I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast
that is Transcend.
Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did
for 14 years.
Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido,
hair loss, etc.
Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have
seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely
incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left, right
and center.
So I myself wanted to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology
and then offer supplementations without ramming, for example, hormone replacement therapy down
my throat.
Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason
why the 7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations.
They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first
responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual.
So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood
drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they
guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.
In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been
very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place.
So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology
knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done.
Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies
they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.
So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low,
but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own.
So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that
you can't come back from.
So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely
one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the
Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling.
This episode is sponsored by a company I've literally been using for over 15 years now
and that is 511.
Now my introduction to their products began when I started wearing 511 uniforms years
ago for Anaheim Fire Department.
And since then I have acquired a host of their backpacks and luggage, which have literally
been around the world with me.
The backpack where I keep all my recording equipment is a 511 backpack.
And then most of my civilian gear, the clothes that I wear are also 511.
Now more recently they've actually branched out into the brick and mortar stores.
So for example, Gainesville where I do jiu jitsu has a beautiful 511 store.
So if you are a fire department, a law enforcement agency, you now have access to an entire inventory
of clothing and equipment in these 511 stores.
Now I've talked about the range of shoes they have and how important minimizing weight in
our footwear is when it comes to our back health, knee health, et cetera.
I've talked about their unique uniforms that are fitted for either male or female first
responders.
And then I want to highlight one new area, their CloudStrike packs.
For those of you who enjoy hiking, this would even be an application I believe for the wildland
community.
They've created an ultra light pack now with a hydration system built in for rucking, running
or other long distance events.
Now as always, 511 is offering you the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast 15% off every
purchase that you make.
So if you use the code SHIELD15, that's S-H-I-E-L-D-1-5 at 511tactical.com, you will get that 15% off
every single time.
So if you want to hear more about 511 and their origin story, go to episode 338 of Behind
the Shield podcast with their CEO, Francisco Morales.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show 35 year veteran of the fire service and the deputy chief of EMS and safety for
Renton Regional Fire Authority, Chuck DeSmith.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from the recruitment crisis that
is affecting us internationally, interagency relationships, firefighter fitness, sleep
deprivation, peer support, the barriers to entry when it comes to firefighter mental
health and so much more.
Now 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 single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of over 950 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 every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Chuck DeSmith.
Enjoy.
Well, Charles, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you, James.
Glad to be here.
So where on planet earth are we finding you your morning, my afternoon?
I am on this earth.
I'm over in the South Seattle, Washington area.
It's a town called Renton and it's also a town I grew up with and I work as a firefighter
for the last 35 years.
So I'm now as a deputy chief and still serving the town I grew up in, which was at first
a little bit like, hey, I haven't moved very far, but after a while it becomes a bit of
an honor to serve the folks who looked after you.
Well, let's start at the very beginning of that timeline then.
So you were born in Renton.
Tell me about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
You bet.
So my mother's a second generation.
She was born and raised in Renton and my father was a milkman.
So very blue collar.
My mother actually did cake decorating in a grocery store and my father was a milkman
and I have two older sisters.
So I was the youngest boy and got to grow up in a house full of women and my dad and
I hung on somehow.
I literally remember, because we lived on a farm, so our drive was, I think it was half
a mile long and the milk float would come every few days and deliver milk and the little
battery powered floats, which is funny because we think of a battery powered vehicles are
so advanced now and actually milkmen were using them for years before.
So how long did your dad work in that industry and have you ever had any kind of conversations
about the evolution of that world, especially with the nutritional choices, sometimes pushing
people away from dairy products?
Yeah.
Yeah, and it was the 60s and early 70s when he was most active and he actually had a whole
key ring of people's home locks.
And so as a milkman, he would take in the milk and they were glass bottles at that time,
which is the best way to drink milk back then.
And they would give him a key and he'd go into the house and put it in their refrigerator.
Talk about trust back then and loyalty and we used to have a kind of a weird saying,
but somebody would always joke, oh, that baby's got the milkman's eyes or something like that.
And I'm like, well, that makes some sense if they have a key to your house.
So he did that just until 1980 and there was a big change.
We had the dairy farmers of Washington and really all over the US were needing some support,
but also a lot of antibiotics were being introduced and a lot of poor farming techniques.
So yeah, he left and milk did change quite a bit.
There's a lot of lactose intolerant folks and he went into sales after that.
But it was one of these jobs that was very personal to people.
They always give them gifts on the holidays.
I got to jump and ride in the car with them in the truck and help deliver.
And I don't know, it's just one of those people in the neighborhood type feel.
And again, it was all through Renton.
Have you had any conversations with him about the philosophy of trust that existed when
he was delivering milk and how that has diminished as time has gone on?
Yeah, yeah.
We had that, he passed about 10 years ago, but we've had that discussion when I was growing
up and I'm like, he was like, yeah, go ahead and just the house should be open on that
side door.
Just go ahead and put, I'm like, are you sure?
It's like, no, I've been delivering milk years and they trust me.
And so that was just kind of how we grew up.
It was some things you just trusted.
It didn't even occur to you that you were in someone's house and you could potentially
take something.
It was just, this is the job and the service that we were providing.
So what about sports and athletics?
What were you playing during those school years?
Oh, yeah, I love to run.
And so, but that was the great thing about sports.
They're very seasonal.
So in the seventies, football was kind of king around here.
So we'd play junior football every year and then that would be in the fall.
And then winter, we'd all play basketball.
And then summer was baseball and track.
And so I did, we just played sports all the time.
Sports was a big part of my life and all through high school, I ran track in college and there
was some teamwork aspects and leadership roles that really carried well into the fire service.
I think sports and that dynamic of going through hard times, pulling together to overcome something
is very powerful.
And I think it translates well into the fire service.
See, it's interesting when people have performed at a higher level in the sport, I always ask
this question.
There's a difference though between the team, say of a football team and then an individual
sport, even though you're part of a team like track.
So when you look back now, what were the impacts of both of those when they collectively came
together in the fire service?
Yeah, I love the team sport.
Track was very difficult for me.
It was something that I did well at doing, but I didn't like it.
It was a mind game.
I felt like my mind was the biggest thing to overcome when you're doing the solo sports.
But when you're doing a team sport like football, American football, you have each other to
lean on.
You can look your teammate in the eye and it just felt like you had support.
But boy, when you're running a race, it's just you and it's a very different dynamic.
I think the combination of both is very powerful.
I fought in martial arts when I was younger and then I was on the big thing that I played
the most was field hockey, which is viewed as a girls sport normally, but it's actually
a pretty aggressive game when a bunch of dudes are running around carrying wood.
But when were you growing up in?
I was growing up in the, I guess I was born in 74, so come like through the 80s and into
the 90s.
But and then it was in England.
But if I think back to the fire service, obviously the station dynamic and some of the scenes,
the team side definitely factored in.
But sometimes when you're in a search or somewhere where it's just that mind saying, we need
to get out, it's too hot.
I think I'm lost, those kinds of things.
I feel that's where that kind of mental resilience from the individual sport really factored
in.
Yeah.
I definitely agree.
It is so much mental when you're in an individual sport.
It really is.
So from the career perspective, then were you always dreaming of becoming a firefighter
or was there something you were thinking about first?
Oh, you know, that's it was nothing dramatic.
It's a bit silly actually.
So in Renton, a lot of my, my dad always played sports.
He was actually very good at baseball and softball.
And some of the firefighters on their days off would also be on planes, other baseball
teams.
So my dad's good friends were some of them were Renton firefighters.
So every once in a while I would be down there and they'd let me polish a rig and be around
the fire apparatus.
But really that was my extent.
I just thought I had no idea how people even got the job.
I didn't know this.
It's a job that you could apply for.
I thought they just kind of a friend, let another friend know and they all work there.
And it was after my second year in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do.
And I was driving by a fire station in Renton actually.
And I saw them washing an engine and they were kind of having fun, spraying each other
a little bit.
And I'm saying, that looks like a fun job.
So there's nothing dramatic.
And my, and I said, dad, do you still know some firefighters?
Oh yeah, I've got a battalion chief down in Renton.
Go talk to them.
And then the more I started to think this is an actual career possibility, the more
I started getting excited, I've always wanted to help others in some aspect.
I've always wanted to somehow use my body for work and do something a little different.
And so it was just that slow, you know, talking to people.
And once I became aware, I got laser focused and started training in 1987.
So that's when I started.
Did you put yourself through the fire academy or did they send you?
Oh, at the time I went through a school, it was called Bates Votek.
And I paid for that.
And then I was a resident volunteer, kind of a part paid.
And once I became full time in 1990, they sent me through the academy.
So it was then I got, I was actually being paid and sent through the official state academy.
And with a combination EMS and fire back then.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
That was exciting times in King County, Washington in the 1980s.
The most exciting times because we had a doctor named Dr. Coppice that worked out of Seattle's
Harborview.
And we were some of the first firefighters on the streets using defibrillators.
Blew everyone's mind in the nation.
It's like, are you kidding me?
You're not having a doctor use this.
You're going to use it outside of the hospital.
And our folks in Renton were some of the first.
And so to be here in King County where we led the nation and sometimes nationally with
all things CPR, it was an exciting time.
So we owned EMS.
That's why we had so many people hired in the 80s.
It was a big hiring time.
And that's why there's so many retirements now.
We've had this big turnover and that's the time we did.
We owned EMS work and all the labor is just like, call 911.
We wanted to be busy.
We wanted to be relevant.
We wanted people to use us and need us.
And the medical side was growing fast and we wanted to be at the forefront.
Well that's an interesting place to kind of contrast with 2024 then.
As we sit here, I would argue that a lot of departments are overwhelmed now by the number
of EMS calls that they get.
What have you seen over the last few decades from wanting to be relevant and wanting to
be present for true emergencies versus maybe some of the abuse that's happened decades
later?
Yeah.
And this is a very passionate and powerful area for me.
And I'm working at the state level and I feel like that crazy person on the hill just trying
to get people to realize how this is moving because I was able to see this evolution.
So you're exactly right.
We told everyone to call 911 in the 80s, 100%.
We teach kids in school.
We'd have booklets.
We'd have billboards, three easy digits.
Somebody will come to your house really fast and help you.
And we wanted it.
And so we kept asking for it.
And like you said, in 2024, we're like, whoa, stop calling.
You're calling too much.
We asked for this.
We really did.
But in the 80s and 90s, it was true emergencies.
If their house was on fire, a car accident and car accidents in the 80s, there's still
lap belts, no airbags, steering wheels that are bent from the chest impact.
We called them grinders back then because it was a big metal mess.
So people called for emergency.
Their arm was cut off and they wouldn't call us for being sick or needing a lift up or
anything.
So the evolution has been dramatic.
And the biggest area, James, that has hit me is in our purpose.
So I got into the fire service.
You got into the fire service to help people on their worst day.
And this is a big area that we're talking about the trauma of our job.
We actually knew this.
We said, we're going to go into people's worst days.
We're going to head into a building when everyone is running out, which I love.
Reminds me of the American bison.
You ever heard that they head into a storm that they never seek shelter in a valley or
trees.
They march into a storm.
We do that.
And that's our purpose.
So a hundred percent trauma impacts us.
But that's where we find purpose.
So we did when people were calling 911 through the 80s, 90s, early 2000, we were finding
purpose with that.
We could end our shift to say, I saw some tough things, but you know what?
I made a difference in someone's life.
We actually save lives.
That's amazing.
These are just throughout the day, you would have one person.
This is a once in a lifetime event for them, but it could be the fourth or fifth of the
day for you.
What an honor to walk into someone else's life like that and to have a positive impact.
They won't forget you.
It could be just your voice that as you're trying to cut them out of a car, they hear
you.
You'll forget about it because it was just one of the five calls that day, but they will
never forget you.
What an honor.
So what's happening now, and we have document and data to prove this over the last five
years.
We've had a three to 400% increase on some of the three, what I call chronic community
needs.
Those needs are our unsheltered population, folks experiencing homelessness.
So they get cold at night.
They're not eating.
They're not caring for themselves.
They're passed out at a bus stop.
People call 911.
They don't know what to do.
They think someone's dead or dying, and sometimes they are.
So I can't fix that with a fire truck.
I can't fix that as a firefighter in one call.
The other one is substance use disorder.
So of course our fentanyl and opiate crisis, huge, huge increase.
I can't fix their addiction with one visit.
And then behavioral health emergencies.
We have members with schizophrenia, paranoia.
They're ripping off their clothes, running down the middle of a major highway, cars dodging
them.
We're trying to save them.
And I can't fix their schizophrenia in one visit.
So what this does, instead of at the end of a shift to fill our purpose of saying, I made
a difference today, it's more like I saw this person today twice.
I gave them Narcan twice.
I'm going to see them again next shift and the next shift and the next shift.
And then what am I doing?
Am I having purpose?
Am I even making a difference?
This is where us feeling worthless lives in this space.
And it's damaging, James.
And it's for us to go home and feeling like I'm climbing up this mountain of mud.
We're not going anywhere is difficult.
So our data is increasing year after year.
So just in Renton, we did 25,000 calls last year.
We only have seven stations.
But I look back in the last five years, every year it's increasing from 400 to 600 calls
a year.
So where is it going?
We still only work 24 hours, which a lot of times gets to your, how do we do shift work?
What can we control?
Because I can't control the 911 calls coming in at all.
But maybe I can control how our firefighters work, what they do when they're off duty.
How do I support them to be more resilient?
Because this work is here.
We can't control it.
But maybe like we've done in the last 10 years, we hire nurses and social workers to work
with the chronic needs.
So this is akin to a house that catches on fire.
Really exciting.
That's our purpose.
We go, we think we put it out, but it rekindles again the next day.
And the next day, every shift we work, that same house catches fire.
That doesn't make sense to us.
So it's the same thing with these chronic needs.
It's that rekindle that keeps happening.
Pretty exciting for that house fire the first time.
As you know, rekindles are the worst, but that's what's happening with our EMS medical
work.
We rekindle and it feels like, what am I doing with this job that used to be so purpose
filled?
So that's all.
No, no, that's such a powerful perspective.
It really is.
One of the things that came across my radar a few years ago, I had a guest talking about
it and I would love to even get a company as a sponsor.
And I think this needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
But when COVID happened, a lot of the red tape was cut on the telehealth side, obviously.
And that, from what I understand, really empowered some companies to be able to put telehealth
into the 911 dispatch system.
I love this idea.
So of course, like you said, an opioid overdose, we're going to send paramedics to that.
That needs to be mitigated.
But a lot of the BLS or lower calls, the stomach ache, or not even stomach ache is a bad example,
but the child threw up once, their new parents are freaking out thinking they're going to
be dehydrated.
And so once they realize it's not an acute call, they tell the person who's called,
we've got two options.
We can send an ambulance to your house or we can give you a virtual consultation with
an ER physician.
And a lot of times people will go, well, that's all I want to just talk to a doctor and make
sure that my toddler is not dying.
And so now they have this interaction.
And then ultimately, obviously, if it's something that is less acute, then they're able to kind
of coach them through it, to take the clothes off for the fever.
If you've got any Tylenol, yeah, OK, give them some pediatric Tylenol.
And then if this, this, or this happens, then call us back.
And now you've saved that family from an immense medical bill.
You freed up an ER bed and the crew that would have woken up didn't.
And I think that's a beautiful tool to bring into the fire service as obviously, hopefully,
the nation starts addressing the issues that are actually causing so much disease in this
country.
Yeah.
Thank you for bringing that up.
And so let's explore this a little bit because we've had what's called the nurse line for
a very long time here in King County and Washington.
We've also for the last couple of years have millions funneled of state funding into what's
called 9-8-8.
And that's in some other states also where it's a mental health line.
Instead of 9-1-1, they can actually talk to a crisis person in crisis.
So why is it that we have this ability?
There's even a lot of insurance if they have the means with a phone that does video or
a laptop to actually do telehealth.
So why is it that people still want 9-1-1 and they will adjust their call to get 9-1-1?
Well you think about it.
It's the first number you can call.
You get two or three firefighters there fairly quickly, even if they just go code yellow
with no lights and sirens.
It's a human connection.
They want a human there.
We know telehealth can work when you're stable, your mind is stable, your body's, you have
the patience for it.
But when you want a human interaction because no one else cares, your family has left you,
you're on the street, you're in a lonely apartment, people want humans.
And this is the hardest thing for us.
So how this really opened my eyes, because it is a whole system problem.
We have a broken healthcare system, 100%.
We have a broken housing system.
So we have members who are non-ambulatory that because there's no one else to live,
they're on the third floor of a lower income apartment with no elevator.
They have critical needs of a dialysis appointment and they can't get down the stairs.
So what happens six times in one week, people would call and they were told to call by their
insurance company.
They called their office in the fire station and said, hey, we need your fire truck to
show up at 1 p.m. on Thursday to carry down Mrs. Jones, to get her into an Uber, to get
to the dialysis.
Then I need the fire truck to come back two hours later to carry her back up.
So every Thursday we need you to, and this kept happening and happening.
And our people are just, the staff is like, oh, I'm so sorry, we don't do appointments.
We're the fire department.
We are just emergency.
And so they said, oh, I'll just call 911 then.
And so this is part of what we're doing.
And so this is where our social workers, our mobile integrated health, which is called
FD Cares, this is where they come in and start helping manage to get and navigate this person
to a ground floor apartment where they can get to basic needs.
So I'm hopeful, James, I'm hopeful for telehealth and for helping things over.
But there is something missing.
There's with our folks experiencing homelessness with our folks that live by themselves and
they're in crisis, they need a human.
And 911 is still that funnel.
So I'm hopeful that for telehealth, but again, how do we, what kind of control measures do
we have?
Who can we send if we know it's breaking down our firefighters mentally and physically because
our people getting smaller?
No, these poor firefighters are lifting 300, 400 pound people the best they can.
I'm buying every type of electric stair chair, mega movers, gate belts, everything I can.
But people are getting heavier.
So we have to somehow navigate through the system and the healthcare system is still
making money off of them.
We're doing this free work for them because they don't want to move them into an apartment
to care for them, to get them into a adult care facility.
It is a tough one, James.
So I'm glad you mentioned it, but there's a lot of things to it.
Absolutely.
Well, let's go to a question I pose a lot of people.
If you were king for a day, what would you do to positively impact the physical and mental
health of this nation?
So if I was king, I would see two things as basic human rights and that's education and
healthcare from an early age.
They need to go in combination because our health is part of education.
So when we talk about United Healthcare, I'm just going to call them out.
They have to post their profits in the first quarter of 2024.
They are $8.3 billion profit.
So in the area that people are just so struggling, struggling basic healthcare, we have people,
major people profiting, some of the largest corporations.
It could roll right into pharmaceuticals.
Everyone knows.
It's like we know this.
We know it's broken.
So I'm just seeing where we are in the fire service.
So we need a whole revamp of our healthcare system and people that are making money.
How does this flow in?
Because police and fire are really the only boots on the ground that still make house
calls.
They will meet you in your moment of crisis, wherever you are in the homeless encampment,
on the side of a road in your home, will find you.
And who else does that?
So we have this vessel of these amazing first responders and every politician wants to use
us and they're going to the well with us.
They want to use us to hand out blankets to folks experiencing homelessness.
They want us to leave behind Narcan to go visit them, to bring them into the fire station.
That was an idea is to have everyone shoot up in a fire station because it's safe.
If they overdose, they're right there.
Can you imagine now our fire stations, unfortunately, are a fortress.
We have locking gates.
We have cameras because we've been shot at twice with 45 caliber.
We've had people hanging out and living around the fire stations.
How can our firefighters rescue anyone if they don't feel safe themselves in their own
fire station?
So the quickest way to help the community, we need to help our firefighters.
If they're not feeling safe, if they're not rested and a hundred percent, just like that
oxygen mask on an airplane, you put it on yourself before you help the kid.
We've got to make sure we're safe.
And so this is the impacts to this.
So King for a day, I would start early.
Everyone that's a basic right, you get that health care.
We got to take the profit out of just education and health.
We have to take that out.
And it needs to start right from the beginning.
It doesn't mean just giving everything for free.
It's having a system where people are actually cared for because profits are being made.
It's just, it's a broken system and they're not going to build enough hospitals.
They just aren't.
So we need to get back to healthy education.
I was fortunate enough to speak to Tulsi Gabbard a few weeks ago and I put all of these questions
to her, you know, all the things that I've never heard her really kind of posed before,
but the ones that actually affect us all in listening.
Not many of us are really genuinely affected by the Ukraine or transgender athletes that
you see over and over again.
And it was, it was so great to hear because she's obviously a real empath herself.
And over and over again, whether it's healthcare, whether it's war, whether it's so many elements,
it's this false economy.
And when I think about the NHS that I grew up in, the healthcare that I had, that I hardly
ever used because I was a healthy young man, when it was needed, it was there, you know,
and there was always that sense of, well, we're all just going to take care of each
other.
And there wasn't, you know, a massive abuse back then and it's morphed a little bit now,
but the philosophy that you take care of everyone was just this ingrained part of British culture.
Conversely, I moved to the States and it's a profit based system.
And I'm not some great economist at all, but I do understand supply and demand.
And so if you have a system that's based on profiteering off ill health, there's no checks
and balances to make the nation healthy.
And that's exactly what we're seeing.
We're 70% obese or overweight in this country.
But that should be absolutely terrifying.
And even now, as they've kind of picked apart the NHS in the UK, I've watched my British
men and women get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And now they're, you know, that's just causing more financial drain on their system.
What should be happening is this system where it's tax based.
So therefore you're doing everything you can to make the nation as healthy as possible.
That's actually what would make everything go back down to where it needs to be.
But taking a step back and realizing that the drug companies and the healthcare companies
and some of these hospital organizations that they thrive on disease, that's their customer,
the long term drug addict.
And it's not opioids, maybe it might be statins or beta blockers, but they need you to keep
taking their stuff.
And so that is only going to make it worse and worse and worse.
And then if you factor in other areas, like the pool of people that you need for the final
fire service, for law enforcement, for the military is shrinking.
Now even the very national security becomes an issue.
Yeah.
And you know, that's, the fire services is caught right in the middle.
And for us to not to ignore that and not see where we're getting pinched in this for profit.
So many stories about large conglomerate adult care facilities, big money.
They have these, you know, high rise buildings.
They're hiring the most minimum staff and they're having that staff that say, oh, if
someone that you're moving falls to the ground, that's a fire department call.
They have to come and pick them up.
And I'm like, no, they're paying you to care for them.
We shouldn't be picking up.
And it's dominating.
They will use us as much as possible.
So that's my big stand.
I'm doing a movement called who's looking out for us.
If we want to care for the community, who's caring for the fire department, stop adding
to our plate.
Let us be great at what we signed up to do.
Don't make us just okay at a whole bunch of things.
And they want to make us, they want to send us to, you know, social work training so we
can navigate, so we can help, you know, do behavioral health training.
I'm like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm a fixer.
I got into this job because I like to fix people's problems.
I like to mitigate hazards.
I'm not good with seeing one person over and over again.
That's we're transactional.
The house is on fire.
We put it out, we clean up, we go home, we do it again.
That's where we live.
So it's going to break us down, James.
I'm I feel like that, you know, the sky is falling person, but I'm like telling chiefs,
wake up, see where this is going.
The numbers are there.
If you keep doing increased call loads every year, if you keep doing increased training
every year, these two vectors keep, it's still only a 24 hour shift.
They are doing more with less.
And now you're surprised and you're blaming this generation Z that they're lazy and entitled.
They're doing way more calls and training than we ever did.
And so it's time to invest in our people.
If we want recruitment, retention, no less burnout.
What is their time off?
How are they recovering in their time off?
If I can't invest in them while they're here because they're too busy, what can I do when
they're off?
Can I maybe buy them a subscription, a one year subscription to calm app so they can
meditate and learn some breathing.
And then if they like it, they can get to it on their own.
Can I introduce them to yoga?
Can I introduce them into sleep studies and podcasts?
Can we actually give them relationship and financial help?
So their lives outside of work will be much better when they come to work.
If the community is going to take a hundred percent of them when they come to work, I
need them to recover a hundred percent.
You ever see those batteries that you don't let fully charge and then you use again and
they kind of keep their fully charged becomes only like 60 percent.
I felt like our firefighters were going through that because overtime was so high and burnout
was there that I want them to get a hundred percent.
So they come because they want to help.
They really want to help.
They want to help our community.
So invest in your people outside of work, which just blows the mind of most chiefs.
They're like, wait a minute, Chuck, we're giving them a good job here.
We're paying them.
They've got good engines and good equipment and good fire stations.
I'm saying, yeah, that's a good start.
But what are they doing?
Are they using, you know, other addictions and substances outside?
How is their relationships?
Because if they're struggling outside of work, how effective they going to be here?
So it's a different way of looking of people.
And we're so good at fire engines, right?
So we know our mechanics know that soon as our fire engines have so many miles and hours
on them, it's time for service.
I also know that we get about 10 years of life on the front lines till we move that
fire engine to reserve status.
And I've we've got firetruck purchasing out 30 years.
We spent we just spent two point three million on an aerial platform.
That's real money.
But who's going to drive these things?
So even our vehicles have dashboard warning lights when they get low on fuel and low on
fluid.
Some things you can say, all right, we can go back to the station.
I'll let the mechanic know some indicator lights are like, oh, no, pull over right now.
We don't move.
What are our miles on our people?
And if you're looking at these call loads and this type of chronic needs that are burning
us out, those are miles.
How are we servicing our firefighters?
What are the indicator lights of some of our firefighters that said this is a warning?
We're so good with our apparatus, but we don't we don't think of the same concept with our
people.
What are these miles doing to them?
And it's a it's a whole new way of looking.
This is what I'm trying to inspire chiefs to think about this, because where is this
going?
Well, I think we're seeing where it's going.
And this is this is the thing.
And I'm when you're on a hill, shout like a crazy person.
Look to your right.
I'm on another hill, shouting about 2472.
Last eight years almost.
But this is the point.
I think that you can look at it doom and gloom and go the fire service is crumbling or you
can look at it as like, wow, now it's got so bad that people are finally going to pay
attention and we can fix the things that are a problem.
Because just like you said about the Gen Z, what I hear over again is, oh, well, we can't
hire now because of the Gen Gen Z's and then everything that you just described.
What I think is the polar opposite.
What I think is partly the Gen Z's are children of the fire service that grew up around it.
And mom and dad weren't home.
And they saw them come back, Ambry, and they saw them drink and they saw that job kind
of tear their parents apart, whatever it was.
And just like the veteran community, their children grew up in 20 years of war.
They're not seeing that father or the son or daughter want to join that particular profession
anymore because not the job, but the kind of environment that they worked in.
So you have that element.
But I think that there's also an opportunity to fix that.
And I think that what I was going to go back a second, I kind of stumbled on myself there.
Let me write that down.
All right.
Hold on.
So what the Gen Z are very good at is researching and asking why.
Why do you do it that way?
And I think what's happened, the real issue that we're experiencing is the people, obviously,
that are in it.
A lot of them are just saying, I'm going to retire early.
I'm done.
I'm transitioning to real estate, whatever it is.
But then also the new recruits that would be excited are now researching it.
And when I started, which is about 10 plus years, 15 years after you did, when I typed
in what's it like to be a firefighter, it was ladder 49 and back draft and 9-11 and
343.
And it was all glory and American flags.
And rightly so.
That is the job.
But now in 2024, if I Google what it's like to be a firefighter, equally an opposite,
it will be divorce, overdose, cancer, all the other things now.
So if you spread that out on a desk in front of someone who's considering the profession
and you say, oh, by the way, it's 56 hours a week and 7 o'clock that morning, you might
get a phone call saying you can't go home.
Now you've just done an 80 hour week.
They're going to go, that sounds a bit shit to me.
I think I'm going to go and learn to be a carpenter or whatever the other options they
were weighing up.
So this is a really important conversation.
We are at a critical mass because people do not, in general, want to be a firefighter
anymore.
But it's not the job that's changed.
The job is just as beautiful and altruistic as it ever was.
But as you said, we've asked over and over again for our responders to do more and more
with less and less.
And here we are.
It's 2024.
It's time to put your big boy pants on and either watch the whole thing collapse or be
part of the solution.
And I love that.
We 100% need to look at this as the glass is half full.
We have a generation coming in that has talents that you and I did not have.
They are learning faster.
They're bringing a sense of technology.
They are all in to our mental well-being.
They get it.
They embrace it and they love it.
So I'm kind of excited.
100%.
I've got a 20 year old and a 25 year old.
So these are our kids, my kids that I'm hiring.
And for them to come in, they can help change this.
They want to impact culture.
So to get us from not saying the sky is falling and we need to actually talk about solutions.
So this it is, it's mental health awareness month, but I want us to stop beating the drum
that we keep seeing trauma.
I want us to really start focusing on what we can control and start investing in these
people that we're adding more and more to.
So if I can't take care of them fully, they're just going to be used when they get to the
fire station.
And that used to not be, you know, when I started in the eighties, it was slow.
We played cards.
We did practical jokes.
We had amazing meals together.
I worked with Vietnam vets that would tell me intense stories.
And what that did, it built trust.
I actually got to know everyone.
I heard about their families, kids, relationship, their hobbies.
We talked about hobbies a lot.
Now if they're running from training to calls to training to calls, is that bond that camaraderie
still being, you know, organically just developed and that trust that we need.
And so investing in them outside of service, outside of the job is huge.
And I know labor, the time is just asking for more money is probably going away.
What they're going to start asking for, and it goes back to what you talked about with
scheduling.
They want time.
They're tired of working overtime.
They want to recoup.
That's them.
And that's their indicator lights.
If they're calling in sick more, if you're a chief and you're noticing a rise in sickly
views, that's them saying, I need a break.
I want to do this job.
I actually want to be here, but I feel I'm losing part of me and my family.
Every time I do.
So take heed of those indicator lights with your people and start thinking about, are
they getting enough time off?
Because this community is going to take a hundred percent.
So we want our people upfitted for that.
And Gen Z is just fantastic.
They don't want to wait 10 years to impact culture.
And that's something I want us to get out of.
Everyone says, change the culture.
People say remove the stigma in the fire station.
Those have no action to them.
If you want to change, what is culture?
You know, fire department, people like to throw that around.
Culture really is your daily behaviors and habits that you bring in every shift there.
I'm trying my best to maybe have that top down impact with culture and trying to lead
with action and everything we do.
We carry weight with what we do, but I'm not in the fire stations.
How are they coming to work?
How's their attitude on serving?
How are they doing?
That's our culture.
And so I want, they want to, Gen Z wants to impact culture a hundred percent.
They don't want to wait.
They want to be heard and they want to be valued.
Listen to your people because this fire service is nothing like when you and I started.
If you're not finding ways and it's not a survey, it's not a, you know, anonymous,
you know, here's, here's an online thing.
If you want, you, you get an outside consultant to come in and what we did, we called them
kitchen table talks.
We had an amazing outside of consultant from the Midwest.
Her name's Callie from Melios and she came in as a third party led by our peer support
lead for each station.
And she sat down at the kitchen table because she asked me, she goes, Chuck, what problem
are you trying to solve?
And I'm like, well, we've got, we had COVID and vaccine mandates out here and we lost
some of our members.
We have burnout.
They're working too much over time.
It's just, she goes, get the dialogue down.
You should know exactly what you're trying, what problem you're trying to solve.
And then she goes, do you know what they're dealing with out there?
And I go, I kind of do, but I'm not on the fire engines anymore.
She goes, I need to listen.
I don't, I want to hear it.
Not only their concerns, I want to hear some of their solutions and their solutions were
things that I couldn't even think of.
So she sat at the most holy place of the fire station and that's at the kitchen table where
we solve all the problems.
And she listened.
And some of the things that were shared were things that our chief would never hear.
And it has helped us move.
It's communication.
So they do, they want to be heard and valued.
And now you have to do something about that.
You have to connect.
You work with labor.
Labor has to be hand in hand with this and understanding where we're going.
So that's to me, some of the advantage of Generation Z is they're going to bring ideas.
54% of our firefighters in Renton have less than five years on.
They're the majority.
So it's their fire service.
If you want them to actually do a job like this for 20, 30 years, you better listen.
Because it's nothing like we are doing.
I want the best for the community.
To do that, we want the best for our firefighters.
There's conversations to happen.
What have you seen about recruitment in your area specifically over the last 20, 30 years?
Great question.
So the last 20 years, Renton is very diverse.
And so what we found is there were gaps.
And that same perception that when I started, it's like, how do you even become a firefighter?
I think that would be fun, but there's no information on becoming.
You have to be in the know.
And so normally we were getting people that went through the volunteer aspect.
They knew somebody, they signed up, they did some volunteering, and then they sought this
job out.
But we did a lot of job fairs.
We started talking to kids in middle school and high school and bring them the possibility
Renton we have 72 different languages spoken here.
Oh, wow.
And so if we're in the most trusted profession, you know, they always talk about nurses being
the most trusted profession.
But when I think about where the only government agency that can go into someone's home, into
their bedroom, because the husband had a stroke and we need to lift them and get them to the
hospital without a search warrant, we are allowed in.
If you think about that for a second.
How often did a spouse hand you their wallet to say, oh, here's my husband's name and the
medications are in there.
Oh, there's the medicine cabinet.
Yeah, it takes Percocet and Oxycontin.
It's all in there.
So much trust that has been built out through years that can be lost in a second.
We are trusted.
So going into someone's home like that takes it takes a lot.
And so, you know, pretty, pretty powerful statement of how we can represent if they
are in bed wearing whatever they are at two in the morning and they look at faces that
they can identify with.
Maybe it's an issue that a female has, you know, that's more private and she's looking
at three men, you know.
And so we wanted to help represent Renton.
We wanted people to feel like they could identify with us to feel bring people into the fire
station, understand it.
And if we are speaking 72 languages, let's let's reach out.
And so we we worked with schools.
We looked at some of the gatekeepers.
One was cost.
A private agency was running all the testing from our CPAT test, the physical part to the
written exam.
And it was expensive, two hundred dollars to put your name into a couple of departments.
That's not always easy to do for, you know, a young 20 year old trying to figure out what
they want to do.
So creating removing those costs, creating groups where they could take a practice test
and before they even take the real one.
Doing that.
And actually we have women in fire and EMS.
We have diversity workshops where people that are more diverse, women especially, can work
with other women to say, hey, you are only five foot two raising up a ladder and working
with the fire apparatus is difficult.
So here are some smart techniques to use all of that.
So we've invested in that to help recruit and retention is creating pathways.
So if our people have an excitement for a certain area, maybe they really want to be
in rope rescue, having a department that has avenues for them to expand their career and
have more engagement.
We have a water rescue.
We have hazmat.
We have pathways for our EMS and medical that they can instruct.
They can travel.
It is is creating that engagement and letting them explore this job and find out where their
passions are.
Over and over again, I hear how successful well formed mentorship programs are.
And I think I've said this many times on here, there's as much value for a young boy or girl
or man or woman to discover through a mentorship program that they don't want to be a firefighter
than there is the ones that do.
So my stepson was one of them.
But if you want to really reach out into underserved communities, whether that's gender or background
or simply just socioeconomic, removing the barriers to entry and giving them the tools
to be successful allows you to find the best candidates from those groups rather than what
we've seen in some departments.
They just scoop up 20 black guys, bring them on, of which some are going to be phenomenal
firefighters and some aren't, the same way as if you grouped any random group of people.
So I think that's absolutely one of the tools for recruitment.
And then obviously, a byproduct is diversity.
And I think the real diversity is not skin tone and sexual orientation.
It's as you said, having that diverse toolbox of responders that will be the perfect fit
for each call.
Yeah.
And I want someone that is going to be a firefighter in Renton to know what they're getting into
and really want this job because it's going to put them through a lot.
I want them to want it and not just say, hey, that's not a bad option.
Because I do believe, especially on the West Coast, we're paid well, but we're going to
ask a lot of our people, 100%.
So I want them to understand.
And so we've gone from having a one day onboarding class before they start our job and enter
the academy to now two weeks where we are letting them wear the gear and experience
whether they got any experience beforehand.
We're teaching them, we're doing workouts together.
We're bonding as a group so they can help support each other physically and mentally
on the job and off the job through the academy.
Let your people bond together, have some agency pride together.
And so we've extended all that to make sure they're supported.
We have a fantastic fire and EMS academy that will hold.
And unfortunately, if we hire 10, on average, we'll lose one in the academy because it is
not the time or not the career forum.
But that's where we're meeting with them on a weekly basis as chiefs.
If they are struggling, we support them, give them the chance, but also if it's not their
time and they're not making it.
We want them to know that if they are a viable candidate, we would love to have you back.
Come back and do it.
So even on exit, we want to hear from them.
We want to learn from them.
But we also want them to know that, hey, we invested in you once.
We would love to, you know, you mean something to us.
It's not the time right now.
It's up to you to decide if you want to continue and come back.
But we'd love to have you with VR.
One of my favorite department, Anaheim, their bar was extremely high the time I got hired.
And every class, mine and preceding classes, basically on average through attrition would
lose 25% of the new hire classes.
But they stood by that high standard.
And I think they probably almost factored it into their recruitment.
And then you're, so that was by the end of the probationary year.
So that was an absolute crucible.
So you feared for your job, not in a detrimental way, but it was you're constantly chasing
that bar.
And then by the time you came out, what I observed was, you know, you had great firefighters
and then they, you know, some of them promoted, they became great engineers or captains or,
you know, battalion chiefs, and it carried all the way through.
The last place I work, I would argue they had to dig a trench to drop the bar into.
And I saw the converse and there, you know, at Anaheim, even those were slightly different
timelines.
I tested against a thousand people in the written test, all of whom were certified firefighters
and EMTs with resumes of experience and volunteering and everything as well.
I think I was, you know, just one of a handful of people in the other place.
So when I hear standards being dropped, supposedly to increase recruitment, my personal experience
and you know, my version of common sense screams that the opposite is true.
When you keep those standards high, you actually challenge people to reach that standard, which
I think excites candidates and puts more outside your door.
What is your perspective of that idea?
Yeah, and I do.
It's taken us a long time to get to a standard CPAT test for physical entry.
And there are some things that you'll have to overcome.
There's, if you've got height, you know, challenges, it's, you're going to have to get very crafty.
But creating that expectation that this job is serious business, that there are some needs,
some expectations, limitations of the job where you have to perform.
But doing it in a way that they understand what they're getting into as best they can
and giving them environment for them.
They have to show that initiative to succeed.
And if they're not, they know what they did wrong.
And that's again, another Gen Z thing.
These are whether it's their written test, they expect to get A's.
They're not OK with a B and a C, which I was OK with.
They expect perfection and they expect some, you know, some applause for that.
Also they said, I want to be recognized.
It's like, well, no, this is our expectation that you do well.
You are a rent and firefighter.
And if it's not your time, it's not your time.
But I believe you're right.
If we don't hold that high bar, because if we care about them as people to be safe, we
care to thrive in this job, we care about the community.
We have to have that expectation, that high bar, because it does.
It creates a buzz.
It's like, hey, Renton's not messing around.
It's a great department, but you're going to have to work harder.
Now, this department over here will take you as you are.
You know, you can go, I think you're right.
There's something to that.
And I'd like to somehow show that with data on, you know, those departments that have
higher than average standards, what the recruitment retention is like.
I'd like to see that.
So that's, I didn't know that about Anaheim.
Thank you for sharing.
Well, what's interesting too, when I think back to that, and I've had this conversation
with a few people now, when there was 30 positions available, something like that, when I tested.
So out of a thousand plus people, 30 got the job.
So when I hear recruitment conversations like, well, we're still hiring.
It's like, well, are you still hiring the same kinds of people?
Or have you just got bodies in your seats now?
Because that also needs to be part of this recruitment conversation.
You've got those phenomenal firefighters, but have you got some of those people, like
you said, whose heart isn't in it, who may even be detrimental to your department five,
10 years from now?
Yeah.
And that's it, and you could have a shining star that was able to do well in the academy.
But once they start hitting the streets and they start working the shift by shift, their
motivation for some reason lacks.
They think, okay, well, I'm actually, I don't like to clean toilets in the station, or I
don't like to just run EMS calls.
Where's all the fire?
And they're running out.
We have what's called a JATC program.
Are you familiar with the journeyman apprentice program?
I don't think I'm familiar with that one specifically.
Yeah, it's a three year program.
So they're still, they just don't have a one year probation.
It's a program that makes sure that they keep learning.
That's going to be slow to hire and quick to fire.
That's a business aspect.
We like to call ourselves family in the fire department, but would you really fire family?
You know, I get, I care about our firefighters, but we have a responsibility to each other
and to the community that we have to be quick to fire and have this down.
We were horrible at letting people go.
And so what happens, I don't think it was fair to that person that was struggling.
They struggled for 30 years and no one wanted to work with them.
They put them out at the slowest station.
Oh, that's the slow station.
That's where you put the people.
We can't do that anymore.
We just can't.
Everyone needs to be held because I think that it really impacts everyone.
Everyone feels like they have to work around that person.
You're doing them no favors.
So have a good, more than just a probation period, have, we've got that apprentice period
of three years where they're constantly being written test and practical.
They're still being evaluated by their officers.
They still need to continue to grow and be invested in this job.
I love it.
Well, speaking of the business, because I heard, you know, that there's certain schools
of thought in the fire service that it is a business.
And, you know, I don't think that we are a business.
I think sometimes I guess misinterpreted.
However, I've had this conversation a few times now.
If you look at the progressive corporations, they are actually reducing their workweek.
So Google and some of these other ones, you know, did pilot programs and they saw that
their employees were as if not more efficient and productive on the four, nine hour, you
know, nine hours with a lunch workday than they were with the five.
Conversely, the men and women in uniform that protects their community for 24 hours at a
time and get out of a dead sleep and run into a burning building to find someone's child
works 56 hours a week on average in the U.S.
So we obviously are ignoring that part of the industry.
And if you had an economist look at our budgets, they immediately would say, well, look at
this money over here, the overtime covering all your vacancies, the workman's comp fees,
the medical retirements, you know, the lawsuits when we make mistakes because we're so tired
that you're so, you know, take this money over here and hire more people, give them
more time off.
So as you've, you know, alluded to earlier, the 24 72 is being the national standard is
something the drum that I'm beating from my my hill over next to you.
So what is your kind of perception on on the way that we've viewed our workweek for so
long and again, king for a day?
What would we have in this country?
So just give you a little background here in Renton.
We have a four platoon system that is one on two off one on four off.
So we it's it's a it's about a 46 hour workweek, but you also have what's called a debit day.
And like I mentioned, we're paid well here.
They they want to be compensated to be able to even live in the area.
Most of our firefighters live a few hours away sometimes.
I'm sure it was in California.
You know that buying a home in your response area is just really difficult.
So they do they want they want to have enough money to at least raise a family and live
where they can to be able to come into work.
But they're wanting more and more less over time.
They want more time off.
And that should be one of those indicator lights.
So we do a 46 hour workweek.
I would like to that's something we'll negotiate actually work towards reducing that.
Explore the the one on 72 off.
How would that work with a with a four platoon?
It's really just math and making sure we've got coverage.
I how can we not if we're doing more calls, more training and our folks are being squeezed,
how do we not look at having a different you know, that is one thing we can control.
Again, I they could they could develop a lot of different 911 systems.
Our 911 system still is the funnel and calls keep increasing.
I can't control who calls 911 for what.
Only thing I can control is how maybe schedule is one of those.
But I would like to explore that actually.
I'm open to it.
We it's hard to do studies on this because over time has been so prevalent these last
five years post covid.
I think now we're finally getting people hired and the retirement has slowed down a little
bit where we could actually do a study and really see how people are recovering on their
second days off because that's again go back to the miles on vehicles.
It doesn't matter if you're running the engine in the day or the night.
It's still mileage.
And I even had another chief who I respect a lot.
And I said, hey, I can't believe we just ran 25,000 calls.
He goes, whoa, you should be proud of that.
Your folks are busy.
I'm like, I'm not proud of it because if we were doing great fire prevention, great community
health prevention, should those numbers be going up or down?
Should be going down.
I'm not proud of this number, but I do realize it keeps increasing.
He goes, well, a lot of those calls are just bullshit calls.
You know what I mean?
Just like a lift to sift.
That's bullshit.
That doesn't count.
I go, OK, let's run through a bullshit call right now.
At 2 in the morning, you get the tones hit.
So you go from a resting heart rate of 48 to 100.
That's an exposure.
You go down.
Now you hear it's a lift assist.
It's going to be code yellow.
You still get in the rig.
You drive out at 2 AM.
What tends to close at 2 AM?
The bars.
So there's a risk of hitting something, being awake enough to drive this $1 million apparatus,
being hit by a drunk driver.
That's an exposure.
You get to the call.
Yeah, it's a 280 pound person that fell off the commode and needs to be lifted back to
bed.
You could wrench your back.
You could shoulders, knee.
That's an exposure.
Now you got to drive back and it's now 2 45.
You think about going to bed, but you've been so awake because you had to drive back and
you can't get back to sleep.
That's another exposure.
We're looking at lack of sleep like a carcinogen, which I've got a whole thing on cancer and
PTSD combination.
We've gotten to the point where we're thinking of cancer resilience.
We got to think the same thing with post-traumatic stress.
So those are all exposures.
Those are miles on people.
So we have to, the data is there.
Chiefs need to look at their data and be able to say, we are pinching our people.
The only thing we can control is maybe their time off.
Of course they want more money, but are they going to really thank you after a few months?
It's just going to get washed in with their general budget at home.
But time off is something that's time with your kids.
Maybe you go on that rock climbing trip or that mountain biking because you have that
time off.
Wow.
I'm thinking the long game.
Are these Gen Z folks really going to do 30 years if we keep increasing calls?
What's it going to look like in 10 years?
How do we invest in them now to make sure that they're enjoying this work?
What can we control?
So that's my opinion on the work week.
I think we have it good right now, but we have debit days to fill in with that schedule.
I bet you they're going to come in and just say, hey, can we remove a few of these days?
We'll probably move that direction instead of bigger increases in money.
More time instead of more money, probably be the focus.
Well, I mean, if you ask people to truly take a step back and reflect what their ultimate
currency is, it's going to be time with their family.
And if you ask the family, it would be exactly the same thing.
I'm going to give you a perfect example.
I had two firefighter spouses on the show a few months ago, and one of them said that
when her son was really young, he was all eaten up about the fire service.
He had the toys, he had the uniform, he had the costume.
And then now he was kind of a 14, 15 year old kid.
And they asked him and he was like, absolutely not.
I'm never going to be a firefighter.
And they were like, why?
And he said, because dad's never home.
No.
I'm not worried about fire.
No, I don't want to see horrible stuff, but because dad is never home.
And I think that sums it up perfectly.
That is the ultimate currency.
And if you look at mental health, the massive part that no one talks about is sleep deprivation.
If you look at cancer, the resilience of the human being against these tumors even stym,
sleep deprivation is a massive part and is classified as a carcinogen by the WHO.
So and then even with the studies, there are no studies.
I tell people, I just actually published a kind of, it was more of a think tank with
some amazing minds that work with NASA and the Navy SEALs.
And we did a weekend and luckily I was part of that.
And they, after taking the gloves off and really having to be quite aggressive in this
room to get people to kind of understand the magnitude of the shift work, at the end of
this session, it was number one on their list, moved towards 2472.
And this is after the county that where I live, it had two suicides in 12 weeks and
they were both guys either side of 30 years old.
So this is the issue, but there's been rumors of, well, because we've got a neighboring
department that's going to 2472.
Well maybe we'll just sit and watch them and see how it goes.
They're going to it in 2026.
So you've lowered your firefighters into the ground and you're going to sit and wait for
research or observe some other department for years before you grow a set and actually
enact change yourself.
I disagree.
And if you really want research, the Navy have an amazing research.
Dr. John Cordell has been on the show.
When they crashed battleships, they were like, oh shit, maybe we should look at sleep.
And they did, you know, the Rangers, I mean, the Green Berets, the people that were actually
going, you know, running the selection were driving off mountains from sleep deprivation
on their way home to their families.
So the army have sleep, you know, and I've had Alison Breger talking about that.
Richard Marquall for the Navy, Kirk Parsley from the Navy SEALs.
I've had people from the sporting community.
So every other profession has research.
The aviation, the trucking, it's only the fire service that's turned their back on the
idea of sleep and shift work being an issue.
So this is what I would say to everyone is think about the common sense.
The more rest and recovery we have, the healthier our people.
You do not need to go into a lab to prove that theory.
Well said, and there is one study I'd love to share with you from Portland Fire in Oregon.
They did shift schedules and sleep studies and they were able to show their worst night
of sleep was the night before they went on shift, which I thought was fascinating.
But also they talked about, you know, the three hour, two hour commute after work, how
they, some of them had to pull off and sleep.
So it's, it is a really interesting thing of how they can reset their minds.
And I've 35 years, I'm still not a great sleeper.
I am trying to tap into every book on insomnia, Matthew Walker and everything I can, why we
sleep.
Because our body, we get very activated and that's, it's at the neurogenic level.
It's not just because I'm anxious.
No, it fires with our nerves.
So we can create things really difficult in our bodies.
And again, we're losing that control of just caring for our people at work.
It's time to focus on their time off work and by giving them some time, not just giving
them, Hey, I've got you some time off because for some people that really feel purpose and
they're bonded with their crew because they are in a poor relationship, things are not
well at home.
They're suffering from alcohol addiction.
When they're at work, they have purpose.
They're away from alcohol and they're with their tribe.
So we don't want to just band-aid this and just focus on one thing.
And that's why our consultant helped us understand the eight dimensions of wellbeing.
It's spiritual, it's financial, it's social, it's nutrition and health.
It is all these things.
Take a holistic look at your firefighters.
Don't just because I go to a conference and grab one thing and say, Hey, I bought this
for you.
Listen to your people.
Another great aspect about Gen Z, they are hyper fit.
Wow.
We've got some amazing and we're supporting it by having good workout facilities.
We, I meant, I mentioned, we do an annual, what's called a fitness incentive.
It was, it's crazy.
So I've, I paid for yoga instructors to come into the fire station to actually help teach
proper stretching and just little workouts.
And if they participated, they got paid an incentive to do it while they're at work.
So it's on work time.
We paid for the yoga.
We paid them to do it.
That's investing.
And that's that they could even do it.
A lot of them end up signing up for yoga because of that.
This year we did what's called defensive tactics.
We got our police involved because I mentioned if homelessness, behavioral health and substance
use is on the rise, violence follows that and it's on the rise also.
So we have people that they think that you're, they see your face and they think you're,
you know, another person that they want to hurt.
So we've had violence against firefighters.
What are people doing with that?
So I had our police officers talk about body positioning, awareness, how to get out of
there.
And then I thought this was going to be kind of a simple class, but we created our own
people.
I found out that we have 10 people, men and women who do or very active in the jujitsu
community.
And they said, Chuck, can we please talk about when someone grabbed your arm, just had to
free yourself.
And I said, that's a great idea.
Yeah, go, go work with the police officer, get some of the basic.
We created this train the trainer and we had our first, they had mats out and they're doing
grabs, holds, escapes.
I never saw so much smiling, laughing.
They learned a powerful skill at work to keep them safe that they can take home and they
were paid extra for it.
It was their idea.
So it's little things like that, that we can invest in them.
But I can get you that Portland study if you'd like.
I'm also working with Dr. Gina Poe at a Stanford who is a sleep specialist.
We're trying to combine this effort.
If you want to, I'd love, I can LinkedIn, maybe I can get you hooked up.
She's brilliant.
And I would really like to, again, stop talking about the loss of sleep and now how damaging
it is and start getting towards solutions.
Not just on time off, but when they're in their time off, helping them with sleep hygiene
and things to do on their own and supporting them in that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's interesting when the sleep conversations comes up, normally it's kind of them and us
kind of, you know, it's the job.
Or it's a lot of the chief office as well.
You know, they're not sleeping at home.
And if we gave them more time off, they just work more.
You know, very, very kind of ignorant statements really.
But the answer is always both in most of these problems.
Yes and yes.
Yes, it's the environment and yes, it's the ownership of the individual.
But if you improve the environment, then what happens to the ownership, it becomes stronger.
So if you can teach sleep hygiene and understand room temperatures and screen use and blue
blocking glasses and, you know, a down regulation stretch or meditation before bed and some
of these things that really work.
And then you couple it with a work week that actually sets these men and women up for success.
Now you've truly addressed the issue.
Yeah.
If it's keep getting busier, they're not going to sleep here.
And we have, you know, I'm still just it's called the NASA nap.
Have you worked with it with astronauts do and it's little breaks throughout the day?
Which is, you know, if if if a battalion chief came in and somebody was taking a nap around,
you know, 11 or 3 p.m., we would used to get in so much trouble.
You had to be just on the edge all the time.
And now where it's like, we know you're going to go to the call.
We know you're going to go to the training, the community event.
If you need to sleep, sleep, damn it, sleep now.
You know, get get some sleep and here's some great ways where we even created a room.
And again, our folks are amazing.
They're creating a space that's comfortable for them.
And they have art on the wall.
One room is is all lamps and you like the leg lamp from Christmas story.
And they have all these lamps and they do music in these.
And they're they're doing this on their own.
And I want that ownership.
It's like, hey, this is our distress room check.
And I'm like, perfect.
Maybe we'll get to those pods you see in Google, you know, in those companies, the high tech
companies that they do these light, sound, you know, temperature controlled pods, you
know, they're going to go to a call.
I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about if they can learn breathing to slow themselves out.
I don't like our folks for 24 hours being on the edge.
That's cortisol.
You know, look at the hormones that are happening with this, what that does to the heart.
I mean, it is a full system impact.
So I love I love technology.
I love looking at how we can do this.
There is an app called Newcom and you see a L.M. and the origin story is about 30, 35
years ago.
Apparently, we have one of the most intelligent scientists we've ever had in the history of
America, at least.
And the CEO of this company has described him like if you had a room of the world's
greatest minds, he was smarter than all of them.
So three decades ago, he started working on trying to measure the frequency that the brain
would be in in certain mood states everywhere from kind of, you know, what they call flow
state, deep sleep all the way through to acute focus.
And then they developed this machine.
So he was able he kind of figured out the frequencies and then was able to figure out
how to actually activate the brain to go into some of these mood spaces.
And it was a big six thousand dollar machine that was in NASA, was in some of the NFL team
rooms.
It was in the I think DevGru the SEAL Team Six room.
And what happened was the evolution of smartphones got to the point where that massive machine
could be put into a smartphone.
So all you do, you put on a sleep mask and headphones and you lie there.
The power nap one is only 20 minutes.
And then there's what's called restore, which is 30 minutes all the way through to a couple
of hours if you wanted to.
And then conversely, they have one I use when I'm writing my book or did when I had monkey
mind called Focus, where it's kind of up regulating a little bit.
Absolutely incredible.
And you wouldn't even need to have a part or a room or anything.
You just need to have one person assigned from your crew to be like, hey, if we get
a call, you know, come come shake me because I'm going to be in my in my headphones and
my mask.
I think even if you're not doing it on shift, if you did that, the 20 minute power nap before
you get in your car and go home by the lazy boy, even in the car, you know, that gives
you equivalent of a couple hours of sleep.
But it's also down regulating your nervous system.
I can tell you, I don't shout from the rooftops about much foundation training is phenomenal.
But you know, for my back health, thorn supplements are amazing.
But this is the other one.
Newcom.
I've done meditation.
I love headspace, but Newcom is an entire different technology.
And I can't highly enough about it.
Oh, well, and and also I'm curious about and I wanted to ask you, have you explored VR
technology where again, it's that neural connection where they put this the goggles on and they've
got some movement with their hands.
But they're trying to in this they're trying to achieve an objective and what that does
with the mind and it connects it to have this person sit down or something calm.
But what it does to the mind to help them do that.
Have you worked looked into VR?
I've heard about it.
I think I've even been connected with some people.
It's funny.
You just reminded me that never went anywhere.
It's probably something I owe an email to.
But yeah, and those I mean, all these have applications.
But I got to say just because the thing is, for me, I was never able to nap in the fire
station like, you know, all the guys would be out on the lazy boy, you know, after a
meal if we weren't getting calls.
And I'd just be walking around the station.
I'm just, you know.
So this for me was a way of saying at, you know, 8 a.m., I will be taking a nap for 20
minutes.
And I might be because you're still conscious.
You'll find yourself as he decides kind of dancing between consciousness and unconsciousness.
And so I'll snore and wake myself up.
Now, I guess I was out for a little bit, but it's just a different it's an entirely different
thing, I think, than all the other technologies.
So definitely worth checking out.
I am I'm going to that's exciting.
I love that stuff.
All right.
Well, I want to shift to peer support so we can get on that road, because I know that
obviously you've got some observations when it comes to to maybe some of the ways that
we could improve in that area to walk me through the culture of mental health conversations
from the 80s forward.
And then were there any highs or lows that you experienced on that journey?
Like I mentioned in the 80s, we have mentors.
So when you start in the fire service, some of our most the calls that have stuck with
us even after 30 years are using those first few, you know, first couple of years of serving.
We weren't that busy.
But if I don't remember, you know, a lot of those calls, and I know I have had more impactful
worse calls since then, but your mind is really like a sponge this first few years.
And so you're taking it all in.
And when I was doing that, I was watching how others were handling it.
You know, if there was dark humor, you know, have they, you know, that's something to lose
your head over, you know, and trying to understand how am I supposed to handle this by watching
others.
And again, that was a lot of Vietnam vets to me, which is amazing.
They served over in this country.
They weren't sure why they were there sometimes, weren't treated great when they came back
and then chose to serve more.
It blows me away.
So different culture.
It's just like, hey, you're going to see this handle it.
Alcohol very strong.
You basically most people say, hey, go to sleep.
You know, we just have a nightcap at home and, you know, hopefully it wears off by the
time you come in to work.
Alcohol was is still today huge, but it was really big back then.
That was something to celebrate, to calm your nerves, to deal with outside of work.
So we were thankfully slower back then and we had a lot of calls with purpose that helped,
but to handle trauma, I just, I watched them and a lot of times they did.
They didn't, nobody saw a therapist.
That was for, you know, really troubled people that wasn't talked about.
Most of them, most of them drank and that's, that was, yeah, they drink to forget.
So that was the culture then.
Now we're very proactive and I love the idea of getting upstream with, with making space
for trauma.
You, you don't get to get rid of it.
I think that's the fallacy people have.
It's like, Oh, I've got all these rocks in my backpack.
I'm going to go see a therapist and start unloading them.
Actually, that's yours to carry.
And by the day that they're hired on the onboarding, you start spending time with them.
You start building resilience.
You start doing these check-ins and actually training them to make space and connect with
it.
You do this.
We, we have great health coverage right now with dental.
So a lot of us see a dentist twice a year, whether we have a cavity or not.
Why do we do that?
Well, because we know a good cleaning, good checkup, some fluoride, that's a good preventative
thing.
We've talked to a dentist twice about it, but you tell someone, Hey, do you see, you
know, have you ever talked to a therapist?
Oh, I don't need that.
I'm doing fine.
Well, you could, why don't you go twice a year, just like you do your teeth.
And it seems crazy to them, you know, to say, well, what you do the same thing with the
dentist.
So we're getting to the point now where they do see it as proactive, where talking to someone
is helpful, where some we on a fire scene, we will do decontamination.
We'll hose down our gear.
We'll remove gear.
We'll bag it up.
How are we doing mental decontamination?
How do we leave that somehow at work?
And so when I'm coming home and I don't see something in the sink or something triggers
me from the night before that I have this reaction, how, how do I do some mental decon
as I go in?
They're all for this.
They want great relationships.
They want animals, therapy animals in the fire station.
They want dogs.
They want, they want happy pills, you know, to be able to pet.
They want to talk in a proactive way with therapy.
And so peer support has really evolved this way.
And peer support started out about 15 years ago and I was, I was on the team.
I have that, I bit of an empath.
So I care about people and sometimes people seek others out that know that care and that
will listen.
They don't always have to provide answers.
You're just, you're going to be that trusted person who listens.
And so our early peer support team, once we got organized was led by Chaplin.
So Chaplin's, are you familiar with Chaplin's?
Did you have them in Anaheim?
I don't remember having them in Anaheim, but Joe Lacognata, I'm probably butchering Joe's
name, but anyway, the local one here in Marion County is very well known in the country.
He's an amazing guy.
Yeah.
Amazing.
There's what, when I go to an infant CPR, that is primary trauma to me that I have made
space for.
I know I've chosen to be in this situation where it's, you know, I'm going into someone's
worst day.
That is awful, but I've made space for that child.
Even if I do CPR on the infant, they don't make it.
Awful, but I've made space for this.
What is really difficult is the young parents who are pulling at me, screaming at me to
save their child that I know has died.
I can't do that.
That is secondary trauma and I'm freaking out about that.
I can't do anything with that.
Because they're, what they're amazing at is that secondary trauma.
I've seen a chaplain, she's wonderful, Loretta.
She'll come in and she just starts hugging the parents.
And she looks over at me and she goes, you can go.
And I've never felt so much relief.
I'm like, okay, okay.
Now we can go deal with the primary trauma.
She's got that.
So secondary trauma is something to really think about.
And when we discovered with peer support, when I'm helping a brother or sister firefighter,
they're struggling at home and they're calling me and they're saying, this is going on.
That is kind of secondary trauma.
It's hard.
It is really hard.
And so we were mostly working with people in a crisis.
We were crisis responders, which I'm having crisis response at work and now off duty,
I'm doing crisis with my own peers.
We had someone that wasn't in our department and another, the peers were trying to help
another brother or sister firefighter who died by suicide.
This was some of the worst trauma for them because they felt they failed one of their
own.
Horrible.
So I understand it.
Peer support was often led by chaplains who are very good at secondary trauma.
It is difficult for us.
So I know crisis responses, peer support is part of it, but how do we lead our peer support
is important.
So this is the difference.
So what we're doing now, we're doing a few things different, but what we're doing now
is leading with resiliency with our peer support.
Peer support right now has had a shelf life.
If you get on the team, you may make it three years on average and then you're done.
That's not fair.
That is not fair.
I don't mind rotation, but we shouldn't wear people out until they burn out.
That's not healthy.
That's not right.
So what I want is my, I have a peer support team of 24.
I want them the, some of the best, most well-being mentally fit people we have.
I'm sending them to rehab, recovery centers, to retreats, not to learn to be a crisis responder,
not to learn about breathing exercises, yoga, nutrition, sleep, relationships, how to handle
your finances.
I want them to model resiliency when they come back to the fire station.
I want people to look at them and it's like, they're doing something right.
Tell me about it.
That's how you get your firefighters.
It's not going to be me as the chief saying, all of you need to sleep better.
It's going to be from their peers.
That's who impacts them.
They listen to each other.
They're trusted.
Yeah.
They think I'm a nice person as a chief, but I'm still a chief and we have HR and what
are you going to threaten my job and all these things.
I don't want to know about that.
Peer support's handling it, but I'm going to support them by giving them all the tools
to be healthy.
Now they can make space to handle the other peers.
So lead and model with resiliency.
Do that.
Invest in your peer support.
Because right now it's kind of volunteer for a lot of departments.
I'm going to pay you.
If you're doing work for us off duty, that is a huge cost savings to the organization
because they may get that member who's struggling back to work instead of me hiring for them.
There's a huge cost savings.
They may fly them out to the airport to get into a recovery center for alcoholism and
they may be doing that and they're, I'm going to pay them for that because that is a huge
cost savings to us.
And it's about our people.
You invest in them.
You tell them, you show them you care.
And labor will always say, Chuck, if you say you care, show me in the budget where you
care.
So as a chief officer with peer support, it's going to be in our vision, mission, values,
strategic plan.
Also it's going to be in our policies.
You have to have your SOPs, your SOGs, they have to have peer support in there because
that's a legacy.
So if I'm going to retire at the end of the year, policies will outlive my time here.
And then last, have it in the budget.
Show that you care, have it in a budget.
Don't rely on a grant.
Don't make it a peer support program because I hear the word program and that means it's
grant funded and it's going to last a year.
No, this is our service.
This is our people.
So it's in the budget.
So those three things, have it in your mission, vision, and values, have policies, have it
in the budget.
That's what I can do as a chief because I'm not a peer anymore.
So we model with resiliency.
And then what we've done last is that we've operationalized peer support.
This is incredible.
We had one of the worst accidents, I made national news actually in Renton.
We had a high speed accident.
Four children died young and it was all teens.
It was the kid was going over a hundred miles an hour in the middle of the day and hit a
minivan and it was the worst accident.
So peer support went in.
We have, you know, we have incident commanders when they're on the scene.
We made an incident command for peer support.
So right away they took their time because this is a marathon, right?
Our folks are in response mode, but they started assigning and getting facts.
What we do as when the call is over is that individually our crews can go into what's
called a decompression break.
And this is in policy for 30 minutes or 60 minutes, they get to decompress anything they
want to do.
So they, some may choose to work out.
Some may go grab something to eat.
Some may take a shower, sleep, pray, meditate, whatever you want.
And we give them a list of things that just to think about there, they're out of service.
They're not going on another call.
I want them to process what's happened and decompress.
Then we have what's called a diffusing.
So to process something purely, you need to understand facts.
Sometimes when you're just one responder to eight different vehicles on the scene, you
don't really have, you've got your picture of what happened, but you don't know the big
picture.
So we bring everyone that was involved in the call together into what's called a diffusing.
No emotion.
This isn't a critical incident stress debriefing.
This is a diffusing.
So you don't bring emotion.
You just bring facts.
And the funny thing is, is that when we're doing this, we're also having a situation.
We got all the players there, but I also bring the right food to eat.
So a lot of times people, when they go through something stressful, they want comfort food.
And a lot of times just throwing one thing out they used to give us was a pizza.
Well, this has dairy, all these, you know, inflammatory things.
So we choose in anti-inflammatories.
We choose things that actually are proper gut health.
There's a big aspect to what you eat after you've experienced trauma that's proven.
So we have, we have food for them to do because they're still on shift.
They're going to go back and they could see this again that night.
Who knows?
So we always start by sharing the facts of the incident so they can process it.
Very powerful.
And we always end with what went right on that call because we can talk about, oh, we
should have cut those kids.
Maybe we could have saved them out.
I didn't set up command well.
I had a bad transportation corridor.
The medics didn't get them out fast enough.
We could do that all day, but it's really important because some things went very well
there that you have to end on.
You made a great call.
You set it up.
You called for a mass casualty incident.
You said 10 patients.
You set this up very well.
So always end on the positive like that because we do.
We tend to focus on the negative.
We always feel we can do better.
So that's what we've done.
Operationally, peer support members are assigned members and they're going to check in that
day, the next day, once a week and once a month because it keeps going.
Individuals can be impacted differently.
One person may have a 13 year old and they saw them in that person that was dead or dying.
Individuals are different.
So that's why we have to check in.
It went so well that we didn't need a critical incident stress debrief.
They said, actually, we're good.
And our peer support is still working.
This happened just less than a month ago and they're still doing check ins.
We call them buddy checks.
Hey, I'm thinking about you.
It can be simple.
And some of them have delayed effects with trauma.
So that's the important thing.
So as a chief, have it in your mission, vision and values.
Have it in policy.
Have it in the budget.
Lead with resiliency with your peer support.
Send them out to be some of the healthiest behaviorally fit people out there.
And then learn how to operationalize peer support and work in a regional manner because
these big calls like mutual aid involve multiple agencies.
So care for each other in a mutual and a regional aspect.
So that's what I wanted to share about peer support.
This is the way to move forward and we're learning a lot and it's probably going to
keep evolving.
But this is some of the new changes that I'm not quite hearing out in the world right now,
but I think is making a difference.
No, that's really innovative.
It's not something I've heard before either.
When it comes to the mental health conversation, I've talked about this a lot.
We seem to talk about stigma and you mentioned that earlier in the conversation.
And I feel like that's again, as you said, an inactionable statement.
We've got to remove the stigma culture just like you alluded to before.
Where I feel the conversation has power is that post-traumatic growth conversation, that
element of hope.
And obviously navigate from I'm hurting to that.
The middle part is the therapy.
What's going to work for you?
And this immense toolbox is available.
Some are still sadly a little in the shadows like the psychedelics and some of those areas
that are having amazing effects on some first responders and military members.
And then obviously you've got all the other things that are more available to us.
Where I see a massive issue is there's still an immense barrier to entry for a lot of responders
accessing the very therapies that they need, whether it's financial, they're not in their
insurance group, the EAP Russian roulette nightmare stories that I hear all the time.
How have you managed to bridge that gap in your department?
Great question.
So, again, with the consultant help and another company called First Tracks.
So everyone just, and this kind of hurts me is that everyone will always say, we just
need more therapists.
We need more therapists.
So this is where that comparison to cancer and post-traumatic stress kind of meet.
You remember when I started in the eighties, it was common for having ashtrays and smoking
in the fire station, smoking after a fire.
Very common.
I was just, that's what it was.
We had one SCBA in 1987 to share during a fire.
And then of course, during overhaul, we just didn't wear anything.
So we learned, it took us this long to really learn about resilience to cancer.
In Washington, if you've been on 10 years as a firefighter, it's presumptive that you'll
have cancer.
Also in Washington, if you've been on 10 years, it's presumptive that you have PTS.
But for some reason, I would never, I'm teaching everyone that's new that we hire that we have,
you've got two sets of gear.
Here's our decom procedures.
Here's our clean and safe areas in the fire station.
We have vehicle exhaust capturing systems.
Do everything you can.
We've got PFAS in the gear.
This is what we're doing to prevent and reduce your carcinogen exposure and build up your
resilience.
Here's a great diet and food to eat and exercise.
But here, everyone's screaming with post-traumatic stress, we need more therapists.
So that's me, a kin just saying to a new hire, hey, you're going to be exposed to cancer
in this job.
But I'll tell you what, I've got a team of oncologists that when you get cancer, they're
going to help put you through chemo.
And someone would say, bullshit, I don't want this job.
I was like, I don't want cancer.
But we're doing that with the trauma.
We're saying, hey, this job is going to take from you.
Here's a bunch of therapists in your time and need it.
It's like, no, they're not always growing out of the ground.
Therapists, everyone's snagging them up.
We need culturally competent therapists.
We need trauma informed.
So what we've done is, yeah, we found our consultant and first tracks, they're finding
the right therapist for us.
They're vetted by our people.
And it's a constant vetting.
And somebody says, yeah, they start out being good, but it's got kind of weird.
And I don't trust them.
It's them telling who we want to use.
And then you have to find out, or do they work with our insurance?
How do we make a pool of money for people that need it so it's not a financial burden
on them?
You could say to someone, hey, yeah, just go get a therapist.
Some people are in crisis.
Talk therapy doesn't get you out of crisis.
Crisis is I'm not sleeping.
I've had nightmares.
I'm awake and I have nightmares.
You know, I can't eat.
You're not going to talk therapy that out.
So we need treatment.
And this is, I'm so glad you brought up different treatment modalities, because again, the company
that we're working with, and I'd love to share what we're doing with you, because we're scaling
it to be shared to bigger departments and to more people, is that we have, are you familiar
with Transmagnetic Cranial Stimulase, TMS?
Yes, I am.
Yeah.
So we've got some of the top doctors who actually have grants for us to use.
I've got some forward thinking people with rapid acting.
Instead of it used to be a kind of a longer process.
We've got five days that are going to make people a distance.
We have somebody that says, I want to just these helmets in the fire station to help
deep press.
I mean, they, it's really moving fast and FDA approvals getting there.
Subganglion blocks, so SGBs.
We have a doctor that again offering grants.
We have to be the navigator.
We have to get our people by the hand.
Don't tell somebody that's in a mental crisis to say, Hey, by the way, yeah, call this,
go Google search for this stuff.
It's called TMS and you'll find somebody hopefully and then they're right one.
And I don't know how you're going to pay for it.
No.
If one of your members are in crisis, you shepherd them, you grab them by the hand.
I've got you.
We're going to do this.
There's some options.
Which one would you like?
Oh, you want to do?
Good.
I've got you.
We've had people drive the other person to the subgangling block, which, you know, the
needles going in your neck.
It's pretty amazing thing, but we've got these vetted doctors.
We have, we've have members who've gone through psilocybin and, and, and other treatments
with psychedelics change their lives.
EMDR still wonderful.
So once we get them out of crisis, then we can talk therapy is there.
So it's removing the barriers, the money barriers, the navigation barriers.
It's like telling a person who just broke their legs, Hey, help for you is two miles
down the road on the right.
We'll see you when you get there.
No, we've got to get to the point of these are our people, whether they're on duty or
off duty.
So thinking of it, like we've gone so far with, with cancer resilience, we need to get
upstream and build resilience with our members on the mental health side.
Even when someone is like, I had, we had one of our beloved members here and I was close
with them.
Um, was diagnosed with cancer, went through chemotherapy.
Um, sadly it was terminal, but we shaved our heads.
We got a Kickstarter campaign.
We visited him and his family, brought food.
We even, we even did yard work.
We had another member that was in post-traumatic stress.
And for some reason they treated this poor guy like a leper, like, Oh, he's struggling.
Leave them alone.
And he went downhill fast.
He lost his purpose.
He lost his tribe.
He was alone and with his own thoughts spinning.
Why do we do that?
So we lost our, our member to cancer.
Even the funeral was something of love and support.
I've been to a funeral of a firefighter who died by suicide.
Very different.
So we need to really change this whole aspect, take the lessons we've learned from cancer.
Both are going to kill you potentially cancer and PTS could kill you.
Both are presumptive.
We've come a long ways with building resilience.
So somebody doesn't get cancer.
We need to build resilience so they don't get, I want to put therapists out of business.
That should be the goal, not just adding more.
So we've also partnered with the university of Washington to create an internship so they
can learn our cultures.
They can do ride-alongs, have your therapist ride along with your people, get that face
to face.
Yes, a lot of them are going to do virtual therapy and it works well.
They can even do virtual EMDR now, but get them meeting them face to face.
We are a trusted organization and a trusted type of work that if they don't meet you face
to face and get to know you and you get to know what they see on a daily basis by doing
a ride along, it's going to be hard for them to truly connect.
If you expect someone to open up their soul to you, they need to trust you.
And so we're creating these pathways for people who want to consider being a therapist, but
also understand that the ones that we have really get to know us personally.
We understand treatment.
We understand navigation and we understand follow-up.
But if we can get upstream, we're going to deal with people in crisis, but we're going
to get upstream and make this like getting your teeth checked.
It's just what you do.
Yeah, the first couple are going to be a little awkward.
Maybe they're 30 minutes and you talk about hiking or the baseball team locally here,
but then you'll start building trust.
And you're just like, you know, I did a ride along with you.
You see what we do.
I think you get it.
I actually am.
I'm struggling with my relationships or whatever it is.
I can't turn out.
I've got a monkey mind.
I'm watching Tim Ferriss and I'm trying to learn everything.
We even have a great company called Host Defense.
Maybe you saw Fantastic Fungi.
It's on Netflix.
So Paul is the founder.
It's here in Tacoma, just south of us in Seattle, from Seattle.
And they want to work with us with utilizing the power of mushrooms as resilience builder,
not just for treatment, but actually to keep us healthier.
Amazing stuff.
This is exciting for us.
Washington is a little progressive here.
And so that's that's exciting.
But even companies I'm working with, Struggle Well and Josh Goldman.
So you talked about post-traumatic growth.
Are you familiar with Struggle Well?
I have heard the mention before.
Yes.
Amazing.
So I'm going to be an instructor with them.
They they brought on a Vietnam veteran who was actually in a in a prisoner war camp right
next to John McCain.
And the way he mentioned, they went through some of the hardest times, but they all went
on to live amazing lives after the imprisonment.
But the people that were also shot down but not captured, they weren't able to process
and go through this.
I think we think that we're damaged.
All the calls that everyone keeps talking about on social media, oh, firefighters are
exposed to this.
They're damaged.
That's not true.
We can actually from that we can actually grow from our traumatic past.
And so that's I'm excited to explore more of this that we don't have to be broken.
We can actually appreciate things about life because we've seen tough things.
I love our job.
Our job has been known to be as a parent with this shift work.
Amazing.
I have I had time with my kid that I know most jobs don't offer.
I have made friends.
I have seen things that help me appreciate more and more about life.
So this job, yes, it can take some things from you like sleep.
But if we can learn how to how to build resilience and understand sleep, it will give you so
much.
So that's I love your attitude.
Let's let's be optimistic about this work.
Let's think about what this job can give you and support the stuff that it may take from
you.
Beautiful.
Well, thank you for that.
And it's funny you mentioned Paul's that Paul Stamets.
Have I got that right?
Yes.
Very good.
I'm not needing it on the show one day.
Oh, well, if I if I start making this connection, we just started working.
If I can get him because he would love to work in the first responder space.
That's new for him, right?
He's just saying, hey, mushrooms are great for everyone.
But if he can understand how much they mean to us here in the North and we're local for
him, I would I'd love to set you up with that, James.
Fantastic.
All right.
Well, then go to the closing questions.
The first one, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Oh, I'm I'm always a Simon Sinek fan.
So when it comes to leadership in the fire service, why eat leaders eat last is one of
my all time favorites.
But also, I just I'm reading through the untethered soul.
Michael Singer, I think is the name, the untethered soul.
This is really opened my eyes to the ongoing dialogue in our heads.
That is that is we really need to understand because we we have this negative track that
always is playing and you talk about having a monkey mind.
It's always going.
So that is that is another book that I love.
Understanding happiness.
I think Oprah Winfrey and I forgot his other name.
Oh, I should have wrote this down.
But that happiness isn't a destination.
It's something that we're doing each day.
And it's not just I need to arrive there.
It's appreciating things throughout the day and gratitude.
So those those have been impactful for me lately.
Beautiful.
What about films and documentaries?
Any of those that you love?
Oh, like that fabulous fun guy.
I think that's amazing.
I love understanding how our brain works and how we connect.
There are some fantastic documentaries.
I love I love podcasts.
I love Andrew Huberman against Simon Sinek, Lewis Howes.
A lot of our young firefighters connect with the you know, with us, Jocko Willis, too.
It's they they love that the fitness side, they love the military tie in side of it also.
So I have to think about if there's any other documentary.
I haven't been watching a lot of TV.
But I do love podcasts.
Tom Billy is another one I really like to.
Brilliant.
All right.
Well, then the next question, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this podcast
as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
Oh, yeah, I would love to bring his name is Christopher Brown.
And he's he's here in the Northwest.
He is a ex military himself.
He specialized in working for the veteran community for post traumatic stress.
He's working with starting to work with fire departments now.
But he's an innovator with psychedelics, with VR technology.
And he's got an excellent way to look at that.
Yeah, a lot of it's on the treatment side.
Owen Muir would be another one.
He was wonderful.
He helped to understand helped me understand how we interact with folks with behavioral
health emergencies.
We kind of I did a podcast with him and we dove deep into that.
He's brilliant.
His rapid acting TMS.
I mean, he's on the forefront.
He's one that you're really going to enjoy.
Brilliant.
All right.
Well, then the last question for everyone knows where to find you.
What do you do to decompress?
Oh, so I'm I love to be out in nature.
So I do a lot of light hikes.
And when I do this, it used to be for me to think about things and try to work out problems
as I was in the forest.
We have beautiful forests here in Washington.
But I work with my therapist and she helped remind me that the more present I can be,
the more space that makes for my brain to handle things outside of this.
So when she had me do a couple of things.
So when I'm out hiking, she has me look up and go my eyes that go back to the top of
the trees.
Look at the clouds.
She says, when you were a kid, do you remember lying down in the grass and picking out shapes
of the cloud, just marveling at how fast they would move different formations?
She goes, adults don't do that anymore.
Look at what phones have done to us.
Our heads are down.
She goes, there's beauty in looking up and when you're scanning back and forth to the
trees, your eyes are moving back and forth.
And that's another brain connection.
She says, be present.
Listen to the sounds of the forest.
Listen to the wind going through the leaves.
Listen to the birds.
And I did that.
And when a forest that I normally thought was a good quiet place, the forest actually
became very loud and beautiful, like a whole symphony.
So I love to get out in nature.
I love to get away and be present, to look up.
Look at the clouds.
Look at the tops of the trees.
Watch the wind move the tops.
It's actually wonderful.
And I feel, I can't tell you how good I feel, even a one hour hike, I come out feeling like
I've just had eight hours of sleep.
And then my mind's ready to go.
I can actually, I can work better.
So that's what I like to do.
It's amazing how many times that comes up when I ask this question.
And there's some glaring common denominators.
And obviously, if you're exercising outside, whether that's surfing or hiking, whatever
it is, you've got the sunlight, you've got the exercise, you've got the time in nature,
you've got the inability to listen to music or read your phone at that moment.
And then when you kind of reflect on what was told to the world during the pandemic,
it literally couldn't have been more opposite than what humans actually need to be mentally
and physically resilient.
So I think it's a powerful takeaway not to spend too long in the 2020 era, but understanding
that the nucleus of human happiness and resilience is basically going back to what we did as
human beings from about 100 years on prior.
Well said.
That's exactly.
And I'm glad that you're getting all the different perspectives of what people do and seeing
those common denominators.
Absolutely.
All right.
So for people listening, I'm sure there's a lot of people in all ranks that would love
to kind of reach out and learn more about what you've discussed today.
Where are the best places to find you online?
On LinkedIn.
And then also, it's got my email and contact.
That's probably the best way to find me online.
Well, Chuck, I want to say thank you so much.
I mean, not only leading us through some of the fire service areas and some of the progressive
initiatives that you have, but also I think what you've discussed in the last 20, 30 minutes
and some of the innovations in your department.
And then again, the financial and emotional support that you're proactively putting into
your firefighters is definitely a voice that we need to hear.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much, James.
And I'll get you those contacts from Portland and Dr. Gina Poe for sleep.
We'll get on sleep and shift schedules.