cogs and they're like if this one turns this way which way does that one turn. And you've got to tell them and they're like okay you're you know you have a brain cell. IQ. yeah okay um then you go on a few other like medicals and then you go on a for me it was a four or five day course where you go down to the base you live there and they absolutely thrash you as in like beast you exercise you make you feel very uncomfortable and if you pass that at the end of the week then you're giving a start date you go home you keep yourself as fit as you possibly can on that start date you get on the train with your bags packed with the right kit go down to this place called limston you walk through the gates and then that is you starting raw marine and commando training and what was that like living on base then when you did start on the journey down there i've obviously left home i'm 16 i'm like wow this is exciting i'm just gonna start my yeah i'm joining the marines i'm hard turn up and it is a massive culture shock so i I was in an intake so they call them troops in the Royal Marines so I was in a recruit troop of about 60 guys I was one of two 16 year olds and everyone else was probably averaging about 22 years old which doesn't seem a big gap but it is when you're 16 it is a big gap like everyone else had had jobs they'd left home me and this other guy we didn't need to shave and all of a sudden you're getting given issued like loads of kit you're expected to be able to look after that kit look after yourself wash clean iron make yourself look presentable that was the hardest bit for the first 10 weeks was keeping myself in order and getting sleep because I was like I can remember being up at like three in the morning still ironing clothes because I couldn't get it right right all the other guys are like some lads would help you but ultimately they've got to go to sleep then you go to sleep for like a couple of hours and you get up and it's like when it came to the physical stuff I wasn't too bad I was 16 years old you could like bounce me off the walls and the floor and I'd be all right the only thing that went in my favorite at that time was because I was 16 used to being told off shouted at normally getting into trouble all the time that sort of thing didn't bother me it was not being able to look after myself properly or up to a standard that they expected that sort of get got to me a little The first two weeks you're living in a dormitory that's like, it's got like 100 beds in it and you're all like lined up next to each other.

9:07That lasts for two weeks. Then once you pass out from that initial phase, you go into your proper accommodation blocks, which you're in like a six man room, which is different to being at home with my two brothers. What did you learn from that first year? The first year I learned that I could withstand a lot. I don't think I learned an awful lot about being a soldier because it seemed like an absolute blur. There was a period in that training phase of my life where I was struggling. I just didn't get it. I can remember being on the phone to my mum crying. I was never going to give up, but I can remember it being really, really difficult.

9:44And then somewhere, somehow, it just clicked. And it was around the 15 to 20 week period. and all of a sudden I just got it and I did stuff and I enjoyed it. I became good at something and I don't know where that came from. I think it was just growing up. I think it was just being a young boy that then suddenly clicked and realised I had to be a young man. And I sort of took things seriously, applied myself where I needed to and then realised that I could be good at something and I enjoyed it. So let's talk about training. What was the Marines training like? like you do you're obviously doing pt all the time they start off gradually you'll do like pt in a gymnasium doing what they call initial military fitness which is actually what they used to be called swedish pt and all you're doing is moving making shapes with your body just weird it's like dark it is and it's got to be coordinated and they have strikers like watching you pt eyes if you don't get a movement right they'll come along and give you a quick slap or make you do press-ups or and you're in like pristine white like pt kit that you have to keep immaculately clean it has to be ironed before you turn up creases down the front of your shorts you look like a right bellend but it's all to do with discipline it's all to do with movement and then they move on to like actual military pt which is like wearing combat bottoms and boots and running with kit and climbing ropes and hauling yourself over assault courses and that's the stuff that you you know that you're waiting for because that's that's what you want to do yeah so it is gradual that it's it gradually gets there and then at the same time as that's going on they're teaching you how to look after yourself how to keep your kit clean how to shoot guns how to like crawl around in the dirt without getting seen by the enemy all this you know all this stuff that as a young lad you think's cool there was stuff that i was particularly bad at that i didn't think about so like washing clothes and ironing you don't think no you don't I think that's the main part of the Marines.

11:47No, but you're doing a lot of your clothes washing by hand. You're washing stuff by hand. They've got a laundrette on the base, but the cues to use the washing machines and the tumble dryers are ridiculous. So you're better off cleaning it by hand. You wash all your clothes by hand. You hang them in the drying room. You then get them out of the drying room when they dry you iron them, fold them up, put them in your locker. They've all got to be a certain... Everything's got to be folded to the same size. It's ridiculous, but it is what it is. Are you now in charge of washing in the household? Washing, no.

12:18Ironing, yes. I can imagine you're pretty skilled at that now. I've got a very good iron. I have a phobia about leaving the house in unironed clothes. My missus thinks I'm mad. I think it's more to do with my peace of mind. Aside from the ironing, mentally, how do you get through that level of training? What's going on in your head? How are you pushing through? You've got to want to do it for the right reasons. And so something else that is a big shock to the system is when you go and live in the field. So you'll do stints of like a week, 10 days living in the bush. And it's fucking cold, wet and miserable.

12:56That is what gets to people. If you don't get comfortable with being horrendously uncomfortable, then that isn't the job for you. And that was the biggest shock. That was something that you don't expect. because when you watch things on telly where soldiers are rolling around in the dirt, you forget that your pants are piss wet through and covered in mud or full of mud and sand's rubbing against all the bits of your body and it's all that uncomfortableness that you just don't think about. So when it happens, you're like, hang on a minute, what's all this about? And if you are doing or trying to do that job for the wrong reasons, then you will give up pretty quickly.

13:36my whole journey with becoming a Royal Marine at the beginning was am I happy being uncomfortable and you know the further I got into it I was like yeah I like being uncomfortable I like this I like the challenge I like the fact that I'm achieving something that is difficult and so tell me about the move from the Marines to the SBS so I did about nine years in the Marines I loved being a soldier, but the Marines, you know, they're an elite military organization, but they are still classed as conventional, which means they are also expected to carry out like ceremonial duties and things like that, basically like polishing your boots and wearing smart uniforms like you see around London, marching around.

14:23And I fucking hate that. I despise it. I loved being a soldier, as in rolling around in the dirt and doing that sort of stuff, but I didn't like the other stuff. Now, I knew about the Special Forces. I knew that they never got up to that stuff, and they went and did other stuff that sounded cool, and I also knew that they got paid more money. So after nine years, I was like, right, I'm getting a little bit... I feel like I'm getting along in the tooth for this sort of marching around in shiny boots. So I thought, if I'm going to stay in the military, which I want to do, I'm going to have to up the game and so I put in for special forces selection now all you have to do to do that is fill in a form saying I want to do special forces selection put it in and that's it and then you go on to a waiting list you'll get mail basically and it will be something saying right you are going to start selection such and such make sure you're ready here's your joining instructions this is the kit you need to bring with you and then on that day you travel down well we travel to Wales and you start selection I was 25 it was just after 2001 after 9-11 you start the process and it's it's long and I know you can't talk specifically about details to do with SAS and kind of SBS training could you give me a little bit of an overview in terms of the difference between your life as a marine versus in the SBS the selection process is pretty grown up you'll turn up you do it's broken down into phases there's a phase in Wales then you go abroad basically operate in the jungle and prove that you can soldier in a very demanding environment there's not a lot of shouting going on on special forces selection you're just expected to do stuff and if you don't do it then you you leave right they just tell you okay you've not met the grade off you go they don't give you any feedback they don't say well done or what you're doing you know it's just like you haven't made the grade off you go and it's like it's quite cold like that so that's the selection process then you pass then you join a squadron within the special forces and it is different to being in the marines because it is just busy you are just busy you're even at the lowest rank you've given a lot of responsibility there's a lot of pressure on you and you are doing stuff all the time you can be abroad you can be at home you can be working with the police you can be working with other country agencies somewhere else there's always something going on when I was in the special forces a lot of people knew what sort of was going on because it was heavily in the news you know you had Iraq and Afghanistan then Syria all that sort of stuff was going on and it was quite obvious what we would have been doing whereas before that there was always still stuff going on but it just wasn't in the news right so it is it is busy you don't get a chance to do an awful lot outside of your career and it has a massive impact on your home life I mean as an example like in a 12-month period I probably slept in my own bed 30 days out of a whole 12-month period and that wasn't in one block yeah you go away a lot what did you learn about thriving under pressure in the special forces I learned I love pressure I probably learned it a bit before but it took it to another level being in special forces you I learned that without pressure you don't really develop you become stagnant you don't truly find out about what you are capable of and actually if people embraced pressure a little bit more you would surprise yourself and be a lot more confident in what you could be doing.

17:59And how do you think that in I guess everyday life someone who's not in the military how can you put yourself in situations that demand pressure and therefore as you say improve you and kind of show you what you can do? I mean a lot of it depends on what your career is or what you've chosen to do, but you've got to keep pushing the realms of the world that you're in. I now do a live tour. Now, when someone asked me to do a live tour where I'm stood up in front of lots of people on a stage, I was like, there's no fucking way I'm doing that. I can't think of anything worse. It doesn't really excite me.

18:36In fact, it petrifies me. And I kept turning it down for a period of time. And then I was like, hang on a minute. I've spent my life putting myself in uncomfortable situations I tell people to put themselves in uncomfortable situations I'm being a hypocrite right and so I was like right I'm going to do this because I'm going to do it because I'm feeling uncomfortable about it so it's things like that if there's something out there that you feel makes you uncomfortable it's probably like an indication that you should try and have a go or embrace it whether it's like going you know people can be in a job and then they're you know there's an opportunity for promotion and they could be thinking themselves I don't want to do that because I feel like I'm not good enough or I'm not very good with certain situations but they would never find out how to get through that without actually getting into it and embracing it and having a go at it and so it's things like that that I've been taught through my you know through my stint in the special forces I reckon and within that kind of selection process that you were talking about how many people were left at the end versus the beginning so we started with 350 guys from all over the you know it's tri-service which means it comes from every branch of the military and we finished with eight of us so it's wow and that's that's pretty much what it's like each time i did not imagine that in four weeks we went from 350 to 60 we went away on the second phase with 60 and then you come back we're like about 14 and then that slowly over the next few months gets whittled down yeah it's a it's a high attrition rate now they would if they could they would pass it they want to pass people they're not there to fail them but there's never enough like human resources in the special forces the job dictates that it needs people but there's never enough people and but they won't let the standards slip and rightly so of course and what do you think those last eight people had that the others didn't.

20:35I reckon we're all just stubborn. Perfect, I'll do it. Yeah, see, there you go. Qualified. If you're stubborn, if you guys need me, just let me know. Physically robust. You don't have to, everyone thinks you've got to be like super fit. You've got to be fit, but you've just got to be able to take the knocks and like deal with feeling like you're hurting. Mentally, I'd say you've got to be robust and you've got to want to do that job. You've got to love being in uncomfortable situations, but stubbornness is, that is the key. And when you've been in those terrifying situations as part of the military, not just kind of the training, but I can imagine there are some really life changing, terrifying situations.

21:13What's your kind of coping mechanism for getting through that? It depends on where you are in your career. So like early on, my coping mechanism was to think that I was young and indestructible and I didn't give a shit. Right. And I knew that I was confident in what I was doing. but then as you promote through the ranks you get into positions where you're like in charge of people or you're responsible for actions I can remember being in a situation where it was a very very hairy situation we were outnumbered we were basically conducting a mission in an extremely hostile environment one of our guys had already been killed within the first 20 seconds pretty much and I can remember being in a ditch being shot at and I remember thinking to myself I'm fucking scared now this was like way into my career and I and as far as I was concerned I shouldn't have been feeling scared because you know I've done this stuff before but all of a sudden I'm I'm in a ditch at about 34 years old thinking about wanting to be at home with my mum and that's what freaked me out and I was like hang on a minute what am I doing I'm not supposed be feeling like this and at that point my coping mechanism was to sort of give myself that proverbial slap around the face and remind myself that I was in that position because I deserved to be there that I'd done stuff before that had gone in favor of my capability so I got promoted I did courses but then at the same time as I was like telling myself to get a grit I was like in this I was in a ditch it was at night and I was looking down the ditch and there was other guys like parts of the team that I was in with me and I just took a lot of strength from the fact that I wasn't on my own that I was with those people that I there were guys that I loved that were good at their job and that I had a responsibility to them so it was a couple of things so in the early days if that happened to me I'd have been like yeah I fucking know what I'm doing I'm good at being a soldier whereas as you progress on you become a different person and you know I had to dig a little bit deeper in those scary situations so I think it changes.

23:18The toughness is very important and obviously as you're saying when you were younger you probably would have been even more kind of tough outwardly in that type of situation but I can imagine also maintaining that humility and sense of self and sense of kind of other values as well is actually probably really important in that moment you need to have a good grasp on your surroundings and your situation and the risk as well yeah like when you're younger I feel like you just feel a little bit more indestructible that doesn't mean that we were reckless we were far from we were like very we're actually risk averse we go into things and we risk assess all the time you know you do constantly you'll be in on the ground involved in something you'll be in the middle of a gunfight and you'll be doing dynamic risk assessments right if I move from where I am now to where I want to be is that a good move is that route safe or is there a better way of doing it you're always looking at that but you're just probably a little bit more as a younger person I feel like you do feel that you can bounce back from things quicker and and that you don't need to worry too much about what the psychological effect will be on you whereas when you're a little bit older and you've gone through other things and you've seen the impact on not only yourselves but other people you are a bit more aware of that and so your mechanisms for coping change as you as you do that but you're just a confident risk taker and someone that is also checking and making sure that the risk isn't beyond the realms of acceptability and so let's talk about moving on from the military when did you start to have those kind of inklings because I can imagine it wasn't all at once so I left the military at my 20 i did 20 years pretty much and i didn't want to leave what happened was that job i was just talking about where i was in a ditch that was my last tour operational tours in afghanistan i came back from that and you come back from being away in a place like that and you go and you go into other commitments and roles within the special forces and you can be doing stuff in the uk all over the place so you're doing all that sort of stuff and then I was getting ready to go away again on another tour and it was going back out to Afghanistan and I can remember feeling like that period that was looming in the in the near distance was like a black cloud and I was like you know why do I feel like this I'm you know I'm supposed to be excited about this I've loved this job and it got worse and I was like dreading going away and I was like what's going on this isn't right and I was trying I was having to dig deep to motivate myself to do all the training scenarios that you have to go through before you go away I was responsible for leading men as well like I had been before and I was finding it difficult to motivate myself to motivate them and I thought right this isn't fair on them or me and so I sort of went and saw the they have like a psychiatric department that no one ever goes to see of course so I went in on the sly you know snuck in there undercover undercover and I went camouflage in in camouflage in a camouflage base i went in and saw and presented myself to the mental health nurse and i said look i want this to be off the record by the way i says i'm not i'm not feeling my usual self about my job can you um i was expecting i was basically like can you just snap your fingers and fix me and i'll be good to go and she's like okay sit down anyway we had this this this went on for a period of time and in the end she's like look i'm gonna have to start making this formal because i i would suggest that you are suffering from ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder and i'm like what does that mean she goes well we can just you know we can sort of like we can take you away from work for a bit and we can work on you and and i was like what the fuck what's this all about and i thought you're making this very dramatic yeah yeah i'm like this doesn't need to happen i just you need to tell me something and this works and i i i get fixed and she's like it's not going to work like that and I was like okay so I sort of succumbed to the system and then before I know it they're like look you need to leave the military and I was like I don't want to leave the military I love this job and they're like you've got you're going to have to leave it's the only thing that's going to fix you and I wrestled with this for like a month and in the end I could see the impact it was having on me you know and at home I was like okay fine I'll go through this whole medical discharge thing which I didn't want to do but I felt like I had to do it and then you know it happened pretty quickly within about three months I got medically discharged from the military my last day serving was on the 5th of April 2012 and I was expecting to wake up on the 6th of April feeling better and I didn't I felt worse and what was it like moving on because obviously the military is very much the definition of kind of your job is your life I can imagine that's not just it's not it's not moving on from a job it's a whole life inflection point what was that like for you it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life I'd say obviously like the job that I did was probably a catalyst but it wasn't the job that affected me more more than anything it was it was normal everyday life that properly affected me and the reason for that is because you know there's a lot of stuff that happens to everyone you know people keep saying I understand why you've got PTSD because you're in the military in the special forces you're away fighting and I was like yeah I don't think it can be attributed to that it's more attributed to the fact that you know I met someone I got married we had a kid the kid was ill we argue car breaks down the washing machine breaks we ain't got enough money for the bills kids back in hospital we start splitting up get divorced you know all that stuff I've never once in my life as as anyone else been taught how to deal with that and it was that that was impacting me more but it was obviously mixed up with the other stuff and I think that's so important to say as well because I can imagine and it would probably be easier for you to sit here and say yeah of course I was in the military I was being shot at of course I would you know go down that to to openly say actually some of the normal quote-unquote stuff yeah was the stuff that really had that impact in amongst obviously other things but I think that's actually really really really powerful yeah I've thought about it a lot because I mean I left I contemplated suicide whether it was going to happen I don't know I was like stood on top of a cliff and everything was falling apart and I didn't I walked away and it was at that point I was like right I need to I need to do something if I'm not going to do that I need to make sure that I'm doing something that's going to change my life and one of the first things I did was I looked back at my life up to the point I was I started drawing lines that represented stuff that happened in my life and if you draw like one long line which is you being born to where you are and then underneath that you draw other lines so that's your timeline then you do one that you know you've got a line that's your career your military career and then within that you've got career courses where you're expected to perform you've got marriage birth of kids divorce all those things cars breaking down everything I've mentioned before but where the lines all converge the most in a period of time that's probably where something was going to snap and if I'd have been paying attention to that at the time I'd have been able to address it better but no one ever does it's only with hindsight and I was like that's where I should have been paying more attention to myself and like checking in with myself and being aware that I need to be easy on who I am because things aren't going right and things are looking like they're falling apart I need to try and learn about normal life and how to deal with it and I didn't but but doing that exercise after I'd been through a really sort of sticky period was cathartic and it helped me and i was like right this is what i need to start doing is to start being aware of what's going on the market's uncertain revenues tied and hiring on hold that's why results driven companies are using upwork to keep work moving go to upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast no bulky overhead no rigid long-term contracts Just the right expert, right when you need them.

31:49Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Post a job for free and get started today.

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32:50We think a lot about, you know, when someone says, I'm really anxious, someone says about what, or, you know, you're saying, I'm feeling down. And it's kind of, it's always expected to be linked to one individual trigger. And I think the, or that's like our general top line understanding of mental health and actually realizing how much other things have an impact. And I always say kind of you can have it all, but you cannot have it all at once. You cannot expect to be flying in your career whilst also having an amazing personal life. Like it's an unrealistic expectation. You can absolutely expect to, you know, have hygiene levels of what you want.

33:25But if you're going to be having a period of time where you're really leaning into your career or you're really leaning into your family life, something has to go. Like it's a percentages thing. It's about it's a kind of like scale going up and down rather than this idea of balance. That's like a 50 50. to me that's completely unrealistic and I think that kind of overwhelm of like I think on top of it as well that's like the amount of feedback we get the amount of information we get on other people's lives and with things like social media there's just so much noise now that actually when you're also trying to balance your own things when it comes to career personal life all of these things if you also add on the fact that you then like open your phone and you see like someone from school's got married and someone you know has just had a promotion and all of these things it really does add on like it's unseen weight that's kind of put into your box of things that you're currently dealing with yeah that is an issue that we have in nowadays with the tech that we've got available to us you know there's a lot of outside influence that doesn't need to be influenced but we make it or we allow it to be because of whether it's instagram anything else you can access on your phone but the one thing I will say in like the fact that it is very difficult to have a balance because it you know you've always something's always got to be getting more for it to benefit as you know for your family to benefit they've got to be getting more time but then that means your career is going to have an impact you know it's going to be impacted but then you switch and you you got to put more time in your career because that's what you need to do in fact the one thing you can do to at least soften the blow is communicate like the one thing that we humans love to do whether we like it or not is communicate that's why you've got a podcast so on and so forth but we're also shit at it when it comes to people that are closest to us the one thing i learned was i was a absolutely terrible communicator when i was in the military even though that we were brilliant communicators that was our job was to communicate and make sure everyone understood everything we're doing brilliant at that work go home I wouldn't tell my missus what I was doing from one day to the next I wouldn't explain to her that I can't you know even if I just sat down and gone I can't tell you where I'm going but I'm going to be okay and I'm going to be thinking about you and rest assured I've got this this and this in place if you need it if I'd have done that things would have been a lot better but I didn't and it's the one thing I've learned going forward you know even now there'll be times when I go away but I'll make sure that I'm communicating all the time and and before I go when I'm gone and when I come back about what it is I'm doing what I'm going to be doing what I have been doing whatever it is I make sure that people feel involved because if you're communicating you're just being a better person so is that one of the most important things you've learned about mental health like not isolating yourself and not isolating other people by communication you've got to communicate Even I thought that there was these super tools and tricks that you can use to help yourself or others when you're going through hard times attributed to mental health.

36:33But ultimately, the first thing you've got to do and the only thing that really works is communicate. What that looks like depends on the individual and the people involved. but somehow somewhere along the line you've got to start communicating with people talking to them reaching out listening understanding trying to understand and with mental health in mind and kind of a lot of the crisis that we talk about at the moment in terms of you know mental health men's mental health in particular do you think overall we're kind of too hard or too soft I've wrestled with this over the last god knows how long few years because I'm someone that talks openly about my mental health and I'm like you know you've got to talk about it you've got to admit that you've got something going on and share it and people have got to be accepting of that on the flip side it isn't just talking about it isn't enough and it isn't all it isn't a get out a jail free card as well you can't just say oh you know I'm struggling please leave me alone I don't want to do anything I just want to run away from everything because that's unrealistic you've got to realize that it is also you know to get through periods of poor mental health you've got to put a shift in it's not easy you've got to realize that hard work is required by yourself to get yourself out of it you've got to if you admit that to yourself then it's going to make it actually easier weirdly but yeah I don't know whether we're too soft or too hard I think it depends on the individual too hard on one person could be too easy on another so we've got to be a little bit wary or aware of where people are at but ultimately we need to be compassionate but at the same time people have got to realize that it's tough and you've got to put of shifting dig in let's talk about then the process of actually moving on from the military what was it like looking for a job i'd never done a job interview as such pull-ups never you go straight to the door and you go look at this so i i went for it yeah exactly i went for i went for a corporate job actually in a facilities management company and there was an interview and i was like where's the pull-up bar they're like what the fuck are you going on about you weirdo I might not be able to do this but watch this yeah exactly I had to write my own CV I've never been taught to write that and it was pretty much like Johnny age five red crayon like my name is Jason I went to war okay what can you offer us I was like I don't know I can shoot a gun but uh no they the kind I think it was out of the kindness of their heart and it was it was the kindness of the guy who I'd met it's heart he was the MD of this company I'm still good friends of him he said i'll give you a job so i got a job i was a project manager and a logistics manager for a facilities management company so they're responsible for cooking and cleaning and you know driving people around and all that sort of thing and it was you know it was all right i had a car got given a company car i felt like a grown-up but i just struggled with it it was a it was a regular nine to five job it was a culture shock i had not really worked with people outside the military i'd be sat at a desk every now and again typing away on a computer i'd misspell something i'd lose my shit everyone on the office would like look up and think that i was some absolute fucking lunatic and i'd be like they're like you're really aggressive and i'm like but i'm not i'm just i'm just angry with myself i'm not angry with anyone else i'm just i'm like causing like drama and yeah it was um it was a difficult time I did I did the job for about I agreed I pushed it out I did about 18 months and I was good at what I needed to do which was organize stuff and you know get people to do things in a way that they were happy with but I just wasn't fulfilled and I was fucking up other things within it my home life so by this stage I'd been divorced once already I'd got remarried and that was falling apart as well because of because of a lot of things because of both of us I'm not going to take the full blame but there was also you know a lot of a lot of it was on me I'd just come out of the military for mental health reasons and I was like I was in a spiral going down I could see it was impacting the job and the people around me in that job and I turned around to the MD and I said look mate I know I'm causing you a massive drama here so I'm gonna I'm gonna resign and he knew the predicament I was in I was like hard up I wasn't doing very well financially I had a lot of commitments and not enough money to for those commitments and he said look mate don't don't resign I'll make you redundant and I didn't um qualify to be made redundant I'd been there long enough but he he squared it away so I'd left with a little bit of money to help me and I was then sort of like rudderless pretty much looking for what the next thing was I was living around friends houses on sofas and did a bit of bodyguarding which is what you know my old job would have lend it would sort of lend itself to but yeah if you said no to me at the front of a club I would say okay sir well I wasn't I wasn't I wasn't I wasn't working the door I was like looking after people when they went to different places but um but yeah it was uh it was it wasn't what I wanted to do either so I was just a bit rudderless and it was it was difficult and you talk about at these key points in your life kind of the importance of your relationship and your family life as kind of an impact on your wider you know your mental health how work was going all of that yeah first of all I think that's very powerful because I think it's especially within a kind of military type background it's almost seen as a not necessarily like a lesser part of life but definitely as a you know the concentration is like the big things and the important things and that's kind of less talked about you openly talk about that as something that affected your mental health at times and actually was a huge part of your life when things were falling apart I'd like to know about I guess the importance of those relationships as a whole in your kind of career your life your mental health I would suggest if you've got relationships in your life with people that are close to you if they are not good because of one thing or another now that doesn't it doesn't matter whether it's home life with a partner relationship you've got with people at work if one of them is toxic and unhelpful and there's bad communication it is going to impact your mental health which in turn is going to then impact everything else that you are connected to because it's very difficult to silo one thing from another there are people out there no doubt that can do that but i don't think the majority of us can you know when if we're pissed off or upset about something someone else will know about it fact and if we if we don't communicate with that person as to why they'll get pissed off with you and then you'll get pissed off with it and then it just it just absolutely snowballs so yeah i think it was a an extremely vicious circle and i I was at the center of it.

44:01So I was responsible for that by not acknowledging it, not understanding it, not being aware, and then not communicating that out. Let's talk about your move into a career in TV, because that sounds like quite a jump from where you were at the time. How did that come about? Right, okay. So very, very good friend. In fact, he's my best mate. He was my best man. I was his best man. We were in the Marines together years ago. we we had a great time pissing up traveling the world loving life when we were young and had no responsibility he left a little bit before me and he did a few bits and pieces but he was he was hell-bent on wanting to work in television as a safety supervisor as someone that went away to far fun places and looked after people and he he started to do that and he was starting to do really well anyway he knew that i was in this really sticky predicament you know no money now separate you know separated from the person i was with at the time and uh he got me to come he said mate i've got a job on down in southampton i'm just stunt rigging for this bbc show he's like can you just come down and give his hand i was like yeah no worries got down there he's like i ain't got much money for this he goes but i'll split the day rate with you if you just so you You know, I was like, mate, no worries.

45:17I'm just happy to be doing anything. That was almost like his interview for me. So I basically, you know, we'd worked in the Marines, but this was our first time working outside of it together. A couple of weeks later, he phones me up and he's like, mate, I've got a load of work on. I'm actually about to go out to Africa to do this job, but I've got another job on in Madagascar that I can't cover. Can you cover for me? And I'm like, yeah, mate, I'll do the job. What is it? And it's basically going out to this small tropical island just off the coast of Madagascar. with a film crew and being their team medic and the underwater cameraman's dive buddy so that was it i was like yeah i'll do that flew out so i'm there as their medic we're in like the jungle by the sea and they were filming these underwater archaeologists like diving on old pirate shipwrecks looking for antiquities and whatnot i was underwater cameraman's dive buddy so all i'd do is sit underwater about eight meters he's filming shit and every now and again i'm checking his air and like giving him a thumbs up yeah he's still got enough air or i'd be like all right we've got to go up you'll run out of air that's it and then every time someone hurt themselves i'd look after them or whatever or tell someone not to fucking walk across the road when it was busy you know we were out there it was awesome we're living in a five-star resort on this tropical island amazing pissing up every night doing this cool stuff watching these old guys dive on all they'd like pick up teacups every now and again you know people stuff that people used to use yeah and then uh one day me and the cameraman sam we're on the surface with our buoyancy as inflated just sort of like bored been out there like three weeks and one of the old guys comes up from below and he's like swims over to us and he goes lads i'm telling you i've found the adventure galley which was like captain kids apparently captain kids lost ship we're like yeah whatever anyway he swims over to the side to go and recharge his cylinders so he can carry on diving and we're like actually go and see what he's fucking going on about so we go down it's only like eight meters deep go down to the seabed where his dive site he's all marked it and it doesn't look like a ship it's just it's just like bits of decaying wood and rock and but he's he's like dug a hole into the into the seabed sam's got the camera he's filming it and he's like that like gesturing for me to go into the into this hole so i've like swum in it's dark murky can't see anything and i'm just scratching around in it like like basically decimating this guy's pristine dive site and then yeah exactly he's gone for lunch and we fucked everything up anyway in the process i can feel something in the mud and it's like cold and hard and i'm like wrestling with it and can't can't lift it out of the hole cool sat i'm like out to sam he puts a camera down swims over we wrestle this thing out of the hole put it on the seabed he goes back to get the camera and i'm like you can't see anything because it's dirty there's like mud in the water so i'm like trying to clear it fan it away and then it clears he comes over the camera and there's a lump of metal it's gray but it's like you rub it and it shines and it's got like a big t carved into it and an s it's got like 95 and then some other symbols and we're like looking at each other like what's this we then realized we've just fucked his dive site up so we've basically like launched this thing back in the hole and swam up got you know surfaced got to the surface as he's going down we've swam over to the side it's in the in the afternoon by this stage got out de-rigged de-serviced everything washed our wetsuits down and what have you and then we've gone over to you know we're just waiting for him to find his treasure we're just laid in the sun like this fucking waiting we're like we're gonna get a fucking bollocking in a minute 100 because he was a miserable twat as well he comes up he pops his head up about 20 minutes later swims outside gets out goes through the whole rigmarole de-service de-servicing his equipment and then he comes over to us and he's like got this face like thunder he's like you two come with me drags us away from all the other people just so we're out of earshot and uh we're like a couple of fucking naughty school kids and um he turns around he's like you found it didn't you we're like yeah what is it he goes i'm telling you now he goes that's fucking that's part of captain kid's lost treasure and we're like whatever but yeah it turned out it was like a 55 kilogram bar of silver biggest one ever found they attributed to captain kid that it was something that he plundered in the atlantic from the bolivians i I don't know.

49:44But yeah, it erupted. And the BBC news came out, France 24, which is another French news platform. The whole place went absolutely mental. It was this small little island in the middle of nowhere. No one had ever heard of it. And then all of a sudden, it was all on TV. And it was this thing, you know, pirate treasure found. That job finished. And I was like, this is awesome. This TV world's fucking brilliant. and I'm on a plane flying back to the UK and I'm like, what's next? I wonder what's next. I've got paid. It was all right. Another bar of treasure somewhere. Yeah, but then what happened was there was a guy that was on that shoot and obviously as you're probably aware, you know, the media world is freelance.

50:28People bounce all over the place. He'd gone and started another job with another company and he was in a meeting where Channel 4 just basically commissioned this tv show about taking people on special forces selection so it was an idea and they were literally like where the fuck are we going to find these ex-special forces guys and he was like i've just been out in madagascar this geezer foxy we should give him a call so i got the call and that's how it sort of came about they were like do you want to do this show and i was like no i didn't want to do it because i did it didn't sit right with me to go on telly but then i realized i needed to pay the bills and my mental health wasn't in a great space so i said yes and are you happy you did i am happy i did yeah turned out right turned out right as it stands at the moment yeah that's it was all right yeah that's an unbelievable story yeah i know yeah there's a few there's there was there has been um people in the press that said that lump of metal that we found was lead and I'm telling you now, they hadn't seen it.

51:31I saw it as fucking silver. Lead doesn't shine. Yeah. And also a little bit poisonous. A little bit poisonous, but you know. Did you get a pot in the winnings? No, there's no such thing as that. So basically UNESCO got involved. It all got a little bit heated. We nearly got run out of the... We nearly got lynched because it was a big political hoo-ha. the Madagascar is an old French colony okay so they still got influence from the French UNESCO is run in France so it's very French dominated the majority of the archaeological team were American so then they were saying that the Americans were there looting and plundering and then the locals got angry at us we had to look at I had to basically put together or help come up with what an evacuation plan was going to look like for the crew it didn't get to that point there was no winnings but the president of madagascar who'd never even heard of this island rocked up he's obviously in charge of it and i and as far as i'm aware it is a paperweight somewhere in the uh presidential palace of madagascar how lovely for him yeah i'm glad that was redistributed it's probably a doorstop very useful one it's heavy as fuck i can imagine yeah it's got big doors in the palace no doubt since then you've obviously had a very i mean a similar in some way career to what you were doing in the special forces based on the actual program that you've been doing but obviously very different in other ways what would you say the biggest I guess learnings that you have from the military that you've then taken into I guess a more normal job have been the biggest learnings there's quite a lot to be fair I didn't think that I would be able to convert what I'd learn in the military into like everyday life but the the one thing I learn post military service but realize we did very well was I call it now to live life like a toddler and I don't what I mean like by that is not to go around shitting your pants and expecting people to clean up after you it's to live in the now now we do that very they do it very well in the military because when everything's going absolutely to a ball of chalk you live more in the now and just deal with what you can deal with to get out of it you don't worry about what's happened before and you don't worry about what hasn't happened in the future you're just there present although the present isn't very nice you're present now the reason I learned or relearned that in a different way was when I was going through what I call the very constructive therapy so I used to go and see someone it was a um a lady called Alex she was unbelievable she still is unbelievable we weirdly we've become friends now but she was my therapist and she's a qualified psychotherapist but she can be alternative if that makes sense as we used to go for walks in the woods and like talk about shit there was this one time when we were watching she told me to watch this kid that was playing with her mum like in the out in the park and i'm like fucking weird she goes now just just keep an eye on the kid while we talk so we're talking anyway the after like 40 minutes she was like what have you noticed about the kid and i was like well it's just being a kid it's just like it's played it's enjoyed itself i heard it crying not long ago then it's playing again she was like yeah yeah she goes what's it doing i said well it's just loving life she's like yeah and then i suddenly realized you know through the course of this little session that kids like toddlers 18 month old two-year-olds they didn't give a shit about what's happened before they don't care about what hasn't happened in the future they just live in the now they're like hoovers they go around exploring doing stuff pushing their boundaries hurting themselves in the process crying you know dealing with that moment of pain then they get back up and they go at it again and they still do things without worrying about what's just happened and without caring about the future and that's one of the biggest learnings i've learned going forward now that I knew in the military, but not in that way, not in that context, but had to reteach myself.

55:38And it's the one thing that I always remind myself to do every morning. We spend too long as adults, and it's a learned thing, dwelling on the past in a negative way. Oh, I shouldn't have done that. Oh, I could have done this. Oh, that happened. Oh, God, everything's against me. And then because of that, we worry about things happening in the future that haven't happened, which is ludicrous. We should just be more present. Live life like a toddler. live life like a toddler don't put your pants don't put your pants no important both important good caveat very very very and keep your diary dates and all that sort of stuff because you know that's the grown-up side in us and so what's next i've got a tour coming up in january february 2024 it's the third round of this tour so i've done it before i did it a couple of years ago did it this year and i did it a year ago i did it this year january february and i'm doing it again because I've actually really enjoyed it.

56:31It was the thing that I didn't want to do. It was scary. I did it. I loved it. I became comfortable with it and I'm doing it again and again. We're going to different venues. So its backbone is my journey with mental health, where I started, where it started, where it ended up and where I'm going. There's a lot of deep, meaningful stuff in there that I've learned or experienced along the way, but there's also a lot of funny shit because there is a lot of funny shit involved as well. there's a lot of behind the scenes stories from the show because there's been a few shows now and there's a lot of funny things that go on in the background so this this tour now that we're going to be doing in january february it will have new stories in compared to the other ones because things have happened like there are funny things that have happened especially in the show we've got a show going out at the moment as we're recording this there's got some interesting characters in it you've got the uh people like matt hancock you've got um you know gareth gates zoe lyons who's a comedian she's very very weird very funny so that there might be some things um linked to them how was matt hancock from a special forces perspective i mean he's he's uh he's a very academically intelligent person he's clever you know he went to he went to oxford and did PPE at 17 that's I would say you know if you're if you're into academia and people that are good at it that's impressive if you ask him to do something he is very very motivated and will put in 110 of his percent he's still a politician isn't he I was gonna say he's the one who did PPE but that was a very political answer from you sir how no no but he he yeah I know the irony you've been learning from mr matt he did politics philosophy and economics and then it yeah great what a good place to end he puts he puts a shift in let's let's end on a high shall we i'll find a new question let's talk about someone else if you could go back and talk to the 16 year old you who was just about to join the marines what advice would you give yourself i've thought about this a lot i tell myself that you're going to have a very good life it's going to be a lot of fun but there's going to be some tough times within it and when those tough times come about just go and find someone to talk to you that's what i'd tell them

59:01thank you so much for listening to this episode of working hard hardly working and getting all the way to the end that is your achievement for the day you can now go back to sleep i'm so grateful for the community around this podcast and talking to jason today was honestly such an honor i would appreciate it so so much if you could like rate subscribe and review the podcast wherever you're listening to it. It helps us hugely and helps us to have these conversations.

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