I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast
that is Transcend.
Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did
for 14 years.
Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido,
hair loss, etc.
Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have
seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely
incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left, right
and center.
So I myself wanted to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology
and then offer supplementations without ramming, for example, hormone replacement therapy down
my throat.
Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason
why the 7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations.
They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first
responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual.
So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood
drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they
guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.
In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been
very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place.
So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology
knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done.
Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies
they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.
So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low,
but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own.
So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that
you can't come back from.
So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely
one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.
So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the
Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling.
This episode is sponsored by Global Medical Response, yet another sponsor that I have tracked
down because they have a solution to one of the biggest problems we have in emergency
medicine and healthcare.
We often hear the term 911 abuse, but what I love is the concept that this should be
a three tier system, ALS, BLS and then the non-emergent element.
With the evolution of telehealth and telemedicine, that third tier is now possible virtually.
In 2018, Global Medical Response pioneered 911 nurse navigation.
In communities across the country, GMR's nurse navigators use evidence-based clinical protocols
to screen a patient's current condition, providing an appropriate resource to meet the patient's
unique healthcare needs, whether that's dispatching a rideshare to an urgent care and a point
management at a federally qualified health center or virtual care with a physician on
the spot.
The five level screening system ensures patients receive the right resource at the right time
in the right setting to achieve the right outcome at the right cost.
So as a huge advocate for our first responders health and of course the people that we serve,
this solves three issues.
It allows the patient to have a far less expensive option when it comes to their non-emergent
issue.
It stops a firefighter or a paramedic being woken up for that call and it frees up an
ER bed for a true emergency.
So if you want to hear more about how GMR can integrate nurse navigation in your 911
system, listen to episode 998 with Joshua Rose and Dr. Jared Troutman or go to globalmedicalresponse.com.
This episode is sponsored by TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things
for the first responder community.
As a strength and conditioning coach myself who also trains tactical athletes, dissemination
of wellness information is one of the biggest challenges.
TeamBuildr is the premier strength and conditioning software for tactical athletes and there are
several features that really impress me.
Firstly there is a full exercise library so you the personal trainer does not have to
create that within your own department.
Secondly, you can send out programming but also individualize, which I love.
So you blanket program for everyone.
Now you can tweak based on someone's injury, someone's need to maybe drop some body composition
rather than having to write a program for every single person on their own.
TeamBuildr also allows you to build custom questionnaires to collate health and wellness
data.
It integrates with wearables and I think one of the most important things is obviously
it tracks.
To me it's imperative that we as a profession start tracking our people from day one and
then over the full span of their career, therefore catching potential wellness issues and injuries
before they happen.
Now if you want to try TeamBuildr they are offering you, the audience of the Behind the
Shield podcast, a free 14-day trial to experience all of the features.
And if you want to take a deeper dive into TeamBuildr, listen to episode 1032 with
Melissa Mercado or go to teambuildr.com and I'll spell that to you because it's not as
you think.
T-E-A-M-B-U-I-L-D-R.com.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show veteran, lawyer and state representative Danny Alvarez.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from his journey into the military,
the world of law, immigration, the American dream, the firefighter work week, Wave, the
incredible technology that's helping with PTSD and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So that being said, I introduce to you Danny Alvarez.
Enjoy.
Well Danny, I want to start by saying welcome to my home and thank you for driving all the
way from the other side of the state.
Thank you for having me my brother.
It's an honor to be here.
It really is.
So for people listening, if you were at your residence, where are we finding you today?
You'd be finding me down right outside of Fishhawk in Hillsborough County outside of
Tampa.
So I heard you on one of the podcasts, it's not complaining is the wrong word, saying
that around your area the traffic is terrible because of the overdevelopment.
So as an icebreaker, because most of us in Florida have to deal with a lot of traffic,
especially I think post COVID with the influx.
So what is the issue that you're dealing with in your own home at the moment?
Is it about traffic or you mean?
Yeah, like just the whole, I think overdevelopment traffic truly is.
So what ends up happening?
This is a Florida wide story, but Hillsborough County seems to like have a magnifying glass
on it.
And as we asked people to come to Florida, because it's the great state and we love it
so much somewhere along the line, someone or somebodies forgot to add some infrastructure
transportation, fire stations and all that stuff.
But the problem is people paid for it, right?
They paid for it in their impact fees.
They paid for it in their development fees.
So right now it's a constant state of catch up and it's constant state of blaming somebody
else.
At some point we just say, okay, enough blaming, let's fix it ourselves.
So Hillsborough County is an incredible place to live.
But when you are getting to the point where people are so frustrated that they're talking
about leaving, right?
So we attracted them.
Now can we keep them?
The investment infrastructure has got to be there so that we can keep them and then continue
to make people happy because we're not done growing.
It's still growing.
We were just out, we had a big old wedding party yesterday, right?
And we had it at the East side, the Southeast side of the county.
And in the old days, when I say the old days, I'm talking about like 20 years ago, you know,
in our lifetime, you would need a passport to go out there before you saw a house, right?
And then now it's just development, development, and then there's a little bit of cow land
left.
So it's just the way it is.
Things are changing, but we got to put in that infrastructure to make sure it can work.
Absolutely.
And protect agriculture, but we'll jump into that in a bit.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, then I'd love to start at the very beginning of your journey and then we'll obviously get
to the key topics that we want to hit.
So tell me where you were born.
All right.
Tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Okay.
I was born 50 years ago.
I can't even believe we say that.
50 years old.
That's crazy.
I'm 52.
You're 52 or five also.
Five as well.
50 as well.
Is it like when you talk about that, aren't you like weirded out a little bit?
It sounds weird.
I look in the mirror and I see how gray and wrinkly I am and then go, oh, okay.
I am 50.
Yeah.
But like when my dad was like in his forties, I was like, that dude's old as heck.
And I look now and I'm like, I have seven kids total.
And I look, I'm like, do they see me the same way?
So that makes me hit the gym just a little bit harder because even if I look at, I'll
always smoke them.
So I just want you to know that that's always coming.
So I was born in Miami and then I was raised in Houston, Texas until I was about 12.
So around 12 or 13, we came back and I'll tell you that in a second.
But when I came back, I had a Texas accent.
So I'm a Cuban kid, right?
Trying to like reintegrate into like Cuban Miami.
And I would say, Hey y'all and yes ma'am.
And I remember like, I grew up in this really, really tight bubble.
Like we were Catholic.
So it was a Catholic school, you know, that you're, you're perfect Hispanic, Catholic
Cubans in Texas.
And when I came back, my teacher was Jewish.
And I remember like, she's like setting up this diorama outside of our classroom.
And I remember telling her, I was like, ma'am, where's Jesus in this thing?
And she goes, well, Danny, like we, we don't believe in Jesus in my religion.
And I was like, well, ma'am, I don't know about you, but you're going straight to hell.
My mom had to run down and her broken English and explained to them that, you know, I didn't
mean any harm by it.
But so we, you know, we, my parents are Cuban.
You and I probably shouldn't even be having this conversation because I shouldn't even
be in this country.
But for like the communist revolution that took over and then put a gun to my family's
head literally, and they escaped to America.
That was in 1959 and 1961 respectively.
My dad's what's called a Peter Pan kid.
So he came over by himself with his brother through a Catholic church program that the
priests helped administer a foster care program here.
So for about two years while my grandparents waited to see if Castro would be as bad as
they thought it was.
And then finally they, they're like, they couldn't take any more.
They came over.
That's one side.
My other grandfather was a sixth grade educated kid who became a soldier.
He was in the Navy at one point, became a soldier.
And then once the, the opposition won, they went into hiding while they were waiting for
my grandmother's family to provide a visa back in America.
So he, they would hide literally all over the place.
And my grandfather would sell eggs on the street.
I don't know where he got the eggs.
That's just our story.
Probably chickens.
Yeah, probably.
I'm no scientist, but so we remember the story gets told to us all the time where, you know,
the day the visa came in, my grandma, my mom says that the guy that was in charge of their
block was a major in the army, but he took a liking to my aunt and my, my mom.
And so he came and got my grandfather and they, and so he was hiding, but hiding in
the open.
Like, so like the bad guys that everyone converts for their survival or they, they suffer the
consequence.
So he took my grandfather away and they thought, oh, they're never going to see my grandfather
again.
So my grandmother gets my aunt and my mom takes them to the airport.
They get strip searched.
They get things taken away as they get on the airplane.
There's my grandfather with that major sitting in the airplane.
And then the major says goodbye, gets off the airplane and he saved my grandfather's
life literally.
Cause there's no way he would have been them that he was on a list that he, in fact, they
were in prison and he had escaped at one point.
So we shouldn't be in America.
So we take our American story and our family very, very seriously.
Whether that's in service or in giving back to the community or how, you know, how we
look at governance overall, that's, that's a big part of our story.
So born in 74 grew up in Houston, went to rodeos, you know, that was our, that was our
field trip, you know, growing up in that kind of culture.
It was funny at the time I was like the only kid who spoke Spanish, I thought, you know,
and then when I came to Miami, I realized I was not as unique as we thought we were.
So yeah, that's it.
Very much.
Just from a eyewitness firsthand account, what were the atrocities that the Cuban people
were suffering that so many were fleeing from?
Well, you know, if you were to talk to my grandfather, like his friends and civilians
and people that they knew would get murdered by the firing squad, they'd get everything
taken away from kids.
The reason my grandparents sent my uncle and my dad over was because they were taking kids
away from their families to go to these re indoctrination camps to kind of teach them
the ways of the other communist ways and the socialist ways.
You'd have people literally just disappear off the street one day, never to be seen from
or heard from again.
Some would reappear like 18 years later, having been put in a political prison that you didn't
know even existed.
So really it was a it was a total transformation of a society where back in 1959 it was Cuba
was run by a dictator and a sergeant decided he wanted to do a coup and took over.
But it was like the fifth coup in a row.
You know what I mean?
So the upheaval wasn't unusual, but there was a thriving middle class.
And so, you know, we look at societies and we say if they're going to make it or they're
not by the level and strength of their middle class.
Well, Cuba had a very strong middle class.
And that was what was really took the greatest hit.
So when they got stuff stripped away from them, you know, they had no choice.
They left.
And now we see the effects of the social engineering now.
So so when you get Cubans arrive today from from from Cuba, they're just not the same
type of person that comes in there.
They're survivors.
Right.
These are people that have done anything they can, any scheme against the government to
survive because when you have a allocation booklet and it says you get like two loaves
of bread and that ain't going to cut it for your family, you figure it out and you figure
it out quick.
So when they come to America, man, this is the easiest place to exploit.
So unfortunately, what ends up happening is it's the the temptation is so big.
And this is not to cast any aspersion against like recently arrived Cubans.
There's tons of great ones that never get in trouble.
But I will tell you, when I worked in the sheriff's office, if we had some sort of fuel
scam, some grow house marijuana or some insurance scam, like my first question, you know, was
always like, can we please be sure it wasn't recently arrived Cubans?
And a lot of times it was a lot of people in Miami.
Well, you'd feel the pressure in Miami when the cops figured it out in Miami.
They'd come to other communities, Hispanic communities, Orlando and Tampa.
And then they try that there until we caught on and then try to put a stop on it.
I think this is one of the the nuanced conversations when it comes to immigration.
If you look at Haiti, right, desperation, those poor people live in.
Right.
When you come to the U.S. legally, legally, whatever that looks like, there's that level
of desperation.
The baseline is completely different than what we would consider, you know, good conduct
as a Brit, as an Aussie, as an American.
And so, you know, there is this kind of this jarring transition period.
So how do we if you were king for a day, what would the immigration process look like, whether
it's filtering out the people that shouldn't be here in the first place or whether it's
helping people integrate into society so that you didn't have that leaning into that same
desperation activity that you were so used to in your poorer country?
I don't think anyone is afraid of working hard.
Right.
So that I refuse to accept when someone says, oh, it's hard for an immigrant.
Yeah, it's hard.
Right.
Like you left your country, you left everything, you know, it's a completely new system.
It's not going to be easy.
But what we should make easier is the speed and system to vet.
I'm all for making sure I know who's in my house.
OK, there's like you let me into your house.
You knew it was me, but you don't let a stranger in here and just hang out.
My German shepherd checked you out for exactly.
And it's a good dog, too.
So there's no problem in that we our system is set up and it's so inefficient.
Our legal system is so inefficient that we're penalizing the people that are really going
to be some of the greatest contributors.
When you look at quality Americans, it's it's those first second generations, not to say
the other ones aren't quality.
But what I'm talking about is you're going to get someone that is so loyal to America
because you not only gave them hope, but you created something front.
Let them create something from that hope.
When we talk about Mexico, when you talk about Cuba, you talk about third world, when you
talk about second world, when you're born into where you're born, that's it.
Right.
And a lot of times there's no upward mobility in America.
We don't we don't believe that.
Like I don't know anything about you and I don't care.
Are you a good person?
Right.
Are you are you working hard and like how can I help you make us better?
That's really what the promise of America is and has always been.
And it can continue to be.
It should be.
We just right now have perverted our system to a way that's like almost unrecognizable
and we were rewarding things that we shouldn't.
And we are actually disincentivizing those that I want to come here and contribute.
You know, I heard someone say the other day, I taught it at the University of Tampa for
almost nine years.
I taught business law and I was flabbergasted how many people were foreigners in my class.
I didn't know this.
They pay full boat.
They don't they don't get scholarships.
So when they're here, they're really here for the American education.
And a lot of them want to stay.
And you know what I want, I want you to stay because everything I just put in your brain,
I don't want you to go take somewhere else and compete against me.
Right.
I want you to make America better for.
There's really not a quick venue for those students to stay here and give back to the
community that taught them so much.
So and they want to a lot of them want to someone to go back.
Of course, it's it's normal.
But I heard there's a plan to address it.
I was like, that's brilliant.
We should be motivating those people that are already trained in our way to stay here
and make us better.
So that's an interesting parallel with the first responder professions, because at the
moment we have this epic recruitment crisis and we're losing a lot of great firefighters,
you know, paramedics, police officers.
And because we're dissing dissing, oh my goodness, sentencing, thank you, because the job itself
is amazing and no one in uniform is going to be like, oh, well, I'm just tired of fighting
fires or I just don't like interacting with bad guys.
That's why that's their purpose is their goal.
But the working environment is what's taken away that commitment because it's becoming
the detriment of their mental health, their physical health and their relationships.
That's exactly right.
And it's an incredible parallel when the environment right.
Like the skills, you know, we might change tactics, right?
The equipment definitely, I think, gets better.
It gets worse, but the equipment definitely improves.
So you then have to ask, like, where did this man and woman come from and why are we pushing
them away in a manner that you don't mean to?
Like every single politician tells you a thousand percent.
I am a back first responders.
And you know what my answer is?
Everyone loves cops and firefighters till it's time to pay for them.
Right.
And in the world that we live in, the safety and security you like is expensive.
It is just is a function of all sorts of stuff.
Right.
Insurance, right.
Workers compensation and just the mere fact that life is more expensive than it is.
But if we've got this baseline minimum that we as Americans have created, because it's
not a Florida thing, it's an American thing where you call 911, you push those three numbers
and you want someone to show up.
That's the expectation.
Just ask any ask any kid how you get the cops to come over, how you get the firefighters.
They know those three numbers, right?
Well, that takes a lot.
It's just it sounds like one phone call, but that one phone call is so deep.
Right.
It just represents so much.
But most people aren't willing to pay for it until until it's time to get a vote.
You know what I mean?
And so I become this I don't care.
I become this unpopular dude around other politicians because when we call out this
hypocrisy and they'll be like, oh, that's not true.
I support them.
And I'm like, Danny, you just think it's an unlimited budget.
And I'm like, no, it's a prioritization of budget.
Right.
Like you want this incredible economy in Tampa.
I want it to.
Right.
But no one's going to invest in Tampa.
No one's going to bring their breast and brightest to Florida if they think, oh, I'm going to
get robbed along the way.
I can't let my kids play outside under the under the streetlights.
You know, when I get to work, I have to worry about clutching my purse because I got to
pass these areas that are unsullied in downtown Tampa.
No one's doing that.
You know what I mean?
They're going to find places that prioritize the public safety and then they're going to
go there.
I'm I believe we prioritize it.
It just I'll never be happy.
Right.
I just I'm just honest guy.
I'll never be happy until we get to a point where our numbers are full.
And I'm rejecting people that are good applicants.
Right.
I don't want to disincentivize anybody.
I wanted to get to a point where our our our pool of people so big because our pay is right,
our work life balance is right, our safety and security is right.
And we're making it work.
So that's the goal.
I mean, I'd rather die trying to get there, if that makes sense.
Well, this is what's crazy.
And I've learned this just through, you know, thousands of conversations now is when you
actually break down the finances behind these first responder communities and the fire services
of when I know there's such a waste of money through the mismanagement, through the way
that we've allowed it to spiral downwards.
And now, I mean, they're offering recruitment sign on bonuses now in the fire service.
We used to have hundreds, if not thousands of people, as you said, and you turn away
90, 95 percent of them.
And that's how you forge an elite team that's going to respond when you push three numbers
on a phone.
That's right.
Now we've got the polar opposite.
But if you look at the mandatory overtime and the workmen's comp, you know, all the lawsuits
and all the things that come from destroying a workforce, the money's already there.
So we don't even need money.
The initial budget year you do to create the extra people, the extra positions, that's
then going to draw people in and Pasco County has done it.
And every department that's gone to 24 72, which I know we're going to get to, they're
seeing a huge uptick.
I just asked Destin.
They said, yeah, we had loads of applicants.
And they just announced that they're going to it.
So this is what's crazy is there's a lot of areas where it's just a false economy and
we don't need more money.
We just need reappropriation of funds.
We need proper use of it.
Exactly.
And what the law enforcement fire needs is more people, more training and a higher bar.
And then the rest and recovery built into their work.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Smart.
All right.
Well, just one more area of the immigration.
Yeah.
One of my friends was telling me recently about the predatory nature of immigration
lawyers on some of these people that maybe came over here initially illegally and they're
trying to do it the right way.
And you know, they're they're trying to hold down a job and it would be another value to
the United States of America.
I hear a lot of these kind of fields are giving people false hope.
And at the end, after taking thousands and thousands of their their money, they end up
getting extradited anyway.
So so I'm a lawyer.
I don't know.
I didn't say that before, but I'm a lawyer and I have done I would say dabbled in some
immigration work.
Really, what I did was you remember when Venezuela when Hugo Chavez was really having like the
bad part of well, it's all bad, but it got really bad in Venezuela.
Like they were chopping people up.
They were murdering people in the streets.
And so we were helping like we as America benefited from getting like the waves of their
doctors and their engineers are most highly educated and their most highly skilled workforce
to America.
So we did a couple asylum applications to help a couple of people out.
Now what ends up happening?
You go to a lawyer and they're going to tell you I can do something for you.
Right.
But I don't know what the outcome is going to be.
Right.
So it's the perfect out.
And there's no blame on the lawyer for that because that's I'm going to do that to you.
You come to me and you have a clear cut auto accident case.
I'll be like, I think I can help you.
And you'll be like, God, can you or can you not?
This is what I know that I when I'm in construction, can you build me my house?
And if I told you, I think I can.
You're never going to hire me.
Right.
But it's just there's no certainty in the law.
Right.
There is best guest or best educated guests at best.
When it comes to immigration, put yourself in the hands of put yourself in the mindset
of someone who is here illegally has overstayed their visa.
But whatever puts them in a status that is not right for them.
And then you go to a lawyer and the lawyer is like, hey, all these factors that are not
in my control, the political environment, the administrative judge that you get, what
you've done to become in that status, all those things affect.
And then they go.
So you pay me all this money and I still you still could be getting a flight out of America.
I just want you to know that.
Some people might not explain it that well.
Some people are very predatory.
And that is a fact.
Right.
So it's easy for to go out in in an environment like that and say, hey, believe me and listen,
hispanic like, well, let's just talk about hispanic side.
Right.
This the central South American, they call me doctor.
Like in those countries that you're allowed, it's it's doctor Alvarez.
Right.
And that's what you call a lawyer.
So and, you know, they have class systems over there.
And so lawyers are of the educated highest class.
So when the doctor says, when the lawyer says it's verboten, that's the Bible.
Right.
So they'll take it.
They run with it.
And if you have someone that could be less than fully, you know, a little unscrupulous,
then you could take advantage of that gray area and really play on people's fears.
Now, could you prove it?
I don't know if you could prove that.
I'm sure you could at some points.
But like in the Hispanic community, there is a lot of fear mongering that goes on.
So I'll give you a perfect example.
When I worked for the sheriff's office in Hillsborough County, bad guys would prey on
the undocumented community or the migratory community.
So we we're strawberries.
We have tons of strawberries.
We have lots of tomatoes and we'll have migratory.
They're legal.
Right.
But they're migratory workers that would travel between Florida and the other parts of the
south.
So they're here and some bad guy is robbing, stealing, hurting one group.
And they refuse to call 911 because they believe somewhere in that mix, some of those people
may have a different kind of status than legal.
And the next thing you know, they're like, oh, the guys are going to come and arrest
me.
So I had to spend a whole bunch of time.
Right.
Think about this.
A bad guy gets emboldened, starts growing, starts fear not fearing the law because there's
no one's going to call the law.
And that person will eventually leave that migrant community and go out.
I want you to call it the first time.
Right.
But they wouldn't.
So we had to do an entire PR campaign.
Our sheriff's office wears white, right.
White shirts.
And so we'd say when you call 911 and those white guys, white shirts come, they don't
even have the capability to process any sort of immigration status.
We can't even check it.
What we're concerned about is that someone break a state law that we're charged with
enforcing and can we go and get that bad guy off the street before they hurt anybody else?
To me, I remember responding to a call one time.
It was a single wide trailer split into four units, which I couldn't, I couldn't believe
it.
I'm not, I'm talking about families living in these like little shells inside there.
And this woman had been beaten by a robber in front of her children with a pistol.
And it turned out everybody knew who the dude was, but they were afraid to call and the
guy just became predatory.
You know what I mean?
So we put a stop to that real quick.
But we, we really had to invest in making sure the community learned how to trust when
they called 911.
So it was a really, really big effort.
So I've had many conversations with people that are either combatting human trafficking
or even some that were victims of human trafficking.
And I think one of the least discussed elements of that is the migrant worker, the forced
labor in all different capacities with you being such a rural area and having a lot of
these fruit farms.
What have you been in your exposure of some of that action?
So we, we recognize it happens.
If you've ever go to some of these like camps, like where does some of these folks live?
Like you realize like the transient nature there is like, you could knock on someone's
door.
So we had to go give, I was the president of the sheriff's Hispanic advisory council
council at the time when I was president, it had been around for 30 years and it was
like a liaison between the sheriff's office and that community.
We went with turkeys, but our shirts said sheriff Thanksgiving, we're giving out full
meal sets.
No one would take the food.
No one would answer the door.
So we literally had to think this through.
So we, we took off our shirts and we changed shirts and then we came back and they're like,
okay, we'll take it now.
Cause they could trust and, and though I say all this to know that the amount of people
that were in and out that you have no idea who that is.
Like it would, it's almost an administrative impossibility to figure out who's living in
this one trailer.
Cause they're here today.
They're gone tomorrow.
Even if they're here to work in Hillsborough County, they get a bad vibe.
They moved to another place cause they're just here to survive.
So is it possible?
Yeah, we, and we keep hearing that even Hillsborough is one of the higher counties with human trafficking.
And here's, here's my problem with it.
It's almost impossible to visualize.
Right?
So like we, when you're on the street a lot, especially working for the sheriff's office
and you're like, listen, I keep hearing this.
Can we go see it?
Can we go find it?
Can we go?
And it's, it's harder to contextualize as well.
So selling this, like we, we hear about it and we hear the numbers, but you don't see
like a bus of, of women or a bus of children getting discovered that often, although we're
finding it now.
Have you, have you been hearing that?
Like the federal government has been, we'll announce, oh, in a joint nationwide raid,
they found 30 kids that had been missing.
And so it's out there and we know it's real.
And in fact, right now as the state of Florida, we're trying to figure out how to attack it.
Right now we have each County has their own sheriff's office.
That's a constitutional thing.
And then we have a state law enforcement divisions as well.
And so we're trying to figure out new ways to attack human trafficking using, right.
Hopefully using the people that used to chase bad guys like terrorists and stuff, because
we have, you know, Florida's home to so calm, tons of retirees come here.
They don't just stop knowing what they know how to do.
Right.
So like there's a guy named, uh, his name is Richard ring.
He's out of, uh, Orlando.
He's got, um, a private eye, like he's a, you know, a security company, but his nonprofit
finds kids and they, they literally go on the computer and once they get the cold case
information or once someone gets them the information and his nonprofit volunteer stuff
literally goes in and says, give me the data.
And they've found people in a day.
They found people in an hour, right.
That we're missing.
Um, so it's a lot of times it's prioritization.
Like we have a certain amount of people, um, we got crimes happening right now that are
violent and we got to prioritize those.
And then by the time it gets to these cases, it's just about resource allocation.
And maybe we need to, maybe we need a force resource allocate there more.
Um, but I know that's something that we, they're talking about literally as we speak, you know,
right now, especially using some of these like former SOCOM assets, that'd be really
cool.
These are dudes that don't say, don't take no very well.
So I like that.
Yeah.
We'll also put in some fear in system, these predators in the first place.
Absolutely.
And that's, and that I think is the biggest problem, right?
So our system is set up like we believe in human rights, right?
Like that's your bill of rights that that was, it was a transformative document that
the world hadn't really ever seen.
Like we didn't answer to God.
We answered to the law, right?
Um, on paper.
And so when we talk about individual rights, we, we really make sure that the government
does it right.
If we're going to take your rights, we have to be sure.
Well, that offers a lot of gray area and the bad guys that want to live in the gray area,
our system is based on faith, right?
Listen, you get pulled over by a four foot, nothing, um, female with a badge and a gun.
You might say to yourself, you know, I could probably take this girl.
You think, right?
Be careful.
There's a lot of really tough women out there and I've seen them take down men like 10 times
their size, but your faith is in the system and it's in that badge that says, I just don't
want the repercussions.
Like when we get into car accidents, we don't come out with AKs and like figure it out.
We say, here's your insurance, here's my insurance.
And we have faith in this is when the faith goes away though, that's when the system collapses.
But, um, the bad guys that knows how to exploit that gray and that's what happens with these
child predators.
And I think thanks to the internet and thanks to folks that are highlighting this more,
we're seeing human trafficking for what it is.
Because again, remember we talked about this thing happens in the gray.
You and I live in, in our little subdivision.
Our kids play outside.
We don't have any interaction with these things.
And we like, that's 2025 that that doesn't happen in our day and age.
And it's happening right underneath our nose and we just couldn't imagine it.
So maybe the internet's putting a spotlight on these things and that's a good thing for
the effort to try and stop it.
So especially prostitution.
That is human trafficking.
And we all think about Liam Neeson and you know, someone getting flung in a van in a
different country, but most of our human trafficking is grooming our children.
And then we're putting them into that.
See you just said that it's perfect.
So at the beginning, when we talk about human trafficking, right?
We say I took somebody and I absconded with them and I took away their freedom.
Right?
Like that's what we think.
We don't realize that you could imprison somebody right, right here in Hillsborough County,
right here, wherever you are and intimidate them to the point where they succumb to do
whatever it is that you want.
And then you use them to prostitute them or sell drugs for you.
And look, we're all people that are free will.
We got that.
But you can beat someone down enough and we've seen it on the street.
You can beat someone down enough to mentally own them, to have them do things that are
against their better interests.
Right?
Hell, we do that with credit cards.
We do that with things that are not, you know, sully or scandalous.
Right?
Imagine you beat someone down enough that they sell their body for sex.
Right?
And then give you a piece of the money for it.
So it's not always there is a lot of it's all you know, we look in black and whites
when we write laws, but there's a lot of gray that goes into it as well.
So I think that's one of the biggest issues I see, especially when things are politicized
is that it's like World War One, two trenches.
So if you look at, you know, many problems are, you know, like you said, you have a choice,
you know, just just you be, you know, use extreme ownership or whatever the thing might
be.
But it's also environment.
You are a product of your environment.
And I at 50 years old, just like yourself, still in good shape, still, you know, I don't
even have a doctor.
But I grew up on a farm in England, growing vegetables, you know, having livestock that
we ate, you know, having dirt and having to bail and sure round up sheep and do all the
things outside.
Exactly.
So that was my baseline.
Like I always tell people, you know, on the show is like, well, imagine if you grew up
in a, you know, in inner city Manhattan or Brooklyn or somewhere, and the local playground
is riddled with gangs and the only food, you know, comes from a bodega.
That's a very different environment.
So if it was just simply making good choices, 70 percent of the United States of America
wouldn't be obese or overweight.
That's the truth.
You know, we wouldn't consume 75 percent of the world's painkillers.
That's right.
We wouldn't have, you know, almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population if
it was just making the right decision.
That's right.
Clearly, there's an environmental element that we also have to bring into the conversation.
Absolutely.
Especially like as we start highlighting food right now, right?
We look at food as so so I'm divorced and my my ex wife and I, when we talk about how
we run each one of our houses, I'm really adamant that the kids limit their sugar.
And it's because we know we're like we talk about fat being like the detrimental thing.
And we like, well, we need good fat.
We need fat on a regular basis.
And the the murder is the sugar.
And we and so I remember her saying to me one time, hey, but we used to eat those all
the time.
And I'm like, that's the truth, man.
I used to eat the hell out of some Oreos, bro.
I mean, but the Oreo from 1985 to 95, you know, is not the Oreo of today.
I mean, if you just look at the table of content, I mean, the ingredients list is they're not
the same foods.
You know what I mean?
And then, OK, so you look at that isolated.
All right.
And then there's like sugar in everything to the point where your kid has consumed triple
the amount of sugar they're supposed to.
And we haven't gotten to lunch yet, you know.
So it's it's really when you say environmental, there's a lot of stuff that works against
us that we don't know that is working against us.
It's coming to light and we're getting that education now.
But man, for a long time, I was like, man, we have in this one phone right here, we have
the world's supercomputer.
We get every answer we need, and I feel like sometimes we're dumber than we've ever been.
You know what I mean?
But but that's coming to light.
I feel like we're getting more and more information, at least as to nutrition.
You know, now you get the information.
What do you do with it?
That's the deal.
Well, I can tell you just from experience, the algorithms are set up to silence the middle
ground common sense voice.
Oh, yeah.
I even got my Instagram shut down a few months ago.
And all I have shared was episodes of the podcast and then usually like kindness and
compassion videos.
I was really and yeah, I mean, it's it's an unpopular thing in all these because they
don't want you talking about healthy food and, you know, psychedelic therapy and all
these things that are actually working.
Sure.
Lots of companies making lots of money.
They're like, you shut up about making the country healthier.
How am I going to sell my next vaccine?
If we talk about that, it was crazy, too, is like it doesn't even have to be nefarious,
right?
It could just be where you are.
I am an advertiser, right? and you spoke about something, right?
And it triggers the algorithm to go, oh, they're like here.
They listen to us talking about food and all their food categories come up on the algorithm
and they start flooding, you know, all these ads that come in at the time of stuff you
and I are talking against.
Right.
And so you'd be like, oh, look, there's the man coming out as just this simple computer
program that is destroying the world.
You know what I mean?
When we look at politics, for example, remember, like when we talk about politics, if you go
on Instagram and you like something that is right of center, well, Instagram goes well,
Instagram is built.
Facebook is built to funnel you content that keeps you on the service, that keeps you looking
at ads so they can sell those ads.
It's a simple formula.
It has nothing to do with right, left, right, left.
Right.
Same as the news.
CNN and Fox.
Same exact model.
You click on something like my father-in-law will click on something and next thing you
know, all he gets is ultra right wing stuff.
And then you're like, the world is collapsing.
You know what I mean?
And the truth is, do we have problems?
Yeah.
Do conservative values maybe save some?
Yeah.
But everyone on the other side of the aisle isn't the devil.
You know what I mean?
They're really not.
America lives in this 80% world.
We always have.
Everyone always has.
And now we're, we're so divided and I, I will blame this little box right here.
I'm holding my phone for those of you that can't see, uh, I will blame it.
There's no doubt because it has programmed, right?
And you didn't know it was programming you right until that came out.
And now, now that we know it, but we still don't do anything about it.
You know what I mean?
So we still stay on it and we still get divided.
So yeah, we have to do a lot to wake up and get ourselves out of this lethargy that we
have put ourselves in the malaise.
But that takes a lot of effort and a lot of people don't want to put in, it's just easier
not to.
One of my guests a few months ago made a really powerful analogy and they said the problem
with society today is imagine you were in medieval England and the king and queen had
got the peasants arguing over something.
So they were at each other's throats.
He said, if you're fighting each other, where are you not looking?
Yeah, you're not looking at the king that's taking all your stuff.
The castle.
That's exactly right.
And this is the thing is that now we've devolved to Joe Biden or Donald Trump is your, you
know, either 90 year old or orange, you know, second coming of Christ rather than how can
I fix my own home and then walk out my front door and be a positive influence in my community.
So they've devalued and depowered and almost like neutered that 80 percent that really is
the base of the pyramid.
And if we all band together and demand real food in our schools and PE programs and addressing
the mental health crisis that's causing our children to have to rehearse their murder
and code red drills, maybe just maybe we can move the needle.
But see that should then we come full circle, right?
So I'm a state rep.
You should be coming and complaining to me, right?
And you should be going to Tallahassee to talk about it because 99 percent of the problems
that we all talk about, those are federal and those have nothing to do with us.
Right.
And they don't really control us that much.
Yes.
I'm going to listen.
I told you I'm a guy who really values the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
We know all that stuff.
But the reason I'm a state rep and I haven't run for anything higher and I'm not saying
I will never, but I'm not super interested in it is because I can really solve problems
for the people in my area and my state.
If you look the way I look at things, I got hired by my district, right?
That's district 69.
I got hired by them.
So I'm very parochial.
I like will fight for those people like an animal, even to the detriment of someone.
Let's just say in Orlando, that's my job.
Right.
Like I fight for them and then I'm a fight for Hillsborough County and then I'm a fight
for my region.
Then I'm a fight for my state.
And so those are those are my rings of of of order there for me.
And so we can do a ton.
And so we'll get calls from other reps all over the country.
And they're like, how do you how do you do that?
And we're like, guy, it's really easy.
You solve your problem and you don't worry about what everyone else is doing.
Right.
So we figure out that Florida needs X, Y and Z and we just do it.
You know what I mean?
Do we get things wrong?
Listen, we're human beings.
We get things wrong all the time.
You know what I mean?
We got to go back and fix them or we're like, Mr. Mark on that one.
Because some of them we get really right.
You know what I mean?
Some of them we get really right.
And we that's why people are coming to Florida, because you know, you know, like, remember
like your boss, like some of your favorite bosses didn't get it right all the time, but
they made decisions.
They were fair and you they respected you and you respected them.
Right.
That's really like the best you can get from government.
You know what I mean?
You're hoping for those things.
You know what I mean?
Like they make a decision like because leadership requires decisiveness.
Right.
And so make a decision.
Like COVID, what are we doing?
We going left?
We going right?
Let's go.
Be fair.
Right.
Know that I'm never going to always agree with you.
You know what I mean?
But I know I'm going to get a fair shot.
Right.
That way we at least have that in our lawmaking and then govern that way.
And you will you'll win both the left and the right.
Because last time I checked, I might be a Republican, but I got elected to represent
everyone in District 69.
Right.
And I take that super for real, brother.
Listen, this is the funniest thing in the world.
Like one time.
So to highlight what we're talking about, this divisiveness.
So this women like I think it's mothers, women or mothers against guns.
I'm butchering it.
So ladies, forgive me if I'm telling this story.
And I remember they all had their shirts and and I'm a gun guy.
Just so you know, like like I am a firm, die in the wood, believer, gun guy.
You want a gun?
I want you to have a gun.
You don't want a gun.
You don't want to have one.
Right.
Just don't limit somebody else's right to do so.
So the ladies are like, we would come talk to you, but we know you're never going to
talk to us.
And I was like, ma'am, you talking to me?
And they're like, yes, you representative Alvarez.
And I was like, well, ma'am, how do you know you won't talk to me if you haven't even tried
to make an appointment?
And they're like, would you talk to us?
I'm like, bring all this group.
Let's go.
And all of them, they're like, they're like clutching their purse or giving me dirty looks.
And at the end of the day, you know what that represented?
Lack of communication.
Right.
Again, I don't agree with everything they say, but they deserve to be heard.
Right.
That's what I signed up for.
Let's go listen to what they say.
And you cannot imagine how many times from conversations like that I'll go, I didn't
know that part.
And maybe it shifts a point of view.
Maybe it shifts a course of action.
Maybe it shifts an energy, right?
Where I'm not as excited to do something as I was before, because now I have a different
point of view.
You have to be open to these things.
If you're going to try to come up to Tallahassee and make laws.
And if you're not, you're in the wrong job.
If you're not, and you think you're just there to like to push something through.
Look, we have an agenda.
I have an agenda.
Right.
Like, look, cops and first responders are my agenda.
Right.
So I'm not going to be really dissuaded off that point.
But it's about degrees.
Right.
So my azimuth is true.
I might go a little left.
I might go a little right.
But we're going to get somewhere to where I wanted us to go.
But I'm not going to do that without listening to people.
So yeah, I think this is the problem again.
The 80 percent.
When we put a uniform on, we respond.
We don't ask which party they are before we help them.
You just help everyone.
That's exactly right.
The mothers against guns.
Was there usually a loss of a child in the in the kind of backstory of most of them?
I think some like in their foundation there was.
And then ultimately, but not any anybody that I talked to.
But that doesn't mean it didn't get founded that way.
I believe it actually got founded by and then expanded on when someone lost their child.
Listen, what you said is the truth.
Like it is disgusting to me that I do battle drills with my children.
Right.
Like I literally we will go to school and we will look at places where they can run.
Right.
And we're like caught out in the open, you know, I'm saying.
And like you have to program to your kid like, hey, kid, run and run.
And if you're out by yourself, you'll never get in trouble because we always say never
leave the school.
You know, don't talk to strangers, all that kind of stuff.
And now you're having to teach them the opposite.
So like gun safety, for example, in my house, we teach gun safety like it is a perishable
skill.
Right.
And so we retrain at minimum once a quarter.
I don't have a timeline, but we're always talking about it.
Right.
I'm not worried about my house.
I'm worried about when my kids go to somebody else's house.
So we have battle drills for that.
Like what happens when Tommy pulls out his dad's gun?
What do you do?
You know, my kids are to leave right away and go find an adult.
What happens if Tommy follows you with a gun, open the front door and run out of the house?
Well, you told me not to go outside.
We will I'd rather find you outside and figure out that problem.
That's a problem for the future.
Let's solve this problem right now.
So we talk about these things actively and all the time when it comes to it.
But should we have to?
No, you know, we shouldn't schools shouldn't you shouldn't have to worry about it.
But that's the world we're at right now.
So well, this is what kills me is when we have, you know, I mean, so many shootings
every year, what ends up happening is it becomes again back to World War One, the pro and the
anti gun people.
Right.
And that solves nothing.
Because if you look at the pie chart that creates a you know, homicidal homicidal teenager,
you have yes, the access to a weapon, of course, as part of it, you know, and I think that
there's a nuanced conversation.
When we're coming here, going to gander mountain, and there was 50 cows sitting there and children
were playing them.
That has one purpose to kill someone from a killer human being from a long fucking way
away.
What a 50 cow?
Yeah.
So I don't think you can say that's a home to another means.
So there's there's there's room for improvement.
Sure.
What we can access.
That being said, though, the mental health conversation, the sleep deprivation conversation,
the violent video game conversation, the side effects of psychiatric med conversation, the
bullying conversation, you know, obviously, then the broken home conversation, I mean,
there's all these pieces, but it's never discussed.
And again, it's like, well, why don't fat people just make good choices?
You know, you know, I think it's discussed, but it's never discussed in totality.
Right.
So you and I go, we can spend some time talking about like violence in the home.
We'll spend some time talking about each bucket.
But one of the things that we refuse to not refuse, but maybe we don't do a good job is
tying all of these factors in together and go, well, that didn't happen when we were
growing up.
You know, well, when I was growing up was in the 80s.
Right.
And in the 80s, we were just coming into the revolution of divorces.
Right.
And we had split homes and we were figuring that out.
And then computers started.
Right.
Like, just like you're saying, and then computers started in these violent video games start
like when my little kid can identify guns, you know, that I can identify.
And I was a soldier.
You know, I mean, like, I don't I was like, they're like, oh, that's an AK-7, some, some,
some.
I'm like, it is.
How do you know that?
You know?
So here's a little sidebar.
That was funny.
My my one of my sons just joined the Air Force and he's talking to me.
He's big into this call of duty.
And I was like, guy, I just need you to understand something.
Call of duty.
Don't you ever talk about that with your drill sergeant because you're going to have a really
rude awakening.
And he's like, well, I want to see if I can shoot a shh.
Don't say another word.
Just don't say another word.
Right.
And it creates this false reality.
And the other part is this World War One.
We had a problem as American soldiers shooting a silhouette because we were not accustomed
in our brain or trained to shoot humans.
Our job in civil and civilization is the preservation of life.
Hell, your job is to go save lives.
Right.
So what we had to do after World War One is we changed our targets in the military from
circles to figures.
So when the so when you see somebody through your sights, it's not the first time you've
ever pulled a trigger on something that looks like a human.
It's this subtle psychological conditioning that was a silhouette.
Imagine shooting someone on this video game and getting points for it.
Right.
And I'm not trying to be like some softie or anything.
What I'm trying to tell you, though, is the reality of the matter is we've taught these
kids that there is no consequence that comes from because all you do is turn off the game.
Well, also, you get rewarded.
Like you said, it's operant conditioning.
If you listen to Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman's work, and he wrote on killing on
combat, but also assassination generation, where he broke down the psychology of the
school shooters.
And there are cases where school shooters were incredibly accurate and they barely ever
used a firearm, but they play video games.
That they played video games.
So you've got this virtual world where they're rewarded.
And then you get this one upmanship and some of these shootings where they've beaten the
score.
Quote, you know, air quotes.
And then you add in sleep deprivation, which is a huge thing, which is now feeding the
psychosis because these kids are up all night gaming.
It's not just the fact that it's shooting guns.
It's so much more than that.
The energy drinks.
Let's add the energy to the conversation.
Right.
Like, first off, what is doing to your physiology.
Right.
So that same boy that is in the Air Force now, he would says, oh, I need two Red Bulls
to go to bed.
I'm like, guy, you don't you're actually destroying your circadian rhythm.
You know, so we'd have to take it away from him.
You know, we literally turn it off.
You know, I came into his life different later in his life.
But up all night playing video games, these violent video games.
And there's a sense of violence that we need to teach men.
Right.
We need to teach men how to be violent.
But then you control it and turn it on for the good.
Right.
And then to suppress the bad.
That's really difficult.
You know that, right?
Because like our natural banal instinct is I'm a warlord.
I like your stuff.
I want to come take it.
We're teaching not to do that.
Right.
But we want the man and the woman, to be honest with you, that can go do that.
And then we say, come back to your society and don't do that, please, until we need you
to do that again.
Right.
So you know that you were highlighting something.
You know, where we saw it a lot is our drone operators.
So you'd have all these kids who had played video games for forever and they were phenomenal
recruits.
So when we had our 20 year war and our drones got a lot better, they're they're sitting
in Las Vegas, right?
Having a drone and you know, that's flying out of Qatar or flying out of UAE or wherever
in Afghanistan, they go kill people.
Right.
Because that's the mission.
They had to go kill some bad guys.
They watched them go down and then like, OK, I got to go.
I got dinner reservations.
I got to go.
I got to go meet my family for whatever.
Right.
The psychology of that is horrific.
Right.
In the long term.
And people will be like, wait, what a wuss.
Right.
But the PTS that they're dealing with, right, when they they're literally cannot handle
flying this drone across the world, killing right in their mind, justified.
Americans you know, we have a combat mission.
We've done all the vetting.
We've done all this stuff and it is justified.
And then go home, sleep in their bed and the safety and security somewhere in America where
they're flying from.
How does that mess with their brain?
It's not a video game.
Right.
But they were trained by their video game.
But when they turn off that PS4 or five is just off when they shut the door to the, you
know, the Reaper control booth, like someone died, you know, and they have to live with
that.
They have to be mentally prepped for it.
So I really feel bad for those folks because, you know, when we talk about the trigger puller
that went through the door or someone got blown up by IED and they're they were out
there, they were risking it themselves.
You know what I mean?
And here that that person is out there in a box.
Right.
But the PTS is just as real.
You know what I mean?
And they've killed maybe more people, you know?
Yeah.
We think of the moral injury because we know now after the fact that all the collateral
damage that was done in Iraq and Afghanistan and now you're in that box, you're in Vegas,
you think you're, you know, part of a noble cause and then you find out actually there
was bad intel and you just blew up a, you know, full of, you know, wife and kids and
that's got to be brutal.
So that that's going to happen no matter what, though, bro.
You know that, like, if you think about it, like you could be the one calling that in
and you're like, holy crap.
I remember my brother had some really close calls.
He fought in Iraq.
He was an infantry guy.
He had some some close calls and even some calls like where you're like, I hope that
was right.
You know, they once shot a little girl and I tell the story normal normally for another
reason, but they they once shot this little girl in and now it's by accident.
Right.
And so I'm telling you the story because of the mistake.
But the reason we normally tell the story is because when when my brother went to they
were rendering aid and they were going to they were going to do everything to save her
life.
You know, he calls in a chopper just for this.
I think she was nine, maybe 10.
Her dad was like, don't worry about it.
It's just a girl.
And my brother's like, what?
So my brother had to do some rough things to get that dude to actually take that girl
because he couldn't leave the line.
They were still in the middle of the fight.
Right.
So to get to the chopper that actually had just come in just for that girl.
So these things happen.
You know, wars very foggy, you know, even and it gets foggier.
Right.
When you get someone like in a super safe box in Washington, D.C. or Tampa, you know,
we out of Tampa, we prosecute wars in Central Asia and, you know, in SOCOM is based out
of there and we prosecute wars there all the time.
So it's it's got to be I mean, I don't envy those people at all, you know, trying to make
those calls.
But you know, I guess that's what they pay them for.
And hopefully they do more right than wrong.
That's the it's my prayer.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the thing they are literally following orders.
They're doing what they're told to do.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, as we unpack these wars and some of the politics behind it, I
know a lot of veterans that struggle now, you know, should we be in Iraq?
You know, was was all the things were the things that we did in Afghanistan?
Right.
You know, was this person actually an enemy or, you know, would they have been a good
tribal leader?
I mean, it's it's after the fact.
It's not blaming the people at all, but that's got to just have its mental health impact.
You know, you left your interpreter behind when we just, you know, up sticks.
I mean, all these these emotional human costs of these men and women, or arguably children
that we sent overseas that now are kind of unpacking their service and questioning some
of the things that happened there.
Yeah.
And I think that's a natural evolution of your service.
Right.
Like when you when you want to sign up to serve your country and like you're some farm
kid from Iowa and then next thing you know, you find yourself in Kabul and you're like,
what?
Who's the bad guy?
That's the bad guy.
Do I go after that guy?
I mean, I just hopefully you're doing the right thing.
The best part about being an American soldier, I'll tell you this, is I knew that I never
had to follow an unlawful order.
Right.
And every and I don't think that like most people like that are on calibrated to the
way we are trained.
Understand this to be true.
You could tell me to do something and I'll be like, no, I'm not doing that, sir.
Right.
Now, that doesn't mean I'm not going to go do unfun things.
I'll have to do that.
But if you go tell me to go murder that family just because you don't like them, we're not
doing that, sir.
You know, and then I'll tell you, there was decisions that were made like that throughout
the war every day of the war without you and I having been there.
I can promise you that that happened.
I know some of them, you know what I mean?
There were someone would be like, no, we're not doing that.
We don't have the and the amount of risk that our soldiers, including, I will tell you,
British soldiers as well, put themselves in right for this analysis process to make sure
we were doing the right thing.
That's how we were taught.
And at first, when I was an infantry officer, I was like, man, that is some that's some
really rough, weak stuff.
I thought, you know, small, immature, just growing my brain set, right?
Going well, my job here is to close with the bad guy, right?
Kill the bad guy if necessary.
And let's go home.
And that was what black and white, right?
And in reality, on a shifting battlefield, you look around, you go, is that the bad guy?
And today it's a bad guy.
Tomorrow is not.
So another story from my brother, for example, when he was in Iraq, there was this thing
called the Great Awakening.
So he would send me photos of him with people and I would get really pissed off and I'd
be like, stop taking photos with those people so close to you.
You don't know if that's a bad girl or not.
And one day Al Qaeda was like had just gone too far and the locals were like, we're done.
And they're like, literally it was called the awakening.
They then go, that guy is the bad guy.
And there's like photos, people in the photos with my brother that he'd been taking photos
of.
I was like, I told you, right?
So it's easy, though, to say that from the comfort of Tampa while he's trying to like
make sure his men and him survive in an environment that is less than hospitable.
But it shifts so much in how that happens, what that affects your brain and how that
is.
It's got to take a toll.
You know what I mean?
It's like the kid from Iowa.
Let's go back to that guy.
I just want to serve or maybe I just want to pay for college.
Maybe I did not really have a venue out.
Like my own son that's in the Air Force right now, he really didn't have a lot of options
in life right now.
He's one of the most brilliant kids you've ever met.
You know what I mean?
Just not a whole lot of motivation.
Now, like just after a basic training, he looks focused and directed.
Still the same kid there.
You can see it.
I'm not saying overnight he transformed into something that he's not, but he is on the
path that didn't exist prior to that.
So I don't know.
It sure is easy talking from Ocala.
No, but it's interesting because it is a nuanced conversation.
Yeah, it is.
It very much is.
You talked about your parents immigration story.
Now you've got this son who's trying to find his feet in the world.
What I find interesting coming from another country is my perception of the American dream
is the old one.
Just a little bit of land, grow some food, have chickens.
When I came to the States, it was before the crash.
So the American dream was to have two Winnebago's and four Suburbans and jet skis and dirt bikes.
And it just completely gone.
What I find sad for our generation, especially this one graduate in the last few years went
through COVID, came out the other side where there were no jobs.
We don't think about that.
We just said, oh, we'll just give you handouts.
Oh, the handouts are done now.
Now go to work, you lazy turret.
I don't see that American dream that you can be anything kid conversation in 2025.
That's what draws a lot of people from other countries here.
And it is what happens in America.
If you ignore the politics and the division and the shitty news stations at our core,
you can be anything.
I came from another country, became a firefighter, became a stuntman, started a podcast, wrote
books.
I probably couldn't have done that if I was from Eastern block or North Korea or a lot
of other places.
So what is your kind of perception on kind of refinding that inspiration, that draw,
not only for immigrants, but for our own young people?
So I think it's almost two tier, right?
So tier one, I'm going to say this, so I go back to tier two, right?
So tier one, the immigrant, tier two is the current American.
So every year I take, I was the chairman of this nonprofit called the Allied Forces Foundation.
And we take veterans to Scotland and we do a 55 mile road march.
They call it a yomp through the highlands.
And it's really to raise money for the British soldiers fund because their VA isn't like
our VA in any way, right?
Which is sad.
So we'll bring teams from the Ukraine, we'll bring teams from France.
And the biggest part of the contingency is from America.
But the reason I tell you that is because number one, I got to interact with their soldiers.
Number two, I got to interact with foreigners.
Like you live in America, you never leave America.
This is all you know.
When you go overseas, you're like, whoa, we really, really have it good, right?
Even just the ability to have land or opportunity because it's so limited over, at least in
Scotland, in parts of Europe that I've been to.
So it's perspective.
When you have an immigrant land in America, right?
The American dream to them is based on hope, right?
A hope which has a lesser light maybe where they're from, right?
You get someone from Guatemala that comes here and they were born poor, brother, that
person's chances of getting anything but just maybe one rung up is almost impossible.
Just a fact.
They come here and we tell them, hey, you can be anything you want.
I once dated a girl from Colombia, right?
And brother, she was gorgeous.
I mean, she was beautiful.
Educated in Colombia, she had a college degree.
She comes here.
She thinks of herself as a waitress.
Their system over there, very oriented by, I say caste, but that's, I know that's the
Indian system, but I'm trying to use it.
They have something similar.
Like a social ladder.
Social ladder.
Thank you.
Perfect.
Yeah.
Her mom says her grandmother who helped raise her, she grew up with dirt floor.
Okay.
Her grandmother goes, why are you reaching so high?
He's a lawyer.
Now listen, when I look in the mirror, I'm a schlub, right?
Puts on his boots just like anybody else.
I think nothing of title, right?
I look at a man and a woman, I say, are you a good person?
Then I want you near me friend or more.
No.
So like their, her grandmother was self-limiting over there because that's the reality of her
family and what they had done over there.
Right?
But we're in America and I was trying to explain her headless.
When you walk in the room, nobody sees that.
No one knows that you had, in fact, you should wear that dirt under your toenails that you
grew up in as a badge of honor, because look at how far you've come in America, right?
That's the American dream.
That's the hope, right?
We used to attach things to it.
You could get your post stamp, you get a house for my parents and my grandfather.
He bought a two bedroom, one bath house.
He had made it.
Okay.
It wasn't big, right?
Two bedroom, one bath.
He thought he was the king of the hill had made it right.
Ownership of property.
I could appreciate if we get back to that, right?
In a sense of, um, because there's something about owning a piece of the dream, right?
And that's real.
You own it.
Your name's on the title.
You have your car.
When they get their first cars that, you know, it could be a jalopy that we wouldn't even
drive anymore, but they got four wheels and think about where you're from.
Like having a car in England is like a big deal.
You know what I mean?
Like bigger than it should be.
In my mind, it's just transportation.
I thought, now, how do we get back to getting Americans to realize that that is the bigger
part, right?
Like where you are so jaded by how, um, it is to be an American notice.
I said, how, right?
Um, what and how it is to be an American.
You, you don't realize the value of what you have and how do you wake someone up to it?
Right?
Um, I probably have had this conversation more with my friends as an, and then nothing
makes me feel more like an old timer.
Like I feel like I'm 90, you know, having this conversation and truly like, I, I don't
land on an answer.
We don't land on an answer because I don't know whether I fight this phone, whether I
fight the lethargy of, of the PC stuff at school, what we're teaching our kids.
Do I homeschool my kid to teach him?
So I stopped trying to control everyone else.
Right.
Even as a politician, I stopped on this part, right?
If you can't see how great it is you have and the opportunities you have, there's nothing
I'm going to do that's going to shake your head.
I mean, we're on a podcast, we have TV, we have documentaries, nothing shows you.
Like I could take you to North Korea to highlight it and you'd still probably figure out, man,
but you know, my internet sucks.
You're like, come on, man.
So what I do is I can control what I can control my kids.
Right.
And so I got told you, we have, we at home, we have seven, right.
And each one of those kids, I am the indoctrinator in chief, just so you know that.
Like I, I am the one that's pouring into them the values of what I think they should have.
And then I do my best until one eight, right.
Until they're 18 and they go out the door and I'm not done.
But at that point it's, I'm more done than not.
At that point, I'm trying to do my left and right limits to keep you in the lanes and
be like, Hey, do you think that maybe you should?
And they're like, Oh, right.
But until then we're talking about American exceptionalism.
We understand America has her problems.
We talk about the incredibleness of the constitution.
We talk about God and faith.
Like there's no tomorrow.
We talk about family responsibilities.
We talk about giving more than you get in community service.
I have expectations of my children, right.
That they serve their community, right.
There's nothing more that I hate about someone who bitches about something that's wrong without
either giving me a solution to the problem or being part of the solution of the problem.
So you as an American, as a resident here, as whatever you have the right to complain
all you want, that's the freedom of speech.
But boy, I feel like your bitching sure does carry a lot more weight when you've put skin
into the game.
Okay.
Not paying taxes is not enough, right?
What have you done for your community?
And I don't need you to put on a uniform.
I want you to, you know what I mean?
I really do.
I want you to.
But if you don't put on a uniform, okay, tell me what you did for your family.
Tell me how you served your church.
Tell me how you volunteered at the hat.
Tell me how you made this homeless shelter better.
Tell me how you cleaned up a road.
Tell me you did something better than leaving your community better than you found it.
And these are the things that I pour into my kids.
And it's not just a one time thing.
I promise you, if you had my kids here, they'd be like, Oh, here he goes again.
And I'll say like, look, even just how we deal with bullies, for example, Alvarez's
do not stand by.
You understand that?
Like they know if they watch someone getting bullied and they don't do something and I
find out about it, they're going to have to deal with a bully here.
Right.
And I don't mean to make light of that word, but they're going to have to deal with me.
Right.
If they know that they have to defend themselves and they know that they have to defend their
brothers too.
Like, so if they get into a fight at school because they went into their sister's help
or their sister came to their aid, they're not getting in trouble with me.
They might get in trouble with the school.
My oldest who is 20 and at FSU right now, he put that to the test.
That dude had a three, got a three day suspension and at school for defending himself and his
teacher were his principal was like almost pissed that the way I was treating it, I was
like, ma'am, did he defend himself?
Yeah.
And he tried to, he tried to mitigate it.
Right.
And then my son put them in a choke hold and the guy passed out.
He didn't threaten anybody else.
And we talked about like making sure that we were making the right decisions.
Even the police officer that was there that day was like, he did good.
Like he didn't go too far.
He didn't be defending himself.
And then afterwards she goes, and you know what?
He didn't even lie about it.
And I was like, ma'am, I didn't understand what this was.
I didn't get this part.
She said he didn't even lie about it.
I was like, what are you talking about?
He goes, most kids would have lied about it.
And I was like, well, my son understands that if he lies to me or he lies to you about it,
then that per percussion will be 10 times worse than anything you could do to him.
And so these are the things we try to pour into them.
When we talk about rebuilding the American dream, I know this a long answer.
So I will ensure that my part of the American dream or my hope is well founded in these
kids.
And then what they do with it, they're off to the races.
You know what I mean?
So I got Logan in the Air Force.
Tony is going off too.
He's still debating how he wants to serve, if he's going to serve.
And then I got a 16 year old girl, Haven.
She's a beauty queen, right?
Literally, literally.
She's in pageants and stuff.
And she's like, I think I want to fight terrorists before I go do my job.
And I was like, really?
OK, that's great.
I'm however it is that you see your service.
And then my brother, we got a cousin of mine who's in special operations at Fort Bragg
right now.
I had another one in the Air Force.
My brother's a cop in Miami who is also a veteran.
So we're a family that serves not because we think it's cool for the scare badges on
our chest or the storytelling, because I think it's part of the ethos that we've developed
of a way of thanking our country for saving our lives.
And then it's developed from there to protect the American way and the hope and the dream
that it is.
Beautiful.
Well, I mean, with all that service you have in your family, you mentioned that you came
up through the military and then the law field.
What was your journey as far as the exposure into law enforcement?
And then what are some of the glaring issues that you're trying to help fix when it comes
to the first responder professions?
OK, so I only got out of the army when I met my wife because I told her I was never going
to be a civilian.
She's like, OK.
And I don't think she'd ever really thought that I was this serious about it.
So I said, I'll get out.
But I'm going to go to the FBI.
So I got into the FBI.
And then when we got into the FBI, she's like, well, I didn't think you'd make it in there.
If you if you go, I don't think we're going to make it.
And so I'm a pretty faith based person.
I was like, maybe this is one of God's challenges.
So I didn't go to the FBI.
Right.
I said, I'm a double down on my family.
And in retrospect, I think there was a mistake.
But like, are there mistakes?
Like, because that kind of like painted and colored my life going forward.
Right.
So I was listless, probably the closest to depressed I'd ever been in my life.
But this is 2003.
Nobody's talking about this stuff.
You know what I mean?
I feel like a wuss.
But there is I sold pharmaceuticals at the time that I had.
That was like a supposed to be a joke job until I got my FBI assignment.
When I remember, like, telling my boss, I quit because I got my FBI papers.
It said report to the Academy on this date.
And he's like, you quit.
Because we were making him a lot of money and we're still friends to this day.
So I remember one day after I had told the FBI I wasn't going to go, I felt so embarrassed
that I didn't go.
I sent my recruiter flowers.
It was a she.
And I don't think she'd ever received flowers.
And I'm sorry.
You know, I was like, I was really embarrassed.
So like a year later, I remember like going into doctor's offices, going, I used to jump
out of airplanes, be responsible for millions of dollars of equipment, all these people's
lives.
And I am literally asking this doctor who blows me off eight of 10 times, right, to
do whatever I'm asking him to do with this product that I'm selling.
This is a ridiculous, non purpose filled life, right?
There's one day I could not put my pants on.
I'm like looking at my pants.
They are around my ankles and I'm like trying to will them to come up.
You know, I remember begging.
I was like, please come up, pull them up.
You know, we got to get out the door.
So that was the day I remember calling my talk to my wife that night and I had called
the FBI back and they'd only been like three years, two years, some since I had told them
no and there were still bad stuff going on and they really needed people.
They said, yeah, we'll take you back.
We just got to do your background check for two years.
So I told my wife that I want to go back, but we now had a son and I was never going
to leave my son.
You know what I mean?
That's my first commitment is to my family.
You know, and she said, no, we're still not going.
And that night I moved to the couch and that's when those, you know, that was my first divorce.
You know what I mean?
Like I said, that was my story of how we got there.
So I had gone to law school in the meantime, you know, trying to figure out something other
to do other than pharmaceutical sales, which I was miserable at.
And I thought, oh, I'll become a lawyer.
And I was a reluctant lawyer.
Like I'm there.
I love these constitution classes.
I love these legal theory classes about how we make law and all.
I thrived in that.
Everything else I loathed.
Right.
I just so I graduated law school.
I passed the bar.
Not very plus about it.
We're in the middle of the worst economy.
You know, this is like when the bubble hit.
I go back to law school to hide and I get a second law degree thinking when I come out,
this thing will be over.
It wasn't over.
It was like it went over a couple more years and I ended up having to open my own law firm
super early because no one would hire.
Like it was that bad.
In fact, like the top 10% people, which I was definitely not in the top 10% were getting
job offers rescinded at that time.
So it was so I had kids to feed.
So it is what it is.
We open our own law firm and we figured it out.
I think the gray hair at the time, like I had a little bit older.
I had some gray hair and it made people think like, oh, he must know what he's talking about.
But if they only knew, you know, they only knew that's when that's why I taught at business
law because that's how I fed my family.
So business law at the University of Tampa, I taught two sections that kept the lights
on.
That was lights money.
So then I volunteered at the sheriff's office and this was my first contact with the sheriff's
office.
And at the Hispanic Advisory Council, I told you, I then became the president.
I was that I did that for five years and I also was on their shooting review board.
So every single time a deputy would discharge a weapon outside of training, it came to the
shooting review board.
And I was a civilian amongst all of the sworn officers.
And if you know anything about a sheriff's office, it is a paramilitary organization
where the sheriff is the general and then it follows rank order.
So oftentimes at a sheriff's office, not this one, but at any sheriff's office, there
isn't a lot of opportunity to stand on your own and free think for fear of not wanting
to do the right thing by the sheriff or not agreeing someone above you and then you getting
the repercussions.
So oftentimes at these hearings, you'd have people be, you know, either they all agreed
and they were bright.
Like I'm not saying that anything wrong happened at those, but there was one time I, I, I
specifically remember they were trying to say it was a negligent shooting.
And I was like, that's not negligent.
And the entire place was like, what?
And I really felt great, honestly, because I felt I was doing the right thing.
I was standing up for somebody who I thought needed this.
This guy had gone to the door.
They were there to arrest like a felon with like 40, either 48 felony charges on his record.
They see him inside.
They go to knock the door down.
The secondary latch to the door catches and the deputy falls back and then starts falling
down a staircase.
They were using Glocks at the time and his finger hits the trigger as he's falling around,
skims the ground and goes into the wall.
No one got injured to me, right?
That that was like in the process.
That is an actual accidental discharge, right?
Like I am, I am horrible on negligent discharges.
Like there is very little room for you to have actually shot your weapon improperly
in my mind's eye.
Either you had trigger discipline, you weren't like being safe or whatever.
But this guy, he was in the middle of the, of the action.
So that was there.
I remember like, Hey, these people could use a voice.
And then it like occurred to me.
I was like, if I hadn't been there, like what they'd have given that guy like a negligent
discharge on his record for doing his job, right?
And I, and then afterwards, I remember a couple of the majors, cause it was a bunch of majors
in there.
We're like, Hey, good job.
Good job.
And I was like, good job.
Why, why didn't you say something?
And they're like, ha, you know, and so then I understood the politics because there's
reality.
There's a politics inside every office.
That's how it works.
So then eventually 2017 comes and there's a new sheriff that gets appointed by the governor,
a governor that I actually had worked for as a political director.
And that sheriff hires me to be an information at the time was called a PIO.
And then we changed it when I ended up getting promoted to become the chief information officer,
right?
So we, we made it a chief level position.
And then I kind of advised him on politics, helping him get known in the community.
And that's what we did.
So I worked formally at the sheriff's office, not in law enforcement as a law enforcement
officer.
I was there for those five years beforehand.
And then I worked at the sheriff's office for another three, but you know, like when
you are like the new guy, especially when you don't have a badge, everyone looks at
you like with distrust, like it's a trust-based system.
Like I was that guy when we were in the army, like who's this new guy coming in and why
am I going to trust him?
So what I did was, um, I made a deal with the sheriff.
I'll do this job.
I'll shut down my law firm, which actually wasn't that hard of a thing to do because
I was super happy to be doing something other than the law.
And, but I want full access to the sheriff's office.
I I'm going to tell their story.
I need to be amongst the men and women and I need carte blanche.
And he's like, whatever you want.
And I was like, huh, I hope you don't live to regret those words.
And so ultimately the man honored his word.
I did everything at the sheriff's hall.
I tried out for the squat team.
We did the bomb team tryouts.
We went to the dive team.
We did, I did a tracker class.
I learned how to fast rope that I was working truly.
We were on call 24 seven because there was only two of us that did the job I did.
And then, so if we had a murder scene, we had to report to it like two in the morning.
Well, by the time you're done with it, it's already time to go to work.
So I was in my young forties, early forties at the time.
And bro, we're not 18 anymore.
And the hours began to catch up.
And so eventually I think the deputies would see me out and they saw like if they were
there, I was going to be there.
And you know, cause normally what would happen is the PIOs would just call it in.
They'd be like, Hey, Sarge, tell me what happened so I could write this up.
And they do that.
And then they go back to bed.
But I, I, I thought that was like a betrayal of the way we're supposed to be.
So we're out, if they're out, we're out.
Um, and I did a lot of ride-alongs.
So to, to learn, to tell someone's story, if you don't know their story, this, and I
tell politicians the same thing.
You, you want to make laws about XYZ, but you haven't gone and visited or you haven't
gone and lifted a finger like ride-alongs with fire departments.
You, you, you don't want to fund extra bunker gear, but have you been to a fire yet with
them and see how disgusting they get and then have to wear the same gear again, because
the dryers are only good for four hours if they even have a cleaner and a decontaminant
in a dryer.
So I did a lot of ride-alongs, a lot of ride-alongs.
I got to see a lot.
I saw more behind the yellow tape than I probably even care to remember.
I didn't think I had any problem with it at all.
Right.
And I, and I still think I have a pretty good grip on it, but you know, when you see enough
dead bodies, when you go from not, right.
This is what I always say.
There's like a fake veil, right.
That exists in, in when you live in society, but when you're in a first responder, that
veil is lifted.
Every corner to me now is, Oh, I remember this little kid got killed there.
Oh, that little kid got murdered there.
Oh, we had a suicide here.
Oh, this horrible accident there.
And I felt like I was kind of losing my humanity at one point when I report like it, like two
or three in the morning outside of USF, there's a veteran, like a homeless veteran that had
been riding his bike and he killed himself by throwing himself in a traffic.
Right.
Um, I'm a veteran.
I told you that and we're standing over his body and the traffic homicide sergeant goes,
Hey, scoot over, scoot over.
He's leaking on you.
And I was like, Oh God dang it.
We just scoot over real quick and just got back to talking about the kids.
And I, when I walked away from that, I'm like, you're an asshole.
You know that like, where have you gone?
This is a dude who shares the same title as you, right in his spiral down, he's homeless
and in his desperation to get rid of the pain, he has killed himself and then ends up harming
somebody else, right?
By being the person that ran him over, right?
Think about the person that hit him then.
Right.
And you, you were talking about your kids and were upset that he was going to leak on
your shoes.
So that's at the point where I was like, Oh, I gotta get out of this.
You know what I mean?
And by the way, remember three years, not 30, not 20, not even 10, three.
And I was already like everywhere I go, I'm seeing dead people, right?
Or dead scenes, tragedy.
Everything is horrible.
Everything is like, like the glass is half full.
I'm a glass, always full guy, not even half full, right?
Like I could have a good time by myself in this room.
You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't matter.
And it was changing me quickly.
And that's when really I started realizing also for some reason, my sheriff's office
had this run of suicides, some of them murder suicides by deputies that, I mean, there's
nothing to show off.
This is in fact, this is the opposite, right?
Like we had one happen.
The guy kills his family and then, or, and then kills himself.
And that happened in Pasco.
So I didn't have, I didn't have to go to that scene, right?
That was another sheriff's office scene.
Pasco is the County to the north of us, but I'm one day I'm taking a shower and I get
a call and it's ringing, ringing.
And then I look up and I see that it's the, it's a 911 center calling the comm center.
And the guy's like, Hey sir, are you by your radio?
And I was like, I'm in the shower.
Like get to your radio.
So I didn't have a portable radio.
I ran to my car.
I turned it on and all I'm hearing is the scene de-evolve, right?
As it's going bad.
It's clearly a deputy that is talking about committing suicide.
And there's three other deputies that are in front of him and they're trying to only
one now is communicating to the, to the radio.
And you can hear his lieutenant who is friends with this guy screaming, the car screaming.
And every time he keys the mic, you hear the engine just ripping the lights and sirens,
but the lieutenant is super calm.
He's like, buddy, I'm on the way.
Don't do anything until I get there.
Just give me a chance.
And then like, I only think it's a deputy like in need at the time.
Right?
So I run in, I don't remember any of this.
I don't remember putting clothes on.
I don't remember anything.
I remember being in my car when the female comes over the radio and says he's killed
himself.
Okay.
I got to that scene.
What I do remember is it was in plant city, which is a, it's its own municipality.
And none of the cops would look at me in the eyes.
Like as I'm going through the scene, none of the cops would look at me in the eyes.
I remember the smell of my breaks, right?
Cause I got there.
It was probably should have taken me like 25 minutes to get there.
I remember I got there like about 12 minutes.
And then when I get there, the three deputies that are still my friends to this day were
zombies.
Like they're walking around and they just, one of them just, I'm holding, I've never
touched this man.
Right?
I'm feeling him crying in my arms, right?
We didn't know.
Well, we didn't know.
I didn't know until I got there was that the guy who killed himself was one of the greatest
deputies that had always been that guy, right?
Had been everyone's friend trained extra come in extra, extremely well regarded reputation.
That day he wakes up at one scene, kills his wife, kills his granddaughter, right?
Gets in the car, drives to his daughter's house, knocks on the door while her boyfriend
is upstairs, kills her downstairs.
And the scene that I arrived was him taking his own life.
Right?
And so now this is number, this is like number two that, that day I remember the chief calls
and like she's screaming at me because apparently she'd been calling me and I just didn't even
realize it because I, I am a zombie now.
I'm standing over the body with his, like he's got something laid on over him and she's
like, where the hell are you?
We got a job to do.
And I was like, Oh, I still have a job to do.
So that same day we lost a firefighter in Clearwater to suicide.
And in the neighborhood I represent now as a, as a representative, we lost an air force
special operations guide to suicide.
Three scenes, two of which my people had to go cover the same day that one of their guys
had done that.
And that's when I was like, dude, enough, like enough, we have to do something.
Right?
And you, you feel so damn hopeless, right?
You're like, like we don't, our people don't do this.
Like we're the ones that go save people.
Why are we hurting ourselves?
So again, you try to control what you control.
So there's this nonprofit called hook a hero and I poured myself into it.
So whenever there's a scene now, any trauma, what we would do as like people that were
in law enforcement, this was founded by a deputy on the SWAT team.
And that includes firefighters now and now we've raised enough money to actually pay
for clinical therapy if it's needed.
So like if you're in a bad scene, like you're in a bad fire scene, you're in a bad shooting
scene or whatever, we take you and we would do buddy counseling and we'd take you fishing,
hunting, something to decompress so that you could talk.
And it's actually more effective than I thought because we'd have deputies that would come
up later and be like, you know what?
I, that, that was just what I needed.
Some needed more and that's how we fundraise to do it.
And so that, that organization still exists today.
In fact, they're part of Orlando's EAP, which makes me happy Orlando PDZAP because it's
peer to peer not risking your badge, you know, and you're talking to someone who's actually
been through what you're, what you're suffering from.
So it wasn't the only one.
Like it wasn't the only one.
Like we still had a litany more of like law enforcement suicides from my own agency.
And then I remember in Sebring, Highlands County, the sheriff's office called and said
like they were on the anniversary of one of their cops being murdered.
They had just had an active shooter in the Sebring bank.
And at the same time, one of their sergeants in uniform kills himself out there.
And that, at that agency only had a hundred deputies.
Like we have a hundred people on a shift.
You know what I mean?
Like they had a hundred deputies.
So that guy knew them.
Not only did they know them, they're probably really good friends.
You know what I mean?
The sheriff was like, they're asking for advice on how to handle it.
And I was like, how to handle it?
Just tell them, tell them media that you loved them.
Tell them that he was part of your family.
Tell them that you don't know what demons could have came and got them, but that he
will always be remembered as someone that you cared for and that you loved.
And we got to figure out how to prevent this in the future and just tell them the truth
and it'll go away.
They were worried that it would bring some bad light or that it was a bad reflection.
Now listen, if you think about it, like think about it.
If you're in the natural progression of things, like, you know, if something bad happens to
someone in your family because they did it to themselves, you say, what did I do?
Right?
I just spoke at the fallen firefighters, um, uh, memorial ceremony.
Like, and it was like one of the honors of my life.
And it was really, I, I look, listen, brother, I can speak to like 7,000 people today without
even a speech.
And this doesn't intimidate me.
I can do it.
You probably will think that, man, he memorized his speech that day.
When I'm looking at the families of fallen firefighters, that was rough.
Right?
But I also took the opportunity to talk about what we're talking about now.
Right?
Um, and we talked about hope.
We talk about the injury.
We talk about how we should look at it.
We talk about rest, all the things.
Do you know that the next day, one of the dudes in that crowd killed himself in the
honor guard?
And do you, do you know what I'm thinking?
I'm thinking, holy crap, what did I say that that was the thing that pushed him over the
edge for the next day?
You know?
Um, so I understood.
I understand where a leadership person could be like, I don't want, does it look bad on
me?
You know, I get that.
That's a very easy, quick, banal thing, but they chose to do the right thing.
And that sheriff went out and said those things or someone for him said it.
So they honored that guy that way.
So that's, that's kind of how I got here.
Um, I've kind of made it my mission to, uh, do something.
I don't know what we'll end up doing, but to do something about it at a minimum, just
not stand by, you know, and let it, uh, let it happen without that.
There'd be some voice of reason, you know, hopefully behind it.
So in eight years and over a thousand conversations, I am an expert in nothing zero, but I've
got to really hunt down the experts and layer these questions to the point where if you
think about a Venn diagram, there's an overlap of absolute truths because we're talking,
you know, Delta and SAS and PJs and psychologists and neuroscientists and, you know, all these
people and they're all, you know, these things are overlapping where I see real glaring common
denominators when it comes to first respond to mental health.
Firstly, the understanding that a lot of us that enter the profession have unaddressed
trauma.
That's why we went into service.
You know, a lot of us were hurt.
A lot of us didn't want that to happen to someone else.
The excitement of the job, we bury it down.
I don't, not only think about what happened to me because I'm too busy fighting fires
and responding to cardiac arrests.
Um, the, uh, organizational betrayal, you know, you put, as you said, that badge on
your chest, that means that I will serve and even possibly die for the people that in my
community and I'm part of this tribe.
I am a police officer.
I am a firefighter.
And when a back is turned on an individual, that is detrimental.
And that's another under discussed thing.
But the most actionable one, aside from simply just putting counseling at the front door,
which would address, you know, the childhood trauma part, let's literally the same way
as we do pushups and run, let's also work on our mental fitness and give new recruits
an opportunity to offload whatever they brought into the job.
And it might be, let's just chit chat about the weather and then ultimately it ends up
talking about those things or, um, you know, offload your military service before you come
in, whatever the thing is.
But the real, um, herd of elephants in the room, especially in the fire service is the
sleep deprivation.
If you, as you know, as your brother knows, if you want to select for SF sleep deprivation
is a tool to cause people to quit.
If you want to interrogate someone, sleep deprivation is a tool.
Um, if you want to even torture someone to sleep deprivation tool and in the fire service,
which is the community I know the most on average, our firefighter basic work week is
56 hours a week, 24 hours basically without sleep.
And then a 48 hour period, the, we have done to own our own mistakes as a profession.
We've told the public that we have this amazing shift.
We work one day on two days off, 10 days a month, which is absolute bullshit because
a eight hour day is a day, not 24.
So we work three days on one day off or 30 days a month.
Now if you look at the last 10 years, 10 years ago, I think people still really were lining
up around buildings for first responder positions.
In 10 short years, we have people begging anyone.
We have people giving financial incentives, you know, sign on bonuses for a cop, for a
firefighter, which is unheard of before.
And what we are seeing now, and this is something I've been very vocal about is the proactive,
courageous leaders, especially in Florida here are realizing that as we touched on earlier,
the false economy of breaking your first responders, there is money there to invest in your people.
And the move to the 24 72, which your neighbor Pasco is done, is one of the biggest answers
to the cancer, the mental health, testosterone, all the things that we're seeing.
And on top of delivery of service and saving the taxpayer money, because as you mentioned
earlier, we're seeing a decline of, of, um, service to our community, but no one's given
tax refunds.
The public doesn't know that.
You know what I mean?
Right.
You know, so exactly right.
So the police officers were pulling over your teenage son, maybe hasn't slept, you know,
and now they get shot because they're reaching for their driving license or the medic pushes
the wrong drug or the fire engine plows into the minivan.
That's a lower level of service, you know, not to mention that the rescue, the ambulance
that should be available for your home is now doing into facility transports for a hospital.
So there's all these things that are behind that veil that you talked about.
For me, I believe that the 24 72 in the fire service is an absolutely crucial way of turning
the ship around so we can get this bar back up and get young people excited about his
profession.
What is your perspective on the first responder or the firefighter work week and how do we
address this recruitment crisis?
All right.
You unpacked a couple of things here.
I want to talk in on my answer to that question, but I want to talk about the resiliency.
I want to talk about sleep and I want to talk about my expectations of fire leadership.
All right.
So those three things afterwards.
So I am a huge proponent of one on three off a huge proponent.
I say that with a caveat that I understand I might this might not be the only answer,
right?
To do that.
That's what I do know because what we're seeing in studies are that two fundamental pillars
of your health and mine, men, women also, to be honest with you, but we're finding when
our studies in men and we get a lot of this coming out of so calm or the army testosterone
and sleep, right?
When I was in the army, I was told you can get four hours sleep regulations.
And I have no idea if this is actually true, but this is what we were told.
We're supposed to give you four hours of sleep and it doesn't have to be continuous.
Think about what I just told you, right?
So you want me to go lead 18 year olds who are operating on, we didn't even have energy
drinks at the time on four hours of sleep with a M 60 machine gun and that then a two
40, right?
High rates of fire.
Do you know how many times we said we almost died?
You literally, we would be like, man, that was close.
We almost died, these are probably decisions we made it because we were smoked.
Okay.
Is that reality in war?
Maybe are you trying to replicate it?
Maybe okay.
So, but we can't live on that edge, right?
And then think we're actually training sustainably, right?
Safely.
And then something that where we can actually replicate it on a regular basis so that it
becomes valuable to us, right?
So in my mind's eye, the more sleep you get, right?
That is showing this, the more sleep you get, the deeper you go, the longer you go, the
more restorative it is for your brain.
If we could bottle sleep into a pill form, you would get rid of the pharmaceutical industries
like there's no tomorrow because all of the goodness that comes from restorative sleep,
right?
Regeneration, our human growth hormone, all that kind of stuff would be packaged in that
little bottle.
So actually, all you got to do is sleep, right?
But when we take that away, so remember when I told you like I'd live with like a couple
hours of sleep because I get called out and it was only me and this one other person and
we were on 24 seven, I felt it.
I literally felt it.
But when I was 18 to 25 and 26, 27, I could bounce back pretty good, right?
Even though it was hurting me then, but I didn't feel as much.
Well, it hurt when I was in my forties, right?
Like I mean, super groggy soup and I'm not used to that.
So imagine a lifetime of it, right?
Imagine I tell you one on two off.
So in my mind's eye, if you can get more restorative sleep, right?
I'm going to give you the tool by doing one and three, right?
And I think what's going to end up happening is you'll start seeing the pressure of that
building.
Coral Gables is already talking about it.
Palm Beach is already talking about it, right?
You know, Gainesville is already doing it.
Palm Beach County went to it already.
Right.
So I'm sorry.
I stand corrected, right?
So we're already doing it.
They're recruiting.
Pasco is already reporting that their recruitment numbers are unheard of and they're stealing,
to be honest with you, from Hillsborough County, from my county, right?
Which is a professionally run, well-paying, good union that represents our people.
Good, really good leadership.
They got really good leadership right now.
I'm telling you, like those, the top chiefs right now have not forgotten what it is to
wear the boots and run out.
Okay.
But I will tell you this.
I'm open to other ideas, right?
Meaning every time I think I've figured out the only way to skin the cat, there may be
other skin the cat.
I'd like to see what the data shows me from one and three, right?
I really want to see that because I think like if I'm a, if I'm, my hypothesis is correct,
people have good effects, right?
I think one of the criticisms of one and three is people are like, yeah, now I need to fund
a third shift, right?
Another, a fourth shift, right?
And those firefighters are simply just going to, they're not going to get their sleep.
They're just going to go get their work.
My answer to that is, you know, they're side jobs.
My answer to that is they're going to sleep at night, right?
And they're going to get the sleep they can.
That is at least it's continuous, right?
Through at hopefully an eight hour period.
Not their 24 on two broken circadian rhythms back to their 24 hours on.
So I have great hope in the one and three, but there is the question, will that hurt
leadership, right?
Like leadership pipeline, maybe in what way, how would they hurt by this?
You I'm one in three.
I have three days off every day.
Why would I want to go up any higher than maybe captain?
I think about that, right?
I don't know.
Maybe because I'm now going to go from one and three to working five days a week for
sure.
Right.
I can see some that I could do a possibility.
The other thing is I once heard another alternative that says, and remember not a firefighter.
I'm coming to the issue with an open heart and a will to fix things.
Right?
So I don't, I don't want to step on, uh, boots, let's say that, uh, and I will, but
I don't want to step on them unnecessarily without having some aforethought here.
So when the fire service comes together, right?
Remember it was fire and then rescue.
And so we have one firehouse, one bus going out and picking people up.
And then we've had to train the truck, right?
To have full ALS on it at all times.
Right.
Because 90% of our calls are medical.
What if we had a different model that said fire truck stays fire, right?
We'll always treat those guys.
They have to cross train.
There's got to be paramedic certified ALS if we need them and we get two buses running
at a time and we shift it from 24 on to 12.
We can do whatever we want.
Like you be creative chief.
You know what I mean?
You can do whatever you want.
Split your shift, right?
You still need as many people, right?
You still need as many people.
You don't need, um, uh, as many houses as you would, you know, I meant necessarily.
I'm sorry.
You don't need as many, um, you need as many trucks.
You need people and you split it.
And now those people that are going, no one should be riding for 24 hours seeing what
those people are doing at the volume of calls that they're doing.
Right.
So if you split that, there's a theory.
I don't know.
Maybe someone comes to us with another theory that we don't know about.
I'm telling you, my brother, that if you told me if we smoked dog crap, right, and we could
and that that would save lives, I would fund with a Floridian tax money that study to see
if we could save one firefighter's life.
Um, so I'm open to anything I really like, and I'm really excited about one in three.
Listen, how old do you have to be to be a firefighter?
Because I might go one in three myself.
I like the idea a lot.
Well, this is what's craziest.
People look at that and it sounds amazing.
It's a 42 hour work.
It is a 40 or more that one on three off, which is a terrible way of saying, cause it's
not one.
It's like I said, three, I actually like, I hadn't heard that before.
Three on two office, what it would be because that's, that's first day you're off.
You're not.
You're not going to be five to eight.
Um, but there's the 12 hour thing, cause the way I look at it, we haven't done the research,
but it's really common sense.
Would a 56 hour we'd be more detrimental than the 42 of course.
So if you flip it around, is it worse?
Look at what we've got now, a national recruitment crisis.
First responders taking their own lives, you know, almost every single day we try one cancer,
you know, divorces, pediatric illnesses.
So our evidence is the way we're doing it now isn't working.
There's this, there's irrefutable data on that.
Imagine I tell you like, Hey, like you're this generation.
I don't even know what we call this generation.
Like, like I can't, when I was teaching, I'd be like, you don't even have to be good anymore
guy.
You just have to be competent.
If you show up a 40 or 50 year old guy like me, like, man, that guy's a go getter.
He showed up in our day.
We had to be there early and wait to the boss left to make sure that we didn't get fired
for lack of will and effort, you know what I mean?
Or desire to be there.
So our pool of people is different.
And so now you want to tell that person, Hey, I got a job for you.
Your kid has a 30% chance of then, you know, of getting cancer than any other kid.
You are probably going to be at least one, maybe two divorces in sounds really great.
You're going to have a lot of nightmares.
You ain't going to sleep a lot.
And there's a, there's a great chance that, you know, you may get this thing called PTS
you in sounds great to me, doesn't it?
Oh, by the way, you get a great union to defend you and maybe you're going to get a retirement,
but everything else still comes with it.
Are you serious?
How do we recruit to that?
You know what I mean?
And so, um, you, you have to look at this globally, right?
You have to look at it globally.
You're not just talking about putting a guy or a gal on a truck.
When you press nine one, the door goes up and out goes a truck.
You have to look at, am I setting this guy or gal up for divorce?
Right.
And you say, well, that's my problem says the city councilman.
And my answer is you keep saying it's not your problem, right?
You keep getting the same result.
Um, I started to think about one in three, and then I said, well, let me look at cop
world, right?
Let me look at cop world.
So now that I left the sheriff's office, I got, I am the general counsel to the Tampa
police union.
It's called the PBA.
And so I still go out on call outs whenever, uh, you know, there's a use of force or there's
a bad accident and then we do negotiations with the city.
So I'm still formally involved in law enforcement and I love it.
Now I get to highlight things between these two departments.
I was born at the sheriff's office, which is a 30 year retirement or was until we just
changed that at the state.
Um, it was one of our priorities.
I want 20, but we, we settled on 25.
It was 30 at the time, right?
Um, they work two days on, two days off, three days on, three days off.
Right.
And then I've already told you the stories of, you know, how they're self-harming over
at TPD, uh, union.
So I say that because I never, I never thought of this before.
If I became a sheriff tomorrow, and by the way, I'm a Republican card carrying, but my
men and women, if I was the sheriff of whatever county we're in today, there would be a union,
right?
And all of the things that you said was real, the betrayal part, right?
This is real life.
Okay.
So if we were operating tactically, right?
And we said, Hey, our job is to go fight bad guys in a vacuum.
Okay.
But there's mayors, there's city councilmen, there's voters, there's stakeholders, there's
a political pressures.
All of that is affecting your police and your fire department.
Right.
And oftentimes that pressure is going down to the end user, the, the, the basic police
officer, which is now wondering, do I pull a trigger on this person or not?
They have a gun in my face.
And 10 years ago, we would have been like, why didn't you shoot them right away?
Now we're like, what's their geo, what's their demographic?
Are you going to get in trouble for doing it?
And I have actually counseled on cases where a police officer says, stop police 13 times
bad guy turns around.
And the only reason the bad guy doesn't shoot and you can see it in the body cam is because
when he had been shooting in the air, his weapons stovepiped, but he would have, we
would be going to a funeral today because the young cop was afraid of what would happen
afterwards.
Right.
And he was dead to rights all every day that ends in why he was okay.
If he would have shot and killed that guy.
So I say we, the union part, I don't care what union, to be honest with you, I just
need those people to have a voice that defends them against the pressures of the politics.
When those pressures come against, because I would never let you be a cop or a firefighter
in any, any city in the state of Florida.
If there, I wouldn't recommend it.
You know what I mean?
Like without one.
I'm positive that my sheriff's office friends will hear this and maybe that will make them
upset.
But there's like a level of PTSD that operates over there because it's some sheriff's offices,
you know what I mean?
Not over at that one necessarily, but there's some, because they don't think that they have
a voice when it comes to operating underneath their SOPs.
There's a lot of politics involves.
So I think that's a really big factor, but at TPD, they've got four days on four days
off, right?
So you're going to have a regular ish work week without any.
Now they only get one weekend, one technical weekend, right?
That means a Saturday and a Sunday every six weeks, right?
But they get four days on four days off.
They retire in 20.
My first retiree that I saw that was 20 years old.
I was like, dude, where are you going?
He's like, Oh, I'm, I'm done.
I was like, you're done what I'm retiring.
I was like, guy, you look super young.
Those extra 10 years of humping his own, right?
Coming in and out of a cop car, doing all that.
That adds to you, man.
The stress, the trauma, all that kind of stuff.
So I think when we're talking about your one in three, that's one of the factors, right?
We got to make sure that their sleep is restorative.
You know what I mean?
The next thing we're talking about, you mentioned a little bit about it is the resilience.
I'm calling it resiliency, right?
Mental health is part of the resiliency, right?
So you said it and we're doing it.
Well, I'm trying to do it, right?
Right now we have a whole bunch of old timers, right?
They've been there now and the old timers are running.
So the chiefs, right?
And then we have the rookies coming in.
So I'm my, my idea right now is to pinch it until it meets in the middle, meaning the
education.
Anytime I go and speak to anyone in any fire service, I literally look at everyone in the
crowd and because what are they going to do?
Fire me?
They can't fire me.
I literally say, if you're telling your men and women to suck it up, you're failing them
and you're wrong, right?
And you can see the eyes open up real big.
You know whose eyes don't open up is like the, the firefighters that are in the crowd
going, hell yeah, give it to them.
Give it to them.
Right?
Why?
Because we grew up that way.
I grew up though.
Hey, this is the job.
Suck it up.
No sleep.
No this.
No.
Eventually, if we continue to make exceptions for everything, we're not going to have a
firefighter, right?
We're not going to have a soldier.
Soldiers got to shoot.
They got to jump.
They got to blow stuff up.
All that does trauma.
All of that does micro concussions.
So we have to learn how to live within the risks that we signed up for, for the emergent
tasks that were given or the dangerous deeds that we've got to go do.
We got to figure this out.
What we've been doing in the past saying, Hey, it is what it is.
When you got a guy stand next to a breaching charge, right?
And he's the number one, number two, number three, that over pressure will jack your brain
up.
Now we got to train it because we got to make sure we do it right.
And for the first time, we actually do actions on objectives, right?
Well, you can only do so much of those until your brain scrambled and you have now opened
yourself up to what is BTS, right?
So I tell chiefs today, if you are doing this and you're not properly addressing the factors
that lead up to it, not just mental health, mental health is one thing we're talking about
environmental factors.
You guys go in and have all sorts of carcinogens, all sorts of chemicals.
We know that PFAS in your, in your gear existed.
All of those begin to accumulate when your biggest organ called your skin absorbs it,
right?
That gets in your system, gets through the blood brain barrier, begins to affect, right?
The trauma micro and macro, right?
You don't need to just go to one scene, see some kid melting, right?
You can have a couple of bad cuts, hear one mom screaming that, you know, her child is
dead.
You only got to hear that one time, right?
Those things add up your lack of sleep, which we're starting to address.
Unrealized trauma from being kids, right, like the, the history that we come with, all
of these factors together, when you start to churn it up, right?
The result is when we don't treat it, when we don't talk about it, when we don't normalize
it is guns in people's mouths, right?
Or you know, like the end of life for someone that is not, it's not their time.
So one of the bills that we're filing is one of the things in my bill that we're filing
in our first responder packages, we're mandating from the bottom, right?
We talked about the top, we talked about now normalizing the conversations, we talked about
influencing and trying to get training in from the bottom.
What we're doing is we're going to mandate in both the fire Academy and the police Academy,
four and a half hour block of resiliency training.
So it won't be the first time they ever hear it is when someone like you pulls them to
the side on the truck and says, Hey man, are you sleeping?
They're going to learn that they need sleep.
They have to mitigate their environmental dangers that they have to report when they
get their concussive effects or their traumas to their head, like TBI is to make sure that
we were safe.
And then they're going to have to deal with just the basics of the trauma overall, right?
When we start to normalize that conversation from the bottom and you tell a tough alpha
male or alpha female, Hey, you're going to see some crap.
It's going to really suck.
If you need a moment, let me know.
There's no shame in it.
When you hear the tough guy do that, right?
The guy you look up to Mr. Delta force or the number one breacher in your fire company
do that.
Then all of a sudden you're like, well, if that guy can do it, then it's okay for me
to do it.
Right.
And it's not weakness.
Here's the, here's the issue that, that really pisses me off.
Like there's no tomorrow.
Like I think what you think is weakness is ultimate strength.
Do you know what it takes for someone to be this revealing that, you know, their brain
isn't firing at all symptoms, you know what I mean?
Like are on all cylinders that that's, that's probably the greatest courage that you could
have.
You know what I mean?
So like in the meantime, um, I've gotten a ton from SOCOM.
Socom is in my backyard, the Tampa, a bunch of my friends, uh, came up through the special
operations community.
Um, I still do a lot of work in the nonprofit space with those guys and gals.
And so they're doing some cutting edge stuff.
Like for example, we just funded ETMS in Florida.
Um, electro, I'm going to get it wrong.
I'm not a doctor.
Trans cranial stimulation.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate that.
So I got this from, from my legislative aid, my former legislative aid was a Ranger battalion
guy hanging out with another Ranger battalion guy and said, Hey, we, we got this new thing
that's that saved a couple of Navy SEALs from getting discharged medically because they
were pretty jacked up, you know, from their accumulation.
Really what is it?
So ETMS in, in quickly for those, your viewer or listeners that don't know, if you're, we
think the front cortex of your brain pre cortex, right, frontal lobe, it should have pathways,
neural pathways that are clear and open, right?
They signal goes back and forth and there's no obstruction.
But because of the things we talked about, environmental trauma, concussive effects,
major concussive lack of sleep, those pathways get muddled.
So what this thing does is it scans your brain and then it comes up with an exact treatment
profile for your brain and it sends signals through it that reopen those very, very much
like these, uh, Hiawaska is these mushroom treatments that do something similar, but
may not have, may not last as long.
Right?
So Ohio did a really good job, um, in leadership and doing this and they provided it for their
first responder community.
And what we did here in Florida is this year we're opening five locations.
The one in Tampa is open, the one in Miami is opening here very shortly.
Um, five locations, $10 million.
If you're a first responder or you're a veteran, you literally sit down, uh, you flash your
ID, they give you the tests that you need to, to sit down and boom, your EAP doesn't
know.
Your chief doesn't know your badge is never on the line.
And what a lot of these, um, folks that I am talking to personally are reporting back
is, um, you know, it's not the wonder drug.
Everyone thinks that you all of a sudden you're not better overnight, but a lot of them, uh,
are thinking more clearly are getting more restorative sleep, like more than they've
ever slept before.
Um, and the results for my people are incoming as we speak.
And we will roll that up into the FDA study, which, so they can be indicated for, uh, PTSD.
And then after that, it's going to be paid for by your insurance.
So we'll probably run this program, let's say three to five years is the guide slope
that I told the bosses that I would need the money for.
And they're like, well, you are persistent.
I was like, listen, I'll let you meet the people whose lives you saved by, by getting
this money in their hands and are getting this treatment on their heads.
So, um, I'm going to sit down for it.
I feel, I feel the effects I feel of, uh, you know, we've blown up a lot of things.
I did a lot of jumps, uh, where I really had a lot of hard landings.
Um, I'm extremely forgetful.
I sleep nothing.
You know what I mean?
Um, I got told you, like, I think some of the effects of, uh, of some of the things
I've seen and done when I was in the sheriff's office, you know, they'll catch up eventually.
Um, so I'm excited about sitting in the chair myself, but the results have been, from what
I hear incredible.
And I'm very excited about it.
Hillsborough County fire department, or fire rescue, they actually provide that service
through their EAP.
So if you, you end up getting that down the line, you're going to, you're going to have
access to it as well over there and their results have been outstanding.
So I'm, I'm excited for what, what the future holds on that side.
Beautiful.
Well, just going back to the, the work week shift conversation, it's interesting because
if you look at the 12th, cause that's one of the things that the fire fighters really,
to be honest, are worried about is all we're going to be told to do 12th.
But if you look at law enforcement, doctors, nurses, you know, not exactly pillars of health,
a lot of them.
So, and if you ask the sleep medicine gurus, they say, yeah, that going from night to day
to night today is the worst circadian rhythm shift.
Absolutely.
So the fire service has a 24.
I think that's a benefit.
And especially as we're Jack of all trades for me, if I think about all the things I'm
responsible for and I go in and I do my physical training and my, you know, my workouts and
my drug checks and then running calls and doing all my equipment checks, you know, if
I left after 10 or 12 hours, I would have just finished my checkouts, you know?
So I think it's a different conversation with fire.
What I would love to see, and I know I think we touched on this when we spoke before, where
I struggled to understand is that a lot of our administrators, politicians, chiefs, even
union leaders, some of them work 40 hours and refuse to advocate for their men and women
that are working 56 or in a mandatory overtime case, which is all the time, it's an 80 hour
work week for our firefighters.
I would love to see a standardized work week of 42, 24, 72.
What is the path to that?
I think that begins with education.
And so I literally, we started off talking about ride alongs.
Remember that?
I need every chief that can ever hear my voice to, so I took one thing from this podcast
today.
I'm going to go reach out to my politicians.
You've got to have a relationship with those folks and you've got to open their eyes.
And guess what?
Someone's going to get unelected and you got to do it again.
Sorry, you're the chief, your job, right?
Let's get them out there.
Let's get them to understand part of my, you know, education campaign doesn't, isn't just
for Marissa top down, you know, or bottom up, top down.
We got to teach even our own elected officials what the reality of what our people are facing
is.
Right?
So for example, one thing that I want to change is I, I'm not a scientist.
I'm not a doctor.
So don't be like, Oh my God, I'd like to drop the D in PTSD.
It's not a disorder.
It's an injury, right?
You got an injury from on the job.
Now the minute I say that, you know what?
Every chief and every work lawyer goes, Oh my God, Danny, what are you trying to open
up workers' compensation?
No.
What I'm trying to tell you is, and I'm trying to normalize that this person got hurt while
doing the job.
They didn't break their arm.
They might've cracked their head for a lack of a better way to describe it.
And it opened this thing up to them, right?
And that way we get rid of this sigma that is some sort of disorder, right?
You know, a disorder, you, you saw a bunch of bad stuff.
You weren't sleeping right.
Your brain's not opening the pathways.
We need to reopen the pathways.
Let's go.
Right.
So I need more people to understand.
And that means we have to sell the story better.
Right.
And people like Danny, should you be selling?
Yeah.
I'm, I'm in sales, right?
As a politician, when I have an idea that I'm trying to pass, I'm selling my idea.
And then eventually if I sell it enough, it passes in the governor signs the bill.
What we're talking about is changing cultures.
Think about it.
You and I have just spent time talking about how the bottom's got to come up and now I
got to change rookie firefighters and rookie cops.
So they go, Hey, it's okay.
You know, I'm not a wuss when I say I need a timeout.
Okay.
And then I hear chiefs.
There's a ton of them there.
Listen, I've met them.
I believe them.
I've seen them, but there's a lot of them that think this is still weakness.
Right.
So eventually they'll get weeded out.
Right.
And you don't change cultures overnight.
This is a cultural shift.
What you're asking is completely different.
We're asking for you to look at the warrior that can have weakness, right?
And the weakness can get treated, right?
Get fixed, get worked on, get prevented.
Right.
And then your warrior has a different outlook than maybe he looked like in the past.
Right.
Our warriors in the past, and I'm including firefighters in that I'm including cops in
that we told them to suck it up.
World War II veterans.
Remember like we have story after story, like where they suffered in the dark.
They came out, they had night terrors and World War I we called it, what was it?
Soldiers' Heart or Battle Fatigue.
Yeah, Battle Fatigue.
Right.
It's existed.
Like it happened in the Civil War.
What we're saying now is the human has a value.
We spent all of this has a literal value, right?
Like just as the humanity of it.
So if you want to put a number to it and you're talking to your politician, how do we change
it?
We spent all this money training this cop to be a cop just to lose them because we won't
provide the service that treats or deals with the injury or prevents the injury in the first
place.
Right.
This firefighter, it takes a lot to make a firefighter, right?
You've become one, right?
It takes a lot to become one.
Right.
Now we got to, it takes a lot to keep one.
Right.
We thought it was just add retirement, give some good benefits.
You know, it'll grow.
It's not 1980 anymore.
Right.
Now we are under the burden of information and the information tells me that to keep
these people thriving and alive, right, we've got to do these things.
And again, that costs money and culture shift.
So it's a really big deal.
Well, it's interesting even with the benefits aside from all the ill health from the hours.
When I think about my career, like when I was in Orange County for five years, when
I left, I made less than when I got hired.
Really?
I sent myself through medic school.
So I got the medic bump, but that was all off my own back.
No education reimbursement, nothing.
But Rick Scott had start hacking away at the FRS.
So I literally made zero pay raises and made less after five years.
Then you look at the health insurance, what used to be a $10 copay and you could go get
anything done.
Now is out of pocket until you meet three, four or five thousand.
So even the benefits that used to be the carrot on the string, they're not there on top of
all the other stuff that's going on.
Where I am extremely optimistic is we are at a crisis.
We're at a nationwide first responder crisis, recruitment crisis.
And yes, there are some pockets where departments are still able to hire people.
They're more sought after.
If you look nationally, we are, but that's a beautiful opportunity to finally make the
change.
As you said, I'm sure there's a lot of pressure on Hillsborough now to start looking at the
2472 when everyone's testing at Pasco.
So that's a good thing to me.
It's going to really force this change.
What it's also done, sadly, though, is exposed, for lack of a better word, cowardice in leadership.
People that have been taking their, parading around with their bugles, taking their giant
salaries, and now they're being called on to lead and they refuse to advocate for the
wellness of their people.
And locally is a good example.
And we've had, I mean, four suicides in four years of young firefighters.
I would think that you'd be searching the edges of the earth to bring solutions.
And we've seen nothing but resistance to any sort of change whatsoever.
To the people out there, how do we spur them up to get the courage to look beyond their
own career progression and salary and start actually advocating for their people, which
is what they're paid to do?
And that's not just a chief.
That's city and county administrators.
That's union leaders.
Anyone who has a position that can force change but isn't at the moment.
So you know, people always say like anyone can lead.
I don't agree with that.
I just don't.
I can teach you to lead.
You know, I can teach you to do the right things.
ROTC is a perfect proof of that, like we, that's a leadership school, right?
West Point's leadership school.
But then you put some of those people out there and they're the worst leaders you've
ever seen, right?
So maybe they're good managers.
Maybe they can, I can teach that, right?
But when you talk about true leadership, you need men and women with moral intestinal fortitude,
right?
To go and make the right decisions.
So I'll say their names.
I think Jason Dockery, Hillsboro County is one of those people.
There's a guy named Jeremy Sitalakis who is the chief at Plant City Fire Department, little
tiny fire department, right?
Like you would overlook in 10 seconds.
That dude loves and fights for his men and women and the fire service in general, both
of those men.
But then alternatively, there's chiefs that suck, you know what I mean?
And you know what ended up happening in the army?
You would watch, the system was so bad that like the smart ones go, I'm not doing this
crap.
You know what I mean?
And they're like, I love my country.
I did my time.
You know what I mean?
I did it.
I'm out.
I'm going to go take care of my family and myself now, right?
Good luck to you.
And so then what happens?
The crap rises, right?
And there's about 20, 25% of those people that are like, Hey, I'm going to stick this
through because if I don't, who will?
Right?
And actually that's one of my lines.
If I don't go, who will?
Right?
So I don't think that the fire service is that different.
You know what I'm saying?
And I don't think that the police world is that different.
There's a whole lot of politics involved in all of it, right?
And there's old, but ultimately if you put on a chief's helmet, okay, or you put on a
sheriff's badge or a chief's badge, right, you can never forget who you are, right?
You're a firefighter first.
Okay.
You are a cop first.
You didn't become the sheriff or the chief or the police chief because you forgot that
or you were a bad cop.
You were hopefully decent, right?
Don't forget that, right?
Leadership is what it takes.
And then moral courage is truly what it takes.
And if you hear that and you're like, oh, that's easy to say, Danny, you don't think
it's hard to sit on this microphone and call out people in the state of Florida for not
doing their job.
Yeah.
It's not easy.
You know what I mean?
And there's a lot of things that are at risk, but ultimately what we're trying to do is
we're not, we're trying to save an ethos, brother.
You know what I mean?
We're trying to save a type of man and a type of woman that has stood into the charge, right?
They stand in the breach and you say, is this worth fighting for?
And then when you look at your badge and it says chief and you're like, well, I made it
and you think you've made it, you're wrong, right?
That's when the job begins, right?
You've proven that you have the intestinal fortitude to get there.
You drove the truck, you set the right seat.
Now you're the battalion chief or you're the district, you know, major when you're in the
cop or whatever.
Now's not the time you sit and kick your feet up.
Now it's the time you actually work.
Now is the time when you turn to your spouse and you go, Hey, you're not going to see me
again for a while because I got to lead.
There's I remember, like I remember there's this guy named Alan Hill.
He was a major.
He now leads Tico's internal security.
What a great kick.
You know what I mean?
And you know what I loved about this guy?
He would still hump a zone once a month, he would go out at night, right?
And hump the zone with his men and women to remind them that he still has it and to remind
himself that he was still a deputy.
That's leadership.
Okay.
Um, leadership is showing up in flip flops on Thursday of Thanksgiving, right?
And showing the men and women that yeah, you're working that night and I could be at home
with my own family, but I'm the fire chief of this County and I'm going to, and you might
be like, Danny is just, what is he's just showing up is just an act.
It's not an act, right?
It's not an act.
You go, you show if you're in your office more than you're in the field, you got to
think of yourself as wrong with a capital W. Okay.
We are in jobs that require hands on leadership with our people.
And if you're not willing to do that, you're not willing to set the example.
I need you to take a good look in the mirror and say, maybe I should hang this up.
Right.
If it's hard to hear that message, well, then I'm sorry.
You know what I mean?
This isn't one of those things where, um, we can call it in.
You know what I mean?
When you fake it, people get hurt.
Right.
And a lot of times the hurt that comes from bad leadership is in the betrayal.
And I love, I'm going to steal your, uh, your that's your words.
Right.
Because that's exactly what happens when we have someone that is betrayed by leadership.
Right.
Like I came to do a good job.
You know what I mean?
I did what you told me to do.
And now, um, we know we're all humans.
We all make a mistake.
And next thing you know, I'm, I'm down the river by myself.
That's, that's not what we expect.
You know what I expect?
I expect you to chew my ass out.
I expect you to punish me, but I expect you to stand with me when I made a mistake because
I'm sure on your way to chief, you might not have rolled the roll, the hose the right way
all the time.
You might've like cut the corner on the this and forgot the, that, you know what I mean?
And you just didn't get caught sometimes.
You know what I mean?
We've all been there.
Right.
So you cannot forget the low man on the pole.
Um, and remember that just because nobody else saw it, doesn't mean your men and women
didn't see it.
And you think you're good.
You know, you think you're getting the applause, but you're not, you know what I mean?
Because the only thing that really counts, honestly, is, is those men and women, um,
in politics, I don't give a damn about what somebody thinks about me.
You understand that?
Like, um, if I'm only supposed to be elected four years, okay.
It is, it is what it is.
I want to be reelected because I like doing my job.
Um, and I like helping.
And so I don't want the people that elected me to think, oh, he doesn't care what I care.
But if I heard every criticism and I let it affect me, then I couldn't do my job.
But do you know what really affects me?
If a firefighter thought I was a dirt bag or a soldier thought I was a piece of crap
or a cop thought I was dishonest, that would demoralize me.
You know what I mean?
Why?
Because these are people that live by honor and code, right?
They live by an ethos or you're supposed to, if you haven't forgotten it.
Right.
And when those men and women like really are super judgy, if they're being fair, cause
you know, we can be childish too, then it really hurts.
And if you're a chief and it doesn't hurt you, then it's time to go.
It's really time to go.
Well, this is, uh, I think this is just to underline that point.
This is what is frustrating and I hope, you know, people can really understand this because
we're in this crisis.
And I, again, I'm incurable optist.
I'm like you, I'm a glass half full or glass full guy myself.
This is the perfect opportunity to do one of two things.
Either you can turn the ship around.
You'll be the hero of your own story.
That's so true.
Or you're the helm when it sinks and you tell your constituents the reason they don't have
a fire department or a police department or, you know, paramedics won't be coming anymore.
So there's such a beautiful way of turning it around.
And it isn't even that brave a decision.
You just literally look at your finances, look how much money is downstream with overtime,
with recruits that you train that walk out the door two, three years later with your
workman's comp claims, with your medical disabilities and line of duty deaths and your accident
lawsuits millions and millions and millions of dollars.
So you just tell them, Hey, we're going to need a little bit because we, we, we haven't
invested in our people and it's got away from us.
The taxpayer gets better.
The mental and physical health of your people gets better.
You can put the bar back higher so you can demand more of your recruits.
There is no downside except having the courage to actually initiate that program.
So that's why I'm so, you know, set on the, again, it's not the magic bullet, but I always
ask the question, why doesn't a firefighter work deserve to work 42 hours a week?
That's the fundamental question.
If we make that big change, so many things will improve.
I agree.
So with that being said, I want to be mindful of your time.
We've been chatting over two hours.
We have, wow, that went quick.
Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up?
Listen, I, I just want to make sure that anybody who hears this understands that, you know,
there are resources, right?
But you got to avail yourself of them.
All right.
If we're talking about trying to save lives, I can't, I say this all the time.
You'll hear me say it.
I can't love you.
I cannot love you more than you love yourself.
Right.
At some point you, I need you to reach out.
So if you're hurting and, or you think you're skipping a beat, it's fine.
Right.
It's totally fine.
Come find the help.
There's tons of help.
You just have to go reach for it.
Right.
I remember it, it took a while to understand this.
There was a guy in the army who I didn't know.
All right.
I didn't know, but he was like this guy we all looked up to.
He had been in the ranger battalion.
He lost his leg while leading his men.
And he's the first ever on record coming back to full duty in the ranger battalion as an
amputee.
Do you understand how impossible it is to be a full able bodied person and lead in the
ranger battalion?
And then this guy did it with one leg, jumping, running, climbing, everything.
So that dude, two years ago killed himself.
Right.
And I'm working out and at the gym and I can hit me.
I can't stop crying.
I mean, I don't know this person.
And I remember just being on a machine and my face is wet.
Right.
And I was like, what is happening?
So I call a buddy of mine who is very high up in the special force guys, like he's a
stud and I'm like, listen to me, bro.
Are you okay?
I, you know, like this guy who's the hero to heroes just took his life.
I can't take it.
I can't bury one more person.
I can't do one more funeral.
And he said, Danny, listen to me right now.
I'm fine.
And I really appreciate you calling me, but you've got to figure out a way to live.
Just let this go.
Because if they don't want the help after we've provided the help, then there's nothing
that we can do.
And I said, and it took hearing it from him.
You understand that this guy who has accomplished everything in the military, who is as gone
as high as you're going to go has done all these secret things.
And then I said to him, I said, look, it's really hard to swallow for a guy like me,
for guys like you that we can fix anything.
We can do anything, but ultimately we're, this is not up to us.
You know what I mean?
So my mission is to provide all the resource needed, right?
And to figure out if how to do the fix, but ultimately I can't get in your head.
So if you're not feeling it, right, help me help you, right?
Ultimately, we'd rather have you on this side, right?
We love you, right?
There are not many of us and those of us that may not wear the uniform or the same uniform
as you doesn't mean we care any less, right?
You're our brother, you're our sister and the world is better for you being in it.
And that's it.
Beautiful.
I'll add one caveat to that.
Another of the Venn diagram overlaps from so many people on the show that have been
at that point that you don't hear people talk about enough is that feeling of being a burden
with that vicious, you know, that, that vicious, um, perfect storm of sleep deprivation, unaddressed
traumas, organizational betrayal, TBIs, all the things the brain truly becomes miswired.
And you hear so many of these men and women, they believe that they believe reason of the
pain for their family.
So if I just kill myself, I will save my family from the pain.
This is why I keep saying, uh, is disorder the right word?
This is an injury, right?
Because you've got a guy who goes in the door when the bad guy's shooting or when the building
is on fire and that that's not a guy who is a burden.
You know what I mean?
He would never think of himself as a burden.
He's like, whatever, let's go.
You are going to have, or you had Doug White on your show?
Um, I just had him on.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he's a great friend of mine.
Part of his book story, I was there for the whole thing.
Right.
So reading his book, um, I'm going to buy, uh, w we give gifts at the, um, at the house.
You're supposed to like, it's like a tradition.
You give all the members a gift from your district or whatever.
I'm going to buy his book and give it to every member of the, of the Florida house and the
Florida Senate so they can hopefully read it and understand here's a guy you want to
talk about leader.
Remember we were talking about leader.
I remember going out into the field and watching this guy as a lieutenant who's typically either
in an office or parked in the car, kind of handling the admin.
That's their job.
Chasing bad guys as lieutenant so that his men and women could see what it looks like.
He can carry the burden with them.
Right.
And he can set the example who in a million years would have ever thought that that guy
thought he wasn't good enough.
You know what I mean?
That, that dude's better than 10 men put together.
You know what I mean?
And here he thinks he's not good enough.
Right.
So that was a perspective that I wasn't ready for.
You know what I mean?
Uh, here's a dude I look up to, I admired.
Why do you think I want to hang out with you?
You know what I mean?
And that's how he saw himself.
So, um, that's a perspective and I'm really glad you brought that up because I, I failed
to see that in him.
You know what I mean?
I just like, yeah, bro, you're good, man.
Keep up the good work.
You know, he wasn't good.
He wasn't good at all.
You know what I mean?
So we didn't lose them because of God.
You know what I mean?
We didn't lose them because there's a higher power.
So now we'll use his voice to go help save lives.
And I'm really pumped about his journey.
So thanks for having me on.