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For Good
From Pro Sports to a Mental Health Crisis: Eric Kussin’s Wake-Up Call
00:52:49
Eric Kussin had what most people would call a dream life: a high-profile career in pro sports (NBA, Chicago Sky, and Phoenix Suns), a luxury car parked outside his South Beach apartment, and a rising trajectory with the Florida Panthers. But beneath...
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [00:20]
B
You've got ocd, ptsd, adhd, depression, melancholic depression, anadomic depression, anxiety. And the reality is my nervous system was dysregulated. Kevin Love had a panic attack attack in the middle of a basketball game and had to run off the court in the middle of the game. But then you start to hear more and more Simone Biles.
- [00:39]
A
And.
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B
Here'S the thing that we're still missing the boat on. What athletes are incentivized to do is to share just their label and some form of erratic behavior that came because of what they're dealing with. No one is sharing what should be shared. Which normalizes what did you go through in your life. Divorce and job loss and breakup and verbal abuse and sexual abuse and bullying and cyberbullying. Like, that's the stuff that builds up inside of us that every human being on the planet can relate to.
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C
What's going on, everybody? It's your guy, Joe. Joe Simmons. And this is the For Good podcast where we focus on the good, never the bad. And we've measured on what we do, not what we have. Today I got a special guest today. I'm excited to sit down with Eric Kusin, a former sports executive who worked with organizations like the NBA, Chicago sky and Phoenix Suns. From the outside, it looked like he had it all until a mental health crisis almost took him out of the game. But instead of staying down, he fought his way back, not just for himself, but for millions of others, founding the same here movement to change how we talk about mental health. Thank you for being here, Eric.
- [01:51]
B
Thanks, buddy. Nice intro. Of course, you know, put a lot of stuff into a small amount of time, which is awesome.
- [01:58]
C
Much love. You know, over here at 3 is 4 in the 4 good universe, we like to do our due diligence. Our research on people that we do have come up because we're very intentional on who we talk to. We're very intentional on what we put out as content. And you know, this podcast is super intentional mental health personal growth podcast. And we make sure we sit down with the correct people. So happy to have you here. Let's get into the questions. I know you don't have much time today, so we'll we'll get right into it. We'll get right into it. Let's, let's talk about the breaking point first. So you had a dream career in pro sports. You had. I even want to, I want to, I'd love an NBA job, let me tell you. Like, I'm a huge Knick fan by the way, so if James Dolan ever wants to call out, wants me to be like a draft guy, I'll stop all this and come. But no, you had a dream career in pro sports. A new car, a new place. But behind the scenes, things were falling apart. When did you realize something was wrong?
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B
It's funny because, you know, as I learn now about mental health, you see the cumulative buildup over time. But back then when it happened, because of what you shared about having the dream job. So whether it was starting at the NBA League office, you mentioned going start at the Chicago sky, from there Phoenix Suns, back east to the New Jersey Devils and where the crash that I call it happened was in Florida with the Panthers. And I didn't notice signs at the time because when you're so focused on doing what you love on an everyday basis, whether that's you're playing sports, whether that's you're an executive in professional sports and obviously that's just the sports industry, if you're a producer, if you're a rapper, if you're, if you're a store shop owner, if you're an accountant, if you're a partner in a law firm, any of the above. And obviously I'm giving some high level positions, you could be someone who's chasing those spots when you are going after something that you love doing on a daily basis and there's a goal that you get to that acts as a distraction mechanism from stuff that's building silently inside of you over time. And so my crash felt like it came. I'm using air quotes out of nowhere, you know, like you said, I'm living in South Beach, I'm making more money I'd ever made at that point in sports in my life. I grew up with Oldsmobiles and roll up windows and I have a Lexus car as a lease, nice new rental, but still apartment, but living on Las Olas Boulevard. And then all of a sudden it feels like my cognition and my ability for my brain to process anything, it's like a switch that went off essentially over a two week period where I was fighting and fighting and fighting it and I just couldn't take it anymore. My brain stopped on me, you know.
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C
I think it's interesting that you say that. You know, and I agree that all these things we go through, whether it's success or failure, is a distraction from what we're actually going through internally. And I think what you went through was you finally got everything you wanted and realized it wasn't enough. It wasn't true happiness. It wasn't. That wasn't what was gonna make you whole. That wasn't gonna make you full.
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B
So here's what's interesting, though. The only reason, because I work with a lot of athletes now, right. Like, our alliance has a lot of people saying, same here. And that happens in a lot of their careers. So I'll use a couple people as an example. Samantha Arsenault Livingston is one of our team members. She won a gold medal in swimming for us, right, in Sydney with Amanda Beard and with Michael Phelps. You know, on all those teams, she. Exactly what you just described. She gets up on the medal stand, and when she receives her medal, her thought process is, this is it. This is all there is. Right. And so. Okay, so that's one example. Then we got a guy named Reggie Walker who played in the NFL. He's a captain of NFL teams, plays for San Diego Chargers at the time with San Diego, same thing. He hasn't been happy his whole life. But when I get to the NFL, then I'll be happy. Doesn't happen. In my case, I was on top of the world with being in sports and being at the. I'm one step away from my dream job. So it can happen in different ways. For some people, it's the hedonistic treadmill like you talked about, which is, there's got to be more. There's got to be more. Wait. I finally got to the place that I thought was the top, and that's still not enough. That wasn't the case with mine, although I understand why you thought you would go there. Mine was, I'm in something I love doing, and yet still. Because I'm going to call it a work addiction. I loved work so much that my brain literally was not focused on what was building silently inside of me, and it eventually toppled.
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C
Yeah, you were just. So. You were happy with what you were doing, but wasn't focusing on the other part of life. I get that. I get that. So I hear you were nearly bedridden for over two years. What happened? What caused that?
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B
So at the time. Right. This is what's interesting, and this is why I'm in this space, because I think that change is needed. I Went back to New York when that crash happened. And I went to every top doctor I know. I use a lot of air quotes, but only because I'm facetious and skeptical of the current model the way that it is. And by the way, I'm a guy who went to Cornell, so I'm not trying to knock Ivy League institutions, but every doctor I went to, because when you're in the Northeast, you've got this belief that the top doctors are all from the Ivy League school. So you went to Columbia trained and Harvard trained and Penn trained doctors. And every single one of them was giving me a different label. You've got ocd, ptsd, adhd, depression, melancholic depression, anhedonic depression, anxiety. And they were giving me different medications to try to pop me out of this chemical imbalance that they said that I had. And so when all you're doing during a stretch when things don't feel right is you are taking medication and doing what they say are the gold standards. Medication management and talk therapy. Medication management and talk therapy. I thought I was doing exactly what the gold standard was and what I didn't know was will come out. I'm sure as you'll ask more questions, is that there's things stored in the body and the body goes through changes. And when you focus just on this thing called the chemical imbalance in your brain, you stay stuck up here thinking the medication is going to fix me and I'm going to think my way through this. Which is the quickest way to think yourself into staying in bed for two and a half years. You could see my energy level. I didn't want to be in bed for two and a half years. It's not like I'm a lazy person who didn't want to work. That's the last thing I wanted to do. My brain was so dysfunctional because of where I was that that was the. Unfortunately, that was my calling for that two and a half year period.
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C
So speaking of these combinations of psycho, you know, psychotropic drugs, it said that you had 50 combinations of it. What was that experience like? And I know you kind of just explained that a bit, but did any of it actually help?
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B
I love your level to everyone, to give you credit for everyone who listens to your show. Now, I usually don't get this level of questions. People just have me go through the story and then it gets breezed over. So phenomenal on you for phenomenal on my team.
- [08:53]
C
Shout out to the team that comes up with the questions. Shout out to Danica Dowell. She does an amazing job helping me produce the show and get all our questions out and do our research properly. Shout out to the whole team, though, not just Danica, of course, but she does do most of, you know, all these questions and research for me.
- [09:09]
B
Yeah, no, it's phenomenal to ask questions. So I'll explain it this way. When we grow up and we're little kids, especially in this country, we get strep throat, we get bronchitis, we get pneumonia. And this medication. Oh, well, Levaquin, usually works for you when you have a sinus infection, so we're going to keep giving you that one because that's the one that seems to work. So when your brain stops working, at least, or functioning to a level that you feel comfortable with, to where you finally go to get help, which shouldn't be waiting that long. It's a side story, but we go to the nice man or woman in the lab coat and we say, what label is wrong with me? And then what medication takes that? So it makes sense that the way that the topic is explained to us and sold to us through the pharmaceutical commercials is you got to find out what label you had, just like you did when you were a kid. And. And this is the medication that fixes that label. I would love for that to have been the case. That was not the case at all. And so I'll get into the nuanced details of some of the examples. Right. So when I first left my first appointment getting medications, I was given five prescriptions at the same time. Okay. There's an ssri, which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. There was something called Seroquel, which is more meant like as a. As a calming agent for allowing me to sleep and get rest. There was a benzodiazepine. You've probably heard the drugs like Xanax and Aclonopine. There was a booster to the SSRI that's called either Abilify or Exulti. So you're getting this, what they call this cocktail of medications. And in the US We've got these doctors that are called psychopharmacologists. They're not even called psychiatrists. Psychopharmacologists is this term for these doctors. You say, well, one medication's not enough, so we got to mix a bunch of medications together to fix your imbalance that you have. And when you hear these labels, you're thinking, okay, that makes sense. One medication is for the depression. One's for the anxiety and the reality. Is, you know, as we'll learn over time, my nervous system was dysregulated. That's what that was. The underlying piece of what was wrong. It wasn't that I have these separate disease states with these separate chemical imbalances, and what they were doing was shoving all the. These different medications into me. Well, when your brain's not feeling right from those medications, all you're doing is staying up here. And one of the lines I like to use is, you cannot outthink your mental health. If you try to outthink your mental health, all you do is spin to the bottom. Even worse, because your sympathetic nervous system, which is the dysregulation of your nervous system over time, starts to go, what's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong? Wow, I'm not getting any better weight. I used to remember this. I can't remember that. Is my memory messed up? So imagine two and a half years of basically being a lab rat and being. Put these different medications in me not feeling better in any sort of way. Maybe a little bit of lift here, but then really down over here. Here's one specific example. When your brain's not thinking clearly, they'll say, well, maybe you have ADHD because you can't focus, so they give you a stimulant like an Adderall or Ritalin or Anuvagil or Provogyl. Well, guess what that does. That makes your anxiety, or again, your sympathetic nervous system response spike even higher. So now, okay, maybe for a moment on your phone, you could focus on something that you need to answer in a text message on your phone, but the rest of the world feels completely whacked and racing. So you call your doctor and you go, okay, I can focus on my phone for a second, but everything else feels like it's coming at me. What do I do now? And they go, take more of the.
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C
Xanax, just keep feeding you the same stuff that's causing you that.
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B
Exactly, exactly. Because they're not thinking about dysregulation. What they're thinking about is disease states. And so when you think about disease states, you think you can just plug all these different medications in and it's going to fix each one individually. The brain is one system with the body, and they're not considering that.
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C
So how did that journey shape your understanding of mental health in the system we have in place right now?
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B
Well, so here was the chronology of what I learned. How the current system works is you're given a bunch of meds, most People don't go through 52 like I did. But, you know, most people eventually get frustrated or they just say, I'm done with medication, or sadly, we lose them to suicide or we lose them to overdose. In my case, I'm a stubborn SOB and I'm holding on. Okay, what do I need to keep taking? And eventually a doctor says, okay, you've tried all the software changes with the drugs. Now let's do the hardware changes where we actually start to work on the neurons in the brain, the brain cells. So for science lesson for everyone, think of two neurons. You have a presynaptic neuron and a postsynaptic neuron. And I kind of call it Hungry Hungry Hippo. The presynaptic neuron goes and grabs particles of neurotransmitters and says, we're an electrical chemical being. We need to have some of those to shoot them across the synapse so that we could have a thought, a feeling, a behavior, an emotion that happens billions of times. Well, trillions of times, but with billions of cells in our brain over and over and over again. So, okay, that's why they want to zap the neurons, because they're thinking, well, we already put a bunch of new chemicals in your brain, and that didn't work. So we got to get these things working. It must be the hardware itself because they must not be firing the right way. So I did TMS therapy. I did 23 sessions, 23 days in a row at the time, not covered by Insurance. So $350 a session. So, like, any savings goes out the window at that point. But I'm willing to do anything I can to feel better. And I find myself 24 day, and I'm like, I'm making the motion for you so you can see it. I'm sitting on my hands with my legs shaking, and my brain is going, swallow that bottle, Swallow that bottle. Swallow that bottle of pills in front of me. I have no idea where that thought came from. I'd never had a suicidal ideation before. So, okay, well, I got to get to a hospital because I can't stop myself. That's why I'm sitting on my hands, because I feel like I'm going to lunge towards that bottle. I go inpatient. And then this is to your question of the process. The Harvard trained attending psychiatrist at Cornell Med says to me, Eric, 52 meds, TMS therapy. Your last resort is to do ECT electroconvulsive therapy, or what we know from one flu over the cuckoo's nest. I'm not saying that's the right depiction, but as shock therapy. So the process that you go through when you're challenged, that the modern medical community uses is. All right, medications. We'll do some therapy along with it. The most common therapies are cbt, dbt, maybe ACT therapy with some talk in there. Okay, if those don't work eventually, let's try tms. If those don't work now, ect. Well, what I learned now, which we can get into, there's about 70 other things and probably more beyond that, that you can try to start to heal and work on your nervous system over time. And none of that was explained to me, because here's the path that you take and here's what we were trained in, and it's, why are our suicide and overdose rates continuing to go up even though we've got the greatest awareness of mental health ever on our planet? It's because we're not educating people. We're not giving them the options that they need to start to heal.
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C
So is that what led you to a more holistic approach to healing? What led you to more holistic approach?
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B
Yeah, so I started failing those other treatments. I should say I started failing. I was failing those other treatments for so long. And there was a woman that I met who was a psychologist, and she was an integrative psychologist. I had no idea what the term integrative meant. Sat down on her couch, kind of like you're sitting in the chair right now, like, leaning back. And she's like, eric, this appointment. I only have one question for you. I don't want to ask you all these deep questions. I just want to get to know you as a person. What's the story of your life as you tell it to yourself? And there's no rules. You could scream, you could curse, you could yell, you could look at the wall, you could look at the floor, you could punch a pillow. And she just sits back and goes, ready? Go. And so what comes out of me in terms of sharing the story of my life? There's a lot of positive things, don't get me wrong, but the. The challenging things that she took away from me. I'm the middle of three boys, and from the time I was 9 until I was 23, 24, this is my next 14 or 15 years. My older brother breaks his femur bone in a sports accident, was put into a body cast for a year. Homeschool, comes back to school, gets diagnosed with ALL, which is a children's form of leukemia. So five years of chemo and radiation, which in the late 80s and early 90s, back then was the. Not the best prognosis, but miracle. He goes into remission. Month later, he's in a Jeep Wrangler that, you know, the cars that people buy sometimes are just cheap. Car with no inspection. Friend has it for his permit. Car loses control. He flies out of the back, lands on the parkway, cracks his head open, heals from that, goes to college, feeling a pain in his knee. They do blood tests. Same cancer from childhoods come back. Now that it's come back, they have to give them a stronger dose of the chemo, which does a great job of lowering the white blood cell counts, but it's also beating up all of his healthy cells. So we're seeing him hunched over. I get a call from my father, come to the hospital. Todd's got 105 fever. We meet with the neurologist. The neurologists tell us his body's gone into septic shock from the chemo treatment. Septic shock? He falls into a coma. And so for three months, we have no idea if he's going to wake or have any brain activity. So miracle, after three months, as if it's a movie, he wakes up, full cognitive faculties. But his kidneys fail from being in the septic shock, so needs to go on dialysis. That happens for a year. We all get tested to see who's the closest donor match. My father donates a kidney to him, that's all successful. I get that job at the NBA that you're talking about, thinking, blank slate, real world. Put all these things behind me, and three of my close friends pass away back to Back to back. 22, 23, 24 years of age. So I rushed through that story because of your question. The woman stops me when you ask, how do I get more holistic approaches? This psychologist stops me with 10 minutes to go in the session. Eric, we only got 10 minutes to go. What else happened to you as a child and a young adult that impacted your mental health that I need to know about? And I said, I don't know what you're talking about impacting my mental health. I'm 35 years old. My chemical imbalance started at 33. You asked me to tell you about my life. I started age four with some memories about toys and got up to 24. The nine years in between, 24 and 33, I was running sales for the Sons and Devils and the Panthers. My brain was fine. What do you mean, impacted by mental health? So it Connects to your first question about noticing symptoms. I had no idea anything was going on. Now, looking back, I was dealing with things like dissociation, feeling out of body, feeling, like, removed, Like I was a little bit numb. But. But no one tells us to look out for those signs. They tell us to look out for sadness or nervousness. Right. The telltale signs of depression. With suicide, they tell us to look out for, are you giving away possessions or making a plan? None of those things were happening with me. Right. So I had my eyes completely off the ball. And this is where she starts explaining to me, eric, you had a front row seat watching all these things happen to your brother, to your friends. And what you were watching was a muddy wrestling match taking place, and you were focused on everything else in the arena that was going on, which in my case was playing sports, working in professional sports, that you weren't paying attention. And this is back to your question about, oh, did I reach a level and say it wasn't enough? No. What I was doing was I was still forging ahead and excited, but I wasn't paying attention to the mud that was splattering and building on me. And that mud is chronic stress and trauma, and it makes physiological and biological changes to the architecture of our nervous system and areas like the vagus nerve and the prefrontal cortex and the HPA axis and the brain gut connection and how your gut becomes porous and has leaky gut and gut dysbiosis. And I'm throwing out geeky science terms, but just to say there's a lot of shit that goes on with our body that gets messed up that were not ever explained to work on that. You know, assuming you played sports growing up. Also, like, when you play sports, your coach says, run up stadium stairs, you do it. Coach says, do bench press, you do it. If a coach had told me this is going wrong and here's what you work on that this is connected with in the body, I would have done it. No one teaches us those things. So that's how I got into the holistic space.
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C
Yeah. You know, I definitely have done some research and I've heard about the gut is connected to the brain, and things that we eat ultimately affect the way we think. And I think a lot of people aren't kind of privy to that. And I love that you kind of spotlighted that is because, you know, we put a lot of stuff in our body that we don't know ultimately is affecting us, you know, as a whole. Not just our stomach, not just our Gut, but it's affecting our body as a whole. So I love that you brought that up.
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B
Well, to dive a little bit deeper into that, the gut, it makes 80% of the serotonin that our brain uses, literally sends it up. Right. So when you have bacterial overgrowth, which is what they call gut dysbiosis, or when you have leaky gut, which is that there's so much chronic inflammation in the system, either from the stress that you're living through or the foods that you eat, starts to make these tears in these single cell membrane linings of the gut, where nutrients can't get absorbed and processed, so they just go into the bloodstream in almost a toxic way. So your gut can't make the neurotransmitters that's needed to send up to the brain. But then they call it a chemical imbalance. Instead of saying there's all these things wrong with the structures that we can fix, they say, oh, the end product, chemical imbalance. That's what we just got to put the chemicals in your brain.
- [22:56]
C
All right. I mean, this is getting pretty deep. And I'm loving how educated you are on these things because this is important for my followers and my listeners to hear. You don't always hear this every day. And there's things that people should be taking out a pad and a pen and writing down everything they can.
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B
By the way, you're laughing as you say, this is not stuff that I ever thought that I would learn. But you learn because life punches you.
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C
In the face and you're like, okay.
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B
I need it for myself. And then I was like, I can help people.
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C
This is.
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B
I love coaching. I love mentoring. When I would work in sports, my favorite part of sports was not necessarily being with the team, which, don't get me wrong, it was a ton of fun. It was hiring reps, hiring managers and directors and helping them grow their careers. I like being a people person, so this gives me that opportunity.
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C
I think the best coaches and mentors are the ones that come from experience. And you can only fall on your face. You can only show somebody how to not fall on their face by falling on yours. So I think that when you try to better yourself, it's ultimately a circle of life, because now you want to spread that knowledge to other people and better them as well. So I think that it's amazing. Let's jump into some, you know, sports executive, mental health advocate stuff. So sports culture is all about toughness, mentally and physically. How did that mindset play into your struggles?
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B
So sports here's the interesting thing about, like, sports executives, right? Most sports executives come from type A, high level athletes who played, you know, college level, some just high school level, but still high, high school level, who are coming in and they're looking at each other, right? Most of the positions in sports are revenue generating positions. Even if you're in marketing, it's how is your marketing role contributing to how many tickets and how many sponsorships the team is selling, right? Like the end of the day, it's all about bringing in monies, good, bad or indifferent. I'm not trying to knock it. And so it's this interesting dynamic of dog eat dog in the sports industry because you're like best friends with the person to your left or your right. And you also need to bite their head off and make sure that you're getting to that next spot. And it especially gets competitive as you get to the director and VP and then C level suite executive. Because now it's like, wait a second, there's only 120 of these spots in the whole world. And I'm in the same conferences with these people. And so it's a little isolating because there's a few people, don't get me wrong, that I'm still friends with to this day that, you know, ride or die. Like, if you were both interviewing for the same spot, they would call you up and say, hey, Eric, are you interviewing for this too? Cool, let's root each other on. But there's a lot of people always, like, even if they were on your staff before, they'd stab you in the back to get to the position that you're at, right? So that absolutely contributes and I think you'll appreciate this. There's a Tracy Murray, played in the NBA, played for the Raptors for a while, played for the Rockets. And at the time, so I'm speaking from the, you know, the sports executive spot, him from the athlete spot. He shared this when we at Boise State. He said, when my grandmother passed away, it was one of the lowest points of my life if I shared with my team how much my grandmother's passing was impacting me. The guy who's a sixth or the seventh man on the bench, who was guarding me in practice in the second team, would be in my ear in practice going, oh, you're not dealing so well with grandma passing.
- [26:22]
C
Where are you?
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B
Because doggy dog wanted that spot on the starting lineup, right? And that's the stuff that you deal with. I'm not saying every human being is that way, but I'm saying the reality of competition is people try to get under your skin, even when they are awfully unempathetic in doing so.
- [26:38]
C
Wow, that's crazy. And I can see how that can play into it. They'll try to take everything and use it to their advantage to better their situation, which could play a lot into your mental health. We're seeing more athletes speak up about mental health now, but back when you were in the industry, what was the vibe? Was it something that people even talked about?
- [27:01]
B
So the arc, and I still don't think we're in a good place, but the ARC was really 2017. 2018 was when Kevin Love and then DeMar DeRozan were like the first two that really stepped out. Ironically, my story when I stepped out was like three months before that.
- [27:19]
C
You set the trend.
- [27:20]
B
So they were no. Well, here's the thing. Obviously, I'm a no name compared to those guys, but I'm sharing it in this way. So Brandon Marshall and Ron Artest, you know, eventually became Metta World Peace. We're kind of on an island. Royce White, I got to throw in there as well. Royce was drafted by the Houston Rockets, where the three of them spoke up. But they. I would say the way that they shared it was looked at by the leagues in an adversarial way, and they were being rogue. And, you know, Brandon Marshall just did a disease state, called it borderline personality. And Ron Ortest was saying stuff like just ad hoc in the middle of an interview, going, I want to thank my psychiatrist. And at the time, people were like, what is he doing? Why is he saying that out loud? And so they were a little bit of victim of the time, more so than just the way that they were sharing it. Prince Harry shared around that time as well. Whatever you think about him now, back then was beloved by, like, everyone in the royal community and around the world. So I think that helped normalize things. But Kevin Love had a panic attack in the middle of a basketball game and had to run off the court in the middle of the game. So I think that coming to the forefront and now this is. I'm an NBA League office guy. I'm going to give you the down and dirty of the ugly stuff that I think happens. The league didn't want there to be an excuse for guys to not show up and play or to take time off. And so they were afraid that something that you can't see if we give guys the opportunity to say, this is what they're dealing with. They're going to take advantage of that. And even the people who don't, aren't struggling with mental health at the time are going to take advantage of that. Think of the Vin Bakers of the world and all that stuff when they're contracts where, oh, we signed this guy to a four year deal and in year one, he's not showing up for practice for three days. To me, that's a big miss. Because someone could claim the flu, someone could claim that their ankles hurt. Even regardless of what happens on the X ray, we weren't giving guys and gals the opportunity to say something's going on. Which I think raises the collective and gives people. They're going to come back actually sooner. Okay, so timing wise, I come out with my story in May of 2017. There's a sports reporter, Dan Revelle, who's got 2, 2 million followers, who shares my story on Twitter. And my personal telephone number was on there. So I get over 400 calls or 150,000 shares on this. And I share that only because, again, who am I? I'm just a sports executive, but because it was in sports, it was a big deal. Oh, my God, someone's talking about it. So Kevin and Damara later that year come out with their story. Then you start to hear more and more Simone Biles and Ao Miosaka. But here's this that we're still missing the boat on. What athletes are incentivized to do is to share just their label and some form of erratic behavior that came because of what they're dealing with. So Kevin, love anxiety, panic attack, ran off the basketball court, Kevin or Michael Phelps, Depression, suicidal thoughts, Right? No. No one is sharing what should be shared. Which normalizes what did you go through in your life? Divorce and job loss and breakup and verbal abuse and sexual abuse and bullying and cyberbullying. That's the stuff that builds up inside of us that every human being on the planet can relate to. And so all we're doing is doubling down Noel Lyles, who's the fastest man on the planet. Now, if you look at his tweet that he was applauded for, he was like, I have adhd, depression, you know, ocd. So you're just throwing out a bunch of labels that you have and no explanation of what you've been through in your life that doesn't normalize that segments more and says, are you part of the group that has it or are you part of the group that doesn't have it?
- [31:06]
C
Wow. So at what point did you decide to turn your personal struggles into a movement that helps you and others.
- [31:13]
B
It's when I went to all these nonprofit websites in this space and I saw them using the same language that I just shared with you there. They were all saying, one in five people are mentally ill. Okay, well then what are we telling 4 in 5 people, 80%, they were all saying, stop the stigma. Stop the stigma, Break the stigma. Raise the stigma. Well, stigma is not formed by my pen or my water bottle, which are inanimate objects. It's formed by people. So if I'm an advocate and I'm saying, stop the stigma, break the stigma, I'm pointing at another group of people saying, you're the ones that being unfair to those of us who have it. That doesn't bring people together. That pulls up further apart. So it was seeing the messages in this space and going, I've got relationships with athletes who I know I can get to open up and share. Theo Fleury's been sexually abused from the time he was 15 years old. Chamika Holtzclaw had to grow up with her grandparents because there was dysfunction in her family with her parents. These are the things that impact people. And yet those are the stories that should be told and they weren't being told that way.
- [32:13]
C
So, yeah, I want to jump more into the same here movement and you changing the narrative. Tell me about your endeavors. The nonprofit. Same here, but also five in ring. Regional psychiatry. Is it? And how do they all play together?
- [32:26]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking for those. Alright, so our organization is three train cars next to each other, if you want to look at that. So train car number one is same here Global Inc. It's our nonprofit. Train car number two is five and five inches. Yep. No, no problem. And then train car number three is regional psychiatrists or clinical telehealth wing. It was not structured in this way from the beginning. When it started, I started seeing your global. I didn't have. I had ideas in my head for these others, but I needed to get this focus. So mission vision of same here. The nonprofit was the athletes, the entertainers, normalizing the topics for five and five, not one in five. That mental health lives across a continuum. It's not binary. And that we all have it. Well, when we started putting that message out there, we started to get requests to do programming. Can you come and speak? Can you bring a celebrity speaker with you? Can we do psycho education? So we started doing that in the nonprofit umbrella. We quickly learned as I started, started to partner with doctors and get their feedback that we've got something here. That two things can get pulled out of the nonprofit. One is a scale for measurement. Think about this for a second. Every form of health, there's a range. Your blood pressure is a range. When you put it on your. Your weight is a range. Your thermometer, your temperature is a range. Why do we not have a range in mental health? The answer is we do. It's called polyvagal syndrome science and it shows how the nervous system shifts. But we're not taught it. So we took the scale concept of measurement and then, okay, what do we do with blood pressure with weight scale with thermometer. When things are off, we do something about it. We make changes to our lifestyle or our diet. What are those changes in mental health? We call them star exercises a gym for the brain, stress and trauma, active release and rewiring. Okay, so we took these two pieces, I guess if you will, of intellectual property of a scale to measure and star exercises a gym and we put it into an app called the same here scale so that now you could do check ins on your phone for yourself or with other people and then either assign yourself or other people exercise to go. How do I start working on my brain health the way that I do my physical health? The third piece that regional psychiatry was, one of our partners owned it and was going to sell it to work on these first two train cars. And our board member, the chairman of our board, Dr. Rosa said we're not selling that thing because great that we're teaching people in schools and offices in the nonprofit. Great that we're giving people access in the for profit to have it in the app. We need a place where people be able to go if the app psycho education isn't enough and they need to be handheld through how to do these exercises and how to be checked in with. We got to deliver those same types of consistent messages in a telehealth wing to now where what's an exciting thing to share with you? Next week we start training our first hospital in this. We're going to be with Central Florida Behavioral Hospital. So you dream these things and say, will anyone ever take us seriously that from a patient perspective we need common language and then common exercise to work on. And now we have hospitals that are actually going to take us on. It's big deal.
- [35:38]
C
That's exciting. Big deal. And I know keep growing and growing as you guys keep pushing and pushing the narrative. But love how you kind of created that train track of trains put together to kind of all coincide and help each other. You say mental health affects five and five people, not just one in five. Why is that shift in perspective so important?
- [36:02]
B
Because let's go back to the one in five message. Okay, so I do this exercise every time. I do what we call our first pillar. And I'll say, jojo, you and your four friends at the table stand up. I just shared a very vulnerable story with you. I want you to look at, let's say there's 200 people in the audience. I want you to look at the other 195 people that are your great friends here in this audience, and I want you to share a really vulnerable, sensitive story with your 195 best friends. And they all look like they're about to shit in their pants. And I go, no, no, no, I'm not going to make you do that. So I go, you sit down, you sit down, you sit down, you sit down. Four of them sit down. Say, jojo, you keep standing up. You and me, we're both the mentally ill. We're the one in five. So then I look at the other four and I go, so how do you describe your mental health if you're not in the one in five? And I get the same four answers every time. Healthy, fine, normal, and okay, okay, well, if that's the belief that you're either mentally ill or your healthy, fine, normal, okay. The four in five people go, there's nothing wrong with me. I don't need to do anything about it. And if mental health is cumulative, like that plaque, excuse me, like that mud that builds up on us, that stress and trauma over time. There's not a person who skates through life without going through challenges. That's what life is. Well, that stuff's going to build, and eventually you're going to get on that side of that 1 in 5 line. Why are we using that statistic? All it does is make people reactive. And I would say in a nefarious way, that's a pharmaceutical message. Because if you get people to see things in a binary way, one in five people, oh, now I have it. What fixes it? Four in five people, I do nothing. And eventually I get it. It's a perfect funnel system for selling the most drugs they can.
- [37:37]
C
I mean, it's safe to say that you're helping people understand that it isn't what the norm would say if you're dealing with mental health, that you need to dig deeper and really realize that more are dealing with it than they think. The person that's walking around normal or thinking everything is all normal is really does have some past traumas and some things that they've got to deal with. Because I think we all have things to unpack. You know, I think every human being from childhood and on has some things to unpack that, you know, we distract ourselves in the everyday treadmill right of life. And whether we're happy or not, like, we're still distracting ourselves from the major questions that we need to be asking ourselves.
- [38:13]
B
Georgia, let me piggyback one thing. Would any person on the planet, would you ask, are you 100% physically healthy? Like, you could eat the greatest, cleanest diet ever. You still have saturated fat that builds up and plaque that builds in your arteries. Because some of the foods that you eat and the way it's broken down combined with your genetics, you got to look out for that. Why is that an okay topic to be like? That builds over time. But, hey, I live through, like you said, everyone experiences traumas, but that doesn't build inside of me. It's. It's insanity that we don't recognize.
- [38:45]
C
Everything builds up. Everything builds up. So what was the most powerful response you received from someone who heard your story and realized that they weren't alone? Wow.
- [38:58]
B
So I'll tell you one that's a recent one, right? Because there's so many to, like, go through, but this one sticks out. So I was at an assembly program, and we were doing it with 9th grade through 12th grade, and everyone starts filing out after the first session of the assembly. And this girl who would be considered in old school term special ed group, comes up to me, and she's twiddling her fingers like this and looking down. She's like, can I say something to you? And I was like, yes. It's gonna take me a while to say it. Listen, take as much time as you need. I get chills when I say this, but it's so simple. She just says, you made me feel not alone, right? And I was like, holy sh. Like, because she was in a group of 999 of her peers where she's always looked at as the outcast. And here, what we were doing in this session was talking about how we all go through things. And I'm giving my story, talking about being executive and talking about how I was taken down off that perch and in that bed for two and a half years and showing how that relates to everyone in this room. So the captain of the football team and the head singer in the choir, they're going through Things as well. Like, yes, there are stories of people who say, you saved my life. Those things are great, don't get me wrong. And I live for them. And because to me, that's more valuable than any ring I could win in a championship or anything like that. But it's the. The specifics of stories like that, where I can just make someone not feel alone and know that every day they carry the burden of feeling alone. Those are really the most important.
- [40:35]
C
It's important a lot of people feel alone. Every day they wake up feeling alone. And you speak a lot about saying, hey, my name's not as big as DeMar DeRozan or Kevin Love. But your name and your following doesn't need to be big for somebody to be inspired by your story. It just takes somebody to. To relate to what you're going through to really feel not alone. And it doesn't have to be the biggest superstar. It could just be the person that they ride the bus with every day that they may never speak to. And that person may say, hey, I'm going to do this, this, and this. And they say, well, so am I, and thank you for giving me that. And that's as big as a superstar telling you that they relate to you is that somebody else from another walk of life sits there and says, I'm going through what you're going through, and it's okay.
- [41:18]
B
From the time we're little kids, we get sat in circles at birthday parties and like, what's your name? Joseph. You're Joseph too, right? Like, it's amazing that you said the same name, even though it's not that big a deal. Like, obviously there's only so many names on the planet. So why do you think the name of the organization is Same Here is because the power of you being able to tell your story and someone to be able to.
- [41:37]
C
I love it.
- [41:39]
B
Like you said, it could be to 5 people or 5 million people. Doesn't matter. There's so much power.
- [41:43]
C
By the way, I love the name Same Here. It's so perfect for and so fitting for mental health, right? Because same here. Right? Same here, bro. Your educational program start as early as kindergarten, all the way up to 12th grade. Why focus on kids so young? And how does your approach change from elementary school to high school?
- [42:03]
B
Because kids so young, one are very honest and open, right? Like, they will tell you what is.
- [42:08]
C
One the most open and honest.
- [42:11]
B
Yeah, I love it. Right? And by the way, these kids, we think, oh, they don't know what's going on. They Absolutely know what's going on. I give them an exercise and I let them know you could draw a picture. You don't need to write if you can't write sentences yet. I just share what I went through with my brother and with my friends. What are some of the things that you've been through? And you hear these preschool through third graders stand up in front of each other and say, my pet passed away. My fish died like a fish. And it made me sad. My grandmother has Alta designers, right? They can't even pronounce the word. And it's sad that she can't remember my name. But then you see all these other kids stand up and go, my grandfather's sick too. My dog passed away too. Same here, right? So it's the same concept when we go from one grade level to the next, but it's the delivery of the concepts that change because they now, okay, when we do that same exercise and it's nine through 12, we do the breakouts and the workshops, we're asking them to fill out four circles. We're asking them to pick one of them and share in small groups. Because now it's, oh, I can't share with a big group, fine, we'll share in a smaller group. And we ask them to write an X if they didn't know that about the person and a check if they did. The X's to checks ratio, no matter how long people have worked together, lived together, whatever it is, is six or seven to one in groups of 10. People don't know what each other is carrying around in these individual backpacks. And I know I'm obviously giving you examples to just short of time. There's five different pillars that we have. That's only pillar one, which is the vulnerability piece of the five and five message. But the same concepts can be shared all the way from pre K up to a CEO at a company. We're human. And when you connect on a human level level and you just make it age appropriate, the same threads tie throughout. We all go through pain, we try to avoid pain. And here's how we can come together to support one another.
- [44:03]
C
I love that. I agree. You know, a lot of people think sometimes therapy or mental health advocacy or education is too, you know, it's too much for a younger person. But I think that's where it starts. I think if, when I was younger, if any kid can start saying how they feel and being more vulnerable with somebody other than their parents sometimes, or somebody that would just listen or somebody that can Relate. I think you wouldn't grow up with so many past traumas. You kind of try to deal with them or figure them out before you get to a certain age because you have a better understanding on how everything works in your mind and how you're supposed to. Not only how everything works, but how you're supposed to approach those pains that you deal with and those problems that you deal with. I think a lot of kids don't know how to approach it and they become adults that still don't know how to approach it. So I think starting young is important for me. That's in my opinion.
- [44:51]
B
What's the average age of a heart attack? 50, 60, 70 years old. Yet we teach kids in 4th and 5th grade jump rope for heart and hoops for heart and the importance of having a heart healthy diet. Like we should be preventative, right? That's an intense concept. That someone could die of a heart attack. That's scary. But we teach kids about it. We don't blink an eye. Why are we not teaching them about stress and trauma and the possibilities of stress, suicidal ideation? That should not be a scary thing to be teaching. We'll get in front of it. It'll be self protective because kids will now know when I get that feeling. Oh, JoJo spoke about that when he came to school. I know I need to reach out and ask someone for help about that.
- [45:29]
C
I know we're getting shorter on time. We've got a few more questions so we'll try to speed through them. This has been literally a great conversation. So it's hard to speed through something when you're speaking about things that I love and I'm passionate about and I want to get out to my people and my followers. But we gonna keep going. Let's talk about balancing your nonprofit in business. What's one thing you learned from running a non profit that every business leader should understand?
- [45:51]
B
That you have got to wear many hats. That all the hats you don't like. You don't even think about these things when you first started. You're like, I'm gonna help people. Well, okay, then you're gonna have to worry about your, you know, sending out your invoices and, and balancing your checkbooks and making sure that your taxes are paid and looking at your W9s and making sure that those are. I mean like it's just there's so many and then that by the way, that's outside of creating the content for your website, making sure it's updated, getting on the app and Making sure that the new features are added, getting a message from your app developer that the app went down and okay, where are we going to focus our time? Like it's just, it's a lot all at once. But if you keep your focus on the main thing being the main thing, you are able to maintain a stability and say, we're going to get these other things done and even if we take two steps back today, we'll take three steps forward tomorrow.
- [46:44]
C
So I know we spoke about the same hair scale app earlier, so we won't have to. I won't get into that question because you basically told me how you started it, how it works and why you started it. But how do you balance making an impact with financial sustainability, especially with a free to download app?
- [47:02]
B
It's a great question. So I would not take investment dollars which people think about in my mind, but in this space I don't want to turn into headspace and calm people who started off with great intentions of we're gonna teach the world how to meditate, how to breathe, and then all of a sudden you get the corporate money in order for it to grow and it's like get 10% happier in 10 days, guaranteed. Like that's not, to me a genuine. That's not reality. So I am making our money in the talks and the programs that we do mention the trainings with hospitals that we're coming out and doing, using that money to invest into the app, then the app itself, while it's free, there's premium features that people can step up into or there's an enterprise model of the app where schools and offices can choose to use it in an enterprise way where they do formal check ins about the entire organization. That still takes eventually hiring salespeople and doing marketing around it. But I don't mind growing slow. I don't need it to be a unicorn app where we're billionaires. I want to help people. And to your point, if I help five people with that app, that's an amazing day for me. Like sign me up for that any day.
- [48:13]
C
I love it. Yeah, anybody you can help is somebody you can help. You know, we're coming towards the end and you know, I want to ask these last three questions. Let's talk about moving forward in the future. You're leading a global movement now. How do you take care of your own mental health while carrying the message for others? Because you know, you do so much for everybody else, but what are you doing for yourself? How do you, how do you care to your own mental health while doing this for everybody else.
- [48:39]
B
So the first step of taking care of yourself is self awareness. Because I am a workaholic. That is an addiction. Everyone is addicted to something. We have to acknowledge that. And so even though mine is not drugs and alcohol, which gets damned, mine is staying up till two in the morning writing emails. So it's taking a step back from that. And even if that means you might have seen my dog move a couple times behind me, I'm going to take 10 minutes to take a walk around the block with my dog right now. Then obviously I have the app and I have the star exercises, so I do those. But it's the discipline of knowing, Eric, you're going to fall apart again because that mental health is on that continuum if you don't do those things. So it's a bank. You're taking from the bank and you're going to leave no money left in that bank if you keep taking from it. So pick your poison. And I'd rather stay fresh and be able to be productive every day than take too much.
- [49:31]
C
I love the bank analogy. Love the bank analogy. What's next for the same camp movement? What's the big business?
- [49:36]
B
So, so right now we have a lot of tentacles into our government and with our military and seeing the opportunity for this to be embedded as when I say this, I'm talking about our measurement tools. We have a lot of data people that are behind it. People don't have a way to measure impacts of programs that they're doing, not even our programs, other programs to use our tool to say how is someone moving and how do we plot that out? So we've got a company that we're working with that does low dose naltrexone. Okay. It's a way to get off of opioids and then eventually not have to take it. After six months, they're gonna be using our app as a way to check in to show that they're improving over time. So universal language of check in across all spectrum, all fields, that's what's needed in this space. It doesn't exist. And that's what we'd like to step into.
- [50:24]
C
So let's wrap this up. Last question. You've been amazing and I think you'd have a great answer for the people out there. So if someone's struggling right now and doesn't know where to start, what's one small step that they can take today?
- [50:41]
B
Okay, so stagnation breeds stagnation. That's where struggle comes from our body, which is called she in Chinese or pranayama. Right? Prana. It's energy flowing throughout our body. And so sometimes we feel like we're laying in bed and we literally can. Can't move because it feels almost like a flu, like symptom when our mental health has declined. And so we've got a link on our website on sameheartglobal.org, it's called Star ting exercise. Not just star exercises. It's literally stretches you can do in your bed. Windshield wiper movements that you can do with your legs and your knees as they're bent, Putting your head to the side and your arm one way, head to the side, arm the other way. It's to get stagnant energy flowing out through. Through your body so it doesn't stay stuck in this place. That's the first piece towards getting that flow and that life energy back. That's the way you start. And you ask someone to be your friend and keep you accountable. It'll get you on the right path.
- [51:36]
C
Thank you, man. I appreciate that. And I hope everybody was taking notes on what they could do just to start a small step today. Just something. Definitely shout out all your organizations before we get out of here so people know where to find you. All the websites, let them know before we get out of here. I know we got, like a minute or two left.
- [51:54]
B
Yeah, no. Thank you for that opportunity. So main site is samehere global.org the site for all the tools is 5in5 inc. So no gaps. The number 5 in fiveinc.com our app is samehere scale. So same here is one word and then scale available on all the app stores. And you see my social channels right there. It's AimeGearGlobal. Want to hear from you. Would love to interact with whoever, see how we can help whoever. So please reach out and thank you, Jojo, for the opportunity.
- [52:25]
C
Of course. Please reach out. Like he said. Same here. Because same here, everybody you know. Thank you, Eric Houston, for sitting down with me. I think this was an amazing conversation, a very educational conversation for people to go to, kind of listen and take in and really understand that what you're pushing is so special and so impactful and so needed for the world, not just in the sports world, but in the world as a whole. So I want to thank you once again for coming on the Four Good Podcast. It's your guy, JoJo Simmons. This is the Four Good Podcast where we focus on the good, never the bad, where we're measured on what we do and not what we have. Thank you guys. Until next time. Peace.
- [53:09]
B
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- [53:15]
A
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- [53:51]
C
Fantastic.
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A
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