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Welcome to episode 529 of Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Robert Burke.
Now, Bobby has an extensive acting career, including Rescue Me, Generation Kill and Black Klansman to name but a few.
But a lesser known fact is he's actually served as a volunteer firefighter for 19 years,
signing up after losing his FDNY friend Captain Paddy Brown in 9-11.
So we discuss a host of topics from his early life in Washington Heights,
his journey into acting, martial arts, the fire service and so much more.
Before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on,
subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every five star rating truly elevates this podcast, making it easier and easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 530 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to everyone else who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Robert Burke.
Enjoy.
Well, Bobby, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time to come on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thanks for having me, James. It's a pleasure, honor.
So there are many parallels, obviously a lot of folklore in our profession about Steve Buscemi, who was FDNY firefighter and became an actor.
But I've had some people on the show like Josh Brolin, who was an actor and then volunteered as a firefighter for a while, for a few seasons as a wildland firefighter.
So when I realized that that was your background too, that you were well embedded in the acting realm and then decided to volunteer in the fire service,
I thought that was absolutely incredible. So I would love to start my opening question.
Where on planet Earth are we finding you today?
We're in a place called Ocean Beach Fire Island, New York. It's in Suffolk County, Long Island.
It's a barrier island, a couple of hundred yards wide by 36 miles long.
Beautiful. And they have a volunteer fire service, is that correct?
We have several departments on the island. Only one, no, I shouldn't say that.
You know, seven different departments on the island. But in the winter and the off season, we just say, hey, we're just, you know, five different engine companies.
The mutual aid has to happen. Not only are we volunteer, but we're seasonally staffed, you know what I mean?
So that November, December, January, February, March, April, May, you may respond to a multi-structure operation with four or five guys until mutual aid is struck
and departments from the mainland come over to supplement the operation.
So, yeah, I mean, it's a lot of area to cover. It's, you know, it is what it is.
This is where I live. This is where I serve. We do the jobs that we do, you know, gas leaks, pretty much straightforward structure fires, a lot of EMS in the summer, spring and fall.
And then in the winter, it kind of gets quiet. But in the winter, you know, people are trying to stay warm in silly ways, as you know, or don't know.
And that's what will turn us out also.
Yeah, yeah, we don't have too much of the, you know, the fire based fires as far as warming.
The ones I saw most in certainly California were actually the candles, you know, some of the Catholic faiths that have the shrines.
And those are a big one. Unattended open flame. Yeah. And cigarettes and all the rest too.
Yeah. Yeah. So just before we kind of get into your timeline, as a side note, one of the, I think the real issues we have in fire police is sometimes when there's
a lack of communication, a lack of relationship between two departments, two communities that are side by side.
How, I mean, you said necessity. How has your island be able to overcome that when, you know, when the season goes into fall and you are relying on each other at that point?
Well, it's experiential and it's absolute necessity.
I can't tell you how many times I have been so glad to see these guys show up and I've been told the same thing by them.
You know, there's, you know, you have a couple of guys, you know, you have a two and a half inch pumping out 120 pounds and you're just slaying.
You're just trying to really keep this thing from. We had a fire. I remember November of 2019 with, you know, 68 mile an hour gusts.
And when the mutual aid companies started to file in, you know, sometimes you're like, oh, yeah, I got it.
But other times you're like, it's great to see, you know, it's great sense of relief and, you know, that you're going to be able to contain this.
These operations, mostly I'm talking about our exterior operations where you're not certainly you have certainly no window to make an interior push.
When calls are within our district and stuff like that, we can contain them. That's fine.
We'll put people on standby. But there's no shame here in seeking mutual aid from other departments, none whatsoever.
That's you are you are obliged to do that.
Yeah, I think a lot of career departments could take a lesson from that. I really do. I think it's about humility.
And today it's about serving the people and getting over your own egos.
I think the new generation is cognizant of that. Why not?
You know, why not have these guys stand by?
Because certainly calling them when it's too late, you know, the cat gets out of the bag very quickly in this business.
And so it behooves a chief, it behooves command, fire company officer to, you know, have guys stand up and then you stand them down.
And in the volunteer service and the paid service, that's why we do it. You know what I mean?
Sure, I'd like to sit and watch television all day. But guess what?
You know, I joined up to serve and I want to serve. And, you know, as you know, on different alarms, you know, people will be embarrassed.
Oh, we didn't want to call you. No, no, no, no. Call. Call.
You know, we don't want you to have a cardiac arrest because you were embarrassed.
We don't want your house to burn down because you were embarrassed. We can build a new house.
We can't build a new you. So call.
Absolutely. I agree 100 percent. Well, you have a very powerful story about your journey into the fire service, but I would love to start at the very beginning.
So tell me where you were born and then tell me a little bit about your parents, what they did and how many siblings you had.
Oh, I was born in a neighborhood in Manhattan called Washington Heights.
We used to call it the Irish Alps, upstate Manhattan.
It's the neighborhood above Harlem.
Essentially, when I was a child, it was Irish, Cuban, Puerto Rican and German Jewish.
You know, real. I heard somebody say recently New York is really a melting pot as much as it is a TV dinner.
You know, you have the Irish over here and Puerto Ricans over here. I know that was very funny.
Both my parents were immigrants from Galway, Ireland.
My mother was a seamstress and dressmaker.
She trained in Ireland and my father was a farmer.
And my mother came here first in 1949 and then my father followed her in 1950.
They were in their 30s and they settled in this working class Irish neighborhood.
My father was the super of the building, the superintendent.
He bartended and he worked on the docks downtown.
So real.
It's almost a story that is akin to or tied them on to the story of friends of mine's grandparents or great grandparents.
But it was my parents who actually had the experience.
Do you know what I mean?
So I'm first generation American.
I have a twin brother, Bill, who is in medical equipment sales and I have three older sisters.
My sister, Margaret, is a retired oncology specialist.
Eileen was a speech pathologist and my sister Maureen was a nurse practitioner who did care with transplant coordination, burn care, AIDS patients.
She touched a lot of different areas in the medical service.
Beautiful. Well, I'm a first generation immigrant myself.
So what when they talk about Ireland, what was it that made them make the decision to move to the US?
Opportunity. My mother had no affinity.
My mother was the ninth child out of 13 siblings and you really had to make your way.
It was just coming out of World War Two.
Not a lot of opportunity in her part of Ireland, very rural, East Galway, I would say.
And my father, I don't think he ever wanted to leave Ireland.
He loved Ireland, but I suppose he loved my mother more.
So he would talk about Ireland all the time, like, you know, thrashing and horses.
Ninety, 98 percent of my family is still there, you know, and there are many, I must say.
And I go back all the time and I love them desperately.
One of my father's brothers married one of my mother's sisters.
So I have double first cousins and, you know, they're great.
We just, I have a very beautiful, wonderful, they're just the nicest people in the world.
And I love going there.
So when we think of, say, racial tension, for example, and obviously Washington Heights has had its share of difficulties over the past few decades.
And we'll get into that in a minute.
But did they have any stories of kind of, you know, injustice as Irish immigrants?
No, no. I remember the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and the Irish.
We were all trying to out catholicize each other, like, you know, with the towers and the statues and the knees and the, you know, my recollection is that everybody got along.
Do you know what I mean? We all seem to be in the same immigrant boat somehow.
This is the perspective of a child.
But at the same time, no, no, I'm sure there were people used to be fascinated. My father's brogue was so deep and thick and, you know, people really couldn't understand him.
Then, of course, my mother didn't think she had a brogue, which was hilarious.
But no, I don't I don't remember anything like that.
And then subsequently moved to Long Island.
My father got a job as a church custodian, and it was anything really at that time to get us out of that neighborhood.
So I finished my elementary education in Long Island. We were very happy.
I was very happy to get out of there. It was not a good situation. It was not going to say it was traumatic, but it wasn't.
You didn't feel safe. It was just.
Maybe I will say it was too bad. It was it was it was hard.
It was. But you see, we didn't I didn't know any better. I was a kid.
But I know certain of the ways that I formed in my young adulthood was definitely informed by my experience as a child there and being tough and all that kind of thing.
But really what the toughness was, was fear.
So, yeah, we moved to Long Island. I finished my education, my primary and secondary education in Long Island. Great, great high school, very liberal, progressive.
You know, if you want to be a cartographer, they're going to find something for you to do.
Like really, they allowed for anything. That's where the acting started with me in an experimental acting class, not like the usual schools that do guys and dolls and all that stuff.
I didn't do any of that. But this was kind of an experimental acting.
And it afforded me the opportunity to audition for an internship. And the internship was with a professional acting theater.
And I got it. And I was supposed to be sweeping floors and answering phones and stuff like that and painting scenery.
But what happened was I auditioned for two of their shows and I got into both of them. So I put the broom down and I went on the road and we toured the Eisenhower Theater in D.C.
And the Brown Palace in Denver and all these stops around the country. And I remember I was paid $150 cash per diem to eat with in 1977.
I might be lucky if I could eat $8 worth of food a day in 1977. So I had all this cash in literally a shoe box when I came home.
And my dad said, What are you going to do with your life? I think they pretty much wanted me to be a policeman, a policeman or a fireman. That's what was opened to us.
That's what everybody else's kid was. And I said, I want to be an actor. And so I will drop the F-bomb.
My father said the three famous words, he goes, a fucking what? An actor. And he goes, an actor. We don't do that. We don't even know anybody who does that.
You know, said to my mother, Mary, come in here. He's crazy. So then I showed him the shoe box. And, you know, in his brogue, he said, we'll stop.
And I said, that's what they gave me for acting. And he's like, he said, you know, James, wait, not be about to, you know.
And so, so he said, can you go to a college for that? Because that was a big thing. Education, education.
And I said, yes, you can go to college for this. And he goes, OK.
And so I went to a couple of different universities. I wound up at a state university of New York at Purchase, a town called Purchase, State University of New York at Purchase.
And they had a tremendous acting program. Very difficult to get in. I got in.
Trained with some some of today's finest actors. Wesley Snipes was in my company.
A Dina Porter, Edie Falco, Stanley Tucci, Adrian Brody attended after me. So a lot of really strong actors. And and so, yeah, that brings me to college, I guess.
But I had some problems there. My father was dying in my last years of university.
So when I got out of school, I wasn't feeling very well. And I figured I'd take a couple of weeks off from pursuing acting.
And I had the big agent, William Morris, and the big manager.
Attorney and all this. And I didn't understand any of it.
And so the six weeks or six months turned out to be six years away from acting.
And I did different things. I taught school a learning enhancement program that I had absolutely no accreditation to teach, but I taught it.
And I did a lot of carpentry, plastering, painting, brickwork, stonework with a contracting company, sometimes out on my own.
And then one day in 1988 or 89, a colleague of mine from SUNY Purchase University said, Hey, I'm doing an independent film.
Would you be interested in doing it? And I said, Yeah, how long will it take? And he said, 11 days.
And I thought, Oh, why so long? And I ended up shooting that.
And that film was bought by Miramax. And I was on a plane doing a press tour and everything changed.
Everything changed. There was no more contracting.
And that was 31 years ago, I suppose. And I've been lucky enough to continuously work for these 31 years.
Beautiful. Well, firstly, I'm sorry to hear about your father. Was the impact of that what kept you away from auditioning for so long?
Yes, yes. I had had a condition we refer to as the Irish virus.
And that's what kept me away. And it wasn't until I took care of that, and I did 37 years ago, that was the key.
Because I was drinking my sorrow. And, you know, until I got a hold of that, I didn't dare do acting because I thought, you know, if I'm successful here,
this condition could rear its head. So I wasn't going to serve two masters. I wasn't going to serve sobriety and show business.
I was going to go on the path of, you know, the Irish would say, learn about lifting the load.
And it was it was great education. I learned more about show business when I was doing contracting and bricklaying.
Like how to negotiate with people and, you know, how to show up. How to just do your job. No excuses. Be early. Be professional.
All these things I had learned, I implemented in contracting in the building trade.
And then once I arrived in the show business portion, everything seemed not easy per se, but I was so grateful.
I would pinch myself. I still pinch myself 30 years later that I get to do this. It's just crazy.
And, you know, and yeah, so it worked out.
Yeah. Well, it's also very, very firstly powerful to hear.
But a reoccurring theme that I've had, I've had like over 500 people on here now, is the element of childhood trauma.
And you touched on, you know, early life in Washington Heights and fear and, you know, this manifests in many, many ways, whether it's addiction, whether it's depression.
But to be able to realize that and knock it on the head, especially before you're standing on the fire, on the pile, before you're working as a first responder,
is, you know, an incredibly powerful testimony, because sadly, so many of us don't realize until in a first responder professions, we're deep in it.
And then that is compounded by all the other elements of our job.
Yeah, it's ego.
I think a lot of times it's ego. It's how you set yourself up to survive.
You know, when I was doing ice rescue, there was a teacher, he was wonderful. His name was Butch Hendrickson, nationally known ice rescue guy.
And he used to, I never heard it until he said it.
And he used to talk about the rescue beast and, you know, how you show up in your first on scene, no gear.
But you're going to you're going to save this kid from the ice and you get out there and then two seconds later, you're the victim.
Or you go into the ocean after a drowning victim with no flotation device, you're going to save this person and you become the victim.
And so you have to continually speak to this rescue beast within you. If you're a first responder, you have to temper it and hold back.
And the other aspect of that is when you're the victim of depression or substance abuse or alcohol or whatever it is, I can handle it.
I can handle it. You know, it's always the rescue beast that can handle everything.
And and and usually, as we know, in the fire service, by the time you realize you can handle it alone, you need help.
It's too late. And so the true strength, I think, and I've seen is when somebody waves the white flag and says, you know what?
I need help over here. And we're finding I find that that's the that's the strong guy.
That's the strong woman who says, I need help over here and and gets it, you know, as opposed to because anybody can drink or drug themselves to death.
We know that. But I think that the real, you know, and then it just sensitizes you for when you do go out on the road to, you know,
in talks, calls and we everything here is designated as overdose.
Never forget when I was a new firefighter, I was driving the ambulance and the first time the designation came over as overdose.
I thought, oh, this person deserves a second chance. Let me well, we call intoxicated.
We call everything over. So I'm thinking this person took pills by an accident.
You know, they were just drunk.
But the fact of the matter is, you know, you kind of see yourself sometimes when you go out, you know, you obviously we go out
a good portion of the time when people are having the worst day of their life, you know, and
yeah, I can see I think Americans are most people are reticent to call 911.
And as you also know, some are not.
They'll call two or three times a week, you know, and have their bags back when you get there.
But so, yeah, I think I'm trying to follow your question here.
And I think I'm I think what we're getting toward is the foundation upon which, you know, first responder near the experience begins, maybe.
I'll speak to that. My first responder experience began on the pile of the World Trade Center.
And my best friend was a fire captain named Patrick Brown.
He was the captain of Ladder Company Three, highly, highly decorated, highly respected, beautiful guy, gentleman, soft spoken, into yoga, black belt in karate,
golden gloves boxer, Vietnam veteran, combat veteran.
So he was a warrior, you know, but he was a very peaceful warrior in the end.
And his path was just terrific.
We became very close friends.
And I refer to it as in a large anonymous organization.
And so when he fell in the line of duty, along with so many thousands of others,
that was a that was where he was my friend for many years.
And I knew he was a firefighter.
We shared a car together and he was a bachelor.
So he would work holidays and I would borrow the car for Easter or Thanksgiving.
And then I would return it to the firehouse and I would come in and have a second meal.
And I was I was I was not a buff.
I was really not interested in the fire service.
I kind of didn't know what they do. If you ask me, you know what firemen do? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, it wasn't until I started my fire training that I realized I don't know anything about what these guys do.
It just kind of happens. I guess they get on the truck and they get off the truck and I guess everything's OK.
The amount of information, the amount of training, certification, qualification is daunting.
I had no idea. And so.
Sometimes I think that my fire service began on that first night at the World Trade Center with Patrick's brother, Mike,
who came in from Las Vegas to search for Pat.
And, you know, that was.
Those were times that you don't forget, although I was just last year, last February, put on the 9-11 registry.
After years of hemming and hawing and.
And so the guys at Ladder 3 and other they're all some of them are chiefs and captains now.
They were writing these things and placing me doing different tasks and some of the tasks I had completely forgotten about, just like completely forgotten about.
And I think that, oh, I remember and I ruminate.
I think I had complete and it's compartmentalization. My mind did this thing where it just locked certain things away.
And anyway, so I didn't know what firemen did, had no idea, even though one of my friends,
my best friend was one of the preeminent firemen in the history of New York City.
And still I had no idea. And.
Maybe it was a good thing, but.
But yeah, I tell a story that.
I was a firefighter for a couple of months and I passed firefighter one and my practical and my written.
I was still probationary and here comes a fire.
And it's, you know, three rooms, residential structure, room and contents, blowing out the windows.
And. Oh, and this famous chief named Billy Goldfeder.
He goes around the country.
OK, so Billy Goldfeder is standing in front of my engine with a camera.
And I look at him and I go, hey, chief, and he's he's here to give us a seminar.
And I said to him, a little performance pressure, huh? And he goes, oh, I'll get the fuck out of here if you want.
I said, no, you're fine. And then I thought to myself, I got to push these rooms.
You know what I mean? And the hallway we were going down was like 26 inches wide, super narrow, super hot, super hot.
The guy behind me is yelling, it's too hot. And I said, what's too hot?
He goes, the floor. And I said, if you think the floor is hot, don't stand up.
Anyway, we operate, knock down the first room, knock down the second room, and I don't shut the line down.
So I bring the line across my chest. It hits the wall and like blast me back.
But I I wrestle it and I get into that third room.
And I get out of there. This is my first fire. And, you know, your wrist, my neck, anything exposed.
And I remember just before I pushed that hallway.
And the flames are coming out. And I thought to myself, I'm an actor.
The fuck am I doing? And I remember I remember saying to myself, this is exactly what I said.
I said, I didn't sign on for this. And the voice that came back to me was my friend Pat Brown.
And it was like a whisper. And, you know, I have my mask on and the whisper says, this is exactly what you signed on for.
Amazing. Yeah. And to have Billy sitting there with his camera as well.
So Billy gives the seminar and they say, oh, super aggressive attack. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I just, you know, all I did that day was simple. I did what I was trained to do.
You know, operate, push, move the line the way I was shown to move the line, operate the knob and the way I was shown to operate the knob.
Be constantly aware. Listen to the fire, not just see it. All these things.
We go to the Suffolk County Fire Academy and we're trained by FDNY. These guys are moonlighting.
It's a second job for them to, you know, work and instruct at our academy. It's top notch.
If you listen to these guys, you know, you'll save your life.
But my friend Patrick, the fire captain, he had a famous kind of quote.
He was quoted as saying, you can do this job absolutely right and still get killed.
And that spoke to Patrick's humility. Vietnam veteran, boxer, karate, firefighter.
And here he tells you, you can do everything absolutely right on this job and still get killed.
So that's cognizance and that's humility and that's respect of each job.
You know, benign automatic alarm. Well, guess what?
It could be the Super Bowl by the time you get there. You know what I mean?
See, you know, we always say, I treat every job and we get lax and we get lazy.
But the smart guy knows in the back of his head, you should be respectful of every alarm.
And even if it's a benign alarm, you say to your guys, hey, guys, what if we had, you know, somebody hanging out that window up there?
The one with the three sets of bars on it? Yeah, that one.
You know, so always, you know, try to instruct even a little.
Like, I don't want to bore my guys. They want to get home. They're volleys. They're going to go back to their jobs.
But use the run a little bit here and there, just a little bit sometimes.
You know, sometimes you get guys who like say, hey, Cap, you know, this hallway here, is this code?
And you're like, what's going on? We're never going to push a line. You know, there are guys who are really into it.
As Joseph DiBenoito said, you know, are you on the job or are you into the job?
And, you know, in any station, firehouse, fire service, volunteers, there are guys who are there and then there are guys who are really into it.
And, you know, a good officer will be aware of who's where in the passion, you know, index.
And so the guys who are not really into it, you know, you got to kind of, you know, shepherd them a little further into it.
But the guys who are into it, you know, you really discuss and you just try to be the best you can be.
That's what's expected of you. You know? Yeah.
Yeah. And I've had several volunteers on here and that's what I've said when I'm talking to them.
You know, when I have career, I'm going to say I, it's not like I'm a bugle leader.
But yeah, but when I have peers that are complacent, you know, and then in the same breath, there are volunteer firefighters that are out there training their ass off.
You know, it's basically it's pretty piss poor that you're getting paid to do what many people are volunteering to do.
And I think the volunteers should get paid.
Ultimately, you know, in any area that has, you know, a decent density of population.
But yeah, I mean, I always tell people like, you know, this job will kill you.
You know, the logo of this podcast said lives depend on you.
You know, and the big thing that I tell myself is how would I feel if my family died because the rescuer hadn't trained?
That's a very, so forget about me. I can die on a fire, whatever.
But if my son and my sons and my wife died because someone hadn't taken this job seriously, how would I feel?
So now put yourself in that rescues position.
You owe it to the people that you respond to to be the best version of yourself.
And as Patrick said, it's not a guarantee you're going to come home, but you're controlling every element that you can and only leaving what's left as chance as the variable that decides if you do or not.
It's what keeps us up at night.
You know, every once in a while, I'll get into a weird, you know, we'll get a notification.
The fire index is through the roof. You know, winds are at 70 miles an hour, hasn't rained in 21 days.
And you're, you know, I started I started playing head games.
And, yeah, there's this, there's a sign up at the FDNY Academy. It's let no man's ghost come back to say his training failed him.
I love all these little anecdotal, you know, you don't train until you get it right. You train until you can't get it wrong.
It is. It's to be cognizant of the fact that you're in a business where that particular situation, whatever it is, only has to happen once.
But you need to train for it. You know what I mean? Because if it happens and you're not ready, you're screwed.
And like even responding to jobs, you know, these guys tear assing in their trucks to get to the fire station and, you know, killing somebody that they say,
if you miss the first truck out, nobody will ever remember. But if you kill someone on the way here, no one will ever forget.
And all these little anecdotal sayings and every one of them are based on horrifying tragedy.
You have to really think it through. You have to think why do they say these things? Well, because they're true.
Never, never want to, you know, in my volunteer, modest district, have to go to somebody's family and say, I'm so sorry, I gave the wrong order or, you know, I conducted the operation poorly.
Yeah, you just don't want to ever be in that position. It's funny. Well, I'm not even going to continue on that thought. But yeah, you should be as good as you can be.
And, you know, we've rise to the level of our training and we sink to the level of what's that other anecdote. But they're all good, man.
I try and send my guys, you know, these little Instagram feeds and, you know, guys, you know, little things. Get off the rig with your gloves on. You see some of these Stockton firefighters and Baltimore guys, Gary Indiana and Detroit, guys who work a lot.
And, you know, they're stretched, they got water, they're knocking down the fire in one minute and nine seconds. You know what I mean? Why? Because they do it a lot.
You know what I mean? Whereas I don't. But at the same time, you know, going back to the volunteer, did I say that? Oh, I tell my guys, you know, the firemen are volunteers. The fire isn't, you know, the fire is the fire, bro.
And, you know, we've had some pretty massive jobs here where we were, we contained and we stopped, you know, the FDNY guys who are who are instructors are hilarious.
They'll say things, you know, history tells us that all fires eventually burn out. This is like, okay, you know, but when you're there and it's your district and and the other thing too, like this time of year from November, let's say until April, when the EMS tones go, there's a good chance you're going to know that person, you know, you're going to know who it is, you're going to know what their condition is.
So, more so with people having moved out from the city during COVID. We don't know a lot of these people, their homes aren't winterized, they're getting creative trying to stay warm, because it gets desperately cold here for just those months.
And, but yeah, you're going to know the people who are ill or injured. And, you know, it feels good when you help somebody that you know, obviously when you don't know the person.
Because as you know, lots of times, you never hear what happens to somebody you medevac or, but here you do somehow, you know, people will send notes, they'll send a check, they'll, there's gratitude here because where we are, we do, I think we do the number one amount of medevacs in the state of New York.
And if you're the out, the designation is Alpha Bravo Charlie, if you're Charlie or above, we're not driving you off this island over the bridges, you know, we'll break your neck doing that, because it's all four wheel.
So, any injury, you're going to go out by helicopter. And when that happens, we pull an engine out obviously standard operating procedure.
I'll shut up for a second.
No, no, no, no, I love it. And, you know, it's funny because I've rarely landed a helicopter in most of my career, and I have, you know, but because I've worked in urban sprawl. So it's the opposite.
Usually it's faster to get in a rig and just haul ass to a trauma center than it is to wait for a bird.
And you mentioned on one of the other podcasts and it, obviously it wouldn't kind of ring to the hosts of those podcasts because they weren't in the fire service but you talked about when you get a call at home, your children get to see you leave, they go outside, they get to see the smoke.
And that was something that I had a group of firefighter wives on the show. Some were career wives, some were, you know, wives of volunteers and the volunteer wife said, you know, contrary to the career when the career guy or, you know, woman goes to the station, we leave at, you know, 5am.
And then we're gone and you don't know what we're doing. So there's an element of not worrying because we just walk out the door. Conversely, in the volunteer world, you know, the pager may go off at 2am.
And, you know, it sounds like something horrific. And then your family are acutely aware that you've just gone running out. So what has been your observation of that volunteer element and your family's perspective of fear for you for your own well-being?
I came home from working on Rescue Me once, one day, it was a 16 hour day. Two things happened this day.
And my pager goes off and it says, working structure fire, East walk, you know, Cornell town. And I go, what? And I know that if I push back in the chair I'm sitting in, in my living room, look out the east window, I'm going to see where they're talking.
And the flames are 50, 60 feet. And I go, whoa, how did I miss that? So I run to the, you know, I get to the firehouse to get in the truck and the driver's name is Timmy O'Rourke.
He goes, what's up? And I was like, yeah, we got a job. And he's looking at me and he's looking at me and he's looking at me. He goes, can I ask you a question? I go, what? He goes, do you have makeup on?
I go, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I just come from a 16 hour day of shooting and they keep putting pancake makeup on your pager and I didn't get a chance to literally take it off.
So here's a fireman. That'll never happen to anybody else's career. But so we get to the fire and my son, my youngest son was watching the whole operation.
So he's got three houses really. And what happens here is at some point it's going to get to the, or not, to the LPG, to the propane. And, you know, you can have 400 pounders, obviously 100 pounders, the 20 pounder, you know, barbecue stuff.
But the 400 pounders, they get your attention. They definitely get your attention when they let go and blebby.
And so we call that the Medal of Honor run, you know, send the new guy to shut the propane off.
So there's been nights where I've awakened for mutual aid to communities eight to 10 miles east of me. And my wife says, what is it? And I said, it's working. It's a working structure.
Where? And I tell her, she goes, well, are you going to say, yeah, she goes, well, it can't be that bad if you're going to the bathroom. I'm going to the bathroom because I'm a seasoned firefighter and I know I'm going to the bathroom first, because I'm not going to get an opportunity.
And she said to me that particularly she goes, well, it can't be that bad. I said, look out the window.
And she looked out the window to the east and it was just an orange ball, you know, and she's like, oh my God, you know, there was another night, I'll never forget where I was.
And the daytime I was doing bench pressing, you know, I guess the chest workout or something. And the pager went off and the pager dropped to the floor and I went down to the floor and all of a sudden I got this pain in my chest.
And I'm like, oh, I'm dying. And my wife was like, are you going to shut that thing off? And I was like, I thought I was having a heart attack. It was just like a cramp in my pectoral.
But I thought, you know, here I am dying on the floor of a heart attack. And she's like yelling me about the pager. No, I'm only joking. But anyway, so yeah, they say to me, going out the door, be careful.
And I am careful. You know, I'm as careful as I can be. I remember there was a fire where a couple of the propane tanks went off and gosh, they could have only been 15, 20 feet away from me.
And three of them went off. And these mutual aid guys asked me if they wanted to take this fence away. And I said, no, leave it there. It's keeping the heat off of us. Well, it's what kept the shrapnel off of us in the end.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And the first one let go and command it's like, the command was my chief too. He took over the operation.
And I said, no, everybody accounted for continuing to operate. Boom.
You know, 325. Yeah, command continuing to operate. Yeah, another LPG. Boom.
You know, all I could think about was people in a war zone, you know, like what's it like with mortars coming in?
Because, you know, it just rattled your chest and your bowels and it's humbling those types of explosions in close proximity. So
there was another time in town where we had taxpayer.
I mean, it was it was a massive fire and it was a propane facility, you know, next door, getting the propane out and it's a big fire and
so by the time I stop operating, it's like four hours later and I can't.
Oh, no, my phone was wrecked. My phone was and I go into the police station. I said, you mind if I call my house?
And they said, yeah. And so my wife sees, you know, Ocean Beach Beach Police Department and she thought, oh, you know, but I said, it's me.
I'm fine. She was, why do you call me on your phone?
My phone is, you know, no longer. My phone drowned, you know, probably about four hours ago.
So it is what it is. You know, again, you can do it absolutely right.
So get hurt. But, you know, when you're when you leave and your children see you leaving, you have a commitment to them to to operate as safely as possible.
You know, I like to think that I'm aggressive, but I think what I tried to do is just mitigate the problem as safely and as assertively as possible.
I choose to put the word assert in for aggression, you know, assertion rather than aggression.
Be very, you know, quick, slow, slow, smooth, those types of things. You know what I mean? Let's knock this fucker down quickly and efficiently.
I don't want people pushing in, you know, wood frame, balloon construction, you know, filled with plastic furniture.
Bullshit. Let it burn. I can we can build another one of those, you know.
But and I think my guys would tell you as much that I look out, that I try and look out for their, you know, you know, grab somebody just before a power line falls on them.
Because there are guys who said to me, fathers who have said to me, hey, you got to watch out for my kid because he's in the department now.
It's like, I will. I will watch out for him. That's happened a couple of times, too, where, you know, great kids, great kids.
And I think I hair on your head cannot get hurt under my watch.
You know, so it's all good.
Beautiful. Well, thank you for the perspective there.
I want to get to your acting journey, because obviously there's some, you know, cross pollination with fire, with military and then black Klansman, which we'll get to in a little bit.
But so going back to your laboring, you know, you overcome the Irish virus, as you say, you mentioned William Morris.
I actually went to drama school in England for a year, and it was amazing because it's I spent a year to learn I was a fucking awful actor.
So that was money well spent. But but I seem to have an affinity with stunts.
And even to this day, I still do some as my side gig.
I had read that. Yeah, which is which is great, actually, because that's a whole science in and of itself.
Yeah. And then there's obviously, you know, the fire service definitely lends itself to that, too.
But when I came out of drama school, I did a monologue.
You know, we had the showcase and I did the thing, a monologue from Tony March and it's called Welcome Home, which is about the Falklands War.
And it was a British soldier and he was basically going through PTSD stuff.
And you mentioned about karate. I was a martial artist, too.
So I threw some kicks in there. And at the end, I had a William Morris agent reach out to me and said, I love what you do, but I'm not the person in the department that will be handling you.
So let me know when you get some work and I'll get them to go and watch you.
Well, then, as an Englishman in what was that, 98, I was in this vicious circle.
You need an agent to get work. You need work to get an agent.
So you obviously were at SUNY in a very prestigious school when it comes to acting.
Did you have any issues transitioning from construction into the acting space again?
Yes, I didn't know what was happening.
I didn't know what's an AD, what's MOS, what's your, you know, all this vocabulary I had no idea of.
The first film was a very modest independent film called The Unbelievable Truth.
And I was shooting it with people I had gone to university with.
And so it was a tight amount to trying to achieve a grade for a professor because these were all my colleagues.
These were all the actors and the filmmakers I went to school with.
So I did have a basis of some of the vocabulary. And the second film was Rambling Rose with Robert Duvall and Laura Dern and her mom, Diane Ladd.
And Robert Duvall, I'll tell you, James, right now, I was nauseous for a week before I got to that set.
I was just so nervous. It was I said to myself, I'm not going to last 10 minutes in this business.
You know, he was like a god to me. I revered his work as an actor.
I always thought he's just so consummate. Just I don't know. There's something about him.
And the next thing you know, I'm playing Frisbee with him, you know, and his little Jack Russell dog.
And then one day he says to me on set, he goes, do you like history?
And I said, yeah, he goes, like military history? I said, yeah.
He goes, come here. And somebody had furnished him with a early copy of the Civil War documentary by Ken Burns.
And I practically watched the whole thing with him.
And I said, you know, funny how life where life puts you, you know, and we talked and we discussed it.
I'll never forget. He said, it's still photography and it's narration.
And I'm begging for more. Well said, you know.
But he was just such a gentleman. Could not have been nicer to me.
I'll always remember his kindness. And that informed my working with other, let's say, young actors now that I'm a sixty one year old man.
Yeah, kindness doesn't cost anything. And he was very, very good to me.
He wasn't Robert Duvall any longer.
He was just like a person who was sharing and telling me things and, you know, oh, don't stand there.
You're blocking my light. So just these little things.
So I was a pretty quick study. I'm going to I'll say that around a set.
The thing on a movie set and a television set is you can yell cut.
You can say cut. I'm not. You know, this is a writer.
They they say cut, but having been classically trained for the stage, you don't get to say cut.
So you're obliged to when they say, you know, when the curtain goes up, you go.
No excuses. Do you know what I mean?
What was very complimentary to my sobriety, to my acting, to every aspect of my life was my training in karate.
When the your teacher says, Hajime means begin.
You begin. You don't say, well, oh, let me scratch my nose.
No, no, no, no, fucker. You go. You know what I mean?
And and you don't stop until the Kata has ended under any circumstance.
And so, you know, people say action.
And to this day, I still hear Hajime, you know, or as my.
They really what did you trade in, James?
So I did some karate as well. I started with WTF Taekwondo, then Shota Kan for a few years and then went back to Taekwondo.
And I talk about this quite a bit. And then then on a road of humility, because every time I switch to boxing, Muay Thai, Jiu Jitsu, it was like, oh, OK, so those parts don't work very well.
So it was this kind of journey of humility.
And recently, I luckily have managed to jump back into Jiu Jitsu and a little bit of Muay Thai again.
So I've managed to keep it going, but as I'm sure is probably the issue with you as well, as you age, you know, you get more injuries, time commitments.
You know, it becomes quite a deliberate effort to stay in the training.
Yeah, it really takes a toll. It really does.
I find it like almost like a parabolic kind of graph as your technique goes up and really becomes efficient.
Your body goes down, you know.
So I was executing different blocks and different strikes and pulling muscles while I was doing it.
It was like, whoa. So I let go of the training.
Like I have my Sai and my bowl outside. I have a Makahara.
I do my Kata pretty much daily, let's say.
You know, I'll throw one Kata or two or three.
But the way we used to train, there'll never be a day when I can train like that ever again.
It was very, very hard training.
It was called Kama-wan training, the Kama.
You know, the Kama is the sickle and the Wan is a bowl.
And in Okinawa, if those two things were in the window, a Kama and a Wan, together those words mean I don't care.
So we don't care if you come here or don't come here. We don't care if you pay or don't pay.
The only thing we care about is if we teach you something, you remember it.
And the level of training was just like, so it was not a commercial school.
It was like 20 black belts who had broken away from their teacher because of a medical issue, actually.
It's too long and complicated to go into.
So anyway, they just wanted to get a space and train and they weren't interested in taking new students.
And I was kind of a new student that came along. That's a whole story.
When I was a child, I wanted to take it. My parents couldn't afford it.
And it was that style of karate, Matsubayashi-shirin-ru.
And I looked through the window and I looked through the window.
And finally, a teacher named Joseph Kabanaro came outside and he said, you're always looking through the...
I was like little Kwai Chang came. He's like, you're always looking through the window. Come on in and I'll train you.
And I said, no, no, no, it's okay, because I literally $5 a month we didn't have.
And then he came out one day and he had a gi and he threw the gi to me and I let it hit my chest and it dropped.
And he said, I'll train you for free. And I turned and I ran away.
Even at like 12 years old, I was a proud little Irish guy. Nobody's given me anything for free.
And years later, I was 24 and I was having coffee with a friend of mine, Steve Panopoulos.
And his arms were like completely bruised. I mean, like I said, dude, what happened?
He goes, oh yeah, that's from training. I was like, what? He goes, oh, that's called ukelaza. It's karate.
And I said, what kind of karate? And he said, and you know, it's like shirin-ru. What kind of shirin-ru? Matsubayashi.
I said, where do you do this? He goes, oh, and I said, I want to train with you.
And he goes, well, we suggest you watch first. And I said, I watched. I did my watching.
And I have friends who will tell you Bill Sage, Paulie Schultz, who are actors who trained with me.
When we would do the arm training, the arm banging, I would get a smile on my face because as a man, I manifested what I wanted to do as a child.
And, you know, this is really, I mean, you can break your fucking arms doing this training.
And I would smile and my teacher would look at me and he couldn't say, hey, Burke, stop smiling.
But what he would say is, Mr. Burke, close your mouth. And I must have looked psychotic.
But it was the pain. It was the entrance into a new life.
It was being able to do something for myself that I wasn't able to do as a kid.
And for whatever affinity I had for martial arts, and believe me, it wasn't going out there to kick somebody's ass.
It was the structure. It was the discipline.
You know, for five bucks a class, you're getting a trainer, let's say the sensei, who says, no, Mr. Burke, that's wrong.
Drop. And you're doing sit ups until he comes back or you're doing push ups on your knuckles until he comes back.
So it could be, you know, 100 or 200 or, you know, 400 sit ups when he comes back.
Okay, stand up. Let's try it again. And they weren't macho guys. They're all matter of fact.
We used to call them Clark Kent because the minute they put on the key, they were supermen.
Literally, the guys I trained with could just tighten their belt before Akata.
And you would see the fucking electricity come off of these guys.
You know, it was very traditional. And we sat down.
That's where the war, that's where I found the real war was between my ears.
It was great. It was like a journey. It was like this fantastic journey.
And, you know, all the time I was there, I thought, I can't do this.
Like five, ten years into it, I'd be like, I can't do this. I'm not good at this.
This is we'd always watch the door. You know, we'd be warming up.
And if if if sensei showed up, oh, good, because you're going to learn something.
But if I'll name him, his name is Gene Kiffer, Mr. Kiffer.
He was like the wrench. He was the right hand man. He was going to condition you.
And if he if just he showed up, you were in for an awful night.
It was just going to be and it was was going to be any way around it at all.
You know, and I loved it. You know, it was my thing. I loved it so much.
But and my buddies who trained with me, you know, my buddy Paul said,
oh, you're always complaining. And I said, why don't you come down? Oh, yeah, I will come down.
It's first night there. We ended up like, you know, 200 kicks each leg.
And like I looked over, it was like starting to whimper a little.
Oh, yeah, I love you. You ever hear this? But he broke his hand on my body like twice during that class.
We had so much fun, you know, and we were in such awe, awe.
And reverence of the men who trained us.
They were just. They were so good at this. It was so beautiful.
It was like the most powerful thing.
But these senior guys get up there and did a kata. Forget about it.
I mean, it was just it was the most powerful and shiru much.
Why should shiru is very natural.
No super wide stances or, you know, sunshine.
It was very natural for the body to do these moves.
You know, nothing extreme about it. And that's why I think that generated so much power.
Sorry. There's my little karate spiel. It'll happen. Sorry.
No, no, don't apologize. Well, I was also thinking as well, timeline.
Was there a parallel between when you found sobriety and when you began karate?
It was at the exact same time. The exact same time.
Because you sound so passionate about it. It seems like it was more than just karate to you.
Yeah, it was. It was everything. It was it was it was, you know,
birth is painful, but rebirth is always painful.
And this type of pain was like the entrance into a new life.
And it was just fantastic. I was so accepting of it.
And you had to be there early and there was no way around it.
You couldn't talk your way out of it or think your way out of it or, you know,
I'm not going to do my pushups while he's not looking bullshit.
Yes, you are. I remember doing Kata one night.
No, that's wrong. And they weren't sadistic or vindictive.
Oh, come on. That's wrong. Drop. And they drop you.
And you're on the knuckles. And all of a sudden, OK, up is brick.
Try it again. Full power. You know, Kata is no power. Snap. Full power. Full power.
No, please again. And I remember one day I was in the middle of a Kata.
And the next thing you know, I was over at the window with two guys holding me up, you know.
And that was the night I decided it would be a better idea to breathe during Kata than not to breathe.
I remember these guys like I'd be soaking fucking wet.
There'd be a pool underneath me during the warm up, a pool of sweat.
And I'd look at these guys, they had a little moisture above their lip. That was it.
I was like, how is this possible that these guys are not fucking sweating?
Well, you know what? They had done their sweating and they learned to breathe.
And that was another key. But it was very complementary to life.
And it was mental. It was physical. It was spiritual.
If you're in the fire service, I suggest I see a lot of guys, a lot of young people now overweight.
And these corporations spent billions of dollars figuring out how to get you to eat their shit, putting candy and sugar at eye level, all this, putting salt in everything, even things that.
So you're all suffering from this.
And I would suggest martial arts as a as a training tool to a more physically fit firefighter or yoga.
I never did yoga. Even now, when I train outside every day, I wear a vinyl work suit every time.
My kids will tell you they call it the clown suit because if I'm not pouring, pouring sweat, I don't feel I don't feel that it was a workout.
And that's that harkens back to my day's training in karate.
Yeah. Well, I agree with you completely with the martial arts because it's about the only sport where there's an element that you can actually protect another person to.
Yeah, that's true, too. Yeah. Usually, usually, I know there was times in New York City.
Two or three times when I thought I was going to be attacked. And, you know, I said, well, I've been counter punching for two years.
I hope this guy doesn't punch me because it's not going to go well for him.
And nothing happened. But I'll tell you what happened afterwards is I got terribly nauseous because, you know, the way we trained was it's not a good day to fight.
This is this is a good day to die. And so it's all going to happen. It's all going to happen.
And then when it didn't happen, you know, the massive adrenaline dump, you know, just like after a fire sometimes really like, oh, they should have my tired.
That's why I tell my guys always you've expended your adrenaline. Your heart needs that to inform the electricity.
Go home and take an aspirin and thin your blood. Cooperate.
Cooperate with your heart function, you know, because guys go home and get heart attacks because they don't have the hormones and stuff like that.
The adrenaline, the heart needs to function properly after a good, hard job.
Yeah. Well, the other thing I've noticed from, you know, again, hearing so many stories here is is the false alarms.
So it sounds like a big job. It sounds like a shooting.
It sounds something, you know, that you're going to have to, as you said, get off the rig and move with purpose.
And then someone else gets there first. Or it was a misunderstanding with dispatch.
And now you go back and you haven't had any physical exertion.
So all that stress and adrenaline hasn't been exerted as it would be if you were fighting, running, you know, working a fire, whatever it was.
And dispatch is a perfect example of that.
Some of these men and women, you know, have to process the most horrific stuff, but they're strapped to a chair.
So, you know, whether you actually worked on a fire, even if you didn't work on a fire, to go, you know, walk a few laps to the station or, you know,
if you go in home, can you jump in a pool or whatever it is that's your environment that you can get that blood pumping a little bit and flush out that cortisol and some of the other hormones that you, you know, were flushed with when you got the call in the first place.
I read something recently, maybe you can substantiate it, that the guy with the highest BP on scene is the chauffeur, the engineer, the pump operator.
I can imagine that would be true because, you know, you can have high BP with exertion and it's healthy, but high BP just from stress standing at the panel, maybe knowing that lives are, you know, you're responsible for lives.
And if that line goes dry, you know, there's a lot of pressure there.
And, you know, let's be honest as well, a lot of engineers tend to be some of our less, you know, athletic members of our crew.
When I read that, I thought to myself, if you had asked me, I would have said the guy pulling the first line, you know, the knob.
But certainly see here in these little pockets.
This is what I like, the data, the research, the underwriter laboratory burns that they did on Governor's Island with FDNY.
You know,
any information, the biggest thing about the Bioservice to me and the thing that fascinates me and the humility of it is it's a learning culture, learning culture, learning culture, always learning.
No one ever knows it.
And so, yeah, when you find out about things like, you know, it's not, you know, expended cortisol or cortisol dumps and how to get, you know, I was reading about it this morning, you know,
boot up on that potassium, boot up on that magnesium, you know, help it out.
But yeah, it's even my pager, it's taken me so many years, you know, the minute to train myself, the minute I hear those tones, you know, and the fucking thing was on too loud.
And it's, you know, it goes right through you.
And I it's like a karate kind of thing where I just drop my breath, you know, into my belly, tandon, cushy, hot on a low, low belly, as opposed to Americans, we, we breathe up and we lift our chest.
That's not the way you're supposed to breathe.
You're supposed to drop the breath.
And so when the tones go, I drop my breath.
And I, you know, my friend Pat used to say, you know, when you're masked up and you're sitting there drinking that beautiful air, you know, and you're all hyped up.
He said, he said, the best thing to do is become indifferent to the operation.
Become indifferent to it.
You know, you can, you're going to talk about the operation and debrief with your guys afterwards.
But when you have this going on, just just calm the fuck down.
You know, I mean, and and really kind of step back a little and observe it.
You know, you know, like, don't become dramatic inside that mask, you know, I mean, because you're going to drink that air down and no time flat.
So breath control.
And I think it's yeah, you have to be physically fit, but you have to be emotionally fit inside the mask, too, I think sometimes.
And I'm guilty of it sometimes.
Like, oh, look at this.
This shit is wild.
And I'm like drinking, drinking down the air.
And but to become indifferent to it and to really get breath control again, the karate helped with that, too.
No, absolutely.
That's something I've talked about a lot, especially in a profession where we have a finite amount of air on our back.
You mean your breath is invaluable.
I remember doing training once and one of my my O rings was like, let me go like this.
And I was new.
I said to the instructor, am I good?
He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just don't breathe too much, you know, and in I go, you know, and, you know, it gave me, you know, seven, ten minutes.
And I was like trying to crawl around.
Anyway, it's hilarious.
Well, getting back on your acting path before we get to some of the soldiers and fire service related TV and film that you did.
One interesting one, I think that you were part of was Oz.
So I remember watching it in England and actually had the DVD set and watched on a laptop while I was lifeguarding, not actually lifeguarding.
And, you know, when there was no one there.
But I remember being struck at what a different complete world that was that HBO created with with the violence, with the graphic nature.
But it wasn't gratuitous.
It was to actually tell the story the way it was supposed to rather than the cliche kind of version of prisons before that.
So tell me about that experience for you.
Well, my time on Oz was kind of limited.
I think I only did I don't even remember four or five, six could be eight episodes.
I played an FBI agent.
The show was created by a man named Tom Fontana, who I think is a genius to this day.
City on a Hill is his new show.
You look at some of the actors, Dean Winters, Chris Maloney, Lee Turgenson, the late Granville Adams, who just passed away last week.
Oh, I'm leaving a lot of people out.
But it was it was this amalgam of these pockets of stories, you know, within the penitentiary system.
So, again, my time was limited on the show, but it was it was really tough stuff.
I did not watch that show.
OK, my wife watched that show.
I said, honey, for me, this isn't exactly Sunday night relaxing.
No, it's not. No, it's not.
J.K. Simmons, you know.
So so what they were doing was, you know, again, very advanced guard by HBO.
They were always trying to be cutting edge and they were and and are.
And it was hard stuff.
It was hard stuff. And but, you know, I guess that's what we're supposed to be doing.
I mean, we have a condition now in Rikers Island.
Apparently, it's so bad that nobody even nobody even knows where it's where to begin.
You know what I mean? So as artists, what you're doing is you're holding up that mirror, you know, and.
That's what Tom Fontana was doing.
It was it was a wild show, a special show.
I don't know. It was such a powerful show.
Incarceration, you know, in a democracy.
The racial questions, the sociological questions, the medical questions, the emotional questions.
Boy, every week it was going to come at you. So but I had such a great time on the show.
Tom was nice enough. He said, I said, but Tom, I never solved anything.
I mean, the stupidest FBI agent is like that.
We like we like seeing you every once in a while.
So, yeah, I was I was very honored to be a part of that ensemble because those guys were heavy hitters.
I thought, yeah, the actors and it was it was a very important show.
I mean, sadly, you know, the Orange is the New Black is a new kind of standard for prison shows,
which I think is, you know, I'm sure there are very minimal security prisons that maybe that reflects as well.
I don't know to some degree, but, you know, it's something I've addressed a lot on the show.
You know, our prison system, you know, sadly doesn't seem to rehabilitate most of our people.
It gets, you know, as time goes on, you know, there's more and more prisons being built.
So I think it was just a very important topic to be visited to the average person
and to really just portray some of the brutality that I've heard firsthand from people who've been on the show
is very present in a lot of these prisons.
It is present and prevalent and not getting better.
Not getting better. You have some progressive minds, I think, who are going to work now trying to, you know,
you know, a lot of the question is rehabilitation.
And you're talking about people who were never habilitated in the first place, you know,
because social network and structure and it's just absent.
The gap between the rich and poor, social services, they're frowned upon now.
And, you know, you're not we're speaking to giving somebody a hand up, not a handout.
You know what I mean? And I don't know who says that it's easier to.
I want to quote to fix a young man than it is to fix a broken adult or something.
Yeah. Hand up is the way to go, you know, because again, you're going to be spending money
incarcerating and caring for these individuals at some point.
You might as well do it when they're young in terms of education and social services.
Absolutely. And I've had people on the show that countries that address drug prohibition and stop criminalizing addiction,
you know, prisons in Norway that use their prisons as a community.
They have no freedom, but they live as you know, live in a house, they go to work, they get education.
And you've got to ask ourselves, you know, whether it's the UK or the US or Australia, how Norway, Iceland, Sweden,
you know, some of these more progressive countries, Portugal, how are they doing it?
They're human beings too. What are we doing wrong that they're doing right where their children aren't murdering each other in the street
and their prisons haven't magnified hundreds of percent over the last few decades?
Yeah. And these are very large questions. The experiment that is democracy, you know, in order to form a more perfect union,
you're finding these situations, you know, these rather large pockets of dysfunction and, you know,
criminality and drug abuse and substance abuse, you know, as we go further down the road of our country and its history.
I don't know. I don't know. Lots of times I think, you know, it's the capitalism that and the disparagement between the haves and the have nots.
You know what I mean? I don't know. You know, religion, you know, what Christ purported to have said and his teachings,
huge disparagement between his teachings and what actually happens.
I do completely. I love that whole be Christ-like. You know, that's, I mean, if a man's there walking with no prejudice and healing people,
and yet we see a very different thing from many, many people who hail from certain religions.
It's like there's a disconnect. There's a common theme of being kind and compassionate and forgiving
that seems to be cast aside by many people when it comes to application in the real world.
Absolute disconnection, absolute disconnection. And you know what? Sometimes it's a willful disconnection.
And the hypocrisy of that just kills me. I'm going to interject here. Father Michael Judge.
He was the first death recorded on 9-11. He was the FDNY chaplain.
He was a friend of mine. And he used to talk about, he turned to me and said, can you imagine living like Christ?
I mean, really, Bob? And I was like, no, I can't. And he used to say to me, the question was not who needs my help or who's my brother.
He said that what Christ asked was who is the least of my brothers.
And he goes, the prospect of that is daunting. I'm supposed to not only help a poor guy, but the poorest, the very least.
And we used to talk about that. They used to rattle my cage. I'm like, oh, I hope he doesn't want me to.
Now I'm a missionary somewhere. But that was the question. That was the prospect.
Who is the least of my brothers? When you have done it for him, certainly you have done it for me.
It was pretty simple teaching. You know what I mean? Pretty simple.
But I'd never forget that. I never forget that.
Many stories about Father Mike. Yeah. I had Jules and Gédion Naudet, the two French brothers that made the documentary and were actually with him.
So that was a very, very heartbreaking and powerful perspective.
That the universe put those brothers there that day was just tremendous.
You know, tremendous. You know, tremendous for me anyway, because I just on a podcast, I was just talking about Father Mike in the lobby.
And he's praying. You can see his lips moving. He's praying. He's praying hard.
And, you know, the topic was not what a man thinks or says or feels.
The topic of look at what the man does. And he has his helmet on and his turnout coat and he is reported for duty.
So that's what he is doing. And my father used to always say, you know, I don't judge a man by his color or what he says or what he thinks.
I judge a man by his actions. And so Father Mike's actions, he could have been outside. He could have been across the street.
He could have been a few blocks away. He could have monitored it from, you know, from his rectory parish, parish rectory.
But he chose to be there on the fire ground. That was his duty. So tremendous lesson in that man and his life.
Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing some of those stories. I'd never heard some of those perspectives before.
Now, speaking of FDNY, at this point, you obviously got, you know, years of acting under your belt. You're also a firefighter.
So how did you find your way into Rescue Me and then talk to me about that experience?
Dennis and I kind of knew each other a little bit after 9-11. He spoke about my buddy, Patty Brown, on David Letterman.
I think it was very soon after the towers had come down and we would see each other at fundraisers and things like this.
And Dennis had set up the Dennis Leary Firefighter Foundation or the Leary Firefighter Foundation in the wake of what's referred to as the Worcester Cold Storage Fire,
in which six firefighters perished, namely his cousin, Jeremiah Lucy, and his very close friend of his firefighter, Spade, I think his last name was.
And, you know, four other guys. Worcester Cold Storage, you have two guys who go in searching for reported squatters.
Two more guys go in, two more guys go in, and then a chief who says nobody else is going in because all these firefighters are reported missing now.
So Dennis starts this foundation to train firefighters, you know, give them the tools, whatever the fire service needs.
I refer to the Leary Firefighter Foundation now as a first responder to the first responders.
And so Dennis calls and goes, hey, listen, I'm doing this show. Would you ever consider playing my cousin?
I said, yeah, sure. And he goes, he's a priest. And I said, no, no, not interested.
He goes, no, no, no, hold on. So, so anyway, he goes, no, he's hard hitting. He's he's a drunk. He's a, you know, he's a good guy. He's a fan.
I says, listen, and he says he's only going to be a priest for one season and then he's leaving the ice.
Okay. So I said, you throw me a curve ball with that. And I said, you know, won't be good.
So anyway, I wasn't always in agreement with some of the subject matter and how it was presented.
I was aware of the greater good we were. Well, he was raising a lot of money for the fire service through the foundation.
You know, and I can go through the litany fire boats in New Orleans, rebuilt, I think, 14 firehouses in New Orleans.
I was down there for that Worcester fire department training facility. You know, thermal imaging for Detroit.
High rise simulator from Manhattan mobile command. But it goes on and on and on and on.
How much good he's done for the fire service. So, again, it was my professional life and my volunteer life.
Colliding a lot of the storyline of the show.
Seemed to me to be very personal to me because it was absolutely mimicking, you know, aspects of my own life.
But, you know, we went ahead with it and, you know, Dennis would say to me, you know, this is going to be a finite prospect. We're going to do seven seasons.
And then that's it. I said, OK. And that's what it was. But the foundation continues very effectively, I have to say.
We have these or he has these it's called the firefighter challenge. You could be a hero for a day, get these executives and they pay money and they come to the FBI.
Academy and they're doing rope rescues, you know, burn rooms, searches, you know,
NBA extrication. They do every aspect of the fire service that's taught at the rock. And if you're an executive or whoever you are, you pay to do this.
And it's a great day. It's a fantastic day. Jeff Bezos was one of the people who participated a few years back.
And his brother Mark is a fire captain, volunteer fire captain in Scarsdale. I'll tell you, Jeff Bezos, say what you want. But that guy has no fear of fire or really anything.
You know, he got in there and he's, you know, he's in good shape and everything. He did every evolution successfully and he was ready for more.
So, you know, a lot of people there that day, Michael J. Fox, Juliana Margulies, John Slattery, certainly Steve Buscemi, Stallworth.
So a lot of, you know, celebrity types turn out and they pack up too and go in,
which is just really tremendous to see.
You know, I have fun because I get to observe and see how they react. And, gosh, there was one year I went in, I forget with who, and I found the baby, you know, in the search, you know, little baby doll.
And then like a year or two later, I bring in somebody else, I think Juliana Margulies, and I'm searching. I'm like, oh, man, I'm killing myself.
There's the wall. There's the radiator. There's a window. And I'm searching and searching.
And one of the instructors who was probably a friend of mine, I go, what are you killing yourself in there? And I said, I'm looking for the baby.
He goes, oh, no, we lost the baby. Jimmy, you know where the baby is?
I had the baby in the room. It was like for nine months nobody saw the baby, but I was determined to find it that day. Of course I didn't.
But I remember I was so gassed out after that, sir, after that evolution. I said, when you're broke, you're really working.
And I was like, yeah, I found the baby last year. I wonder if, oh, yeah, baby's gone.
So anyway, it's a great day. It's a lot of fun. We raise a lot of money.
And again, Dennis continues to be super effective with the foundation.
Love it. Well, firstly, you just made me think we should always carry a baby with you when you do a training search.
That way you can always be a rock star.
That's a great idea, James. Jesus.
You know, but I think I've seen the Leary Foundation do so many great things.
I had Nancy from Friends of Firefighters on here. They do some great things as well.
I'm actually working on getting Steve. I don't know how close I am.
I know the perception might be different than reality, but I have communication now, which is beautiful.
I think his story would be another great one for our profession to hear.
Yeah, he's just an amazing, a more quiet, earnest, genuine gentleman you will not meet in this life than this man.
I was when I was at the site of the World Trade Center working one night, and I remember somebody going, hey, hey, hey, like this.
And I turned over and it was him. He was sitting on a wall with a line of guys.
He goes, how are you doing? I said, good. And he said to somebody later, he goes, is that guy Burke, an actor who wants to be a fireman or a fireman wants to be like, what's the story?
No, no, he's here. Patty Brown was his friend. A lot of three brought him down.
But what a human being, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you said about the Trade Center. I actually kind of full circle.
I've been a firefighter for, I guess, a few years by that point. I was in L.A. and I actually basically was a glorified extra, but I got work on the World Trade Center movie they did with Nicolas Cage about the Port Authority cops that survived.
But it's another funny casting story because I ended up corralling.
They said we need more people. So I got some more of the Anaheim guys.
And then when it came to it, she almost didn't cast me. And we're talking about extras. We ended up being silhouettes, but they wanted real firefighters for this film.
And she said, and I quote, you look too Californian. And I'm like, you understand I'm English, right?
And secondly, you understand New York has lots of different people that look all, you know, colors and creeds.
But yeah, I was like, really? This is, you know, this is Hollywood casting. But in the end, it was it was fine.
And I got on and there was Long Beach Firefighters and some other sprinkle from other places.
But that was a really unique experience because none of us obviously were there at the time.
We're West Coast firefighters. But, you know, we're replicating, as you did with Generation Kill, you know, we're we're recreating a very tragic event.
You know, so it was a very kind of it was a fun time, but a very sobering experience, you know, being around these mockups of the inside the world trade.
Yeah, it's, you know, somebody said to me one night when we were leaving, it's like it's like a movie set.
And they said, I've been on movie sets. This is not like a movie set.
And I never used the designation Ground Zero, because that's a designation for a nuclear explosion.
So that's an improper designation. And, you know, that day may come. You know what I mean?
But yeah, that's misappropriated. I hate that expression.
But to be there was just, you know, there's no the scale of it was very large. I had nothing. I had no point of reference.
I had never been a fireman. I was just down there and I was just staring off like kind of, you know, into space.
And I was doing what I was told to do. No more, no less.
So yeah, and how nobody ever got hurt or killed.
You know, I used to come home and I used to be like I used to get overwhelming anxiety that like somebody would slip and fall through a crevice or one of the guys I was operating with a fireman.
He it's in it's in my friend, my friend's brother, Pat Brown, his brother Mike wrote a book called What Brothers Do.
Mike passed away last year, October 30th of 9-11 related cancer. He was a fireman at
Engine 37, Lat. 40, 125th Street. He was a fireman for a bunch of years and then he became a medical doctor and went to Las Vegas, practiced medicine there and emergency medicine.
And they came back to search for Pat.
And he pointed me and goes, and you're coming with me. And I had no affinity. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing. And they put gear on me and down I went.
And that's how that came about.
But he passed away just a year, almost a year ago, a few days short, 10 more days shorter of his year.
And so that place was bad, you know.
The smells of it and, you know, there were different things burning, I guess mixing, you know, the toxicity was no joke, you know, and
you would, it would smell one way one day and then two days later it would smell a different way. I don't know how to explain that.
But, you know, and these firemen, these, the old guard, the fathers, you know, they would use this expression, we're not leaving here until it's broom clean.
You know, that's like at the firehouse, fire station. So, you know, broom place has to be immaculate.
And these were men who had lost their sons or sons-in-laws or, you know, it was
very still hard to like articulate. It's
I don't even, I can't even, I can't articulate it. I cannot, I cannot articulate it because of the scale, you know.
Again, but again, one of my preoccupations was the fact that nobody got killed or hurt.
Like, obviously people have become very ill in the aftermath and continue to be ill and will continue to be ill.
But the fact that like, you know, when a cable would break on a crane and it would whip around and,
you know, firemen and the cops, everybody would duck except the local 40 iron workers. They didn't duck. They were just used to it, I guess.
And it was so strange and, you know, how everybody would get quiet, you know, because they thought they had heard somebody.
Just your observations of like, where's the doorknob? Where's the computer? Where's the, where is everything?
You know, sure, there's paper and iron and steel and like this compressed sheetrock, what have you.
But where is everything? You know, and I think by virtue of how many men you lost in your company,
like ladder three lost both complements of two shifts. So they weren't down on the bucket brigade.
You know, they were up on the top of that thing and that's where we operated. And, you know, other companies from outlying areas, volunteer companies,
different municipalities, you know, they would be in the lower sections, let's say.
But certainly, you know, you would take a while to get up there. And then as the initial search became recovery,
then they started to bring in the big claws and stuff like that. And so you knew the characteristic of the operation is changing.
Because, you know, we were just scratching the surface. It was just everywhere you look,
there was somebody trying to affect some type of, you know, discovery or rescue.
And it was just like, it was like a therapy session. Nothing's going to get done until we start pulling this thing, you know, really apart.
And just even that task alone was just crazy. You know, the scale, scale. Anyway.
Yeah, it must have been horrendous. Now, before we started recording,
you touched on your sister, Margaret, being an oncologist and her perspective of the 911 cancer.
If you're OK with kind of going over that again, I think it's a very important perspective for people to hear.
I think that what they arrive at is what the construct of the cancer cell is.
It's kind of weird. It's kind of different. It's kind of off. It's not recognized as, you know, your basic this or your basic that.
I'm not an oncologist. But so there's something sketchy about the cell itself.
And then the speed, the metastatic speed, the speed with which it spreads and goes from lymph to bone to, you know, that that then becomes.
Recognizable as 911 related, because that's the way I think a lot of them are presenting.
You know, there's this model and joke about, oh, if you're a firefighter, you're just going to die. You're going to die of cancer.
You just don't know which type. Well, that goes back to I think the fire loads that are burning now or this, you know, these plastics.
You know, the trusses are plastic. The furniture is plastic. Everything is plastic. Where is it made?
Well, I'm not going to say, but, you know, what kind of materials are being used? We have no idea.
You know, and when you light this stuff on fire, you know, are you kidding me? And you're breathing that.
And you're coming back to the firehouse, the fire station with that stuff on your gear, you know, around your neck, you know, where your glands are.
You know, that stuff, you know, seeps in through your skin, which is an organ.
So as in the fire service, just need to be a lot more cognizant and a lot more diligent, because that's what's killing us a lot of the time is our own.
Well, it was, I think, kind of a innocence in terms of what could harm us and what could make us sick.
But certainly hoods and fire gear that's not decontaminated and then washed is not helping our cause.
You know, back when it was horse hair and wood and cloth have at it.
But now it's just, you know, as they say, the metal metal bad shit. You have no idea what's burning.
You know, we had like a benign igloo cooler, you know, you could put, you know, whatever.
And this thing was burning on a stove top. And we went, what the fuck is this? It's stunk.
It was like you didn't you didn't want to be a little cooler, stupid cooler.
But you know what? You knew intrinsically don't breathe that and all the tough guy bullshit in the world.
Oh, yeah, no, no big deal. Oh, yeah. Live and learn.
You know what I mean? Because I'll tell you one thing.
There's, you know, Billy Goldfeder, when he gives his seminars and we all, you know, poo poo and just say, oh, yeah, you know, it's just, you know, just smoking.
You know what? There's no reason to leave your family and your children alone because you chose to breathe shit, you know, on a food on the stove call.
You know what I mean? Why? You know, wash your shit, take care of yourself, you know, prolong your life because you're only this is an address rehearsal.
This is the only one you're getting.
Yeah, 100 percent. I tell people think of it like an EMS call. If you have blood and shit all over your shirt, would you wash it?
You're damn straight. We act like, you know, we're going to die of cholera when we get biohazard on us.
But when we get, you know, smoke, it's like it was a badge of honor.
And I started the fire service in 2002. So, you know, it was kind of like one foot in each.
You know, we were definitely under a lot of the old school mentality.
But you listen to the Swedish guys behind healthy firefighters who really kind of push the clean cab element.
And there's a misnomer there. They're not talking about surgically clean.
You're talking about not breathing in the off gassing from the fire.
But that was because they were burying their friends and they were sick of it.
But one of the things I see now is this kind of, as you said, machismo bullshit from this small but very loud section like, you know, clean cabs, stop grabs.
No, no. If you're running off an engine with your pack on and you haven't even looked at the fire and you're leaping in, you're probably going to die in the fire.
There's a reason why we take our time and why you're looking and assessing and listening to your LT or your captain or doing a 360.
You're snapping on your pack and then you're ready to go.
But you don't need to be completely masked out, breathing air inside an engine.
So that that whole mindset needs to change. If we're going to be good at what we do, take that moment while you take it.
I love the packs on the outside. I was a tiller man in California and that's where my pack was.
And it took six seconds to throw it on my shoulder and snap it together.
So, you know, I think there's a lot of that almost like romanticizing about the dirty gear.
There's nothing romantic about watching a coffin with an American flag over, which is then folded and given to grieving children, wives and husbands.
So they need to get over that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's you know, it is the culture and the culture is hard to change.
And, you know, there's only like two times a fireman complains when he goes to work and when he does.
And, you know, there's there's only, you know, that Dennis Lear was telling me about.
So most of the guys said about we, you know, we hate change and the only thing we hate as firemen, we hate change.
The only thing we hate more than change is when things stay the same.
You know, it's so listen, it's 2021.
A lot of the answers are here in terms of how to protect ourselves.
And like even the last 20 years, these answers have arrived and we know that the fire loans are just poison shit.
You know, off gassing 800 times greater carbon emission, you know, black fire and, you know, smoke that just forget about it and blow your head off.
And not and I'm not putting myself in those situations.
I'm not saying that I'm experiencing that, but I know that, you know, that when it is going off, just be careful.
Just take, you know, and if you have to be the jerk and the dick and the captain who says, bro, you know, put the mask on.
I'm just pulling ceiling. Yeah.
The fucking place is still on fire. So just put your fucking mask on, you know.
And we had it. We were pulling ceiling like three or four weeks ago.
And I don't know what was burning, but I had the mask on, took it off.
I was, you know, switching out guys because it was a big task.
And, you know, give me two fresh guys, give me that big guy over there.
And I got near the door and the smoke hit me and it just felt like getting punched in the chest.
I was like, fuck this. And I moved out a little further.
You know, at 61 years old, I'm not interested in breathing, like, you know, taking the meal any longer.
No. When I first got hired with Anaheim, one of the captains is now actually the chief, the fire chief.
He's a big, big guy and he was outside and he was just kind of like doing a 360, but he was kind of close.
And I don't know if it was a host stream or whatever, but there was, you know, superheated gases came through the window.
He took a breath and he was intubated for days. So in that one moment.
So, you know, it's the only thing that can change overnight on the fire ground is everything.
And that fire, I was telling you, with Billy Goldfeder, you know, I sent somebody down to see where's the seat.
And I could see the guy was sitting a little. He wasn't really making it.
I said, come on back out. And I pulled him. And then I tried to get under the smoke without my mask.
And I'm telling you, boy, I didn't get very far.
I felt like literally getting punched in the throat.
And so I masked up and went down and I said, oh, it's in a utility room back here.
And but, yeah, there's no reason to do it anymore to show that you're macho.
It's like, and I think the new generation, you know, that point is being expressed to them.
And again, it's the culture begins in your training, begins with your officers.
And hopefully, you know, a lot more guys, you know, because you're sitting at these funerals.
And I've gone to my fair share of funerals and you're thinking, you know, I needed to be here.
I didn't need to be here because this guy conducted himself on the fire ground.
It was a funeral for a poor kid, Jared Lloyd, Lieutenant Jared Lloyd, Spring Valley, the height of valor.
You know, masked up trying to evacuate an old age home.
A lot of code violations in this old age home, the spring course system was probably turned off.
But they rescued a bunch of people.
And this poor kid got caught in a collapse and just a good kid doing everything right.
We were at his funeral, I think, in April.
And, you know, it's it's it's you got to respect it.
That's all there is to it. You have to respect it. You have to respect it.
Respect is lacking in our culture, I think a little more than it used to be.
But, you know, the fire service will straighten you out.
You know, there's there's there's spiritual awakenings and there's rude awakenings.
And you can be rudely awakened very quickly, very quickly.
Absolutely. Well, I got one more area to touch on before we go to the closing questions.
If you're still OK with time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Beautiful. All right. Well, you mentioned Ron Stalworth.
I had Ron on the show. So an incredible story.
So what was it like working on Black Klansmen? Oh, did I mention Ron?
I think you said I think you said Ron was one of the people on the fire ground that tried the training.
Did I did I pick up on that? No, it wasn't. No, Ron was not.
But anyway, I'll talk about Ron.
Again, you know, in my career, you do these films and you meet people like Rudy Reyes.
You know what I mean? I've met Jim Lovell, Apollo 8, Apollo 11.
I've met these in Apollo 13.
And certainly Ron Stalworth is in the, you know, the higher echelon.
He is he's a quiet, soft spoken professional, literally the quiet professional.
And you find out about his time in the Colorado Springs Police Department and the way he conducted this operation.
And, you know, it's it's daunting to listen to. It's like, holy smokes.
So, yeah, he was another great guy to get to work with.
And actually, you know, you have a question. Here's the guy, you know, ask your question.
And because sometimes you don't get that, you know, you don't get the when you get a good consultant.
But very rarely do you get the guy.
There was a film I did called Bright Shining Lie.
It was an HBO movie about based on Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize winning book about the Vietnam War,
about a man named John Paul Vann, who became a civilian two star general and one of the.
Captains, he was a captain.
In the book, he retired as a colonel. His name was Richard Cassidy, and he was on set with us in Thailand.
And you could turn to him and ask a question and he'd give you the answer.
I remember one day we were doing simulating the. A B 52 strike, you know, in Doctel.
You know, a lot of NBA were. KIA that day.
Anyway, I said to him. Hey, Colonel, is this the way it was?
And he's like, what? I said, you know, are we getting it like anywhere? Oh, no, no.
Your job is to like tell these guys, no, no, no, you can't simulate a B 52 arc like, you know, strike.
And I was like, well, I guess you can't because these guys had so much.
Explosives and these jerry cans and these 55 gallon drums, as far as the eye could see, and they were going boom, boom, boom, going, you know, 70, 80 feet in the air.
And he said, no, that ain't it.
It's like, oh, God, but getting back to Ron Stallworth, he just sent me something in the mail like this detective's badge.
And, you know, when he when he produces that card that says Ron Stallworth, you know, a member of the KKK, it's like and it's signed by David Duke.
You're like, you know, what do you say to somebody like that?
It's like you literally say you must be out of your mind. I mean, but in the best way possible.
Gentlemen, his wife, Patsy, the nicest people you would ever want to meet and work with Spike ultimately.
Spike is a terrific guy.
I got to do another film with him called Miracle at St. Anna, where I played General Ned Almond, who was in charge of the 92nd Division of the Buffalo Soldiers, another guy who actually lived.
So I got to read about him.
It's fun because I'm a history buff.
So when you get to I remember Generation Kill being online for the Chow, my first day there in Namibia, my third trip to Namibia and Rudy Reyes is in front of me on the food line.
He was, hey, who are you?
I'm Bob Burke.
He goes, oh, yeah. Who are you playing?
I said, playing General James Mattis.
Fuck me.
Fuck.
God damn it.
And he's like, fuck it. Like because I was in pretty good shape those days.
They didn't send us some bullshit.
And he was he was just really.
Listen, I was happy that he was happy.
But, you know, we stayed in touch.
He has with my fire department, we do a warrior appreciation event.
COVID obviously shot us down, but, you know, we invite wounded veterans, able bodied veterans, what have you, to come out and just, you know, have a bit of a parade and big old meal and, you know, give literally cash and prizes.
And Rudy, we invited Rudy and there's a couple of Marine contingents in New York, you know, that I work with a foundation called the Vet Hack.
Anyway, so we invite Rudy, but then I forget about it.
You know what I mean?
And all of a sudden, the parade is happening and I'm in charge of the color guard, what have you.
And I see this dude, like this jack dude, like leaning against the garbage can and it's Rudy. I'm like, Rudy, like you're here.
And he goes, yeah, you invited me, right?
I said, yeah, I said, you're supposed to be the parade.
He goes, yeah, no, I'm not going to be in the dog.
I'll get the chow and the booze afterwards.
Dude, you flew in from California and the guy who's in charge of the Marines here, former Marine Sergeant named Gene Wu, who I work with a lot. And he goes, oh, yeah, Gene's my brother. I come anywhere from Gene.
They said it so matter of factly, you know, like flying in from L.A. on my own dime to be here at this moment on time for you all and for my brothers.
It was just so matter of fact, it was like, what's the big deal? And I was like, I was I couldn't thank him enough, you know, and and then he does he does that a lot.
He just pops up. We had these it's called the vet hack rock march and you invite all the services, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and then we all get together.
Central Park and we do PT and then we march around its designated route in Manhattan and we go to a police station and they have hot dogs and hamburgers.
It's just a day of fellowship amongst these services. And, you know, you know, a lot of connection in terms of job prospects and job hunting and that type of thing can happen.
And it's a great thing. You know, all this interservice rivalry and disparagement and bullshit.
You know, you can get from the Coast Guard talking to a fucking Marine and it's like, yeah, Jimmy, call Monday.
We have a job for an IT opening. It's all it's very beautiful with this new generation.
They're not again, harkening back to this.
I'm not saying that there's not an element of it, but there's a lot of fellowship and these guys are having to put the pieces back together and they're doing it themselves.
And we as civilians, we have a lot to learn from these guys. These guys have lessons in life and service that we can't even dream of.
So as civilians, we have a lot to learn from them. That's why, you know, that's one of the reasons I support them.
Especially something like Rudy.
Plus, he's like, some days I don't want to work out and I'll think, oh, fucking Rudy comes up with my Instagram page.
I'm like, I gotta go.
His tiny pants. No shirt.
Now I got to go out and crucify myself just to try and, you know, you know, he's such an inspiration and, you know, and literally a guy who walks the walk almost every moment of his waking life.
Yeah, and just such positivity as well. I know he does a lot of work with Force Blue and I have one of his teammates from there.
But yeah, I'm just kind of making sure we can reach out and get some dates. But I mean, he was going to a while ago. We just kind of reconnected.
So I'm hoping that will happen soon. Can hear his whole perspective, not only of the real work that he did, but also his experience on set.
With you portraying General Mattis, were you ever able to meet him?
No, I was not. And I think the best we were able to do months later was get his assistant or some colonel who was his aide on a phone.
And that happened because I'm going to try and truncate this story.
My mother had a doctor and this doctor had a son and the son wanted to be a Marine.
Only the son had cancer when he was six years old and 11 years old. And MEPs, Medical Evaluation Processing Center, MEPs would not let him be a Marine.
They said, You're a cancer boy. You're not going to be a Marine. And he asked me could I help.
And we wrote to Chuck Schumer, Peter King, all these congressmen. And then myself and this other Marine, former Marine Sergeant, tried to get a message to General Mattis.
General Mattis, he was still with the Marines then. And we got a reply.
What's the kid's date of birth, social, who's his recruiter after 18 months of trying to get to Mattis?
Because Mattis did send a message to me that said, whatever, if I could ever do anything for you.
I'm like, well, what can this guy do for me? Well, certainly.
I said, this is the actor who betrayed you in Generation Kill. And he's asking that the Marines reevaluate this prospective recruit.
Well, the kid calls one day and he says, I'm in. My recruiter calls. I'm in.
And I said, That's great. Congratulations. I can't tell this story without filling up.
I said to him, Justin, why do you want to be a Marine so bad? And he goes, Oh, Mr. Burke, he goes,
When I was having my chemo, I didn't have the chemo in a place for children. I had it in the hospital. It was very scary.
He goes, I want to go back to that hospital. If there's kids there, I want to be in my dress flues and tell them they can get through this.
So, you know, the ideals of being a Marine, you know, being efficient killer, that was not what was foremost in his mind.
What was foremost in his mind was instilling children with power and confidence and hope and faith.
And I think that, you know, isn't the highest ideals in the Marine Corps. And he was able he's over in Okinawa.
He's I think with Marine intelligence now. He's on a second ending a second tour.
Just a complete consummate gentleman. He's got a wife, beautiful wife and child.
Yeah, he's a special guy. We stay in touch. I don't want to mention his name here, but if he hears this, he'll know who he is.
Beautiful. I'm so glad I asked that question.
I want to tell you a story. As he was finishing recruit training at Parris Island, the DI or somebody comes in and says, I want you to write a one page.
Everybody one page as to why you wanted to become a Marine. And he tells the story that I just told you to go back to.
And it's for Stars and Stripes magazine, the one that's pretty good will be picked.
So finally, his one is picked and it's the items and he goes, are you fucking are you fucking trying to make me cry?
And he goes, is this shit true? And he's like, yeah, yeah, Sergeant. Are you fucking?
And so finally, next thing you know, he's with the commandant, you know, getting his picture taken and his story was picked.
It's all true. You know, you know, cancer twice as a kid becomes Marine.
You know, just won't take no for an answer.
That is absolutely amazing. And again, I mean, as you said, with the vets helping each other at the the vet hack event, you know, I think that's the thing is people helping people, you know, and through.
I had an opportunity to help a firefighter who was terminally ill through some of the connections I've made through this.
And so, you know, there's this path that we lead when we're able to, you know, to help someone else out and give back.
I mean, that's, you know, that's humanity. And what an incredibly powerful story that is.
I hope I hope it I hope it. I hope it jumps over all these, you know, these walls of these political walls and these ideological walls.
They mean nothing. I think they're meant to keep us away from each other and control each other.
You know, I'm very disheartened by it. This is the United States of America. And and when I read things like the left wing and the right wing is part of the same bird, you know, and the Democrats and Republicans.
I would, you know, you go out on a call, you're not. Excuse me. Are you a Republican? Bullshit. You're pulling line off that truck so fast.
You know, you're getting that stretcher ready. You're not asking somebody's ideology, you know, or their sexual orientation or their race or their fucking nothing.
You're there to help them as one human to another human.
So let's see if you have the balls and let's see if you have the commitment to keep it there.
You know what I mean? You know, all this bullshit that goes on, all this bullshit, as far as I'm concerned, it's a waste of time and energy.
And we could be pulling together. You know, that's the way the whole country started pulling together.
And I can't stand it when people try and separate us. You know what I mean?
Or you're stupid and you're stupid and you don't know what the fuck and fuck you. You know what I mean?
It's just it's just a waste of time and energy. You know what I mean?
I don't really care what anybody else does there. You know, they want to wear pink fucking hats or what?
It's all good. That's what we're here for. It's an experiment who says, you know, racism, it doesn't serve our species.
It just doesn't serve us. If you go 150 feet and you look down on a species, it doesn't serve us.
You know, pollution doesn't serve us. You know, it's like get out there and clean up, bro.
You got to understand that, you know, resources and you know, what's what's not finite, though, is love and compassion.
There's plenty of it. You just got to mine it from within yourself and extend it.
But these other resources are fine.
So but yeah, the whole ideological and political thing that pisses me off greatly because half the fucking guys who promote this shit never wore a uniform.
Their family never wore a uniform and not saying that I'm some kind of, you know, B all or anything.
There's something about like a guy who's never been, you know, roughed up by life.
You know what I mean? And, you know, or sits on his armchair, you know, stuffing Cheetos up his ass and talking about what a bad guy this guy that guy is.
Everybody deserves a hand up, I believe.
You know, I think that'll work for us. But but all this other energy wasted.
It's just it's just wasted energy. It's not going to work. It's not going to help us in the end.
No, no. And I agree. You are preaching to the choir. I've talked about this all the time on the show.
I see my friends. I just spoke to a friend yesterday and I was checking on them and immediately started talking about the Democrats who are in the country.
And I'm like, oh, fuck. Here we go again. You know, I'll tell you right now, when we were kids, we got we used to call it crap in the can.
My brother and I, we marched down this avenue, eight, nine, ten years old.
And we come home with these cans of food that was given to us. I think it was even illegal.
You know, we weren't signed up for anything, but we went down and got them. You know what I mean?
And my mother had help from Catholic charities.
She got this terrible infection in her hands and she had three small girls and we're living in a tenement.
And and so we had we needed help. You know, and and and I just, you know,
one of the great things about the way I was read was there was everything it was colorblind.
We saw people for who they were because in our neighborhood, we had to pull together.
Everybody had to pull together. And or because the sinking, you're really paycheck away from being homeless.
You know what I mean? And and so everybody, you know, you could see it, the butcher shop.
Oh, pay me Friday. It's all right. You know, and then Friday would come in.
I forget about it. You know, people help each other. But now there's more people.
There's more, you know, again, this is big disparate. We're getting very sociologically.
No, no, it's brilliant. I love it. It was funny as well.
I get so much more English and I swear a lot more when I get passionate and you just got so much more New York esque when you were talking.
Yeah, no, I know. I let the F bomb so I find it.
It comes back. I could track classically trained.
Here it comes. Where were you from?
So I'm from a place called Bath, which is a beautiful Roman city near Stonehenge.
So the southwest countryside area, beautiful part of the world.
Wow. Southwest. That's intense. That's amazing. Yeah. Wow.
I didn't I've never spent much time in London a bunch of times, you know, walking around the tourist spots and then back onto the plane.
But but I spent a lot of time in Ireland.
Wow. That's that's and why did you leave there?
So my story actually involved show business, funny enough, in a way.
I went on a round the world trip with a girlfriend. We were kind of pretty much fragmented by that point.
And when I was in Australia, I got a job working for Universal Studios as a stunt man, opening the park, the theme park in Osaka.
I was playing the T1000 in the Terminator 2 show. Robert Patrick's character doubling him.
That's hilarious. Yeah. I'm working on getting Robert on the show because he was in Ladder 49 too, but we'll see.
But so anyway, I met an American girl, my son's mother, my now ex-wife.
I'm remarried very, very, very happily. But so it was either, you know, moved to the UK and stay there or move back to the US.
I'd worked here for several years on summer camps, so I knew I loved it over here.
So that was what brought me over. And I'd been told as a young boy, I was colorblind.
I could never be a firefighter. Well, when I came over here, had an epiphany. Yeah, I read that.
Yeah. I mean, I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, as I always say.
It took me a long time to figure out I wasn't. But challenge the test and start in my fire service career here.
Oh, I see. Oh, OK. Wow. That's pretty wild. You talk about a circumventive way to arrive at the fire service.
Wow. That's pretty interesting. That's pretty interesting. And where are you stationed now?
So I actually transitioned out. We started talking before we started recording that picture with all the names on my back.
That's what started me, made me start this podcast. I was looking for good wellness information.
My background is also an athlete, a coach, a sports science major in college.
And so by no means an expert, but definitely an understanding of wellness and the information we should be getting.
As podcasts started becoming more popular and I started listening to them, I'm like, wow, these people have information that the fire service needs.
And it just wasn't permeating our siloed profession. So I started it five years ago.
And then three years ago, I was at I moved around because I was divorced and was taking care of my son.
And I was in, let's just say, a very complacent department. And so I was rehabbing a knee injury, was at a crossroads.
And I'm like, you know what? I told my wife now, I'm like, I'm going to take my pension, cash it out, pay myself a salary.
I'm going to go all in on the podcast. So I've actually been, retired is the wrong word because I'm not retired.
I don't get any money. But I've transitioned out to doing this full time because the force multiplier effect of thousands of people listening to a conversation like this,
to me now outweighs riding a rig, running one call at a time. So I did it for 14 years, absolutely loved it.
But, you know, the universe God, they basically gave me a kick, swift up the ass and said, I mean, a swift kick up the ass and said, all right, this is what you're supposed to do now.
So here I am from from riding the tiller bucket of a truck to sitting behind a microphone.
You know, Father Judge, the day before 9-11, he was up at some engine company or ladder company and he gave the speech and that speech is referred to a lot.
And, you know, he talks about, you know, the fire service being the greatest job.
And he I don't know the speech and, you know, I should know it. I should have it committed to our place. There's one sentence where he says something like, you never know what God wants you to do when you get off that rig.
And but and I remember that sentence. And but the rig is different. The rig can be leaving your home.
The rig can be doesn't have to be the fire apparatus. You know what I mean? It's just like, you know, finding your purpose. You, James could potentially be of greater service doing this than being on a fire truck.
You know what I mean? And so it's just really having the facility and the clarity to listen to what you're calling is in 14 years.
I mean, you've earned your stripes. So, you know, good on you.
Thank you. Well, it was so much fun as well. I mean, it really was. And it was interesting, though. I've spoken to quite a few operators and there's a kind of shift that happens around 10 years, I think, as a career firefighter where, you know,
as you were talking about your first fire was a bomb burner. You know, a lot of a lot of ours, you know, a room of contents or mattress fire or, you know, kitchen cabinets, whatever it is.
And when you're a rookie, you're like, oh, my God, you know, I just slayed the dragon. And then 10 years in, you know, it needs to be, you know, fully involved, maybe one room not involved to really get your heart rate up.
So, you know, I think I got to see some great stuff. I was at departments, definitely the peak. But, you know, like I tell people when we transition out, whether you're injured, whether you're retiring, you know, whatever it is, it's the same purpose.
Just like you said, just like Father Judge said, it's the same mission. You're just wearing a different uniform.
A friend of mine, he's one of the assistant chiefs, recently said to me, he goes, hey, be kind of quiet lately. I said, dude, you know better than to say that. He goes, I could use a job.
And right now, like I'm the happiest guy in the world, you know, when, you know, the training is up, let's say, but the nonsense, the craziness is low. I don't need it anymore. You know what I mean?
You know, 19 years went by very quickly for me.
And, you know, yeah, wherever you're going to be effective, you know, wherever you feel like you're practicing seeing the presence of the universe and of God, if you want to put it, that's where you need to be.
And, you know, I had a bailout of an EMT, EMR class recently. I was four classes in and the work thing happened and I couldn't just study.
And it's my second attempt at it. My wife goes, you're never going to be an EMT. I said, I know. I just realized that. I just accepted the fact.
And so I had to accept that. And, you know, it's not going to happen. And it's never going to happen. I should say never. I never say never. But at the same time, it's a high probability that it won't happen.
But again, is that my path? I thought it was. You know, at 61 years old, I don't want to be incompetent at something. I want to be very competent.
I want to I want to polish the confidence. Do you know what I mean? As opposed to, you know, being in a classroom with 21 year olds again. But yeah, these types of podcasts have become very inspirational.
A friend of mine, Jason Bresler, is a lieutenant at Rescue 2 and he's a Marine major and his podcast, Leadership on the Fire, you know, boy, oh boy, it's super effective, super inspirational, super informative.
So yeah, these types of things are very, very, very important, I think. These conversations.
Yeah, Jason and I have just gone back and forth very briefly, but I think he was writing a book. So I don't know if his book's done, then then I'll reach out to him again, because that's what he wanted to do is wait till till that was out. But he's someone I want to get on the show at some point.
Terrific you being another guy just talk about walk the walk. Holy smokes. You know, reminds me of a young Patty Brown, to tell you the truth, just in terms of his Marine Corps service and his, you know, his free decor and the way he's he takes his tasks and the job seriously, but not himself so much.
And just a super great guy, you know, super great guy. Beautiful. Well, I'm going to transition some closing questions so I can let you go. We've been chatting over two hours and it's been incredible. But I want to be mindful of your time. Yeah, it's amazing when you get into a good conversation.
The first one I love to ask, is there a book that you love to recommend? It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated or books, plural.
Good question.
No, not one single book.
No problem. I'll deviate to the second one then if if that's a struggle, movies and or documentaries so any of those that you feel would be an easy answer.
I have to tell you, I'm in movies, I'm on television, and it wasn't until COVID that I actually watched television, you know what I mean? My wife screaming to me, you have to come and watch Game of Thrones. I'm like,
and or like so like, I have no allegiance to any television show I've watched a couple documentaries I've seen so many, you know, books with me it's history.
So, I'm fascinated by Mesoamerica, megalithic ancient cultures. I'm fascinated by who taught these fucking guys. How are they cutting stone like this? How are they placing stone like this? I'm just simply fascinated by that.
But no, it's funny. I read lots of, well, again, lots of history. What am I reading now?
I'm not reading anything but work. It's all scripts, scripts, scripts, scripts. But I'll read about Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo or Einstein.
Those are three Isaacson books in a row, I must say. And, you know, I do so much reading for work.
So, right by my bed, there's this book, The Teachings of Jesus, the Holy Bible King James Version. And let me see who it's by. Let me see how many pages this book is.
This book is 53 pages.
It's the smallest book you've ever seen in your life. It's about four inches by four inches.
And it's by Penguin.
And it's from 1995. So it's like a little pamphlet.
It's all in there. And I don't even call myself a Christian.
I was raised Catholic, blah, blah, blah, all these religions. Not my thing. But this dude, this fella here, I think he was on to something.
And so, you know, Buddha, Allah, whoever it is, they were all on to something. If you read them simply, it's just about a kindness.
That's the religion, babe, right there. Fucking just be nice to people. Start there, you know, and see what happens to you in your life in terms of karma.
See what comes back at you, you know, if you respect others and if you're kind to them, see what comes back to you.
So the book is called, it's here, it's Penguin's, Penguin 60s. It's this little Penguin pamphlet. I swear to God, I'll send you a picture of it. It's hilarious.
But this book I've been reading for 37 years. It's going to go back further, actually.
Yeah, it's, you see, because about Jesus, we're not really sure what he said. You know what I mean?
His brother James started a movement called The Way. It wasn't called Christianity.
And it was just these very simple tenets due unto others, you know, who was the least of my brothers.
It was really about just picking up a lowly guy. And as Father Mike used to say to me, if you go down that road, you won't have anything to worry about.
You know what I mean? You'll be coming. Because I said to him, Mike, I don't really know. I'm not getting this white beard and long hair thing.
So anyway, you asked about a book. Music, I'm going to, traditional Irish music, traditional Irish music, not we drink, we get drunk, not that Irish music.
Traditional, the Chieftains, Iliad Pipes, jigs, reels, that type of music. I don't know why.
Maybe because I heard it as a child. That's what's in my blood. When I hear it, I respond to it.
Traditional, not trad, they call it. And I love poetry, believe it or not. Contemporary poets, the old poets, the classical poets.
Obviously, drama, Shakespeare, Stimberg, Ibsen, Shaw. I'll go back and read those again, some of them.
So yeah, any art like that, anything that really moves me, anything that's like, well, I fucking couldn't do that, I'll tell you that.
Anything that moves me. And it can be anything. It can be like really anything. I'm wide open.
But gosh, I should have a book, but I don't. It's anything. It's all, they're all good.
No, that's a great book.
My kids will tell you, I eat books. I'll read many of them. I'll read about military drones. And then the next minute I'll be reading about, you know, megalithic structures.
So it's pretty diverse.
Beautiful. Well, thank you for that. I mean, that book, I mean, sums up what I talk about all the time. Don't be a dick, basically.
You can sum it up in a few words.
Apparently, it's a lot to ask. Just don't be a dick. Exactly. And that eliminates. Be respectful. Yes.
Be respectful to everybody because you know, like they say, oh, you never know. Everybody's going through a struggle. Well, that's the goddamn truth.
That's the truth. Everybody is going through something. Guy who's got all the money, the guy who's got the world by bullshit.
Everybody's going through something, you know, be mindful because you never know.
You never know who and how you're going to affect that. I'm like, you know, oh, Robert's on television. Oh, oh, oh, bullshit.
You know what I mean? What I want to present is somebody who helps the community. You know what I mean?
You know, I think these guys thought they were going to get something different out of me.
It's like, hey, he's an actor.
Yeah, but he's he's he wants you to clean the rig the next time you put it. You know what I mean?
That's what they got out of me. Hopefully, you know, it's been a privilege to be of service to be able.
I remember I was 40. Yes. 41 years old in class with 20 year olds and.
And and and so it was a privilege. It was a privilege to be able to, you know, at 41 years old, God said, now you're going to be a farming.
It's like, oh, you know, so anyway.
No, I think it's so good to hear. And like I said at the beginning of the conversation, you know, that's what I love.
I mean, there's people on here that are, you know, are in Hollywood.
There's people on here that are only known by their own department, but they're all great human beings.
They're all kind human beings. And it doesn't matter if you're, you know, a celebrity, quote unquote,
or if you're an elite sports player or a special operator or a firefighter, you know, if you're if the nucleus of who you are
is doing good in the world, then that's who I have on this podcast. And this is what I love.
And it's also good. Like Josh and I had a conversation, Josh Brolin.
It's like, you know, the other side of the coin is, you know, oh, what does he know? He's just an actor.
He needs to shut the fuck up. No, he's a human being who's been through an entire life who acts for a living.
And yes, there are some people, actors, plumbers, accountants who, you know, walk around like that.
You know, the shit doesn't stink. And there's a lot of people in the acting industry that do incredible work.
As you said, Dennis Leary and Steve and some of his other ones that are out there using their platforms to really do good in the world.
Yeah, yeah. And again, it's like the son of Irish immigrants. You know what I mean?
You know, the sky was the limit. We were told to get an education, go help somebody, go do something.
Like my dad used to say, don't tell me about it. Don't tell me your feelings and know that.
Do it. Go out and do it. And that was the motto.
Just, you know, my sister eulogized my mother. And I'll never forget it because she said my mother was not interested in your happiness.
I was like, what? What is she talking about? Like during the funeral?
My mother wasn't interested. And she said, my mother wanted results.
She wanted to know what you were doing and were you being effective and were you being successful at it?
Were you trying hard enough? And if you all those things, if you were doing the best you could and you were getting results,
well, then the happiness would take care of itself. She knew she couldn't give you the happiness.
You had to give it to yourself. And I said, oh, okay. Yeah, I agree with that.
But nobody took my sister eulogizing my mother to actually formulate what the message was.
And I was in total agreement with it. You couldn't give anybody happiness. You had a forage for your own.
Absolutely. Well, one more question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you, follow you online.
What do you do to decompress when you're not acting, when you're not at the station?
Workout.
And what does your workout look like?
The kids call it the prison yard. A lot of rusty weights, a lot of jerry-rigged stuff.
It's right outside on my deck. My wife was here in the room with me.
What are some of the sounds when I work out? What does that sound like?
Someone's dying.
She goes, or someone's being killed. Because if I hit the Machuar or something like that,
sometimes I'll punch the posts that are holding up my deck for the hand training.
But yeah, I fish, I surf cast. I play basketball with my youngest son.
I watch my older son. He's a big time surfer, very, very good surfer.
And I live in an island that's a barrier island. It's seven miles out into the ocean.
It's just so beautiful that you can't believe it.
Yeah, and again, read and stuff like that to decompress.
And I said during the pandemic and everything, lockdown and all that,
I started to binge watch stuff and become compliant.
Because I had my son and his girlfriend and my other son.
And so we were all together watching these shows. And it was great.
It was a very happy time in lieu of what was happening.
So again, decompression for me is really just I like to work out.
And if you look at my, yeah, I'm in okay shape, but I'm not like, you know, cut up and all this.
I just like to go out there and hammer myself for a couple hours.
And, you know, I just, in my mind's eye, in my own self-evaluation perspective,
I don't even see myself as somebody who works out.
And yet I do like almost every day for an hour or two or sometimes three.
And, you know, it's funny because I had an argument with a guy the other day.
And, you know, my shoulder is bad, my hip is bad, my back is bad, my knees are going.
And he goes, that's not being in shape, Bob.
And I said, wow, you're right. You know, being in shape is about being in shape.
It's about feeling good. It's about being effective in your body.
And none of those things are true for me.
He goes, you're out there hammering yourself.
And I was like, yeah. And he goes, yeah, that's not it, bro.
And so, oh, God, someday I'll get to yoga, maybe when I'm 90 or something like this,
because everybody's slamming me in the head for 20 years.
You gotta do yoga. And I'm just like, nah, you know, unless my hands are bleeding
and, you know, I'm soaking wet, then I don't feel like it's a workout.
And that's just the, you know, 37 years ago when I started training.
That's still in my head. You know, try to teach it.
I'm sorry, I was going to say there's a thing called foundation training that I do,
and it's not yoga. It's actually started by a chiropractor who jacked up his own back
and through trial and error found basically a series of poses,
but they do wonders for, you know, lower back, knees, ankles, shoulders,
everything that we all get beat up by.
And you literally do it like 10, 15 minutes a day.
And it's hard. So you will actually, you know, feel like you've worked out.
But if you can't get yourself to be...
15 minutes? Nah.
15 minutes.
No, not a full workout, but you put it at the front or the end of a regular workout,
and now you get that mobility as well thrown in there.
I'm going to share something that I don't think I've ever shared with anybody.
There are these series of tapes that were made in 1995
about class 234 SEAL teams in Coronado.
Buds?
Yeah, Buds. Do you know that tape?
Yes, I've seen it. Actually, I think if I'm not mistaken,
one of my friends, Jeff Nichols, was actually one of the guys in.
So actually Ryan Parrott would have been too.
So I think I've even had some guys that were in that class.
Oh, Birdman?
Yeah. Yeah, you know, Ryan?
Birdman, yeah, I attended an event with him.
He attended the Joseph D. Bernardo seminar in 2019.
He was one of the guest speakers.
Birdman, who? Tough way to get that nickname.
Yes.
One of my things is that literally, my kids will tell you,
every day for 19 years that I've worked out, it's been to one of those tapes.
And I just put it on in the background.
I can recite like all six hours in my head.
It's an obsessive OCD kind of thing.
That tape has to play in my head while I'm working out because it's the lessons.
And you can't learn them enough.
You know, attention to detail, you know, that's the big one.
And, you know, the humor, the gut wrenching, the guys who tap out,
not likening myself as a seal at all.
I'm just saying the inspiration.
And my son said to me, he goes, why don't you fucking listen to something else?
You've been listening to this thing for fucking years, you know, 19 years.
And after I'm done with you here, James, I'll go out, turn that tape on,
and start my work.
And it's just that's it.
It's like I'm like a fucking robot.
You know what I mean?
I don't need to hear, you know, it's the old thing like 10,000 inspirational tapes, you know, to be to master something.
I need to hear one 10,000 times.
We know that from the martial arts.
Do you know what I mean?
So attention to detail, you know, hammered into your head, hammered into your head, you know,
and to the point, you know, you say you train not to get it right.
You train so that you can never get it wrong, you know.
And so, yeah, I've always listened to those tapes.
It's a weird thing, but it's the truth.
Yeah, no, that's I mean, I can see why I really can.
Well, for people listening, I'm obviously, you know, they're able to see your work on the screen.
Are there any places online they can learn more about you or follow you on social media?
Gosh, on Instagram, Bobby 1960.
And, you know, I'm on there looking at your stuff.
I'm not on there a lot posting my stuff.
And I was always cognizant not making my the only important things to me seem to be the lives of first responders or like military guys.
And, you know, let's say they're they're deaf and posting about.
And I said, you know, I don't want to make it.
This is my own thing. So I'm just going to, you know, on 9-11, I'll post something about my friend, Pat, that he, you know, that that whole prospect of never forget.
And I remember talking to Jason Bresler. I was like, never.
That's the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard. How could you forget?
Well, society, you know, John Q. Public, he's going to forget.
There's nothing you can do for him, you know, like Pearl Harbor and the main, you know, but to tell people, you must.
I'll never forget it. It's it's with me every day. Guys wanted to get tattoos.
I wear a bracelet. Why? Because I have to put that bracelet on every day.
I take my friend up every day and attach it to my wrist every day.
It's not like a tattoo and just forget it and forget about it.
My father didn't like ink or holes either. And that wasn't going to happen on his watch.
My friend, Freddie, got a tattoo and he's what are you a fucking land pirate?
And we thought those two words together. Land pirate was the funniest thing in the world.
Nobody in my crew ever got earrings or tattoos.
But I don't disparage anybody who wants to get a tattoo. My father used to say, if you were if you were on a destroyer in the South Pacific in World War II, if you're a Maori tribesman, knock yourself out.
But he's the foot. The rest of it is just cultural appropriation.
But of course, you know, that cat is out of the bag in the United States.
I pick my friend up, I put him around my wrist each day, you know, and and that's how I honor him and remember him.
He would have gotten an awful kick out of being able to discuss the fire service.
I would have loved if he were alive and to discuss the fire service with him.
But I hope he's you know, I know he informs like almost everything I do in the fire service and his brother, Mike, who I miss the two of them.
You know, this is the anniversary of Michael's passing and Mike and I, we did everything to protect and propagate and cultivate Pat's legacy. And, you know, after he fell on that day and we became like brothers and very painful.
You know, my grandfather, I was told I never met any of my grandparents. They were always in Ireland and they're dead.
And my grandfather came in one day to my aunts and uncles when they were children. And by virtue of their numbers, there were 13 of them.
He said, you will know great joy, but you will also know great sorrow.
You know, and the people we get to meet in the fire service are the really great people, you know, and when they leave us, it's very hard. It's just that much more difficult.
So with them, we know great joy, but when they go, we know great sorrow, you know, and but I read something recently.
Boy, it won't leave me is grief is just love with nowhere to go.
You know, and when that grief comes upon you, you know, find somewhere in your actions for that love to go and your grief will lift your depression may lift.
But, yeah, certainly you'll ride out that sorrow. You know, if you could find somewhere to put that love that you had for that fallen person, you'll be more effective as a human being because they these people who leave us.
They don't want us to be unhappy. They want us to be happy. And, you know, and continue on.
I couldn't agree more. I think that's why altruism is so healing as well as being good for the people that you're helping.
Yeah, it should be natural. Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely. Well, we have been talking, like I said, for two and a half hours.
We have gone all over the place. I just want to thank you. Thank you for your generosity with the time today. Thank you for saying yes in the first place.
But also thank you for, you know, your courage and your transparency and your vulnerability, because, you know, there are many areas that we've been that, you know, aren't all happy and smiley.
And, you know, and I think that's as if not more important than, you know, some of the funny stories and some of those other areas.
So I just want to say, you know, I'm so appreciative. So thank you so much for being so generous with your time today.
Well, I looked you up a little bit and I said, boy, this guy's on the path, you know, and it's just so it's an honor to be to be on your show here and to be a part of your path.
And that's what we do. We stick together. We respond together. And this is to me like responding, you know, because we don't know, you know, potentially somebody can listen to this and say, you know what, I'm going to change things about my life today.
I never know. We never know. I'll give you a story about Patty Brown.
Highly decorated fireman, you know.
Oh, I'm getting banged out, buddy.
Got to go. All the best. Best way to finish it. Be safe.