Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name's James Geering,
and this week I have an extremely unusual
and unique episode for you.
I have done almost a thousand episodes now,
and each one of those is with a guest.
But after really trying to be one of the voices
to push the 2472 firefighter work week
as the industry standard,
I have been inundated with messages,
which is a beautiful thing.
So rather than keep answering the same questions
over and over and over again,
I wanted to create a free resource
collating all of the great minds
that I've had on the show talking about this,
so you can then use it as an open source document
to give to your fellow firefighters, your union,
your city, your county, your civilians,
whoever needs to hear it to understand
that there are absolutely fixable solutions
to the physical and mental health crisis
and the recruitment crisis
that we are enduring in the fire service.
What I'm also gonna do,
if you go to the YouTube channel
or the webpage for this on jamesgeering.com,
I'm going to list all of the resources
that I talk about on here.
So there will be hyperlinks.
So you wanna listen to Professor Russell Foster,
the man who literally discovered
the chronoreceptors in the eye,
then you'll be able to just click on that link
and you'll take you straight to that episode.
So before we get to this, I would say conversation,
it's a monologue this time.
I wanna add one more thing.
I was responding to questions that you will see
if you go to the video side.
Most of us, I think, listen to podcasts.
So it will sound a little strange
because I'm answering questions that I'm reading.
If I did it again,
obviously I would verbalize those questions for the audio.
So towards the end, you will hear me answering questions.
Hopefully it's still seamless,
but that's why all of a sudden
I'm talking about different things.
So as I mentioned,
this is a free library of almost a thousand episodes now.
So all I ask is that you share these incredible
men and women stories, and in this case, this episode,
so I can get it to every single person on planet earth
who needs to hear it.
So with that being said,
here is the episode on how to transition
to a 2472 firefighter work week.
Enjoy.
All right.
Well, I want to welcome everyone to this once in a lifetime,
me monologuing podcast.
The reason I am doing this,
I will get to who I am and the origin story in a second.
I don't ever, ever normally talk on a podcast on my own.
I've done almost a thousand interviews now
and every single one is with a guest.
However, when it comes to the topic of the 2472,
I have had so many questions
and they're the same questions over and over again,
which is amazing.
I think I love the fact that I'm getting all these questions,
but obviously the solution is to create a video like this
and an audio like this.
So I will kind of lead everyone through the questions
that I hear over and over again.
I invite you to ask questions if you'd like to.
And then hopefully then this will be a living document
for you, because as you will hear when they say,
where's the research, where's the data?
There's a good reason why you can't find it.
So I wanted to create it.
I wanted to have a way of answering all these questions
so that when it's your union, your administration,
or your city, or your county, or your husband,
or your wife, whoever it is,
that you can just show them this
and it will give them all the solutions.
So I am gonna get to these questions I'm about to say now.
So I'm gonna kind of follow a structure
just to keep it flowing.
But some of the biggest questions I get is,
how can our department even afford X amount more firefighters?
We will get to that and the money is already there.
This is why this is so crazy
the way we're doing at the moment.
The money is literally there.
We're already short staffed.
How can we hire extra people?
We can't even fill the holes now.
We will get to that too.
Again, there is a solution
that has actually been shown to be true
by some of the local departments here
that have recently moved to this shift schedule.
We're gonna have to take a pay cut.
Another fairy tale, no, and we'll explain why.
I'm not gonna get any of these yet,
just to let you know they are coming.
Where is the data?
Where are the studies?
Another, it's a great question,
but I can tell you where you will find
absolutely comparable studies,
but I will also show you where there's such a lack
of research in our profession, specifically in this area.
So starting with an introduction, who am I?
I am literally a normal firefighter
and this is why I do what I do.
I wasn't at the World Trade Center
or the Grenfell Fire in London or 911 or 77.
I am the other 99.9% of firefighters
that day in, day out ran to normal calls.
Some absolutely horrendous, some completely benign,
and it's the death by a thousand cuts.
I originally came from England,
as you can probably tell from the accent,
and became a firefighter 20 years ago.
So I entered the fire service in 2004,
and back then everyone was testing,
and we'll get into that,
the stark contrast between 04 and 24 as far as hiring.
But I had a very gypsy career in the fire service,
following my son's mother.
She was pursuing fame, which took me,
I trained in Orlando, took me down to Miami
for a Hialeah fire over to Anaheim Fire, California
for a few years as a tillerman, loved that job.
Then came back because of my little boy,
and then spent the last 10 years
in the kind of Orlando area in a couple of departments.
But what it did is it gave me a very unique perspective
of the fire service.
And in that group, I would argue,
one of the best fire departments on the planet
in that group is probably one the opposite side.
Some extremely affluent departments
and extremely poor departments, East Coast and West Coast.
So you got to see the commonalities,
as well as the differences.
A side note, I also am a sports science grad from the UK,
and then a sports science bachelor graduate
here in UF in Florida.
So exercise physiology, excuse me.
I've been a lifelong athlete
and a coach for most of my life as well.
So expert in absolutely nothing,
but I've got a solid health background.
And the origin story of the podcast was 10 years ago,
10 years into my career, I just started going to funerals
and they weren't dying of everything, excuse me.
They weren't dying of one thing,
they were dying of everything.
So it was the heart attacks and the cancers
and the strokes and the suicides and the overdoses
and the autoimmune diseases.
And friend after friend after friend,
was last call bells and bagpipes.
And it broke my heart.
And I realized that the fire service were very reactive
and we're extremely good at that.
You can be a dead sleep, push three numbers on a phone
and we jump up, slide down a pole
and go mitigate whatever your disaster is.
But we're not proactive, we're not designed to be proactive.
And when it came to the firefighter health element,
I realized that that was actually detrimental
because we kept doing the same thing over and over,
expecting different results, i.e. insanity.
And so with this wellness, exercise physiology,
health background, I was looking for a podcast
to listen to and I'd listened to Barbell Shrugged
and there was a Navy Seal, Dr. Kirk Parsley.
So he was a pre-9-11 seal, went to med school,
went back to the West Coast teams as their physician.
And very long story short, within about a year or so
of all these insane blood works of these Uber athletes
that their blood work made them look like
they were an 80 year old woman,
he realized that it was sleep deprivation
that was really destroying his tactical athletes.
And he got with this command,
he changed the way they trained, a lot less night ops,
a lot more rest and recovery.
And he was able to completely reverse
all the testosterone drops and the cortisol peaks
and get them back to where they needed to be.
Well, I'm listening to this 10 years ago, nine years ago,
going, well, why are we not talking about this
in the fire service?
So I couldn't find a firefighter health podcast back then.
And so I was like, okay, well then there's my sign.
So eight years ago, Behind the Shield was born.
It's a completely free podcast.
Everything on there is open source library.
There's no Patreon, there's no VIP, nothing.
I just wanna bring the greatest minds of wellness to you,
the first responders, military, medical professionals
and everyone else.
So that's who I am.
I'm no one, I'm just another firefighter.
I'm no one special, but I'm someone who's so sick
and tired of burying people.
So I wanna start with the shift myths
because I think this is one of the reasons
I'm gonna be fair to all of us,
whether you're a firefighter, whether you're a chief,
whether you're a city administrator,
we have all told ourselves fairy tales for a long time.
From my level, I never promoted,
I was a firefighter the whole time
and I absolutely loved it and a paramedic as well.
We have walked around, beaten our chest,
telling the public that we have the most amazing schedule,
that we only work 10 days a month.
I work one day on, two days off.
And most of my career, I worked 56, no Kelly.
And so at that level, I'm gonna explain why we're so wrong.
So just, my camera looks blurry, I hope it's actually not.
It's gonna point this not towards my groin, but to these.
Okay, so you've got 10 shifts.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.
So we say we work 10 days a month.
Oh, as I completely mess this camera up, there we go.
Put that back.
All right, so here's one of your shifts.
Well, no one talks to us about,
is that 24 hour period consists of three, eight hour days.
So that's not one day, that's three days.
The average civilian work day is a nine hour day
with one hour lunch.
So we have been kind of telling ourselves this fairy tale
that we work one day on, two days off.
And we don't, we work three days on, one day off.
Because the second of those three days,
you work from midnight to 8 a.m. shift change.
So that's already a day you've worked.
So you've only got that third day,
which as most of us know, you're ramping up towards
getting all your stuff ready to get up at five,
which I used to do,
and then drive all the way to the station again.
So that doesn't make it 10 days a month,
it makes it 30 days a month.
Now what's interesting, as I've heard a few times,
and I disagree with this completely,
but people will say, well, the fire service
is like a business.
Well, if it is like a business,
then why are we working on firefighters
like an Indonesian sweatshop,
instead of the progressive leaders in the corporate space?
If you look at Google and Virgin and all these, you know,
good, extremely successful corporations,
they're now going down to a four day work week.
That's 32 hour civilian work week.
And finding productivity is just as good,
there's a lot more innovation,
and the happiness and camaraderie of their employees
has gone through the roof.
So we are turning our backs on all of these signs
of what's wrong.
Now in the upper levels, you know,
then they just sit around, you know,
they sleep, don't rest in the lazy boy, all that stuff.
This is kind of what you start hearing
from the chief level, you know,
and the reality is if you actually spend time
in the stations, a lot of us are working all day,
and you know, some stations most of the night,
if not all the night, is there times, you know,
are there times where we sleep?
Yes, but is that a good quality sleep?
Absolutely not.
And I've had numerous sleep experts,
I'm gonna give you a whole load of episode titles
so you can look it up.
But I always tell people, if you imagine going to bed
and someone's got those big symbols from the orchestra
and they stand over your bed and they say,
I may or may not smash these in your ear
at some point tonight, maybe multiple times,
how well are you gonna sleep?
We physically cannot get into a deep restorative sleep
in a fire station, which it doesn't matter
if we are physically up or not, it's disturbed sleep,
it's, you know, interrupted sleep.
So then when it comes to the city and all the public,
we as a profession have done a horrible job of branding,
of showing them what we actually do.
And it is insane that people still say,
why is there a fire engine on my medical call
when we've been doing EMS for 50 years now?
You know, they still think that we sit around
and we play cards and we work out and that's it.
And I think what really does a disservice is people say,
oh yeah, but what about those, you know,
we got a station where there's only one call a shift
or one call every couple shifts.
All right, well good.
But I'm concerned about the people that are getting destroyed
in all the other busy stations.
But for some reason we focus on that one.
Those usually are gonna be firefighters
that have had been in the meat grinder
for 20 plus years,
who at this point now kind of deserve to be
in the quiet station if we're being completely honest.
So dispelling the myths and understanding
that every single rung of the ladder,
we all have kind of got it wrong
because it was a great system
when we were just running fires.
But you add in EMS and then the 911 abuse
and all the other calls that we respond to now,
you know, it's not the fire service of 40, 50 years ago,
but our shift schedule was never changed.
And I think most of the departments I've worked at,
their staffing hasn't, you know,
hasn't increased for a long, long time.
So those are the shift myths
that I think it's important for us to understand
because this is why I'm so passionate about it.
The very first question needs to be
for all of us to look in the mirror and go,
why is it that the bank teller stops at 40 hours,
but the person who goes, you know, wakes from a deep sleep,
you know, goes to the pole, goes down,
drives a rig or drives the back of the tiller to a call,
you know, pulls ladders, makes entry, does a search,
pulls someone out, then is trying to work out
cardiac algorithm, you know, drug calculations,
that that person is totally fine for them
to be working 56 plus hours a week.
And then you add in the mandatory crisis
that we have, the recruitment crisis,
it's 80 hours a week.
And I work mandatory a lot in my career.
And this is, you know, agencies on the other side
of the country, you know, a huge amount.
And that's an 80 hour week with one mandatory.
So that's double that bank teller now.
And no one is going to be able to explain that.
Can you, you know, if you can justify
why we need to be working longer, I'm all ears.
But the important thing to underline is
if the way that we did it worked,
we wouldn't have this crisis of cancer and heart attacks
and suicides and overdoses and divorces.
If it worked, I would be wasting my time
because everyone would be happy
and everyone would be healthy
but James, I don't know what you're talking about.
But if you put your hand on your heart,
you know damn well that it's not working.
If you're in the Northeast and you already work
42 hours a week, that's amazing.
And this is what's interesting is we revere
a lot of the Northeastern departments
and they work the schedule.
But I don't hear voices saying,
hey, why is the rest of the country working more?
We need to get them to where we are.
So this is where this fusion is.
So the very first question I'm gonna get to
is where is the data?
My question to you first would be, will you tell me?
Because people ask that when I put this out,
I want you to see white papers, I need to see studies.
The reason why you're saying that is I know damn well
that you can't find it because if it was everywhere,
you wouldn't say, James, where is the data?
The problem is there is so much data.
I did a post the other day, every single exam,
every health issue that we suffer from,
there is a connection between that and sleep deprivation.
I have had guests, which I'm gonna list in a second,
from all branches of the military,
from the sporting community, neuroscience, you name it,
all talking about sleep.
Every one of them agrees irrefutably
that the way that we work our firefighters,
especially the 56-hour weeks, is insane.
And it's completely, it's expected
that we have all these issues that we do.
So the data exists, but you have to look
in the military, you have to look in other areas,
but it's human beings in a uniform,
not sleeping under high stress.
It's pretty much apples to apples.
The other question that I think is more important
is why is there no data?
Why, when the word PFAS was mentioned with cancer,
everyone was up in arms, and I had Rob Belot on the show,
which I'll get, episode 631, and he was the guy
that really blew the door open on PFAS,
the dark water story, he was the lawyer.
And that is absolutely, needs to be part of the conversation.
But there was no loud voices on sleep deprivation,
a known carcinogen labeled by the WHO.
So it's a very kind of pick and choose,
well, I can blame PFAS because I don't have to do anything,
I can just point my finger.
If I talk about sleep deprivation, I as a leader,
have to actually make changes and go to my city and county
and advocate for my people.
I think I'm just gonna blame FI, PFAS.
So the lack of data, I think, really underlines
the lack of effort that should have been put in
by firefighter organizations, unions, et cetera,
because we should have a whole load of data now.
We lose hundreds of firefighters.
This is what's so sad.
If you look at our official statistics,
our numbers are, for example, I think it's just sub 100
for suicides.
I live in the state of Florida.
We have tens this year already, one state,
you know what I mean?
There's another 49.
So you're telling me that we make up 30, 40%
of those stats, there's no way.
So you've got the under-reported statistics,
obviously suicide with the stigma,
a lot of people don't come out and say that was the case,
but our biggest miss, our biggest failure
in the fire service is our retirees.
Most of these diseases, most of these mental health
conditions, most of these addictions really take hold
when we're middle-aged and beyond.
And the VA, even though it's not perfect,
counts military members after they have left.
We have no VA in police and fire and EMS.
When that bay door comes down, we're not counted.
So if I drop dead today, I wouldn't be on any firefighter
statistic whatsoever.
So the reality is that the numbers we're seeing
are probably the 10th of the numbers
that are actually going on there
because our retirees are silently dying of all these things
and no one's counting them.
So I guess this whole early bit is kind of underlining
the importance of this conversation.
And what's beautiful is as you were here,
it benefits everyone and it saves money as well.
So when it comes to the concept of sleep deprivation,
if you look at what that is used for as a tool,
it is used for special forces selection.
And I've got some hilarious stories.
I've had so many special operations members on the show
of hallucinations, seeing pirate ships in the middle
of the fields and all kinds of stuff.
And this is only three, four days with no sleep.
We have the interrogation, whether it's police
or whether it's military, whatever it is,
we use sleep deprivation to break someone down
to interrogate them.
And yet we have our profession that's trying to move
to a 48 hour shift, 48, 96, which is literally
heading towards that side.
Matthew Walker, why we sleep, he quotes that one night
without sleep is like the same cognitively
as the blood alcohol of 0.1.
Now here's what's interesting about that.
Most studies that are done, usually they're advertised
to the local college kids where that lab is,
and the kids will take part and they'll do a sleep study
and then they'll go back.
Now these kids, they might be partying a little bit,
but otherwise they are simply sleeping every night
and studying.
So you've got a kid that's gone from probably
a pretty decent night's sleep consistently
to this one test and then back to their normal life.
Now you take a 20 year firefighter,
that's every third day for 20 years.
So there's no way in hell it's even close to 0.1.
If we don't sleep that night, we're way, way past that.
So this is the thing, no one in the sleep science industry
has said anything other than it is insane.
So we have to be up at night.
That I got a kind of a rather aggressive message
on my Facebook the other day.
It's amazing how unprofessional some firefighters can be
when you're trying to help them.
But anyway, I digress.
And he took umbrage to the fact that I was trying
to make 10s and 14s at 24.
That as you know, isn't the case.
I'm trying to get all the 56 plus hour people down to 42
so that we can save their lives and their marriages.
But that being said, if you listen to the sleep people,
just as a quick tangent, you will hear that
when you go from day to night to day to night,
as a lot of these shifts do,
that is horrendous for the circadian rhythm
because it can't reset.
The one good thing about 24
is even though yes, we might be getting up,
we're not, you know, the nighttime isn't our shift.
We're not up the whole time.
So we're actually able to regulate better than, you know,
the 10s and 14s.
And a good example of that would be our police officers,
our doctors, our nurses, a lot of them work these shifts.
Are they a pillar of health?
A lot of times those professions are struggling immensely.
So again, is it working?
If it is, and everyone on 10s and 14s is in tip top shape,
then I got nothing else to say.
Let's go to 10s and 14s and call it good.
I would argue, especially in the fire service,
that the 24 is the answer.
We have fire stations, make naps essential,
understand sleep hygiene on our days off.
That is as close to good as we're gonna get.
We still have to be awake
when people are sleeping in their beds.
So as far as what does sleep deprivation do,
so the acuity side first, let's go to that.
When you are not sleeping for one, two, three, four days,
whatever it ends up being,
or, you know, disturbed, interrupted sleep,
the cognition, as I said, imagine a blood alcohol of 0.1
or way more worse, there is a thing called microsleep.
And back in the day,
we used to have those line of duty deaths all the time,
the kind of intersection wrecks, and they still happen.
Sometimes with two of our own vehicles.
When you are exhausted, you will take a microsleep.
And what's interesting is that someone just told me the other
day on the crash scenes of a drunk driver,
there'll be a brake pattern, there'll be skid marks.
On the crime scenes, or when they forensically look
at the scene of a driver's fall in the sleep,
a microsleep, there are no brake patterns.
They just plow straight into the person.
And this is what happens to us all the time.
So you've got the microsleep.
So I would argue of our line of duty deaths,
the people that got lost in the fires,
the people that fell off the roof or the aerial,
the intersection accidents,
how many of those were actually partly sleep related?
How many of the fatal wrecks of firefighters going home
were related to falling asleep at the wheel?
Or suicide is the other one.
I think there's probably a lot, you know,
within that that actually would deliver and we'll never know.
So that's the acuity side, you know, trying to do,
like I said, the pediatric drug calculations on, you know,
40 hours into a 48 hour shift, it's dangerous.
It's just that simple.
If we talk about doing it for them
and the highest delivery of service,
you cannot do that on two, three days of no sleep.
That's why with the 2472, you've got that 72 period after 24,
and I'll explain why you wouldn't be mandatory.
And then that gets you close to baseline
so that you're not adding and adding and adding.
Now, equally as scary is the long term,
the chronic effects of sleep deprivation
over and over and over again.
So I talked about cancer.
I mean, you know, the biggest killer outside of suicide,
which in itself is just absolutely heartbreaking.
But yeah, the WHO is a class 2A carcinogen.
So it's a known carcinogen.
People are aware of it.
And again, a lot of times they're studying shift workers,
you know, night, but then go home.
They're not being mandatory to stay all day as well
in these places.
So, you know, every time you look at shift work,
we're the extreme example of that.
So you've got cancer.
So like I said, I'm all for, you know, clean cab
or a version of absolutely, if we discover a PFAS
and Rob's episode was incredible,
we need to get out of our gear if we can.
It's in our AFFF, it's in all these things.
But if we're not talking about the resilience of the body
to fend off cancer,
then we're missing a huge part of the puzzle.
Same with COVID.
A lot of our first responders overworked, under slept,
more vulnerable to COVID and we lost a lot of them.
Suicide.
So again, and I'm gonna give you a load of episodes
that you can watch, but when it comes to suicide,
you will hear an absolute direct correlation
between sleep deprivation and suicide.
And is it the only thing?
And this is the thing with all these conversations,
are they the only thing? No.
But they're the thing that no one's talking about.
And they're the biggest of the things.
But when the body sleeps, when the brain sleeps,
it literally takes a kind of version of a bath.
And that's when you process thoughts.
You process the learning.
So you took a rope class that day.
That's why sometimes you can't remember the knots
the next day if you didn't sleep.
We physically need to sleep to process learning,
but also all the thoughts,
discard the things that are kind of superfluous
that you don't need to remember,
but also the traumas to process that,
to make it a memory,
not something that's still in the front of your mind.
So you think about, you saw something horrible
and you didn't sleep, now you've compounded that.
So, and then with the lack of sleep,
you start to get this breakdown.
I wanna just take a tangent
because I think this is important to say a thousand times.
When I first became a firefighter,
it was still that generation of,
suicide is cowardly, it's selfish,
how could they think of your wife, think of your kids?
And I think most of us thought that way.
It wasn't coming out of a place of meanness.
It just didn't make sense to an arguably healthy mind.
What I've realized now is when you have the perfect storm
of unaddressed childhood trauma,
trauma can be an absolute superpower
if you've been able to work through it.
But if it's been buried down,
it becomes a fractured foundation.
What we actually see, the side effects of alcohol,
maybe psychiatric drugs, relationship issues,
financial issues, but then sleep deprivation,
you've got all the pieces of the puzzle
that literally miswires the brain.
And I have, of the thousand guests,
probably, I'm not exaggerating,
400 of them had suicide ideation.
Some of them went through of it and survived,
jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, shot themselves.
And then a lot of them were right there
and something saved them, a phone call, a dog,
whatever it was.
But here's what's so important to put compassion
in the suicide conversation is pretty much all,
I'm talking like 99% of them said,
I felt like I was a burden to my wife.
I felt like I was a burden to my children,
my husband, my friends.
And that miswiring causes that shame
and that guilt to amplify.
And they truly believe that they are the reason
for their loved one's pain.
And so you take someone who's already taken an oath
that they will die for complete strangers.
And now they think that their beloved wife
and their two girls are hurting because of them.
That makes at that point in that broken miswire brain,
and I say broken with compassion, not judgment,
that makes that a selfless and courageous act.
It's not right because their brain is lying to them,
but their reality is so strong.
And there's no better example
than those two young police officers we lost.
I think it was late last year.
They were both, I think in their 20s,
they had a newborn child.
The husband or boyfriend killed himself.
And I think a week later, the girlfriend did.
And they left behind an infant.
But at that point, they were probably
going through the same thing.
So when you add sleep deprivation,
you add so much more weight to that person
getting to that miswire brain.
So as a, this is a tangent, but I think it needs to be said.
If you are feeling like you are a burden
to the people you love,
or you hear someone else talk about that,
that is the biggest red flag that we should be waving
when it comes to mental health.
So a little tangent from the 2472,
but I think that needs to be said.
Addiction, the real stigma when it comes to mental health
and the fire service.
You know, when it comes to suicide,
we've kind of accepted that in some way,
some conversations.
But addiction to opiates, you know, I've lost,
one firefighter I got hired within my last department,
and then several firefighters locally I know
to opioid overdose, several.
And then you've got obviously the alcoholism,
whether it ends up in a car crash,
whether it's cirrhosis of the liver.
These are all part of the same thing.
There's a void, they need to feel the pain,
insert whatever coping mechanism it is.
But that addiction again, amplified by sleep deprivation.
Obesity, you know, we talk about this,
and I'm very deliberate when I talk about fitness standards
in the fire service.
You know, I don't know if you can see,
but I'm in reasonably good shape.
You know, I still hold my own in the gym.
I did the CPAT not too long ago,
definitely held my own there.
Not a big deal, but I believe that fitness standards
should be where they should be in the fire service.
They should be high.
What we are required to do, in the worst case,
a high rise strip alone is 100 pounds
before you climb 10, 20, 30 stories and then go to work.
That being said though, the way that we work our firefighters
sets them up for failure.
And I have a free class that I do in Ocala.
If you're in Ocala, Mondays at 5pm Eastern,
Iron Legion, I do it for free.
All first responders, military, it's a free class for you.
But I hardly get anyone.
And I don't blame them.
At the moment, our local firefighters
are so overworked and exhausted,
they just wanna go home, and I understand that.
So this is the kind of juxtaposition
is we should have a standard here,
but we can't expect that standard to be met
when our environment is down here.
Now you go to a 2472, over time, not being unfair,
you can demand that your new recruits
and then your staff get back to where they want to be.
No one wants to be down here.
And anyone who says they do is lying.
So this is the thing.
So the obesity thing, sleep deprivation, massive.
Testosterone, the testosterone crisis
is another kind of elephant in the room.
There are so many young firefighters
because I coach at Iron Legion
and some of our original members became firefighters
and I've watched them go,
some of them almost 10 years now in the fire service,
and I've watched the breakdown.
And these are young guys,
like either side of 30 with a testosterone of like 250.
And that is completely reversible with more sleep,
which is why we go back to current parsley.
Now there are exceptions to the rule,
extreme age, TBIs, some of those things
can actually stop the body making it.
But as another side note,
what I'm also seeing as a predatory element
when it comes to exogenous testosterone,
there are men's clinics popping up everywhere.
It used to be that you go to your doctor
and the scale was, I forget now, like 250 to 950,
and you'd be 252.
Oh, you're within normal limits, you're good.
And you're a 28 year old tactical athlete.
No, you're not good.
You should be probably in the 700s.
So you wouldn't get anything.
Now it's swung the other way where,
I've got a good friend of mine that was given TRT,
they never even did a blood test.
So there's a thing called peptides now,
and it's a great company that I use personally.
So every sponsor I have on the show is there
because I have hunted them down
after I've loved their product.
So I take what's called peptides,
and all they do is they just boost
the body's natural testosterone production.
If you take TRT, and they're not warning you
that it can cause male pattern, you know,
balding, sterility, literally atrophy of the testes
because your body thinks it's got so much,
it doesn't need them anymore.
You know, I forget the term,
but you know, what people affectionately call bitch tits.
I mean, that's all the real thing.
With the peptides, you can just boost it up.
So, you know, ideally you have this great shift schedule,
but if you're gonna, you know,
if it's gonna take two, three years to get there,
you're in the process, like hopefully Ocala is,
then this is a great way of kind of boosting everything up
in the meantime.
TRT is not the only thing.
It's the last resort because once you take it,
you're on it for the rest of your life.
And one of my good, good friends took it,
you know, bro science, locker, bodybuilding, testosterone,
when we were in kind of medic school,
and now he's, you know, it destroyed him, you know,
he's doing well, but it had such a negative side effect.
So just wanna put that there.
If you're looking for a excellent company for that,
Transcend, amazing.
But the testosterone thing again,
before you take anything, diet, exercise, time,
and you know, in sunlight,
and then, you know, sleep is the most important thing.
Without sleep, your hormones are all wrecked.
Even the diabetes, you know, if you don't sleep,
your blood sugar, your insulin, excuse me, is off.
So any hormone at all is disrupted if we don't sleep
because we regulate when we sleep.
Injury, I had a Dr. Stuart McGill,
known as the back mechanic, amazing guy,
revered all over the world for, you know,
especially spinal health.
Had him on the show, and again,
explained to him the shifts that we work,
and he said, James, it's not will you get hurt,
it's when you get hurt.
Because any of us that take our job seriously,
that will be out the back pulling hoes,
throwing ladders, and then we do a workout.
If you're not sleeping, the muscles,
the connective tissue, they're not repairing.
So you're breaking it down to build it up,
but you're not getting to build it up,
which is why a lot, they say,
it's always the fit guys that get hurt.
It is, and it's a shame,
because they're doing everything right,
but they're kind of being punished by it, you know,
for it, by not getting the rest and recovery.
So all the muscular scaly or injuries that you have,
and we go, oh, it's because I step off the rig funny.
No, it's probably because you haven't slept for 20 years
and your knee finally gave in.
And I've got meniscus tears on both of my knees,
and I rehabbed a back injury with foundation training,
no surgery, no meds.
Look up foundation training, phenomenal.
And then the other, the last one was two things,
reproductive health.
I think this is the one that really lends weight
to this argument.
People have said to me, oh, I'm gonna lose my overtime,
and other kind of things that are very self-serving.
I had Dr. Sarah Jenke on three times,
the most recent one we did, we just focused on this topic.
And this is going back to where's the data.
She, I interviewed her five years ago,
and when I talked about sleep deprivation,
and she talked about this, so she knows I'm saying this,
I remember her looking confused and almost like
a kind of dismissive, well, that's not anything.
And then that was five years ago.
This last one, she said, when I actually dove
into the sleep deprivation, you know, the medicine,
the science behind it, she was blown away
how it was behind everything.
But where she has done some incredible research
is the impact of what we do, and the sleep deprivation
shift work on our children, on our reproductive health.
And I know there's a huge amount of first responder families
that struggle to get pregnant, or they lose a child
X amount of time through the pregnancy.
There seems to be a higher level of autism,
and Down syndrome.
So imagine this, even though you're concerned
about your last five and your drop and your pension check,
think about the impact that this is gonna have
on your children.
You know, that in itself should be enough to really,
you know, pick up a torch and wanna be part of this fight.
Even if, you know, you've had kids and then,
you know, what's happened, the fact that our actions
can affect our children, you know, the pediatric cancers
that we see in all these other heartbreaking,
heartbreaking things, if we can stop one parent
from going through that one child by making this change,
then this fight is worth it.
And then lastly, another one that I'm seeing
an insane amount recently is strokes.
I mean, I've got multiple firefighter friends
that had strokes.
And again, if you look at the research,
see deprivations and strokes,
there's an absolute correlation.
So when people say, show me the research,
don't type in 2472, because I'll be really freaking blunt
right now.
If you need a study to show you that a 42 hour workweek
is healthier than a 56 hour workweek,
should you be raring a badge?
You know what I mean?
You don't need a study for that.
Do you need a study to find out if you step in front
of a London bus, it's gonna hurt?
No, it's common sense.
So we don't need studies for that,
but we do need to learn about the sleep deprivation.
So if you put in any of these things that I've talked about
with the words shift work,
you will see all these studies come up.
So there's your data.
All right.
I'm just gonna reel off a few of the resources for you
on all that stuff I've talked about,
and then we're gonna get to the recruitment crisis
and then how do we afford to make this change.
So Dr. Sarah Jenke, The Science, The Data, episode 928.
Professor Russell Foster,
when you hear Andrew Huberman
and some of these other people talking about,
when you wake up, go outside, get daylight on your eyes,
I've never heard Russell credited for this sadly,
but he was the man who discovered the KronoSat,
Krono receptor in the eye.
So before it was rods and cones, that's all we were taught.
And the ophthalmology, the eye people,
I can't say that word properly, ridiculed him,
laughed him out saying, there's just rods and cones,
what are you talking about?
And then he proved it.
And what's interesting is even with some of our veterans
that lost their sight through IEDs and things,
if their eye was still intact,
they actually were still able to tell day and night.
If the eye was completely removed
or the retina was completely damaged,
then as he talked about,
you'd have soldiers that say that their neighbors hated them
because they would be mowing the grass
at three in the morning.
They didn't realize what time it was.
So Russell is like the,
and one of the real grandfathers when it comes to that
and sleep as well.
So he is episode 647, amazing man.
Two of my military, sorry, three of my military guests,
actually more than that, they're all.
Okay, so Alison Breger, army sleep specialist, episode 117.
Rachel Markwald, episode 196.
She's the Navy's sleep specialist.
Those two ladies are coming on together in a few weeks
and we're gonna hit this again with the shifts.
Dr. Kirk Parsley has been multiple times,
but episode six was the first one.
Literally one of the, you know,
the first person I heard about sleep deprivation
is so worth listening to.
Dr. John Cordell, Navy captain.
He was beating the drum about sleep.
No one was listening.
They had that horrendous fatal battleship crash
where multiple sailors died.
All of a sudden the Navy started paying attention.
I don't know why we have to wait for people to die.
I was actually, this takes me to a good tangent.
I was looking back, so I was thinking,
okay, what's a good analogy for this?
Being British, you know, back in the Victorian times,
the industrial revolution,
we had children cleaning chimneys.
We had children working in factories.
And I did some Googling.
I'm like, well, you know, let me see what numbers are
because back then there were no white papers
or peer reviewed studies, you know.
So let's just see what was actually happening
that people didn't need that kind of data to make a change.
And 30,000 children died each year
and a half a million were maimed.
So what happened?
Someone said, people are dying.
We need to change things.
They didn't ask for studies.
They didn't, you know, say, show me the data.
They just realized that something was happening
where families were devastated
because they were losing children.
And it's no different in the fire service.
We are losing so many people
and I'm getting, oh, but show me the data.
That is your data.
And in 1833, the Factory Act was passed
where children weren't in chimneys and factories anymore.
It's common sense now looking back at it,
as will the kids that work and become firefighters
20 years from now, they'll look back and go,
I can't believe they used to do that.
So again, when it comes to, you know,
do you wait for everything to collapse
or do you be a thought leader
and progressively and proactively fix your profession?
So that's John Caudle, Lieutenant Colonel Janelle McCauley.
She's Air Force, same thing,
human performance, sleep, episode 175.
And these are all early ones.
This is how long I've been talking about.
I've been talking about 2472 for eight years
on this podcast.
And then Dr. Stuart McGill,
the back mechanic, was episode 95.
All right, so now let's get to
how do we actually make this happen.
So firstly, how are we finding the people?
There's a recruitment crisis.
We can't even hire people now.
I literally had an interesting conversation
with one of the Ocala firefighters.
I just bumped into the store today
and I was telling him that one of his peers,
one of the other firefighters
had messaged me on social media.
Gainesville Fire, for any of you that have been following,
Gainesville Fire Rescue just went to a 2472,
literally, I think it was this Monday.
Yeah, this last Monday.
They, from what I understand, had 300 applicants
for their fire department for,
I think it's only a few spots.
City of Ocala, from what I understand,
secondhand information, had five applicants for their spots.
So this is the problem is right now,
we have a group of very intelligent,
young potential recruits.
And I have to give a huge shout out.
Where I live, Chris Hickman started a thing
called the mentorship program.
And it's a combined thing with City of Ocala
and Marion County.
There's a lot of other people that help out with that.
And they are doing an amazing job of training young people,
removing barriers to entry,
to get the best of all the different diverse backgrounds
and get them and challenge them to be incredible recruits.
And there's scholarships for fire academies
and then loads of departments waiting to hire at the end.
So that was another tangent.
But if you wanna fix,
one of the things to fix recruitment
and certainly diversity,
because there are groups that just can't afford.
Literally my mom, my mummy paid for my fire academy
and I wasn't a young man.
So I can't imagine being in a very financially struggling
family wanting to be a firefighter
and I don't have three, four, $5,000 to go to fire academy.
So the barrier entry is a big thing.
So why is there a recruitment crisis?
20 years ago, when I was testing,
I went down to South Florida
and I worked for Hialeah and bless them, they picked me up,
but it was extremely competitive.
Then a year later, I tested in California.
I sat at the actual written
with a thousand candidates going for 30 jobs.
And these were, they made it through all the other,
the filtering process
and they were firefighter EMTs and or paramedics.
Most of them had ambulance operator experience.
Most of them have wildland experience.
A lot of them went through Explorer programs.
So I'm not just competing against Joe Blow in the street.
These are extremely competitive people
that I'm trying to get a job, one of those spots.
Fast forward now, five people testing for Ocala.
Again, if the way we're doing it is working,
I have nothing to say, but it's not.
So one of the big reasons why we have a recruitment crisis
and I hear people go, oh, it's these gen Zs,
they don't wanna work or it's the obesity epidemic,
which of course is definitely hurt in our pool of candidates.
But the biggest thing is when I went to become a firefighter
and I look in, I type in, what's it like to be a firefighter?
It's like, oh, James, it's amazing.
You get a mustache, you get leather helmet,
ladder 49, cats in trees, fires, Dalmatians.
Now, when you Google, what's it like to be a firefighter,
you get all those things,
cause the job hasn't changed.
And this is what's crazy.
The job is the same.
It's the working conditions that are devolved.
But so if I Google it, I also see firefighter cancer,
firefighter suicide.
I mean, locally here, if you put firefighter in Marion County,
the spate of suicides this area has had recently
is one of the first things that you'll see.
The divorces, I mean, all these things that we talked about.
So a young candidate now is like, okay, I've got UPS,
I've got whatever the thing, but I wanna serve.
But this is a 56 hour work week.
I've done my research about,
cause I mean, Don Campbell was on,
he was saying like he had a recruit
who had all the departments laid out
and stats and everything.
It's like, well, these guys get mandatory,
it's an eight hour week.
So if you were a young recruit looking at this,
how excited would you be?
We signed on to do the job.
We didn't sign on at 7.30 to be told you can't go home
week after week after week.
That's not the job, that's mismanagement.
So the reason we have a recruitment crisis
is we haven't fixed the working conditions.
It's that simple.
The beautiful thing is we have an opportunity
to turn the ship around, to make an absolute difference.
Because as I tell people like genuinely,
this isn't being dramatic.
At this point, you can either be the union leader,
chief city administrator, whatever,
that proactively and progressively save the city
a bunch of money, improve the morale
and health of the fire service,
improve the delivery of service,
or you can be the person that was at the helm
when your fire department sank.
Because if for example, I'm not picking on O'Callaghan,
I just know the stats.
If they only have five, then that's diminishing,
that's a line.
And then this is the other important thing.
Some people have said to me, oh, we're still able to hire.
What kind of person are you hiring?
Say about 1,000 people in Anaheim and there was 30 spots,
you're talking about whatever, 3% or yeah, 3%.
Top 3% is what they took.
So obviously it's not gonna be that acute in some places,
but arguably you wanna be taking the top 25, 30% of a list
in an ideal world.
And if you're below that as a candidate, you go, okay,
well, I need to get my CPAT higher,
I need to study more for the test
and be a better candidate next time.
But if you're taking everyone,
that means you're taking those rock stars at the top
and you're taking the opposite side at the bottom,
they're all coming and now they're promoting.
Now they're battalion chiefs.
You know what I mean?
Next thing you end up with some horrific incident
that ends up on national news, like how do we get here?
When you talk about money savings, get a lawsuit.
So don't look at the numbers that,
oh, we can still fill the spots
when you're taking almost everyone.
That's a very, very dangerous game to play as well.
But if you look at all the things, like I said,
the burnout, so we've got obviously a recruitment crisis,
but you also got a retention crisis.
I think law enforcement is worse,
but how many people are we losing
that we could have stayed an extra few years?
If their health is good and they wanted to,
that knowledge that we're losing out the back door,
they're leaving prematurely.
And then the big thing is, this young generation,
the Gen Z, they value time with their family.
They're not carpenters and mechanics
and some of these things that I wasn't, I was a farm boy,
but the generation before me, they were builders.
They were carpenters, they were trades people.
Well, now these kids are really great with computers
and all kinds of other things,
but they grew up in this world of work-life balance
and meditation and breath work and ice baths,
and they understand health.
So when they look at the way we do it now,
they're like, that doesn't seem very healthy.
All right, so let's get to the money.
Hopefully I'm not waffling too much,
but I'm trying to make these points because for me,
I look at the Behind the Shield podcast as a law,
a case, a court case.
Well, I have all these experts and people are like,
who are you, are you an expert?
And I've always said, no, I'm not.
Even my book, which I'll show at the end,
it's not written as an expert,
it's not written as some incredible biography,
it's literally written as a normal dude,
and it references all the people
that have the answers to our problems.
So where is the money?
So this is, I think, the one that most people
are really interested in.
So I did, I was part of a thing,
and I'll show you this here,
BioFight Resilience Blue Sky.
Here in Marion County,
we lost a total of four firefighters,
two within a few weeks of each other,
one of whom I taught just, I don't think it was days,
certainly weeks before,
when I did some tactical athlete training at Marion County.
And a local business person said, what are we doing here?
And there was a great research organization called IHMC,
and they are satellite offices in Ocala.
Their main one is in Pensacola.
And they work with the Navy SEALs, with NASA.
They live with NASA, with DARPA.
And DARPA is, you think, tier one, delta,
just come up with any idea and prove that it won't work.
That's where you get these crazy innovations
from satellites and all that kind of thing.
That's who they work with.
Well, they have a thing called Blue Sky,
and this businessman in the hospital district
funded a study, and we all went to,
and I was very fortunate enough to be included
as one of the voices.
And we went for two days,
and sat in a room and brainstormed,
and everyone kind of gave their thoughts,
and there were psychologists and neuroscientists,
and all kinds of people there.
And what was interesting is Marion's
union president was there,
and he said, for every recruit they hire,
it costs them $18,000.
So every time that you hire someone, you train them,
and then they walk out the door a year or two years later,
that's 18, 20 grand that you just lost.
So right there, and it's the same with that retiree,
that 10, 15, 20 year guy or girl
that may have stayed another five or 10,
they walk out the door, that's another 20 grand
that you've got to go through and replace that person with.
So that in itself, if you're bleeding people,
look at those costs.
The biggest one that, I was blown away
how many people were like,
oh, that alone pretty much covered what we needed,
was the overtime costs.
If you are currently understaffed,
and you have a vacancy,
that means that you are paying someone time and a half
to fill that vacancy.
And so, I think Marion's, I forget what it was,
I don't wanna misquote them now,
but it was an insane amount of overtime.
And some departments are spoken to,
it's literally millions and millions of dollars
in overtime alone.
A lot of time, if you look at what is needed
to make the transition, it's not a full shift.
It's not an entire start from zero,
I need another entire shift to make a D shift.
You've got Kelly days that you don't have to fill.
So you've got X amount part of a shift,
you've over hired, so you've got a few extra bodies.
You gave extra vacation days,
because your shift is so terrible,
that you could negotiate three away,
and that way you're kind of blunting the amount.
But most of people, they only needed to pay
for a half to a third of a shift to actually fill that spot.
If you've got Kelly days, you've got an overtime spot
every single time someone's on a Kelly day,
when those go away, that frees up,
that overtime money as well.
The workman's comp claims.
So if you think all the things I've said,
everything that we do makes us sick mentally and physically,
that all obviously has a downstream effect,
all the injuries, the medical retirements,
I said the workman's comp claims,
the insurance premiums being so high
because we are always hurt and sick.
That is another huge chunk of money
that if you proactively invested,
you would actually, lower premiums,
the workman's comp claims would be far less,
medical retirements, line duty deaths.
So that's another big chunk.
But like I said before, just retaining recruits
and your overtime cost alone,
if you do a financial overview,
and people ask me, have you got the numbers?
No, you've got the numbers.
Each and every one of you has got the access
to your own department's personal numbers.
They're unique, other people's numbers are obsolete.
Then the biggest one that a lot of people
don't think about is lawsuits.
I mean, I'll give you an extreme example.
How much money do you think that the city of Vivaldi
is gonna have to pay for what happened in that school?
Would that have funded extra training, fitness standards,
a fitness instructor, whatever it was, I'm not an expert,
I'm not Monday morning quarterbacking,
but obviously it was a huge, huge error.
What is the downstream cost of that
instead of proactively fixing whatever issues
that they were having?
So the lawsuits, the intersection wrecks,
the drugs that we push, the wrong drugs,
being physical with a patient
because we're so burnt out and exhausted
and it's the third time we've seen them.
And you know what I mean?
These, I know that there's people that come
and they're searching for money.
That's another one.
A healthier, more rested fire department,
this is gonna happen less.
So where is the money?
It's downstream.
You're wasting it instead of investing it.
So it's not about asking for more.
Now, budget year, would you have to go to your city
or county and say, we need to hire X amount of people?
Yes, but if you can then,
because you've done the forensics on your finances,
say, this is gonna affect this
and you're just talking retention and overtime alone,
but then every year we're gonna keep saving that,
that's where your money is.
And then as a fire department, think about that.
You've gone to your city and said,
we have a solution for the recruitment crisis
and we have a way of basically justifying
our own pay increases from here on in
because we're saving you money.
We're making you our pay increases.
A big thing I think that people don't think about too,
as our level of service is diminishing,
no, we're not telling the taxpayer.
They're not getting a partial tax refund
because now there's only three instead of four
on the engine.
And now that closest rescue is two districts away
because the one that should be covering them
is now doing inter-facility transports for the hospital.
So by fixing this, we can make sure
that delivery of services,
what the public has actually paid for and expecting.
So there's that as well.
Moving on to will our pay be cut?
I get this a lot.
Oh, you're gonna cut the hours, you're gonna cut our pay.
It's very simple.
We don't get hourly rate, we pay the salary.
You can break it down to hour,
but like I tell people, okay, now you go to training,
40 hour, do they cut your pay?
No, they adjust your pay, your hourly pay.
And that's exactly what would happen.
If you have, and this is where the recruitment thing,
you fix this now and this Boynton saw this,
Gainesville saw this, PASCO saw this.
When you say to the world,
we are gonna go to a more progressive shift
because we care about our firefighters,
people start lining up outside your department.
And now all those holes that you are plugging
have now been filled with recruits.
So there isn't that overtime to keep slamming people with.
The good thing is though, when you do get overtime,
because it's not going away,
like the Gainesville guys are telling me,
they have Gator games and all kinds of stuff
where there's lots of overtime,
but again, it's not overnight all the time.
Now your hourly rate would actually be higher,
your overtime rate would be higher.
So you're not gonna lose money,
you're actually per hour gonna gain money.
But this is another kind of urban legend fairy tale
that we've been telling ourselves is why not
to put the effort to make the change.
All right, losing overtime.
I think I touched on this before,
but the long and the short is when you became a firefighter,
we looked at how much it paid.
We didn't say, oh, but I'm gonna have all this mandatory
or overtime I'm gonna work and this is actually my salary.
So talking of the firefighter ownership,
it's on us if we can or can't afford our lifestyle.
But that being said, are there times where we need
to supplement our income? Absolutely.
But is it healthier to do it in a different capacity
rather than work yet another 24
and be away from our family for another entire day
and be even more exhausted and more likely to get burnt out?
No, it doesn't make any sense.
So I don't wanna lose my overtime is an absolute BS,
reason why we do this because I guess I said,
it's not about you, it's about them.
That being said though,
there is such a healthy alternative to this.
I know, I don't think I know a firefighter
who hasn't got a side hustle,
who isn't an innovator in some other way,
who didn't have a trade before.
You could hang drywall all day, you could install cabinets,
you could teach piano, you could personal train,
whatever it is, but you're gonna be in your own bed
that night.
So you're still able to make money,
but you go home to your family,
you sleep next to your partner and you get a good night's sleep.
The reason why this is so important
is if you watch a lot of our retirees and all you've done,
your identity has been purely, I am a firefighter,
it is a jarring transition when you leave
because you've lost your tribe, you've lost your purpose,
you lost all the things that made you that firefighter.
But if you were a firefighter and a landscaper
or whatever your thing is,
well, you've got that second tribe.
God forbid something happens in your city,
they have to cut the whole load of positions
and you get fired, which is what we've seen in the past
during the crisis, you have that to fall back on.
So ownership of the firefighter, I wanna hit that hard.
If we're gonna advocate for a work week
that's healthy for you, it is up to you to not take
a second fire department job, an overnight shift in the ER,
a private ambulance company job,
that you've used this to be with your family more
because the way that we save a lot of these firefighter
relationships is we just home more.
There is nothing more heartbreaking than promising your child
that you will be home and at 7.30 that morning
you get the phone call and you have to call them back
and say, daddy, I can't, daddy can't come home,
I'm so sorry.
And then by the time you get home, you're so damn exhausted,
you got a few hours and then off to bed
and back to the station.
So this time at home is so important
and that overtime was never promised to you,
it will always be there but it was supposed to be occasional.
When we have a hurricane blow through Florida,
it is all hands, we kiss our loved ones
and we go towards the storm, it's part of the job.
But that should not be a year in, year out
staffing procedure, it's not fair because the only people
that pay for that are the firefighters themselves,
the people that do the scheduling, 5 p.m., see ya.
So it's so unfair.
All right, I got chance, the collective host,
amazing podcast, he's running the tech here.
So we're gonna skip to what did Gainesville,
Pasco County and Boynton Beach see?
So these, what, two of these departments have recently gone,
Pasco County is going to it in 2026.
But even that, advertising that they are going
to this schedule, they are seeing a massive increase
in recruitment, morale has already gone up.
I mean, everything that we've talked about is not working,
it's starting to work.
Now, here's what's exciting is the city of Gainesville
is actually having, I forget which school it is,
I think it's, I don't wanna miss, Florida State,
I think it's Florida State are actually studying them.
I hope they got baseline pre and then they're gonna
be studying them.
So we will finally have some data, not that you need
to wait for the data because again, we all know
what it's gonna show, it's gonna be better.
But everything that we're worried about
is starting to turn around.
And if we fix this work week initially,
recruits are gonna be going for the better department
and not testing for the one that hasn't changed yet.
As we go on now and there's this progressive move
towards the shift, more and more people are gonna start
filing back into this profession.
Because think how many people have their certificate,
they just chose not to become a firefighter.
We can attract them, we can stop the people
that are thinking of retiring early, leaving,
if it suits them.
So then there are, there were so many firefighters,
so there's never gonna be like, oh, we're not gonna have
enough firefighters.
We used to have so many that we would have to wait years
to get that spot.
That's where we need to get back to, choose that top 25%.
All right, so as I said, with the financial savings,
we got the wage increases, reduced insurance premiums,
that obviously benefits everyone.
I forget who it was, but I was talking to someone
the other day and I think it was Rob Milano
and their self-insured.
So if you get your workforce healthier,
you can actually have your own insurance,
depending on the size of the city, of course, or county.
So that being said, I wanna give you some more resources.
Chief Hugh Bruder, chief of Boynton Beach Fire Department,
they went to 2472, originally from 2448, 18 months ago.
Amazing, Hugh has been in the fire service
from Miami-Dade through the ranks.
He ended up working as a city manager for a bit
and he's the Boynton Fire Chief now.
His brother has also been in the mental health space
the whole time, so amazing, amazing episode, 854.
If you haven't heard that one, listen to that one.
Dixon Phillips, one of the union leaders
in Pasco County, episode 879.
Again, this is a much bigger county
and they're having to roll it out a little slower,
but they're rolling it out.
They just took it upon themselves and said, we're doing this.
And just so you know, this is why I'm doing this.
I fielded so many phone calls, so many texts,
so many emails all over the country,
from the West Coast all the way through to the East Coast.
So the revolution has started, this is happening
and it's so exciting to see.
What I gotta point out though is if you're a thought leader
and you wanna be progressive and as Hugh talks about,
you wanna create a destination department
where people are vying to go for, this is your sign.
Now is when you need to do it.
Where I live, we have the Florida State Fire College,
an amazing college and it's in Marion County.
Now we have City of Gainesville, fire instructors,
we have Marion County, we have Ocala
and then some other ones.
But you think about this, those young recruits
that are going through the school,
just a few miles from where I'm sitting,
they're going through the pipeline.
We've got one department here, it's got 2472.
I think Ocala, correct me if I'm wrong, has a Kelly
and then Marion in 56, no Kelly,
frequent mandatory overtime.
Of those three, if you're a young recruit,
which one are you testing for?
So the people that protect my family,
because I'm in the City of Ocala
and Marion County are the paramedics, the transport medics.
The people that protect my county are the ones
that are gonna be getting the rest of the candidates.
But Gainesville, where I do jujitsu,
they're getting to choose the best of the best
for their department.
So as I said, you can be at the helm
as a progressive leader,
or you can be going down with the ship.
And I hope to God Marion County changes
because this blue sky study was done for them.
I will read you just quickly.
Put my old man glasses on a sec.
This was the first takeaway from all these great minds.
Explore how work scheduling can be improved
with interconnected goals of improving
firefight resilience and health.
Improving recruiting and retention
and reducing mandatory overtime.
Several presenters suggested exploring options
for adding more time between shifts.
In particular, there was an extensive discussion
of possibly moving to a 2472 schedule.
So number one, that was their takeaway.
So the city where I live, that these business people
put a lot of money with one of the greatest
human performance research organizations on the planet,
haven't made this change yet.
I'm just gonna say that very politically correctly.
And I hope they do because I have a vested interest
because it's my family that they're protecting.
So do you wanna be a destination department
or do you wanna be the one that's left
with all the recruits that no one wants?
You know what I mean?
It's just, it's that simple.
If we move as an entire profession,
we inspire a generation of young firefighter recruits.
And then we go back to hundreds of people testing
for a handful of jobs, which is not a fairy tale.
It's literally the fire service 10, 15 years ago.
All right, another, I think extremely valid point
is when you give more rest and recovery,
we can then put the hiring standards back
where they should be.
I'm a raise that bar kind of a guy.
City of Anaheim put that bar up.
Every, excuse me, every class lost 25% of their probies
through attrition.
And they were like, okay, you know, thanks.
There's other departments that will take you.
It's nothing personal, but this is our bar.
We're not moving our bar.
And I know from my probation, it was 365 days of terror
thinking you're gonna lose your job, you know,
and then you get to the other side
and you try not to be a Yad year and a day.
But they had incredible firefighters,
incredible engineers, incredible captains, BCs,
because the bar then stays, it's intrinsic, it's a culture.
And this was funny with the fire service.
I hear a lot of people saying,
the leather helmet is history.
Sorry, the leather helmet is a tradition,
and it's not, it's history.
Tradition is selflessness and courage
and camaraderie and service.
Those are the traditions of the fire service.
And what's interesting is we've got courage
making entry to a burning building,
but we need to find that same courage
to advocate for our people.
Because if you're, after especially hearing this
and seeing this gamut of research
and these incredible minds that I'm presenting to you,
still refusing to acknowledge the change,
then to be completely blunt,
don't show up to the funerals anymore
because you refuse to be part of the solution.
It's that simple.
We are at that point now where the evidence is irrefutable,
the sleep medicine world, the musculoskeletal injuries,
I mean, all the things.
We don't die of one thing, we die of everything.
So amongst all the other elements,
the sleep deprivation breaks us down
and whatever the weakest link is,
a blood vessel in our mind, a disc in our back,
a valve in our heart, whatever the thing is,
that's what kills us.
So this is the time for courageous leadership.
And if you don't wanna be a courageous leader,
then have the humility to step aside
and let someone else take the helm.
So that's kind of the closing thing.
I didn't see any questions pop up.
I've seen, I don't know, chance if you've got any for me,
I've just been monologuing all the way through.
Say again?
Okay, yeah.
So before I go to the very, very end,
then I'll do some questions now, as I promised,
otherwise it was just an A, no Q.
All right, how do you argue department saves
30% less, it's 30% pay?
So here's, someone said like kind of the opposite.
So it's a great, I'm glad that you asked this.
I've got a friend in the Northeast
who's surrounded by departments that work
42 hour work weeks, and they are on a 56 hour work week.
So I'm gonna flip that around.
Bearing in mind, how do you justify
that a person in admin works 40 and you work 56,
not sleeping, that you can't justify that.
But what he said is basically what the department
is saying to the 56 hour people when the 42s are a thing,
and then the fire services are general,
the Northeast, Boston, and everyone around there,
they work 42, 24, 72s, and that's normal,
which is probably why this conversation is maddening to them.
I don't understand what he's talking about.
We already do it.
A 56 hour department, you're telling your people
that they are worth 33.3% less
than the fire departments that work a 42 hour work week.
So I would flip that around.
Why are you expected to work 56
when arguably the fathers of the fire service,
the cities in the Northeast, work a 42?
So until you can explain to me, council member, whatever,
why you need to go home at 5 p.m.,
but you say that I should do two more civilian shifts
per week than you who doesn't save lives,
doesn't push meds, doesn't cut people out of cars,
then your argument is invalid.
So the pay is the salary.
It's the hours that we've got wrong for so long.
And if you wanna actually save money and fix this crisis,
here's your opportunity.
If you wanna keep bleeding and, like I said,
be at the helm of a fire department that sinks,
you keep doing what you're doing.
But like I said, don't show up at the funeral.
So again, yeah, from what I understand,
and I worked Kelly Day,
I had Kelly Days in a couple of departments
and then 10 years of 56 hour weeks,
no Kellys and frequent mandatory.
But from what I understand, I mean, if you have a Kelly Day,
obviously, if James is supposed to be there on this day shift
on the Tuesday, every Tuesday, and I'm not,
now you're filling that spot.
So you've gotta look at it as this is the overtime
that is filling these K Days.
So you're giving the K Days away.
And I forget the actual math,
but if you have Kelly Days, obviously they go away,
but you end up with a lot more days off.
So if you're fighting that,
you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The vacation day accrual, Orange County where I worked,
I forget what I had, I had like 16 vacation days a year
or something like that, and I was only there five years.
Funny enough, I earned less when I left
than when I got hired.
There we go.
But so, if someone said to me,
hey, we're gonna go to 2472,
but James, we're gonna have to give away
four of your vacation days in lieu of whatever it is,
30 days more a year, then I'm not a math genius,
but that works for me.
But that being said, when it comes to specifics like that,
I'm not the expert.
I'm literally the conduit between the real experts
and you guys.
So what I would do, Chief Hugh Bruder
is always open to conversation.
He went from 2448, they were Kelly's intermittently,
and then they went to 2472.
So I reached out to Hugh.
I think he's ultimately gonna be speaking.
Oh, well, I remember, let me look it up,
the Florida Fire Chiefs Conference.
I don't normally ever speak, but I'm Q&Aing,
I'm chairing a Q&A, and we have Pasco,
we have Hugh, we have Dixon,
and then we've got one of the Gainesville Chiefs
coming on as well.
So we'll have the three departments
that are recently gone are about to go,
and then we have one of the neuro, excuse me,
the firefighter health scientists coming on as well.
So that will be, it's the one,
it's the seventh, eighth, ninth in Orlando.
So if you're around there,
you actually get to physically ask these people yourself.
I mean, here's what's sad.
I, and I think I said this on a quick short video
when I was promoting this.
When I left my last apartment,
I gave up my pension to start the Behind the Shield.
So I basically cashed out,
gave myself a salary for a year and a half
to do this full on.
And because for me,
burying my friends was enough in itself.
And this is what I've said before.
I struggle to understand why a chief or a union leader
wouldn't be scouring the edges of the earth
to find solutions after burying their men and their women.
It is enough to move me, that's it.
All you have to say is people are dying.
Like I work for free.
I have sponsors, not been a great financial year,
not making as much as I gave up, but it's not about that.
It's about this.
It's about less last calls and less bagpipes,
less helmets being handed to broken hearted children.
But that being said,
not all the people have the same servant's heart that we do.
And so it boils down to money.
So if you again, go to your city or your county
and you ask them to forensically analyze
how much you spend on overtime at the moment,
what is your recruitment and retention?
What are your workman's comp fees?
And then if they're able to,
are there any fire related lawsuits?
And can you just tell me how much the settlement was?
That's gonna show you how much money is,
cause it's two trays in and out.
So this is the thing.
I mean, I like to compare this to nationally.
I come from a country that had the national health,
which when it was first put in place,
I would argue is the best healthcare system in the world.
The reason I say that is if it's done properly,
it costs the taxpayer very little.
And the focus is making the country as healthy as possible
that they only need to really use it in car accidents
and childbirth and taking care of the elderly
and special needs and the occasional A&E visit.
But what's happening in my beloved country
is they're getting fatter and sicker
and my beautiful healthcare system is falling apart
cause it wasn't designed to be used
and it's kind of partly privatized and picked apart
and to the point where it's bleeding.
So the healthier the department,
the less money you cost.
The healthier a nation, the less money we cost.
So we don't ask, the focus is not to ask for more money.
It's just to show them, look,
you'd show me the figures, here's the money.
We just need to do this recruiting one time,
with these new people,
and you're gonna keep saving year after year after year,
and you're gonna look like a rock star.
And you can say it was your idea,
massage the ego if you have to,
but the reality is that it's the money
that's really gonna talk.
And I think sadly, that's the case
with most cities and counties,
but that's a beautiful thing.
It will work.
There are money savings there,
so you don't have to cook the books.
You just have to do good forensic accounting.
Ask for the right numbers and say,
look, if we proactively fix this, more rest and recovery,
let me show you Gainesville.
Let me talk to their chief
and find out what happened to them.
And then you're off to the races.
So firstly, hey, Matt, he's been on my show.
I think we came on twice now, Matt.
So when people save as far as a data,
like I said before,
really you need to go to your own department.
Now you can absolutely kind of find out,
all right, South Metro, wherever you are,
what would be an appropriate size.
So for you, I would assume city of Gainesville
would probably be a good one.
So again, contacting Matt and Brian
and some of the leaders there
would be a great way of finding out,
okay, what did you see?
What were the savings?
But they're somewhat new to this.
So the problem is the data is gonna take a while to accrue.
So if you go back to all the data we've shown
on what happens with seat deprivation and all the things,
and you look at your department and go,
oh, we're getting all those things.
And South Metro is a very, very progressive fire department.
I've had Chris Macklin on the show
and most of the things are doing really well.
The shifts, they're not there yet,
but I know they're talking about it.
But this is what happens.
So we put in a mental health counselor
and we put in the strength and conditioning coach,
and that's amazing.
But if you listen to any of the high level coaches
of which I've had so many, Dan John,
and so many people that train tactical athletes,
sporting athletes, they all say,
if you are not sleeping,
the exercise and the nutrition side
is not completely wasted,
but it falls by the wayside.
The sleep is the pillar of health.
So it's going back to just understanding that.
But what I would say everyone is, again,
just forensically look at your own department.
You need your numbers.
Like the city of Boynton Beach,
Pasco's numbers aren't gonna help them.
Pasco County is a county,
and it's a completely different animal.
So I would go to your own place, say,
can you show me where we're losing all this money?
And then obviously, you put your common sense hat on,
okay, 42 hours a week is gonna be a lot healthier than 56,
more rest and recovery, and we're gonna see,
okay, we've got all these muscular skeletal injuries
in Workman's Comp.
Well, we know that more rest and recovery
will allow people to heal.
They'll have more energy.
We can implement a better strength and conditioning program,
get people to lose some weight,
and it's just this positive vicious circle.
So as far as data, Matt,
I don't know if you caught earlier in the conversation,
but what I was saying is if you listen to the research
in the fire service, the researchers,
they haven't done any studies at all on this.
So this is why we're behind the eight ball,
and this is why people ask me to see a data,
because I know you've tried and you can't find it
because it doesn't exist.
So we have to go to the military and these other places,
but now we have some fire departments
that are starting to go.
They would be your absolute best resource.
And like I said, I know all of them,
they are extremely excited about doing this
for their own fire departments,
and every single one of them I've spoken to
is more than happy to help other departments get there too.
So what I would say is Chief Bruder, Dixon Phillips,
Matt Harrison, Brian O'Connell,
any of those guys reach out to them,
ask them where they can sort the savings,
but most importantly, then turn the mirror around,
look at your own department
so you can say these are our numbers,
because that's what's gonna sell it.
If you say, oh, this department did this
and this was their numbers,
you're not digging into your own department.
But if you can show that you're spending, for example,
$3 million on overtime filling vacancies
because of recruitment crisis and lack of retention,
right there and then you're talking about numbers
that will catch people's eyes.
Two things, firstly, in a second,
I'm gonna talk about 911 Telehealth,
which I think is gonna help pre-hospital and hospital.
But that being said,
I think digging into the world of sleep medicine,
it's gonna show the doctors and nurses, like I said,
we all know that a lot of our physicians and nurses
also struggle with a lot of these things,
suicide and the weight gain and the heart attacks
and all the things.
So understanding the sleep medicine
and understanding the research through this fight
that we're trying to do in the fire service
absolutely has a place in the hospital setting as well.
I'll give you a good example of why you need to challenge
the way things were done.
This is a true story, I've had many people verify it,
but you hear about the residents
and the crazy hours that our junior doctors
or new physicians work in these hospitals.
And the origin story of that is there was a,
I think it was a surgeon a long time ago,
I think it was like 100 years ago.
And he would be awake for hours and hours and hours
and hours and so obviously when you're a young student,
you're like, well, I need to be awake with my physician,
my teacher.
Well, years later, they discovered
that he was a cocaine addict,
very different time back then,
you could probably get it anywhere.
So he was up for hours and hours
because he was tweaking this whole time.
And this became a standard for residents, junior doctors,
depending on which country you're in for a long, long time.
It's only recently they finally started unpacking
and going, wait a second,
we shouldn't be working 60, 70 hours a week
for physicians that are making life or death decisions
in an ER or in an operating theater.
So absolutely this whole sleep conversation,
if I'm gonna want an ER nurse to be awake from 8 a.m.
to 8, sorry, from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.,
then do I need to put more rest and recovery in their shift?
If the corporate world has gone down
to a 32 hour work week,
why shouldn't that apply to our law enforcement,
our nurses, our corrections officers,
and all the other people that can't do a 24,
they have to do 12s or 10s and 14s?
Well, what's bananas is this is the resource.
As I mentioned, there's some resources
that I've mentioned in this resource.
So you can go down an immense rabbit hole.
And I always tell people, if you're looking for even more,
you've listened to the 10 episodes on sleep deprivation
that I mentioned today
from all the branches of the military and sports,
I can give you another 30.
So the biggest thing is,
firstly, watch this from the beginning.
For everyone that's not aware, I'm recording this.
So I'm gonna post this on Twitter.
So I'm gonna post this as Tuesday's podcast,
and it will be in video format on YouTube as well.
So I'm gonna share it.
I don't know if it's too long for the socials,
but it will be on YouTube.
But this is the resource.
Hopefully this is something
that now will be a living document
that you can just say to your membership,
hey, we're emailing you this however long it's been.
I can't see a clock, an hour and a half conversation,
or not even conversation, this English guy yapping.
But everything that you were like, oh yeah,
but there's a solution to that.
And again, as someone pointed out,
anyone can go on a podcast.
I'm merely telling you what the experts are saying,
and I'm giving you all the resources
that you can dive into their work.
And these are the people that literally deal with this
for the military and the psychology
and all these other worlds.
So the answer is make them listen to this.
Put it around and say, look, this will appease your fears.
For the wages that, it's all urban legends.
When you unpack it, we've literally been
just making stuff up as we went along.
So will the money change?
No, like I said, your overtime rate will actually go up
and hopefully the mandatory overtime will go away.
And we are literally gonna revolutionize the fire service
because if we had people lining up to do this job
and we took the top 25, 30%, only 10, 15 years ago,
certainly 20 years ago when I joined the fire service,
there's no reason why we can't get back there again.
But this is a very smart generation.
Until we fix the things that are broken,
they're not gonna test for us.
So if they wanna stop working mandatory overtime,
if they wanna have more time with their loved ones,
take 90 minutes, put this in.
During a commute, there'll be an audio only version
when I put this out on Tuesday
and just allow yourself to drop your guard,
listen to the solutions and realize that this is just gonna
be a solution for so much.
And we're never gonna save everyone,
but we're gonna make an immense dent
into the medical and medical,
the mental and physical health crisis that we're in
because I don't know about you,
but I'm so tired of burying my friends.
So again, it depends on the dynamic.
Some people over hire a little bit to cover,
because this is the we haven't talked about,
we talk about Kelly days, well, obviously you've got
sick days, you've got vacation days,
you've got workman's comp, you've got all these holes.
So this is why I say every department needs to do
their own forensic look, look at the holes,
the staffing holes, who is filling those holes
at the moment, that time and a half will go away
if you had an actual full-time employee there.
But some have Kelly, some have don't Kelly,
as I mentioned earlier, some have a lot more vacation days
than others, so that's then a negotiation tool
if I'm gonna gain 30 extra days a year off
and I give away four vacation days,
I'm still winning immensely.
But it's literally department to department.
So the answer is, Randy, how many would you need?
So I would do the, ask for the forensic accounting on,
what are we spending on overtime?
What are we losing on recruits that leave our department,
if that's the case?
Are we offering, people are offering bonuses now,
like sign-on bonuses.
Like I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation,
I tested against a thousand people for 30 spots
and now we're giving sign-on bonuses
trying to attract people, so that would go away.
You know what I mean?
So there's a huge amount of money,
but again, if you missed part of this conversation,
when this goes out as a recording,
listen to it from the beginning
and I promise your questions will be answered.
So as I mentioned before,
it's, I haven't had a department yet that did it,
that said they needed an entire shift.
This is the kind of misnomer as well.
Like I said, you've either got Kelly days,
you've got up staffing, you've got extra people,
but it's a department by department.
But what you're really doing is again,
you have to do the accounting first,
you have to show them, this is where the money is.
They're overtime, they're retention,
they're wasted recruitment costs
on people that leave your department.
The workman's comp claims,
the lawsuits from exhausted firefighters,
figure out where that money is and show the department,
there is the money.
Now this budget year, you've already wasted this money.
People are already broken, we're understaffed,
the money's already there.
So this budget year, yes,
you are gonna have to put your big boy pants on,
ask for a little bit more of a budget,
but educating the people that you're asking it from,
I'm obviously talking from a city and county manager
point of view now.
This is just to get the staffing here
and all these costs are gonna reduce dramatically.
And again, I would use other departments as a resource.
How did they do it?
I didn't do it.
I'm James Gearing sitting in my dining room in my house,
but I've heard so many people that have now.
And then more and more people getting messages
and people saying they've just gone to it as an EMS agency.
They're small, but they just had the largest hiring class
they've ever had in their history after they went to 2472.
So use the resources of the people
that have already gone to it
in the episodes that I talked about,
but every single one of you,
you need to go to your department
and ask how much you're spending
on all these things that I mentioned.
That's where your budget is.
It's just downstream.
So once they can see this is gonna be the savings,
it's not gonna be all of it, of course,
but a massive dent, that's how you make the sell.
But yes, of course you're gonna have to come up
with a little bit money short-term,
but if you've got to build a new school in your town,
they're gonna have to put money out.
That's what cities and counties have to do sometimes.
Ah, great question.
Put that bar back up where it's supposed to be.
Now this is a double-edged sword.
We miss a lot of great candidates
because they're in a part of town
that maybe they don't have the money
to put themselves through fire academy,
as I was saying earlier.
So mentorship programs are phenomenal.
Chris Hickman, the Ocala Marion Mentorship Program,
absolutely amazing.
So you first, you go into your city,
figure out where it is underserved,
whether it's race or whatever, orientation,
whatever the thing is,
and then challenge those young people to rise up
and be excited about being a firefighter.
And then you pick the ones
that can actually reach that bar.
But then obviously the ones that are already certified,
they're already eligible,
just put your bar up high.
If you've got a thousand people, Anaheim did that.
And then they literally would lose 25% of every class
through attrition.
And it was terrifying being a pro-be for a year,
but you forged,
I went to excellence is the wrong word
because you're not excellent after a year,
but you forged the philosophy
of pursuing excellence as a firefighter.
And that was the entire kind of vibe.
And the real word I'm escaping, but yeah.
So if you have a lot of people, that's beautiful.
Now you just get to put that bar up high.
So have a solid written, have a solid physical.
If you do the CPAT, you don't have to have 10, 20,
you can ask your candidates to get to 9, 20.
You know what I mean?
So making it fair, mentoring people
that maybe aren't being accessed normally
that have barriers to entry and bringing them in as well.
But yeah, I mean, how exciting to have a load of people
wanting to work for you.
You get to choose the best.
That's a great question.
Chuck was on the show, absolute must listen as well.
A phenomenal leader in the fire service.
I just had that conversation
because I think Ocala are kind of mid contract at the moment.
So honestly, I think it's education, it's storytelling.
Like I said, we've told ourselves a lot of fairy tales.
If you were here at the beginning,
we had the, oh, I work one day on two days off
and we don't, we work three eight hour days
crammed together one day off.
So debunking these myths.
I'm gonna use this prop because I had it ready
and I forgot to use it.
There is a massive push at the moment for the 4896.
If you caught any of the sleep deprivation conversation,
you would understand immediately
why that's a horrible way to go.
But I wanted to illustrate, I literally paid 20 bucks
so I could buy these for this demonstration.
The 56 hour work week, 2448, 4896.
The Berkeley schedule, I worked in California.
Everyone spins the cube,
but no one asks why is the cube so big?
That is your 56 hour work week, that is your 42.
So this is the thing,
we've got to stop telling ourselves fairy tales,
stop arguing about shift patterns
that literally fix nothing
and actually fight for the one
that's actually gonna make a massive difference.
So mid-contract, I think it's just educating everyone
from the firefighter through to the county and cities.
So when the contract comes around,
you're not even negotiating,
it's a shoe-in because everyone understands by that point.
So this is the thing,
I mean, would it going through tomorrow be ideal?
Absolutely, because that means that tomorrow night,
people get to be in their bed an extra night
every shift cycle.
But next best thing is getting everything ready
so by the time you hit that contract negotiation,
everyone from the firefighter to the general public
understand why you're doing it.
I work three shifts and we always have the same pay periods.
So again, I'm not an expert, I'm not a financial guru,
but actually this is completely different tangent.
While we're on other solutions,
another thing that Sarah Jenke talked about
in the research where I think is genius
is also when do we have shift change?
So the conversation first should be the workweek.
So let's say hypothetically you're making,
so like Chuck, you're talking about mid-contract,
all right, we wanna go to 2472, we're all in agreement.
But the other thing is I've always come in
at like seven, 730, my whole career.
I've always lived,
because this is normally the case with a lot of us,
you can't afford to live where you work,
so you live quite a long way away.
So it was usually like a 70 mile commute,
hour, 15 hour and a half.
And so I'm getting up at five in the morning.
Well, the night before the shift
is often when we get the worst sleep.
So what I love as well, and this is,
and again, I can't speak from experience,
I've never done this, but coming in at midday.
So imagine this, you're already doing a 2472,
but in this contract agreement, you've also said,
we're gonna have shift change at midday.
The reason I say that, now I wake up,
I actually have breakfast with my son,
I get him off to school, then I get in my car,
I've missed rush hour, now I get to change shifts,
the person I relieve is also not in rush hour,
they get to go home, they're at home in time for dinner,
flip that round on its back, the person who's on shift
got their rear end handed to them all night,
and we don't have to wake him up at seven o'clock.
That blew my mind in most of the departments,
they would wake everyone up.
Anaheim was great, they would let us sleep,
and we would just take our partner's gear off,
and we put our gear on, and when they woke up,
if there's anything pertinent
they haven't written on the board, then they could tell us.
But to allow someone to sleep in,
if they've had a rough shift,
and then to allow the person who's oncoming
to not get there till midday,
I think that's genius as well.
I think that would be another game changer,
because the night before shift,
you would actually have a good night's sleep too.
As far as the pay periods, I don't think it would change,
but again, I would contact Hugh Bruder,
but I wanted to throw that in,
I think that's another genius solution.
I've been doing this, and there's been a change of guard,
and I'm hoping that this is now something
that they're addressing, but let's just talk about
when I was on, and I transitioned out five years ago,
I agree 100%.
What I understood, and I paid my dues
my whole career, what I understood as working conditions
was the number one thing when it came to unions.
And if you look at the trucking union, the shipping union,
the pilots union, I mean, all those,
they have all this time, you can't fly,
you need this amount of rest.
So the work week was very important.
And I just don't understand why it hasn't,
especially, and here's what was interesting,
I actually was just Googling it,
because I was, this is constantly in my mind.
Fairfax, Virginia, where a lot of our guys from IFF
were when I was in as a firefighter,
the leadership, IFF leadership,
they still work 56 hours to this day.
So they didn't even have that conversation
with their own department,
even though the Northeast was predominantly 2472.
So if someone has a great answer,
if someone's progressive in the IFF leadership,
that they wanna lead this charge nationally,
because I think it should be an industry standard.
And as I said at the very beginning,
of course there will be quiet fire departments
or fire stations where people already aren't doing a lot,
but they're still away from their family.
Like I went around the world with a group of Navy SEALs
and triathletes called Seven X about 18 months ago.
And so I got to see, I literally live on a plane for,
I think we were on the plane for nine days
while we went around the world
and these guys ran marathons on every continent.
And so you saw what crew rest looks like.
Now that crew was sleeping on that plane,
but they weren't having their hours docked
where they were sleeping.
They weren't telling them to do busy work
and go check hydrants and all that stuff.
They have to be asleep, that's stipulation.
So if all these other industries are okay
with their people having rest and recovery,
why isn't there this massive outcry
when it comes to the fire service,
especially when we have the immense physical
and mental health crisis?
So I'm not, new leadership, new people now,
I know it's more Boston focused.
I really hope this becomes a massive conversation.
I haven't heard anything.
I've been doing this for eight years
from any of the letter organizations in the fire service,
even though, like I said, I paid my dues for a long time,
but what an opportunity to change now.
If you haven't yet, let's start the conversation.
So I hope they do.
Absolutely, I did talk about it earlier, Ryan,
but I will just quickly go over it again.
Chief Hugh Bruder, city of Boynton Beach,
went to it 18 months ago.
You can listen to him on episode 854.
Dixon Phillips, one of the union leadership
in Pasco County, Florida, episode 879.
Matt Harrison and Brian O'Connell
from the city of Gainesville that just went to it Monday,
episode 942.
So you'll find all their kind of contact information there.
And then Dixon, Pasco County are actually transitioning
fully in 2026.
So it's another interesting one.
You've got small, mid and large department.
You've got some that have been doing it for a while,
one that just went and one that's going to it.
So it's a pretty comprehensive perspective of how to
and the hurdles.
So, but I'm relaying a lot of the solutions
that they gave in this Q&A to make it
in one compact video session.
Well, here's the thing.
I mean, firstly, what we signed up for,
because in Fire Academy, you became,
let me put it this way, you became a firefighter
in the Fire Academy.
They never talked about your work week.
So what you signed up for was to be a firefighter
and an EMT or a paramedic.
And I adore this profession,
which is why six years later, I'm still fighting for it.
But that's not what you signed up for.
That's the working conditions.
And as I touched on earlier,
we used to send children up chimneys
and having them work in factories.
Well, it's what we've always done.
So what you signed up for doesn't mean that it's right.
And you can't justify working 40 hours
and then pointing someone and say,
well, that's what you signed up for.
But then again, the biggest thing,
if they have no heart, and I hope people out there do,
but let's just say they're unable to access it,
is the financial savings.
Well, the way that you're doing it now
is literally destroying the fire department
and we can barely recruit anyone.
And you will be known as the commissioner
who was at the helm, who fought this and resisted it.
And you'll be known as the one
who was there when the ship sank.
Or you can progressively actually invest in your people,
fix this, and you'll be known as one of the people
that made this a destination fire department,
that made the city safer for its residents.
You can be the hero.
But it's what you signed up for is not,
because I could take my firefighter certification
and go to Boca Raton or the city of Boynton Beach,
and I signed up for a 42-hour work week.
It just so happens that yours is a 56.
That's not what you signed up for.
And if you show them that there's
many, many fire departments that work 42,
and then you relay these other ones
and tell them that there is a revolution,
and if the departments around you go to it and you don't,
you won't be able to hire anyone,
maybe that'll be enough.
But I mean, sadly, let's be honest as well,
there are some people in these positions
that just don't care.
I got mine.
So you gotta find everyone else
and create that groundswell.
But you're getting to the point of heartlessness now
if that's their only response,
because there's no sense behind it whatsoever.
Yeah, I'm just gonna wrap it up.
So two things.
If you wanna learn more, this isn't a sales pitch,
but I did write a book four years ago
called One More Life, Life, Death, and Humanity
Through the Eyes of a Firefighter.
The only reason I say that, it's not a biography.
I will underline this again.
I am you.
I am a regular firefighter.
I wasn't at any big event.
I didn't do anything heroic.
Just did what we all did.
But what I did is took a bunch of my stories
from my life and career in each chapter
as like a short story, but then as a takeaway
and explain sleep deprivation, mental health,
suicide, injuries, the obesity crisis.
So it's just, well, I don't understand.
It's another layer.
If people read, give them that book and say,
this is what we do.
This is what it actually looks like
to be a firefighter paramedic in America.
So that's a resource for you.
The podcast Behind the Shield is completely free.
You have to pay for the book because they have to print it,
but it's very, very cheap on Amazon.
But yeah, the podcast is almost a thousand episodes now
Behind the Shield.
There's, I wanna touch on one thing
before I let you guys go that I think is extremely exciting.
I'm just gonna sow a little seed.
I'm not gonna tell you the whole thing.
I have just discovered an incredible national resource
that is doing amazing things integrating telehealth
into the 911 system.
And this is not the community paramedic.
This is literally you call 911, you,
if it's obviously through the EMD
that you've realized it's a somewhat non-emergent call,
you then get the option to do a video conference
with the ER physician or a nurse practitioner.
They can write prescriptions.
They can set up urgent care clinic appointments.
They can set up Ubers and lifts to get you to and from.
And so all the calls that they should never have called us
in the first place, there's another incredible resource
that I'm gonna be bringing to you
that is gonna address that as well.
So imagine if we could get the work week
where it needs to be, eliminate some of the calls that,
let's be honest, it's benefiting everyone.
What's gonna happen is the person's gonna get
a lot smaller bill, because they're not gonna enter an ER.
An ER bed is gonna stay open for someone who's really ill
and you guys won't even get called.
That won't even become a 911 for you.
You won't get toned out.
So it's a win, win, win.
So if you can address the work week
and eliminate some of these calls
and be available for that stroke,
that horrendous accident, that structure fire,
which we should be doing, again,
that's what we signed up for, not running as I had.
Oh, my dentures, I don't like the taste of them.
That's not a 911 call.
So if we can do it both sides, I mean, man,
oh my God, we make such an impact.
And then we could set that bar high.
People have time to work out, to train, to eat together,
to spend more time talking around the kitchen table,
offloading some of the trauma.
It would be incredible.
So just keep your eye on that.
The telehealth conversation, I'll be announcing that.
So that is the next thing.
But I'm gonna wrap this up.
I've been talking a lot longer than I thought
I could even possibly do it,
but I hope it's brought solutions to most of the questions.
Use this as a resource.
Like I said, once this is recorded,
I'll be putting it out on Tuesday,
and then it will be out for you to share completely for free.
Give it to whoever you want.
And then feel free, obviously, to message me.
But I would honestly recommend the departments
that have already gone or are about to go,
they're the SMEs, they're the ones that, you know,
but if you find out the bleeding side financially
of your department, that is your ammunition for this.
You know, the science and the empathy
and the compassion side and saving fire, fire lives,
that should move your people.
The financial savings should move your cities and counties,
and together, you should have everything you need
to make this happen.
So thank you so much.
I hope this helps, and signing out.
Thank you.