I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast,
and that is Rescue 1 CBD.
For any of you who have listened to this podcast for the last eight years, you will have heard
my own personal journey from using prescription pills after a knee surgery to finding CBD
and having incredible success with that.
I then saw my son's wheezing diminish, my wife's anxiety, and so many more kind of success
stories.
The problem is though, I've also seen the stigma and misunderstanding about this incredibly
powerful plant medicine.
When it comes to workplace drug testing, it's THC that they are looking for.
The concentration is higher in marijuana, but there is a small amount in most CBD products.
And with John being a veteran firefighter paramedic himself, he was determined to find
a product that was pure that would ensure there was nothing in there that would put
someone's career at risk.
So he developed a three tier system.
The third party testing facility tests to parts per billion, which is the most minute
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The results of every batch are posted on their website so you can literally see the same
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Secondly, they include workplace drug test kits in the order when you order it.
So if you have any fears, you get to do it just to appease it, even though this is a
pure and safe product.
Thirdly, they've just finished a year long study with the University of Maryland and
Arcadia University, and firefighters from all over the country sent in their urine samples
and not a single person failed a drug test.
So you have three different tiers of trust with this particular product.
Now they have different flavors for their CBD.
For anyone that's had it that's just the CBD oil, it does not taste good, so they found
a way of making it more palatable.
They have a sleep remedy that has terpenes in, again, completely safe.
That one's called out of service.
And then topical CBD, obviously for aches and pains on the outside.
Now on top of all that, Rescue 1 is offering you, the listener of the Behind the Shield
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And you can find all of their products.
You can find all of the testing and understand why this truly is a product that you can trust
by going to rescue1cbd.com.
And you can listen to my conversation with John on episode 1011 of the Behind the Shield
podcast.
This episode is sponsored by Team Builder, 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.
Now 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 Team Builder, 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 Team Builder, listen to episode 1032 with
Melissa Mercado or go to teambuilder.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.
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 health care.
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 health care needs, whether that's dispatching a rideshare to an urgent care, an appointment
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.
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 strength and conditioning coach and Golden Eagles hotshot Justin DeMoss.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his journey into the world
of coaching, training the tactical athlete, the unique challenges of the wildland firefighter,
mental health, the impact on our seasonal firefighters, the incredible tools Hotshot
Wellness are offering, their upcoming summit, 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 well 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 with that being said, I introduce to you, Justin DeMoss.
Enjoy.
Well, Justin, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming
on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Yeah, thanks so much for the opportunity.
It's a great time to talk about the topic of health and wellness, and I'm really appreciative
of your platform and all that you do for the first responder community.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you today?
Now I'm back in Southern California.
A few months ago, could have been anywhere.
So yeah, glad it's a little bit more stable for me now and I can do things like this.
So I love to start the very beginning of your journey because you've got quite an unusual
route into ultimately the wildland fire service.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
Cool.
So yeah, born and raised in Camarillo, California.
It's in Ventura County, super chill, calm, very ideal place for people to raise kids,
I imagine.
And I pretty much had a very similar route of upbringings from all my friends around
me.
We just grew up playing sports, really cool family dynamics, very small scale city, like
where you know everybody everywhere you go, you see similar people and faces.
And it's a very cool place just to develop a lot of fun attributes as a kid where you
just get to go outside and play and see your friends and just stay outside all the time.
So I was really blessed with a cool upbringing where I had constant cool social interactions
and was moving my body out in nature.
It was a really sweet environment for me.
And I have a pretty small family, so we were all pretty tight knit, I would say.
But overall, I spent most of my time just studying and playing sports.
And that was cool.
It was like kind of tunnel vision.
You just don't really know what the world has to offer at that age when you're just
so in that state where it's just all academics, all sports.
Like you have this gold grand vision of going to a college and playing a sport and getting
a scholarship.
That was kind of the route that I found myself in.
I played football, basketball, ran a little bit of track, but was really never going to
amount to anything in terms of making money off those things.
I just really enjoyed them.
It was really cool for me.
And that's kind of like the intro track to my field and human movement and my passions
for sports performance and what led me to study the field that I did.
But I, like many other individuals, early on in their careers had a major setback.
I first play of the first scrimmage of my senior year in high school, snapped my ankle,
was out the entire season.
Probably was the first time I experienced anything traumatic like that mentally.
I was very depressed.
Couldn't move much.
Was just rehabbing and sidelined.
It was a really amazing thing that it amounted to because it required me to have these existential
thoughts of what is life?
What am I here for?
What's my purpose?
And that kind of made me really spark the new interest that I had in career fields of
what do I do?
PT, OT, strength and conditioning.
I was always fascinated with movement and I wanted to help people.
So it made me find the path of kinesiology.
I probably explored every type of route within exercise science, human movement.
And I hope to be an advocate for individuals to explore that path and the diverse fields
that it accompanies because I feel like a lot of kids with that type of scenario go
in and feel boxed.
Like kinesiology kind of can be very monotonous at times if you just look at it from like
a physical therapy standpoint, which that's the original route that I had.
And then I found out so many other cool realms to dive into and what an amazing field it
was as a whole.
And I've slowly just finessed my way into a very niche avenue, which I'm sure we'll
touch on later.
But that's just like basic overview, kind of like my background, how I got into this
realm in the first place and the dynamics that I grew up in.
When you look back now, what is your perception of the pressures of a student athlete when
it comes to scholarships?
And the reason I asked that, I watched my son who ran track, I think he ran his, was
it last year?
The first two years.
So freshman and sophomore year, if I got that right.
And by the sophomore year, he was running the mile in under five minutes.
So he's doing well, not smashing any world records yet, but certainly in a great trajectory.
But he had a kind of overuse injury and really had a kind of psychological crisis.
And I think what became apparent to him is he was running for a scholarship, not running
for as you touched on the love of the sports.
When you look at this whole kind of spectrum now, what do you kind of, what are you observing
as far as where that passion is healthy and maybe where there's undue stress on some of
our young people on this need to secure a scholarship through, whether it's academia
or sports?
That's a fantastic topic, and I think if you were to ask me that question 10 years ago,
it's a completely different landscape.
Like when I, when I was leaving high school, I started to see social media becoming such
a huge role player in the lives of kids such as myself.
And just like people were playing sports for almost the most extrinsically based reasons.
It was like, I wanted to get an education and gain a scholarship.
I wouldn't consider those unhealthy motives and things that could come as a consequence
of dedication and hard work.
But I found a lot of individuals in the dialogue that I was exposed to trending in the direction
of I want to get on highlight reels.
I want people to see me.
I want to go out and play the best so that like I can gain this fame, fandom exposure
and get on social media.
And I think that's a really critical derailing of the natural positive traits that sports
embody, like team dynamics, communication, dedicate, like loyalty to a program, like
all these things that should be developed at these high school level operations now
become very individualized where kids are maybe trying to think a little bit more on
like the what's in it for me.
How can I do best for myself?
How can I set myself up the best to succeed?
And I think it's just a it's a beautiful time to develop more of a leadership quality aspect
to your to your way of being as well as just a communal sense of achievement rather than
personal gain.
You have your entire life to achieve personal success.
And I really I valued growing up in a small city where we had a really old school head
coaches that they didn't they were not about that.
They were very strict and like ingrained it in us that you are a small piece of a large
mission.
And that was just really developed a communal sense of we're all here to serve each other.
We're all here.
We're in the weight room to better our chances for the team success, not our own.
We're not trying to go to the weight room to get big muscles and show off to the rest
of the world.
We're not going out on the field to go make a highlight real catch.
We're there to win a championship.
We're there for the pride of our city.
Like it was a really cool program to be a part of in Camarillo.
And I'm thankful for the small city, small dynamic, old school way of thinking that accompany
it.
And I don't know if that is particularly the same scenario now.
I'm not that involved, but I imagine that the trends across the United States and in
other international regions to many kids probably aren't being exposed to those same circumstances.
But even at the level of youth sports, it's kind of just atrocious to see this isolated
like the phenomenon of single sport athletes at age eight is dumbfounding.
That is like the worst route I could ever imagine from a physical development standpoint,
a mental development standpoint.
Just every type of characteristic that sports can play in your life is now being funneled
into success and quantitative outcomes, like instead of passion and love for the game and
all these other soft skills that prove more vital as you grow up.
So I love sports and there's tremendous positives, but I sadly see those positives being outweighed
by the current landscape of what kids value and what they deem successful because of the
involvement in social media that's probably transpired for them.
I see a lot of Uncle Rico's living vicariously through their children too.
And I mean that again with empathy because it's just something that you've been groomed
to be that way.
But I've talked about this quite a lot on the podcast, but it's interesting because
it's always the same response just like you've talked about when you speak to high level
coaches that work with all these teams.
They're constantly talking about these overuse injuries and these young people and the burnout
mentally too.
And so all the good coaches are saying, no, you should play sports.
You should love the game first.
And then if you are going to excel in that game, you will emerge.
But where I think it's done a lot of damage is when I first came to the States, I kept
meeting these like 20, 30 somethings.
I would have been in the NFL, the NHL or whatever if it wasn't for insert injury here, slapped
hair, you know, MCL ACL.
And now they're deconditioned.
Now they're obese and they're on fricking insulin or whatever the thing is.
And so I think where we've done a lot of damage is we've forced this excellence.
We've squeezed performance out of our high school and college kids at the expense of
their longevity.
And like you said, absolutely there are things that people gain from that teamwork, hard
work, being uncomfortable, all these things.
But there is a middle ground line where you can still win championships, but then that
athlete can go on and live a healthy life, continue to enjoy playing sport and then take
those assets and apply it somewhere else in life.
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
And that is kind of the sole reason for my shift away from sport performance in an athletic
setting into more of wanting to serve first responders because it was fun to work with
athletes.
It was an honor to work with the individuals that I did and see like the feats of human
capabilities on display on a daily basis.
I was very fortunate to work at Sports Academy, an area where we got constant flow of collegiate
professional athletes, high level individuals.
And it's like kidding a candy store for somebody who's in exercise science, learning all these
principles and being able to apply them with individuals with the unlimited potential to
take advantage of these methods.
It's not like I was constrained at all with the audience I was able to work with.
So it was amazing, but I never felt like I was doing the world any service by getting
these genetic freaks to be 1% better.
It was like, we're all here on a mission to get this group of X amount of athletes to
get their vertical jump an inch higher or to get their 225 bench press a couple reps
more so that they can make an extra 200,000 on their draft placement order.
It's like, this is all cool, but it's again, extrinsically motivated causes for these individuals.
I'm sure like a handful of them really had an intrinsic love for the game, but it just
felt like there was always something missing with my purpose in that field.
And I feel like that trends in parallel some of the things that we're bringing up with
like the youth sports, adolescence all the way into adulthood.
It's like, it's fun to love sports.
There's amazing things that can come out of that.
The triumph, the success stories, people can be uplifted by sports, but I just found myself
in this cycle of thought of, man, we're really not doing anything here.
It's not going towards any worldly matters.
Nothing of consequences happening as a result of this.
And it's kind of just very businessy.
And that's not why I love sports.
That's not why I fell into it.
And I saw a deeper passion when working with individuals like police, military, fire, and
a population that I could make a meaningful impact on.
So it's, and I've never really turned back, still love sports, but it's not the population
that needs the needs to help the most.
I did the exercise, excuse me.
I did sports science and fitness evaluation in university of North London.
And then just a few years ago, I did my exercise physiology BA in the university of Florida.
When I came, well, it sounds great.
This is the problem.
When I came away from each of those, especially after finishing at UF, I kind of reflected
like none of these really gave me the tools to actually coach well.
The only thing, the only real thing that I took away is one of my first semesters at
UF, we basically did an entire semester on all the preparation for the NSCA CSCS.
That was a great class because at the end of it, if you wanted to, was a certification
that you could then go and start training.
But it's interesting.
A lot of people that have gone through the sports science, exercise physiology roots
have said the same thing.
It almost prepares you to stay in an academic setting and then study sports science as opposed
to then apply it to the professions that most of us want to go into.
What route did you take academically and how did it prepare you for the actual coaching
itself?
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's definitely a hidden dilemma within any of the human movement fields, whether you're
studying motor control, biomechanics, physiology, any of these things that you study in undergrad.
I feel like prepare you with a decent broad set of skills to then go specialize in some
other realm.
After undergraduate, just based on my observation of my cohort, it didn't leave a lot of people
with a direct route to success.
One thing that I had a great context building up to my university setting when I went to
Long Beach State, I went to community college and had two years where I was able to do internships,
volunteer, get a really good deep dive into various fields and settings and fine tune
the kind of environment I wanted to be in career wise.
That's how I found myself at sports academy, which was just a luxury.
It was right in my backyard.
I was able to do their internship program, become like entry level exercise instructor
and move my way up all the way to like being a full strength conditioning coach by the
end of my academic career where I was working and being able to take on high level athletes
or teams or just kind of groomed myself into being the best strength conditioning coach
because I was surrounded by just high caliber individuals, dudes who, guys and girls who
had degrees and certifications and licenses and had worked with pro athletes, had been
contracted by international professional teams and things.
It's like the culture really shaped my view of excellence in this field.
It was cool to be in an environment that pushed that so heavily.
We're like, if I'm not on the top of my game, I'm going to get fired.
There's way too many people applying for these positions.
There's way too many people that would kill to have this job.
Every single day when I went to work, every program that I made, every consultation I
had, every assessment that I had, it was like, this needs to be as if there was a researcher
looking at this process or there was like a PhD looking at this process or a physician
looking at this process because those all existed under the same roof.
The highest level individuals in their respective fields all had eyes on what you were doing.
All that I had the experience of by the time I was 20 years old and went to Long Beach
State to then go study.
It was like, wow, what a two-year experience where most people that went off to college
after high school just joined frats and sororities and drank and went to parties and had GE classes.
That's fun and all, but it was a very amazing return on investment for me with those internships,
the setting I was in and allowed me to really thrive in my undergraduate setting and leave
and go on to my graduate studies with a clear headspace of the impact I wanted to make,
the skills I needed to develop to make that impact.
When I talked to advisors and other individuals, I came across as very immature for my age
because I had a direct route in my head of what I wanted to do.
I already had done the work for them.
You don't need to guide me.
I just need you to put me in places to succeed.
That was an amazing developmental stage for me.
I'm a huge advocate for community college for that reason.
I just felt like I was able to, even though I only had two years of undergrad at a university
level, I maximized everything out of those two years and just took my abilities and success
to new limits because I came in as a mature adult at that point, on the surface at least.
That's my direct route into academia in my graduate studies.
I still went to Long Beach State and studied exercise science, but yeah, it was probably
my favorite program, my advisor, Dr. Valenzuela, one of my favorite individuals on the planet
because he allowed for just complete creative freedom.
There's a lot of graduate studies that box you in to what their lab is doing.
This is an individual who gave me complete autonomy over what I wanted to study, backed
me every step of the way.
When I told him I wanted to study hotshots, he said, I don't even know what those are.
I was like, okay, I have an uphill battle here.
I'm not going to a university where I have resources and connections, but that just because
of the nicheness of the population, the under-representation, the difficulty of reaching out, the barriers
to getting involved with them, and just overall just kept hearing this rhetoric of these guys
are nuts.
These guys are crazy.
They put in work more than any other first responder population.
They do it without any recognition.
I was just infatuated with the concept and was like, I'm going to help these people whether
they want it or not.
I'm going to beat down doors.
I'm going to go and camp out in my truck.
I'll do whatever I need to do to collect data on these individuals.
It just became a passion for me to want to serve them, even though it was very much barrier
ridden at first.
How would you heard about them prior?
Did you have any exposure to fires in your area?
I'm thinking Ventura burns quite a bit too, or was it through that municipal route that
you were talking about?
I have a really good buddy in Cameroon.
His name is Cody Tim.
He was on the Ventura County Hand Crew for a few years, and he exposed me to the population
just through our dialogue as friends.
He went and detailed on a hotshot crew in the Los Padres forest and got absolutely rocked.
He was on a type two crew and he was doing really well.
I'm assuming he was put in a position where it was like, yeah, you're going to succeed.
You've been doing really well.
You're going detailed on this crew and put in some work, go for an assignment.
He said he'd never experienced the workload that was present on that fire.
He had never seen people hike with those kinds of demands, loads, terrains, elevations.
The demands of the fire were crazy and it was just hot and crazy and miserable and the
work never stopped and he ended up just having such a rude awakening for the shift in demands
between his assignments on that type two crew and the up level of demands from the hotshot
experience.
That really, him talking about that provoked this thought of, in a nutshell, anecdotally
was like, these guys are superhuman and you should study them.
I was like, yes, that's who I want to study.
That's amazing.
I got to learn more and see what they're all about.
It was a really hard initial reach out.
I had to go, every person that I talked to would not talk to me without seeing me.
I had to go to the station.
It's always miles out in the middle of nowhere.
I was throwing rocks in my Jansport backpack and just going on hikes with these crews and
they're like, who is this guy?
What does he want?
It just was always very weird at first, but then as soon as you throw down a really good
hike time and you keep up with the crew, it becomes a level playing field.
I think that's something that holds true for the population as I've dove in deeper.
If you can work, if you can go through the sucked, if you can just be gritty and just,
I don't know, humbly get stuff done and go through pain and persevere, it levels out
whatever race, color, ethnicity, sex, religion, any demographic variable you can think of
doesn't matter if you can work.
I really value that about this population.
That's one of my favorite aspects of working with these individuals is just the, let's
shut up, we're quiet, humble professionals and we just like to work.
I think that's commendable.
You mentioned about looking into the data.
One of the things that I've discovered in the fire service, at the municipal fire service,
for example, is that there are some areas that they love to research, flow patterns
and nozzles and ventilation and all those things, which absolutely have a point.
But when it comes to the wellness of the firefighter, there's some on cancer, but again, they're
focusing just on carcinogens.
There's some on mental health, but they're focusing on what we saw.
There's all these areas where people really just didn't want to touch, like for example,
shift work, sleep deprivation.
There's a barren landscape of no data.
When you looked into the world of firefighting and hotshots specifically, where were the
strengths as far as research and where were the deficits at that point?
Yeah.
So I think in the last 20 years, there's been a huge uptick in research with wildland firefighters
in particular.
Before that, it was definitely like, I would find studies that were very heavily cited,
privately utilized studies, kind of just a lot of introductory information about the
demands of wildland firefighting.
And that has grown into a very clear view of the demands as of the recent years.
There's enough research and literature to support the bioenergetics demands, the kinematic
and kinetic demands on the injuries falls, the different epidemiologies that exist among
wildland firefighting.
There's a good amount of information of the tolls that this population faces after multiple,
like five, 10, 15 year careers.
We know a lot about the acute demands in terms of calorie expenditure, types of fueling that
should be undertaken for various job types of assignments, the kinds of hikes and durations
and patterns that we see between hotshot crews, type 2IA, type 2 crews.
There's a handful of, there's a gauntlet of literature that could, that directly kind
of assesses what's going on among this population from a physical standpoint.
And I believe I have a fair amount of contacts within academia and we all seem to have the
same dialogue where we acknowledge that this literature is there.
Now we just need to find a way to implement strategies and get the resources out there
to the population of the correct courses of action.
How do you fuel?
How do you hydrate?
How should you train in the off season?
How should you maintain and recover throughout the season?
So getting the right practitioners in play to interpret that literature and provide
the unique solutions and education to the population is kind of where I see the next
steps.
Because it's taken decades and decades of analysis to understand those demands and now
we kind of have a relatively decent idea of them from a physical standpoint.
But when we look at this, like the population from a mental health standpoint, that's still,
I feel like very new because you look at this population, that's a topic that was hushed
and pushed down for the entirety of as long as hotshots have existed.
That's part of kind of the tradition.
If you're having problems, keep them internal.
Nobody complains, nobody talks.
It follows a similar stigma as other first responder populations, but magnitude is higher
because these individuals are now out in the wilderness for weeks on end, minimal communication
with their family and friends.
And now you're just only surrounded by a network of individuals who breathe this culture of
shut up, don't complain, don't talk about your feelings, don't talk about your issues.
And you feel like you have to suppress that for six months out of your year.
And then they come home and it's a complete shift where they don't necessarily feel like
they want to bring all that to their family members or their friends.
Maybe they feel like they're burdening them by talking about it.
So now you're talking about a population who for years and years and years is undergoing
a ton of potentially traumatic events, moral injury, a lot of negative things, dialogue
being perpetuated.
And I don't know, a lot of individuals who maybe don't fall in the perfect category for
wildland fire where you don't fit into the environment perfectly.
Let's say you're a part of any marginalized group.
I can't even imagine being a person in a LGBTQ community or being a female on a hotshot crew
in like the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s.
Even now it's still, there's a, I'm imagining that in the next 10, 20 years with the emphasis
on mental health awareness, understanding the toll that it's taking on individuals with
outcomes like suicide rates, like major depressive disorder, anxiety scores, like all these things
to point to how big of a magnitude the toll is on the mental aspects of this job.
I hope that in a select amount of years, we're in the same position.
We're like, we understand what's plaguing the community and now it's time to take action.
Now it's time to implement the resources, get the practitioners involved.
And hopefully by then the efforts like what hotshot wellness is doing, like what grassroots
is doing, like the Eric Marsh foundation, like the list goes on.
There's all these amazing entities advocating for it.
And it's a really cool time period that I've been able to find my way into because it's
a conversation that's at least happening.
Like these individuals in high level positions like superintendents, like captains, they're
aware of it and they're much more open to finding out strategies and ways to help their
crew members and expose these issues rather than maybe even 10 years ago.
It might've been hard to find somebody who was bringing these up in fire camps, bringing
these up at these meetings with other superintendents at these government level, high agency meetings
talking about these problems.
So as disheartening as it is to see the statistics, I feel like it's a very optimistic context
of a year that I've had just seeing how many individuals want to talk about it and want
to change the narrative.
I think what's an interesting dynamic about wild land as well that I've heard people like
Ben Stron talk about is the seasonal nature.
So you have these men and women, they become extremely cohesive.
They have this purpose, they have this tribe, even though as we'll get into, there are some
negative stresses involved as well.
And then the full-time people obviously go back to their camp and continue to work the
rest of the year, but the seasonal people now, now they're done and now they've lost
that tribe.
They lost that purpose.
They lost their paycheck.
And so I think where I've seen it kind of mirrored is when you watch some of those like
crab fishing shows, for all those months they're on the boat and they're working their asses
off, but you can tell there's a kind of cohesion to it.
And then you hear the same thing with a lot of those professions, then they go back and
then there's addiction and alcoholism.
We're supposed to be part of something, but to be part of something and then be told,
okay, now you've got to leave, I can see how that's just an added stressor that really
amplifies the mental health challenges they're already having.
A million percent.
I've only been on one crew and I can only speak for the dynamic within that crew, but
it consists of a lot of individuals that love to work.
They go crazy when they're not working.
It's this weird dichotomy where you're going from even like looking throughout the shifts
in the season that we had, there were assignments where there was constant work and things to
do and you were outside, you were moving and it's like fairly, I don't know, you're torn
physically from some of the workloads, obviously.
It's different stressors, but that's the stuff these people love, like going and pushing
their bodies to the limit.
Looking out in nature and just absolutely getting worked to death every day, but then
looking at the end of your day at a product that's so cool and you accomplish so much,
that's where I imagine a lot of this population finds their happy place.
But at the same time, at the end of the season when those assignments are slow, when you're
just sitting in the buggy or you're staging and you're just left with your thoughts in
the middle of nowhere with no service and you don't now have this screen, you can just
flick and occupy your time with what happens in the internal environment of the mind.
So I think that as I saw that season trend that way and things slowed down and individuals
had a hard time, I mean, I had a hard time, anybody would have a hard time, but I came
from a background where it was a very integral part of my practice to find stillness, find
presence, develop more, I'm really into meditation and mindfulness and journaling and overall
just like looking at the landscapes and being in peace.
I found ways to really be optimistic with my setting and find an opportunity to practice
and develop more of a sense of the things I wanted to grow with internally.
So I was able to have a decent time and make the most of that situation, but definitely
was apparent to me of the discomfort that several individuals and most of the crew probably
was experiencing when you're just left there to sit and find things to do because now you've
had this mind that's just hyper stimulated and you love it and your body's moving and
now you have to accommodate a complete redirection of your environment.
So now thinking about six months where these individuals don't, maybe some of them work,
but I imagine a handful of them don't and you're just maybe alone in your house and
it's quiet and there's no work to be done and maybe you don't have the like drive to
go out and kill your body because you just went through it for six months.
Giving those individuals the opportunity to utilize that space, that time period towards
mentally healthy avenues is critical because I imagine that if there's no intention behind
it, your mind is going to run rampant, go down a dark hole and just this inner dialogue
can just go down a very negative path, a very destructive path.
So I think there's beautiful opportunities to make this career positive for personal
development, professional development, health overall, but it needs to have intention behind
it because left alone, I think it's setting a lot of individuals up with not the most
direct course on how to navigate the uniqueness of a yearly schedule that it brings.
What are you seeing as far as if you've seen any trends in the reduction of staffing versus
the physical and mental health outcomes?
Yeah, since I've only been involved for a limited time, it's hard for me to be like
the best spokesperson for long-term trends and retention, the types of individuals who
are leaving for what reasons, but from just dialogue that I've heard broadly, it seems
like it's being like the pay, the benefits, the overall context of the lives that individuals
are leading, weave them into more routes of going municipal, going towards county crews,
like leaving the federal services just because of the lack of sustainability for having a
family, having a wife, you're spending so much time away.
It's extremely, what would I say, attractive to look at other departments and other realms
of fire that pay you well, you get to be home more.
I think there's amazing benefits that go along with working from more of a federal standpoint
and the environment that it breathes, the types of assignments you can go on.
The adventure is just insane.
I'll never be able to experience this with any other job and that's no questions asked.
I think anybody who works for the Forest Service, National Park Service, BIA, anybody on a hand
crew, anybody doing wildland, going on these assignments six months out of the year, I
think they can attest that it's some of those beautiful environments you can ever picture
yourself in.
Some of the coolest job assignments I've ever imagined being able to take part in happened
here and it's just a six month Boy Scouts on steroids experience.
It's very unique and I think there's a place for it with the right context.
I think individuals will gravitate and stay longer, but that needs to first start with,
I believe, showing them that we care as a country.
So supporting them financially, supporting them with their health, acute and long term,
and then building skills that take advantage of the wildland experience like leadership,
like grit, like determination.
There's like we talked about with sports.
You can build tremendous qualities through these professions and those are transferable
to anything in life.
I just had the opportunity to go to the US Hotshot Association Conference and I heard
probably one of the best speeches I've ever heard in my life and it was from an ex hotshot.
His name is Jose Navarro.
He won 2009 Teacher of the Year.
He works in East Los Angeles and works with middle schoolers and just hearing his experience
about going into an academic setting where there was no leadership, nobody taking charge.
He acknowledged the socioeconomic issues in that school system, how kids were just getting
left behind and not really being given good mentors, good people to like show them the
way and push them.
He took his hotshot experience, the leadership skills he developed and the overall just,
there's an aura about him that makes you want to work hard and I think the kids were very
receptive to it and that led to his success.
So hearing more stories like that of individuals who didn't find a 20 year career in wild land
but credit all of their personal success to those few years of development, more things
that get exposed and illuminated like that creates optimism for this community.
It shows that even if you don't find your niche in this, make the most of your experience.
Like there it's a, you're a first responder, you're a servant, you're not going to probably
be able to maintain peak levels of health, peak levels of performance, peak mental health
even at times but there's something to be said about pushing past those hurdles with
the best intentions and best approaches and doing what you can with what you have, which
is rhetoric that is spewed on the fire line all the time.
Like just do what you can with what you have, do what you can with the resources you have.
Like you need to take that and parallel all of that theme with everything in your life,
your communication with your family, your health in the off season.
It's just let's make the most out of this career for the time while we have it and see
what happens from there.
Because I think a lot of the negative internal dialogue that individuals have kind of goes
like this job sucks, it's hard, I don't get paid well, I don't get benefits, it's not
setting me up for lifelong success automatically and it's like, okay, yeah, maybe you're not
being treated the best.
Maybe the federal government's not supporting you to the max capability that they could.
Maybe there's like things that constantly deter you from trying to have or have the
energy to make those decisions for yourself.
But it's the hardest working group of people that I've ever met.
You just have to channel that energy into realms that are foreign to you now.
So I think everyone in this field has the potential to succeed in any aspect of life
they want.
I think they just need the tools and guidance to push them in those directions and give
them the opportunity to see it.
There's all this conversation at the moment about, I don't know if it's called DOGE, D-O-G-E,
with the whole analyzing the federal budgets.
I think that's great.
Let's look at the fire service.
Because to me, you want to see the biggest false economy and wasted money.
Look at what it takes to break a firefighter.
And I think you're absolutely right.
As a country, we can't just stand up, clap, and say thank you for your service like they
just did with the palisades and then turn around and be like, anyway, moving on.
There's a plane crash over here.
We've got to keep supporting our first responders because otherwise you're not going to have
any.
And I think if you look at the false economy of, as I said, the holes, so the understaffing
and the overtime, and then that leads to all the workman's comp claims and line of duty
deaths and all these other massive payments that people have got to pay.
If you actually want to be a sound business person, you invest in your people and you
create that environment.
So you attract all these young potential hot spots, hot shots and smoke divers and regular
people on the line who want to be there.
They'll work hard, but then they do get to go home and they do have a paycheck.
They don't have to do a second job.
So I think this is a beautiful time for us to really say, all right, well, why are you
looking at all these other budgets?
You want to look at ours?
Because we've been doing more with less for about 20 years now.
And I don't know if you've seen the paper, but we're dying all the fucking time.
So maybe just maybe you want to thank us for our service, do a financial analysis of the
fire service nationally.
And you'll realize that if you actually take some of that money from downstream and put
it upstream and inspire young people to join wild land, municipal, whatever it is, you
will have a much better delivery of service and you will forge longevity in your first
responders and wildland firefighters.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I find it ironic that it really wouldn't take much.
You already have the most loyal population of public servants I've ever come across because
these individuals have families, have wives, have kids.
I'm single and have no kids and I can already see like, oh, this would be very like I understand
the financial strain.
I'm very I'm liberated by living out of my Prius and not needing to pay rent, not having
to pay for like just excessive costs of food and just like the climate that we're in.
Everything's so expensive.
I'm just whenever I think of my financial strain, I just it gets so amplified when I
look at the context of other individuals in this field who are 30, 40, 50 and trying to
buy houses, buy land, just basic life necessities don't come easy to this population.
And then you expand it to like not having year long health care is atrocious to me.
That is absolutely like I do not understand it.
I don't I have no ability to conceptualize how we can rationalize that decision of this
population who's being just torn apart physically for six months and giving their bodies and
in some cases like suffering chronic injuries that just go unnoticed and lead to like the
demise of their quality of life in their 40s, 50s, 60s because it's maybe they didn't go
get the physical therapy they needed or a surgery they needed.
And I found myself in that headspace just because of not having the best financial backing
through all this.
Like I've torn my PEC, I've torn my MCL and at the times I didn't have basically any money.
I was a broke college kid.
I was like, man, it's not a full tear.
I'll just bandage it up and it'll heal.
And now like my tendon sits like two inches lower on my PEC.
My MCL still gives me continued like aches and pains and whatnot.
And I'm like, that shouldn't be how these people are meant to live.
If you have an issue and you're in, you have chronic back pain, if you have knee pain when
you run, you shouldn't have to feel like, man, it's too much money.
I can't go out to a PT and it's too much money.
I can't seek a strain and conditioning coach.
I can't see a dietician.
I can't see a physician.
Those individuals should have access to any healthcare professional they want for free,
at least in the off season when it's like you have six months to now get your body back
and recuperate and get in a good position to come into the season healthy.
I think like in the case of my season last year, we had maybe three additional days off
other than our mandatory rest and recovery days.
There wasn't really a lot of opportunity to make successful interventions as far as like
injuries go, but you're six months off.
You have the time to now get a dietician to work with you, get your body composition back
to within a healthy range.
Get your biomarkers and blood tests back in accordance with good long-term outcomes.
You can go to a physician and get different ideas of how, I don't know, could this be
... Does this need surgery now?
Is this something I could put off?
How urgent is this?
You could have conversations at least and get some guidance.
I don't know what percent of people are actually able to do that without really good health
insurance.
In some cases, I imagine individuals don't even probably have health insurance.
They're probably just waiting until the season rolls around and they can take advantage of
the healthcare that maybe their agency offers or a workers' comp taking care of their issues.
But that's just, I don't know.
It speaks volumes about what we're willing to do for our first responders when you don't
even offer basic things like healthcare.
It wouldn't take much.
I don't think this population is the kind of group that needs $150,000, $200,000, $300,000
a year to convince them to stay.
You see in structured apartments, as people move up, they can make a very lucrative living.
It's a very good, oh, if I stay in this and I work hard and I make my way up, I'm going
to get the return on investment that I'm going for.
In the federal level of things with wild land, that just simply doesn't exist.
But you have individuals who just want to be outside, don't want to be in an office.
They love the job.
They're the most loyal individuals.
It really just would require you giving them their hierarchy of needs to be covered, like
roof over their head, food on the table, happy family values.
Everybody's very simplistic minded in this field.
So it's like, you look at the investment it would require to give everybody that baseline
quality of living, the retention would skyrocket.
I cannot even imagine how many people would stay in this field for 10, 20 years if you
could just live a decent wage because the lifestyle is epic.
You just get to travel around, fight fires, go on cool assignments.
Right when our season ended, I bought a one-way ticket to South America and had the most mind-blowing
experience for three months.
I would do that for 10 years if I could financially support myself, my family, my loved ones as
well.
You give me that, I'm not quitting.
So I imagine that that probably follows a similar theme for a lot of individuals.
I've made this comment a lot.
We don't have a VA for first responders.
And yeah, arguably most first responders work a lot longer than our average veteran does.
It's not comparative as far as all this, so they shouldn't do it quite the opposite.
There's a lot of people that did four years and we thank them for their service.
And if they had any sort of injury or illness, then now we'd be covered in the VA.
And if they're not, there's the TRICARE.
For us, it's nothing.
The door closes behind you, whether it's six months into a wildland contract or at the
end of a 25-year career in a fire service, it doesn't matter.
You're in the same place.
Like, all right, your benefits are done.
Enjoy your pension.
You'll probably be dead in five years.
And so I think whether it's a version of that that we put in for our first responders or
if you want to take away the complication, put in a national health service for everyone.
Because in the UK, there is the firefighters charity, which goes above and beyond.
But you have the NHS.
The problem is it's devolved now because the UK is starting to mirror the US as far as
obesity and all the illnesses that come with that.
So I think there's no better motivator to make a nation healthy than to put in a tax-based
health care system.
Because I mean, we know that the one that we've got doesn't work because 70% of our
population is obese or overweight.
If we had a good health care system, everyone would be looking like athletes.
So we do one of two things.
We just take care of our first responders.
Beautiful.
I'll take that.
Or we extend it to the whole nation and use that as a motivator to make everyone healthier.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I'm optimistic that that eventually will have to transpire.
There's no way we're going to allow the health epidemic to continue on the trend that it's
occurring at in such a rapid way.
And the metabolic crisis that we find ourselves under as nations, it's got to get to a point
where the data outweighs the economic advantage of the individuals who are kind of opposing
that.
Because I don't know, if we don't have a healthy ecosystem, if we don't have healthy bodies,
what does the rest of it matter?
So that's like my overarching view of optimism.
But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that I can't wait around for institutional
changes to happen because it takes far too long.
It's no guarantees.
And we see that with the changes in administration and the redirecting of values that's already
kind of happened.
And we've seen it's been kind of just reinforced the volatility of these resources coming from
federal levels.
So that is really what has transcended my view of the role that private entity support
like Hotshot Wellness and these other organizations that we partner with can have for the first
responder population.
Obviously, our efforts are more towards the wild land resource realm.
But it's really cool to see these other movements happening where there's just first responder
support organizations and being like mental health advocacy, individuals who are giving
discounted rates for their services.
It's nice to see people acknowledge that a change needs to come.
And there's individuals like myself who aren't willing to wait and just please give us money.
Please change these health care circumstances.
We feel that in true Hotshot fashion, we're just going to do what we can with what we
have.
We're not going to wait for handouts.
We're not going to wait for people to appease our mission.
We're just going to get shit done.
So that was kind of the route that we've taken with our stance as a private nonprofit entity
of we know there's resources out there.
We know there's research out there.
We know there's individuals trying to help.
Let's just go ahead and put everybody in the place to succeed and get this mission going
and spearhead this ourselves.
So that's kind of like the overarching mission for us as an entity is just kind of to be
more of a sustainable source of information and resources for individuals to go and receive
help the health care they need, the financial support they need, the guidance, the opportunities
for personal development.
That's a niche that we hope to fill.
And it is being served on a platform that's not subject to the federal government's opinion
of what should be talked about, what should be silenced, what should be funded, what
should not be.
We know what should be funded.
We know what needs to be talked about.
And it's kind of fun to be able to do whatever we want and say whatever needs to be said
and do whatever needs to be done.
So that's kind of how I'll introduce the topic of hotshot wellness and kind of our mission.
Beautiful.
That was a good segue.
So talk to me about the origin then.
Who were the group of people that originally came up with it?
And you know, what is the vision as far as the tools that you're bringing to the table?
Yeah, good.
Good question.
So one of my partners, Jason Leeper, is the one who founded Hotshot Wellness.
It was a couple of years ago.
It started as an Instagram page for him and a few other individuals who were kind of just
taking a like, let's just do, let's just see what happens.
Let's start posting health content.
And it gained a lot of traction.
People were receptive to it.
It was really good, solid online content people could look for on this page with respect to
wildland health and wellness.
But it would like gain traction and then fall off, gain traction and fall off as any just
volunteer efforts typically do.
These individuals were doing it out of the goodness of their heart, but had to go ahead
and make their living.
And that was obviously a priority at different phases of its development.
So it hadn't really transcended the way that Jason had depicted and was hoping for.
And then right after my season, I took a similar approach of making my personal account where
I was just posting reels, posting lectures on YouTube, trying to just put out some resources
for individuals to take advantage of for free.
Like making an off season program for wildland members to partake in.
And yeah, just kind of between my YouTube and Instagram, I was posting a lot of just
like fitness and health related content.
And then Jason and I connected with the Hotshot Wellness account.
And he told me about the Hotshot Wellness initiatives, what it was hope, what his hope
was for it.
And then I told him about my grand vision for what I wanted to be able to contribute
to the community.
And we just decided that conjoining forces would be better than us going on isolated
routes.
And we thought we could come together and put Hotshot Wellness on a course of new trajectory
with better invigorated spirit, more energy towards it.
Because that's pretty much all I have is just energy and passion and dedication.
And I think it just created a really cool opportunity for him to be reinvigorated to
do the same project.
So from there, the team has grown.
We now have several partners and board members.
We have Ben Freeman, Nick Merlin, Kareen McNutt, and Bruce Wilson, who's the captain at Alta
Hotshots.
So we've grown with individuals who want to help and fuel this mission, but we've grown
from more of a social media online platform into an official nonprofit.
We're based out of Portland, Oregon, and we're all ex-Hotshots or still currently Hotshots
or serve in the wildland community in some way, which is really important to us because
we think we want to be the people who bridge the gap between academia, between practitioners,
between the forest service, between government, between the people who need boots on the ground.
In order to do that well, we kind of wanted to assemble a team of people who have walked
the walk and now talk the talk in the advocacy realm because this field is just a little
bit more receptive to individuals who have seen the circumstances.
So everybody that we bring on and put a part of the mission, it's not like it's exclusive,
but it really means a lot to us for individuals to have at least been on fire assignments.
Seeing the workloads, I don't care if they've done any specific career, but just understanding
the mental and physical tolls that the job, the environment takes on you is important
to us in being able to bridge that gap between institutions.
So that's a little bit about the team, a little bit about the foundation.
As far as the niche that we aim to fill, we want to provide preventative support and personal
development for wildland members.
So what does that mean?
There's a lot of institutions and organizations that work with wildland members after they've
experienced trauma, after things have already taken shape and unfolded in negative ways
and have had a negative impact on those individuals.
And all those services are amazing and need to happen.
They need to be funded for, and that's crucial in the longevity of these individuals.
But we want to be more of a proactive approach with how we serve this population.
So giving them opportunities for professional development aside from just extensive things
on their red card.
Like if they want to go out and explore alternative careers or go out and receive a workshop,
yoga seminar, a yoga certification, a gym membership, an adventure-based therapy, like
anything that can aid in their health and wellbeing or a new career avenue or some combination
of both.
We want them to be able to have the resources and opportunity to, like I've mentioned previously,
utilize the skills they're developing with wildland, but then go ahead and channel it
into those other avenues that they're interested in life, be able to explore them and have
the financial backing to do so.
We also want to be able to provide things like the Wellness Summit, like a conversation
had amongst the experts in their fields coming together, talking about these issues, giving
wildland members tools, knowledge, resources on how to fuel their bodies, to train, to
recover, to do acute stress management, like the gauntlet of topics we're covering in
the summit all by leading experts in those fields.
It's amazing to see what it's come to, and it's honestly an amazing opportunity for all
first responders to probably come to.
There's some really knowledgeable folks giving cool topics, and I think it's going to speak
to a large majority of the first responder realm rather than even just wildland members
who it's catered towards.
We're talking about those specific issues and things, but people hearing Ben Strand
talk about his story, that's impactful beyond words.
Just hearing people that embody the concept of well-being and advocacy for these individuals,
just eliminating the stigma that's plagued these populations for so long.
Hearing people like superintendents, captains, long time hotshots, some of the hardiest people
you'll probably ever meet, but being willing to talk about these niche and abstract concepts
like yoga and meditation and mindfulness.
It goes a long way just to show where the field is trending.
With individuals like that are also backing it and behind it and have seen the value in
their own lives.
Also just creating just a culture is what I'm getting at.
Just getting a community movement where we have all these individuals at very high levels
of leadership, high levels of academic proficiency, high levels of practitioner experience, all
just creating this nice movement of you can come to our website, you can come to our app,
you can come to our feed, you can reach out to these people.
There's a community that wants to help.
There's a community that knows where you're coming from.
We show support, we want to give back.
That's what we hope we can make a really huge impact on, just providing that sense of camaraderie
for folks and showing them that there's people that care about them and understand their
detriments and it's okay to talk about it.
It's okay to not be okay and everything that coexists with that.
That's one of our other things that we're really spearheading.
That gives you an overarching theme of where Hotshot Wellness wants to be of service.
Tell me more about the symposium.
I saw Amanda Marsh is talking, Megan Louts, I've had them on the show as well.
Some of the other guests and then how can people attend?
Okay, that's perfect.
All the resources to attend, I can send to you and you can give it to all of your audience
members in whatever way that you see fit.
You just have to register through Eventbrite.
It's completely free, which is the amazing thing because we started this and sent those
emails out to these huge individuals in their respective fields with I'm imagining monstrous
speaking fees because they're amazing.
We were just like, yeah, we're a few people just trying to put on this wicked summit.
We would love for you to be a part of it.
It's going to be awesome.
You should join.
Very, I don't know, we're like three people in a garage starting a company essentially.
Then now we've been able to land individuals like Megan Louts, like Ben Strand.
Brent Ruby is another one to mention.
He was one of my mentors.
Almost every study that I referenced in my master's thesis had Brent Ruby's name on it.
I was fanboying on Brent Ruby throughout my entire graduate studies, had the opportunity
to meet him at a conference, talk shop with him, see his grand vision of where he wants
wild land to go and I'm so honored to have him speak at the event.
In my perspective, he's kind of like the grandfather of wild land physiology research.
His work at the University of Montana has probably set the stage for most of what we
know about the physiological demands of wild land fire.
Of course, somebody in academia will be like, that's bullshit.
This person's been studying it for X amount of years.
There's these people in it.
I get it, but I'm just saying he's a big figure in the wild land research realm for
me, especially.
Excited to have him.
He's a wealth of knowledge on various topics.
That's a huge one.
Let's see.
We have a lot of mental health experts.
We have individuals that have a unique blend of job experience, of working on hand crews,
have seen the mental toll that it takes and they're also coming from a space of, they
were females on a crew.
Those demands are even more exaggerated and it takes a lot of resiliency and mindfulness
to probably accommodate some of the male figures that I'm imagining they came into contact
with.
They're a beautiful part of this movement of giving that platform and being a voice
for the female demographics in wild land for people who are being, I don't know, part of
marginalized groups who maybe don't get the proper resources and backing and things that
they need and just people to reach out to.
That's a huge part of our summit initiative is to make this as well-rounded as possible
and address all of the groups that exist within wild land.
Not just catering towards the male demographic that is predominant.
We have one of my friends and colleagues, Lauren Visconti.
She does female specific research with war fighters.
She's a badass herself and she's an amazing role player for the female community.
I think her topic is related to more adaptations and stressors that are specific to the female
physiology from intensive physical training periods.
Just another way that we can get a lot of topics covered by broad realms, different
individuals, different minds, different backgrounds.
We just want to create a space that the summit has now come to fruition with where every
type of topic can be addressed.
It's an open platform.
Everybody with various issues is going to be heard and understood.
That's been a beautiful part of constructing this cast of individuals coming from mental
health backgrounds, physical training standpoints, dietitians, people in leadership within wild
land.
It's a huge gauntlet of individuals with great minds.
It's an amazing resource to the wild land community.
It's all done out of the goodness of the speaker's hearts and it's free.
It's the 24th to the 1st of March and we encourage all first responders to come out.
There's unlimited seats.
If we get enough of an audience, we'll just keep upgrading our Zoom feature to allow for
more audience members.
We've easily surpassed our goal of 400 members per day or 400 links per day.
It's grown in a ton of traction.
We're really excited about all of the eyes that are going to be on these speakers with
that platform.
Beautiful.
When you talk about the female firefighter, I had an interview with Brooke Carrasco years
ago and she was one of the inmate crews that ended up transitioning into full-time wild
land firefighter.
If you look at Brendan McDonough, his story of addiction and being given a second chance
with his firefighting.
I think one of the most beautiful stories that's come out, the Palisades fires, is they've
been actually highlighting a lot of these incarcerated men and women who are going to
ultimately transition into full-time wild land firefighting.
I think your community is such a beautiful blueprint of what I think we need all over
the country.
Creating these resources, especially a lot of these people, their early life did create
challenges.
Some of them found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Some of them found themselves luckily going into the fire service first.
Understanding the healing that can happen there, not only your regular firefighter,
but someone who transitioned from a pretty challenging upbringing.
The wild land fire service really could be a model for a lot of other organizations and
professions to start enveloping some of their community that maybe had found themselves
a victim of their circumstances and environment and bring them a mentor and back into a healthy
profession or calling.
Absolutely.
I think it's a great blueprint for individuals who, like you said, maybe haven't had the
best upbringing, the best resources, the best immediate track to a way of life that is typical
of most people.
Maybe they've had certain things on their record that inhibit them from getting the
jobs they want or the opportunities, the doors open.
Wild land presents that equal playing field where individuals, whether you have a DUI
on your record, whether you have a green card and you're not a full citizen, it just seems
like it's a field that holds no limits as long as you're willing to work.
That's the beauty of it.
I think if any individual wants to get a fresh start, to provide themselves with an opportunity
for success, to develop good qualities, to be amongst a profession of colleagues where
there's no judgment, everybody's weird, everybody has their own things, everybody had an unstructured
route of getting here, has their own trauma.
It could be such a beautiful community for individuals who have had a rough patch of
time and need an opportunity to get back on their feet and move forward.
The sky's the limit with the amount of individuals that could take advantage of the career in
this field.
Just with the right things in play and right funding, I think those are very feasible measures.
It wouldn't take a lot and you'd be able to develop more retention, more people gaining
interest.
I didn't even know this profession existed when I was in high school.
If I did, I would have done it right after because as an 18-year-old, this is a monstrous
amount of money as an 18-year-old in comparison to any and you get to work outside, be with
a bunch of friends and there's so many cool parts of it that need to be exposed, but at
the same time, handling what we need to do with the detriments, the mental health struggles,
the physical ailments, those are also just as much on the forefront of our initiative.
Illustrating the good and the bad, a part of our mission because both are necessary.
I agree.
I think the sky's the limit for getting individuals involved from any type of background.
Will Barron You hit on a point that I'd never really thought
about.
I have been talking more and more about mirroring law enforcement when it comes to the age of
the firefighter recruit because we're learning now about the fact that the brain is still
developing, that we're not really ready for all that kind of trauma at 18 years old.
For example, my local department here, they're literally snatching kids out of high school
now out of desperation.
What a great way to get some experience while you wait to age out at 21 would be to spend
a few years in the wildland side because you're being exposed to firefighting, but you're
not having that unending trauma that usually the EMS side of our profession bombards us
with.
You get to actually fight fire, you get that teamwork, you get to really forge resilience
and that physicality.
Then this is what happened when I worked for Anaheim in California.
A lot of my friends that I got hired with had gone through CDF.
They ended up being fantastic firefighters and obviously they were the ones usually deploying
on the strike teams back out to their old stomping grounds, but that is a great way to
transition a high school kid into the municipal fire service.
I'm not saying that they should all leave at 21 and come to other agencies, but if that's
kind of your plan, well, beautiful.
You get three years of these young fit people before they then transition into a municipality.
Yeah, 100%.
I've worked through my time at Santa Ana College with a variety of municipal departments.
We would go out and have eight hour days where I'm administering physical assessments for
the most part, but a lot of the times I just get in conversation with folks about what
their lives are like, what are the demands like, what do you like to see in individuals,
what's a good person that you look for to hire, just things like that.
It seemed like those conversations were kind of being redirected where they don't want
individuals coming in with this cookie cutter approach.
Right after high school, they got their EMT, they did their structural academy and then
now they're 20 and then they come in with no life experience and they try to be a public
servant at that high of a level.
I think that's one thing that I don't like the dialogue for with some people who are
in structural departments.
It almost seems like certain individuals lose the public service side of it.
They don't have the altruism that it requires to be a good firefighter, to be a good paramedic,
to see these traumas, these tragedies, the work that it entails and the amount of benevolence
and good you have to have in your heart to be a good fireman.
I don't know how the hell you could be that at 20 years old if you've just done what I
did to get up to 18, played sports and now you've done a couple semesters of classes
and now you have to go see constant mortality and terrible outcomes and tragedies and maintain
positive head spaces and leadership qualities.
It just doesn't make sense.
This is one of the hardest jobs to do on a daily basis, especially in high volume call
regions like Los Angeles.
I just feel for the individuals who are put in those roles and don't know how to accommodate
it but in those conversations I had with people high up, it seemed like they were looking
for individuals with life experience, with those ethics, having lived and learned things
outside of fire.
A lot of these things that don't directly manifest in a successful fire route become
very valuable to those individuals it seemed like and they were having better retention,
better success, better leadership from those individuals who took rather diverse avenues
and ended up in fire versus those 18 year olds who were just stoked on the schedule
and loved the idea of being a fireman for X, Y, Z reasons.
I am 100% an advocate for the idea of individuals exploring other avenues.
It doesn't need to be wild land but I think the wild land is a great realm for people
to tap into at such a young age where you're free, you're single, you can go off for six
months and nobody's going to … People will miss you but nobody's going to give a shit
if you're gone.
You can go mess around for six months in the forest.
That's cool.
You're 18, go do it.
It's a massive opportunity to be pushed to your limits mentally and physically and grow
that resilience but also just give you empathy.
You're working with the most diverse individuals you're ever going to meet.
You're going to be exposed to different minds and ideas and backgrounds and ideologies and
it really just tests your own thought process as well having these conversations.
I think getting away from my perspective, if you're on a coastal city in California,
there's diversity but a lot of the conversations seem like a lot of people are on the same
page.
Maybe you don't get pushed.
Maybe you find a department where the ideologies are very similar.
Maybe everybody has the same political stance, the same background, the same socioeconomic
status.
There's none of that in wild land.
I think it's a beautiful opportunity to show people that there's diversity in the world
and it's awesome.
It's great to have confrontation.
It's great to have these oppositional views.
It's great to acknowledge that other people might not have had the circumstances that
you've had and just humble yourself a bit and look big picture and be able to have the
perspective to show compassion and empathy for individuals.
There's a ton of opportunity for great personal development with wild land that I think would
translate into any other tactical realm if you don't choose to have a 20-year wild land
career out of it even.
I had Sebastian Junger on a few times and one of the things the first conversation he
talked about bringing back national service and immediately he was like, oh God, you mean
conscription?
It's like, no, it's a difference.
Yes, some people can choose to go to the military and that will be their national service.
It's interesting because another one of my guests is asking how do we prevent sending
more of our children to wars that aren't absolutely necessary and he said bring back national
service.
If all the kids have to go, including the rich ones, you watch how quickly we'll temper
some of these wars.
National service can also be, we think about the first responders, but obviously that wouldn't
work on municipal fire and police, but wild land, all right, you don't want to go join
the military unit, well then go join a hand crew and you'll learn, like you said, the
importance of community, the diversity of the men and women that surround us, service,
what hard work is, time in nature, even see parts of the country you didn't even realize.
You were born in Crenshaw, LA and now you're out in the mountains of Montana.
So I think that is another interesting concept, like if we had a form of national service,
that would benefit the wild land community and subsidize the career and seasonal men
and women, not take their jobs, but add manpower and woman power to an underserved crew so
when you have these crazy fire seasons, now you have people that have signed up to do
this, they're not going to do it forever, but they, like you said, are forging into
adulthood through this shared suffering in this community.
Yeah, I hadn't fully invested into that thought, but I think there's, I know the National Guard
comes into play with certain fires and those individuals get exposure, but having a dedicated
group of individuals who want to serve in some way, but don't find the mold in military
or police directly, having some sort of program that gets them involved in these assignments
with the right training and resources would be, it'd be a monumental shift.
And to be honest, I consider, like when you talk about the service side of things, my
life can kind of be broken up so far into like pre-service and post-service.
Like there was just a shift in mindset that took me away from the one that had naturally
transpired growing up, where you're looking for personal gain, for like success for yourself,
your family, your loved ones, and those aren't bad things to aspire for, but they don't lead
anybody towards long-term happiness in my view.
You could be the most successful person.
You could have the most accolades.
You could have every certification, license, degree, cars, houses.
You could still be unhappy.
And when I made that realization and shift towards volunteering, philanthropy, just putting
my efforts towards the goodness and wellbeing of others, it's really opened up my view just
how impactful it can be.
And you talk about kids, adolescents into early adulthood.
These are all opportunities that I want to expose them to in one way or another, because
I had that shift at 23 and I had 18 year, like at 18, that would have just been so monumental
in my grand scheme and scope of what I wanted life to be in the avenues that I took.
And I'm thankful I had it at 23.
But if we could expose that idea to 10 year olds, to 12 year olds, to kids going into
high school, I can't imagine the positive shifts in mental health outcomes, the positive
shift in better choices of careers or just more sustainable career routes, better usage
of their education.
Maybe in some cases they don't go to college because they found a calling in a different
avenue they never would have thought of, because now they're not just thinking money, like
clout, fame, acknowledgement, all these things that are extrinsically motivating them to
make their moves.
It's now you have this shift of mindset towards how can I be of service to the rest of the
world around me?
How can I capitalize on my personal success while also that success being translated to
everyone else around me or a specific population that's underserved?
So I'm a huge fan of trying to get kids involved with these types of conversations and movements
and give them the opportunity that I've had in the recent years.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to hit one more area and then we'll close out with some closing questions.
You touched on off season conditioning.
So you enter from the sporting world.
What was your impression of the baseline fitness and strength of the populations that you were
working with?
And then let's talk about training that population off season to be ready for the next one.
And of course, obviously to be resilient as far as the injury and longevity side.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I would categorize my crew in particular.
And from what I've seen in the brief history, I've been involved.
There's individuals who are insanely dedicated to fitness and take it very seriously.
We have a ton of competitive runners in the wildland community.
So it's cool to see that movement transcending and people in their off season diet like doing
crazy sport science performance type of measures to get good in their respective like passions.
So there's individuals who have an intrinsic relationship with training, with adaptation,
with optimizing performance.
And that translates obviously into their into their well-being during the season, because
now they've built in habits of how to hydrate, how to fuel, how to manage their recovery.
They've built a relationship with their body and stress.
So that's one overarching theme that individuals who train regularly have an upper hand in
of just understanding how their body adapts and how they can get themselves to positively
induced changes and reduce the amount of negative impacts from things like over training, knowing
when they need to rest, knowing when they need to taper off.
So there's individuals like that who train all year round and love it.
There's individuals who show up in May, June, April, whatever, whatever your season starts.
And they're just like blue collar, just want to work.
They know that they'll get in shape as the season goes on.
But at the same time, that over years and years and years of like you going in with
no training, you've only been sitting and eating and just festering all off season.
And now you're going into these huge scale demands and stressors on your cardiovascular
system, your pulmonary system, your skeletal system.
Like those systems would do much better over time if you gave them some sort of a systematic
buildup to the point where now you're on a fire assignment within three weeks of you
coming on.
That's not enough time to train to adapt.
Like you can get some small scale changes, but the real training needs to come in in
the off season so that over time you don't have a population that's going in and suffering
for months on end to get back to where their current systems need to be fully functioning.
And that goes into the same token of the first responder population, the fire population.
We all, it can acknowledge the detriments that cardiovascular disease and on duty cardiac
arrest play in the demise of this population.
And that's a multifactorial type of phenomenon.
I'm not going to say it's fitness based entirely, but you look at just the six months of an
off season, that could be a health detriment.
And now you're getting put in a scenario where you're hiking in heat, large amounts of psychological,
physiological stress imposed.
That overall as a theme is not healthy.
Like you need to treat your off season as a time to build stress resilience so that
when you're put in those fight or flight scenarios, so that when you're like hiking at peak heat,
peak elevation gain, heavy pack, like obviously individuals are doing different things as
they work their way up the food chain in a way as they go through their careers.
But I want to shift the mindset towards this population to treating your body like an athlete
where you're getting the resources to strength train, to cross train, to build up cardiovascular
endurance, to have a better relationship with your musculoskeletal system where you're not
fighting against movement patterns that you feel like are hurting you, your knees hurt,
your back hurts, like getting you the resources for things like yoga and mobility training.
So overall, I want to be an advocate for individuals to treat their body holistically like an athlete
through the off season so that there's less of a steep strain curve when you start that
in season training, get on your first fire assignment.
So that as a broad aspect is my goal with fitness and how important of a role it should
play in their off season.
What advice would you give to a municipal firefighter that doesn't have an off season
but it's 365?
Yeah, I would say my best like optimistic view for them is there's a dose response relationship
with training that should not go unnoticed.
You don't need to be training two, three, four hours a day to get the max results you
need.
There's like minimalist ways to get really good returns on your investment, whether it's
a 10 minute hit, whether it's a 15 minute metabolic resistance training circuit, whether
it's doing a 10 minute yoga in between calls or like just take advantage of the time that
you do have because I know that like unless you're on a huge call volume type of station,
there's usually opportunities to fit in these tiny micro adjustment in like just overall
periods where you can dedicate time to your health and well-being.
So just finding something that fits for you and your mold and allows you to be successful,
not put yourself at a detriment during your job, not exhausting yourself, but just acknowledging
that those are beautiful tools that are very actionable.
Don't take a lot of time and effort and resources and could prove vital in your mental health
for the day.
It'd be amazing to hear people's experiences when they start implementing things like a
simple breath work protocol or an NSDR protocol, just like your effectiveness as a servant
on the job when you're working and doing patient care all the way to when you come home at
the end of the day and need to be the father, the husband, the wife, the spouse, whatever
role you play at home, you're just going to come home in a better spot.
You're going to be elevated in your mood, better cognitive performance on the job, better
health and long-term outcomes.
It's just move more, do it frequently, do something you love, do something that fits
you.
It could be a mindfulness practice, it could be journaling, it could be a visualization.
There's a million ways to get involved in practices that all get at the same root of
these themes.
I would advise them just to explore.
Find a relationship that works with you.
I don't know where you're coming from.
Every excuse in the book not to, let's find a way to accommodate those excuses and put
it into action and work around them.
Going to empower individuals to make that decision for themselves and explore how effective
they can be in improving their wellbeing on the job and off.
One more thing I'm going to squeeze in because you come from the high-performance world.
I realized that when we're talking about sports, when I talk to a lot of people when they're
in the special forces, special operations world, especially the tier one, they're squeezing
out performance from these war fighters or whoever it is.
They have nutritionists, they have strength and conditioning coaches, they have sports
psychologists, they have all these things.
When you look at the same conversation in our populations, more often than not, it's
really, well, let's try and get them to die less.
Not human performance at all.
We're talking about keeping them moving, getting their body weight down, that kind of thing.
Can you contrast the sporting athletes that you coach versus the tactical athletes?
Talk to me about, for performance, the importance of sleep because I think this is another underdiscussed
thing.
We're asking a lot of our responders to operate at a submaximal level because of this, especially
this recruitment crisis.
How important was it on the sporting side as far as sleep on the rest and recovery conversation?
That's a fantastic topic and one that could probably involve an hour-long lecture of the
multifaceted benefits of high-quality sleep.
We'll keep it simple.
Sleep is your main mode for recovery overall.
When you talk about supplements that can induce better recovery or whether you should roll
after or before, people get fixated on a lot of these mechanisms of, should I static stretch?
Should I do myofascial release techniques?
Should I do this before or after working out?
Should I make sure that I'm not training a certain way or should I not do it at a certain
time of the year or after calls?
For shift workers overall, we have a detriment on the level of consistent sleep that you
can get, but there's tools and interventions you can take to probably try to maximize the
brief bouts of sleep you can get on shift.
Just talking about the role of sleep in recovery for athletic performance, it's a non-negotiable.
It's probably the best tool you can utilize to enhance the proper restoration of tendons,
ligaments, bones, muscle, anything musculoskeletal that happens during sleep.
Those pivotal stages of deep sleep are so heavily implicated on our tissues' ability
to restore and rejuvenate.
It's probably the most magical pill I could ever sell you in terms of recovery because
if I marketed it that way, like a $100 supplement that you can take and it would boost growth
hormone, it would do all these amazing things that sleep does and people would buy it instead
of taking the time to get off your phone two hours before bed, to reduce blue light, to
get up in the morning and get bright sunlight in your eyes, to just do things to explore
what gives you the right context to fall asleep when you have control over it, is your best
return on investment to allow you to train harder, to get better adaptations, to continue
to push yourself every day.
If you don't sleep well and you're not getting enough deep sleep, another side of the equation
is learning.
You process things and it goes from short to long term during REM sleep.
It's just this amazing multifaceted usage of your time.
It's the best performance enhancing drug you could ever talk to and it's free.
You just have to do the right things to set yourself up with the right environment, the
right context to fall asleep and then take advantage.
I'm not a sleep expert.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know how to give people the perfect recipe for
success but there's resources out there.
There's podcasts, there's Ted Talks, there's all these practitioners that with endless
resources online of routes you can take to try.
But if you're a first responder and you have the mindset of, I'm a shift worker, my sleep's
going to suck, I have kids at home, my sleep's going to suck, it just falls into this negative
dialogue of throw your hands up and not try to do anything, which is where I'm trying
to be an advocate for.
Even the smallest dose dependent increase in these things leads to monumental positive
shifts in outcomes.
Whether you can't train like your buddy who does CrossFit and can train for three hours
a day and gets massive numbers, that's not the tree I'm barking up.
You kind of have to look at your profession as you're a servant first but there's things
we can do to make your time as a servant as positive as possible.
Make your acute health as best as we can.
So just having a shift in mindset of, man, my sleep might not be the best as this athlete
who gets to go to sleep for 10 hours and wake up and train twice and go to sleep again.
But if you can get an extra 40 minutes of deep sleep that night or you can fit in a
nap and improve your cognitive performance on the acute level where you're doing patient
care and all these other things that require high levels of cognitive abilities, just maximizing
the amount of sleep you're getting for cognitive and physical performance, the little changes
and little shifts really go a long way.
So yeah, I'm a huge advocate for people shifting that mindset from this sucks so we might as
well just accept that to this sucks, let's try and work around it.
Well, I think there's another layer to it.
This sucks, let's fight for a better work week that gives us more rest and recovery.
And I think that's the mission that is starting to find legs now when you speak to all the
people, whether it's strength and conditioning, whether it's Stuart McGill, we're talking
about back injuries, whether it's the mental health practitioners, whether it's the cancer
experts, whether it's performance or longevity, sleep is an absolute essential part of this
conversation.
We talk about cancer and what's in our gear and the carcinogens.
No one talks about sleep being a massive carcinogen.
We talk about mental health, that's what you saw.
No one talks about sleep deprivation being completely detrimental to the mind.
And as you said, learning, you process learning in a positive way.
You also process trauma when you sleep properly.
So everything that you see we struggle with has a direct correlation to sleep deprivation
as well.
So as you said, it's a free solution.
And if you proactively invest in your people, like we talked about earlier, whether it's
wildland, whether it's municipal, you have just hit a massive force multiplier in both
health, longevity and performance.
So it's an absolute win-win.
It's just people having the courage to stand up and say, my sleep is important.
My time in my own bed next to my spouse is important.
Waking up with my kids an extra day between shifts is super important.
And being fully staffed so I'm not told I can't go home the next day is insanely important.
So that's just the, you know, the basal thing.
Now you add in longevity and you get these guys that are fired up about forcible entry
and cutting lines and hell attack and all these things.
And you say, well, you're going to be a much better firefighter when you're well slept.
The same way as your favorite basketball player is much better when he's well slept.
So this is what's exciting is that as these layers add up, it's irrefutable.
Like we have to give our first responders, you know, ER doctors and nurses and all these
other high performers whose lives are in their hands, the rest and recovery they deserve.
So they're not chronically broken like we see in so many of these professions.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And the data doesn't lie.
That's kind of the nice thing with in terms of like looking longterm at policy, the more
that we can get involved with academic institutions looking to put data to these practices and
provide evidence for improved retention, better quality of care, better line construction,
better crew outcomes on their on their tests and things like that.
I don't know.
Like the list goes on.
You just if you start to paint a picture of improved performance, improved health, you
can convince these institutions to make those changes like workweek shifts, like mandatory
naps, things that when it's applicable should be implemented.
I understand that sometimes shit needs to get done.
You can't change the circumstances.
The fire is not going to wait for you to take a nap.
So I get it.
But there's a lot of situations where if the policy advocates for or allows for individuals
to take advantage of this super food to the max type of supplement that sleep is like
the the cascade of benefits that are systemic among the body for it.
So it's it just paints a picture of why they should invest in these in these individuals,
the return on investment they'll get with better workers, better outcomes, better productivity.
I am hopeful that we can paint that picture and build a better environment for these first
responder populations as a whole to get the advocacy they need for it.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, the first of the closing questions, is there a book or other books that you love
to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Yeah, that's a that's a good one.
I'm currently reading a very cool one from Ethan Cross.
It's called Chatter.
So that one I watched a Huberman podcast, and Ethan Cross was on it.
He essentially is talking about the inner voice, the science and the neuroscience behind
the inner voice, our cognition, what what self dialogue and self talk can do in terms
of positive states and degradatory states, their context of mental illness and disease
and deconstructive rabbit holes you can drive yourself down.
Also with very actionable tools of how to distance yourself.
That would be a kind of a common psychological term of just positive distancing techniques
to utilize that inner voice to your advantage, but also turn it off when it's not necessary.
So for individuals who find themselves in situations where if you're in stillness, if
you're in your off season, your relationship with yourself consists of you like not being
comfortable with boredom.
You go your phone immediately or like you get awkward and don't know what to do when
you're just like there with your thoughts or maybe those moments lead you down negative
rabbit holes of I don't know, just negative states where your anxiety ridden, maybe you
get too fixated on certain things and it's just a constant tearing down inside your head.
This is a great book with actionable tools to provide you with some strategies to overcome
that inner voice and shift it to more of a positively adapted one.
Brilliant.
I can totally relate to that.
It's funny, I just started day one of Headspace again.
I'm going to do like a 20 day meditation run because I finished my book last year and that
consumes you.
It's in a good way.
Like you're focused on this thing that you're creating, but then you're done and it's released
and now you're left with this void again and then you start hearing that how loud that
voice has become the whole time.
So I'm literally combating that very thing that you're talking about.
Yep, and it's cool because even in that book, he acknowledges that he's a lead researcher
at this laboratory that studies the inner voice and he references examples of time periods
where the inner voice has been highly destructive to him.
It's been like he knows all the tools, all the strategies, all the things of how to counter
this and it still overtakes him sometimes.
So it shows the power of this concept, this phenomenon, how everybody experiences it and
it's okay to acknowledge its role.
But he's a very humble individual even though he's at such a high level that he's gone with
his study of this concept.
So yeah, I really, I love his approach to talking about it.
I think it's receivable to any type of person.
Beautiful.
What about films or documentaries?
Let's see, trying to think of one that is related to this field in particular.
Documentaries.
I just watched, oh, I know a good one.
It's the rugby one with Nelson Mandela.
No, what's it called?
It's about the South African rugby team that won the World Cup against all odds.
It was fueled by Nelson Mandela's efforts to unite the country under civil unrest.
It starts with a V. It's not victorious.
I do.
I don't remember the name of it, but yeah, it was a spring box, wasn't it?
Yeah.
And there was the massive mutual respect between the team captain and Nelson Mandela.
Yes.
Yeah.
That was a really cool one.
I just watched it on a plane recently.
That was a really uplifting one.
It's one that I think can parallel a lot of things in our current political landscape
and an optimistic view and a shift of humanitarianism uniting a country and fueling it in positive
ways.
Yeah.
I think it's a cool one based on you could go on the news and be very disheartened by
some of the things that maybe depending on whatever your stance is, it's a really just
great film to uplift individuals and kind of ground you a little bit that we're all
human.
We all are after the same thing of freeing ourselves from suffering and creating peace
and contributing towards common good.
So I enjoyed that.
It was a really fun film to watch for the current state of our situation.
I think it's needed.
I'm actually just started the minute baby steps towards making the last book I wrote
into a series and that's going to be the exact underlying element is putting hope into a
kind of human experience story where the struggles but also kind of putting compassion and empathy
back into where a lot of division and judgment has been forced into us.
So I think the world needs it.
I really do.
I think Tiger King was a good fit at the beginning of COVID to make yourself feel better about
yourself by watching a shit show of a life.
But I think now people need to have that kind of inspirational glue that pulls all the normal
people in the middle back together again that were cleaved by the extremists of both sides.
Yeah, 100%.
I'm excited for you to break ground on that book.
It's a much needed topic and the more stories of success like that that we can illuminate
and bring people together with these positive examples set, it's going to be moving.
I think a lot of people are waiting for that change and aspire for it and the mass majority
of people want to meet in the middle and create a world where everybody can find success and
happiness.
I hope it becomes more universally put out into the world just like where our social
media is filled, our books, our films, our everyday experiences are fueled by those types
of themes rather than ones that tear us apart.
Maybe those algorithms on TikTok start to trend more towards that.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, well then the next question, is there a person that you'd recommend to come
on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated
professions of the world?
I have many mentors in the field.
John O'Connor, ex LA city firefighter, huge mental health advocate.
He's a beautiful mind, a beautiful person and he's been a person I constantly go to
for perspective because he's been in the field for so long.
He's just a kind of person that has walked the walk.
He's a badass in his own right.
When he walks into a department, everybody takes notice and when he starts speaking,
it's all command presence you could ever take.
He's a great blend of a person who wants to break the stigma of the fire industry, but
does it in a way that's well received.
I would love to see him on this podcast talking about his experience and I would love to give
you his contact.
That'd be amazing.
Yeah, actually the Jose Navarro sounds like a fascinating one as well.
Oh, oh my God.
Yeah, him too.
You need both of them.
Jose Navarro's speech was just mind blowing.
It left everybody in tears, standing applause, like a whole deal.
It was one of the best speeches I've ever heard and he's a great individual overall
with an inspiring story.
Beautiful.
All right, we'll have to try and make both of those happen, so thank you.
All right, but then the next question, what do you do to decompress?
I have a gauntlet of tools, I would say.
Surfing is probably one of the ones I could lean on for the last five years that's been
a game changer, whether it's before a test, before a big meeting.
The cold water emerging combined with stillness, combined with an adrenaline rush of, I don't
know, I don't need to go out and catch a ton of waves, but if I do, that's obviously a
cool perk to it.
Just going out and distancing in some way visually really helps me.
Whether it's a trail run and at the top taking a moment to admire the view or going to the
ocean and looking into the broad horizon, something that grounds me because of just
how big the world is and how small you are in comparison, that's probably my most successful
tool of decompressing.
If you ever get caught up and you start to fixate on little issues, if you go do something
like that and just put yourself in that kind of state in awe and admiration of nature or
something of that magnitude, it just dissipates.
You just naturally start to let those worries fall.
There's evidence and things you can look at to support that strategy and the efficacy
of it, but subjectively, it's something I found myself just doing constantly.
I think it's contributed a lot to the success I've had, the ability to approach stressful
situations and come at them with a good headspace.
Instead of letting that internal dialogue direct me on a negative path, just involving
myself in nature-based activities has automatically given me an outlet to get back to my roots,
show me that this moment is not as drastic as you think it is.
Five years from now, this won't be an issue.
It gives me an amazing free tool that's always accessible to me, thankfully.
Beautiful.
Well, for people listening, firstly, Hotshot Wellness.
Remind us again where we can find that, where they can register for the event and all these
other areas.
Yeah.
You can look at our website.
It's hotshotwellness.org and it's under events.
You can go to it'll take you to the Eventbrite page where all you'll need to do is sign up
for whatever days you want to attend and it's all free.
You can use the same link if you are a department and you want to watch it together.
You can click and just buy one.
You could just get one link and then everybody can use that same one.
There's no need to have everybody in a department or on a crew sign up for their own links.
You could just distribute that link however you please.
But yeah, we have a Squarespace where all of our different platforms are under one singular
software.
Our main website, our social media at Hotshot Wellness is probably the best ways to stay
up to date on our events, our projects, our initiatives.
Our website is continuing to develop with a resource hub that is a developing process
where the goal is to create this all-encompassing platform where individuals can go and find
practitioners to help them with various things they want to work on, whether it's a dietitian
that's necessary, a physical therapist, a strength and conditioning coach, a physician,
a mental health expert, also looking up validated articles and publications, new research that
comes out with respect to first responders, wildland members in particular.
Maybe it has to do with smoke exposure or reproductive health or women's health, like
just a cascade of articles, resources, lectures, application, opportunity, contacts, just the
central hub where if you have an issue, you have something you want to work on, you can
find the solution within that hub.
So stay tuned for that.
That's a grand vision for us and it's an ongoing project because it's super monumental
in its landscape.
So yeah, that's something we're really psyched on and think is going to break some ground
in the upcoming weeks.
Fantastic.
And what about you?
I want to reach out to you.
Where are the best places?
You could reach out to me with a DM at the healthy underscore hotshot account.
That's my personal one.
Or you could DM our hotshot wellness account.
My email I'll make accessible.
I don't know if I'm going to get out my phone number yet, but I'll make my my justin at
hotshot wellness dot org email available to everybody as well as those Instagram pages.
Fantastic.
Well, Justin, I want to say thank you so much.
It's been such an interesting perspective coming from the strength and conditioning
route and we didn't really touch on this, but basically joining the wildland fire service
to really immerse yourself and get that all important buy in that we know is essential
in the first responder professions when it comes to people from the outside.
But it's such a unique lens that you brought to this conversation and such an amazing tool
that you're bringing to the wildland community as well.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you so much for the opportunity.
It's a conversation I love to have.
It's one that I hope keeps propagating positive shifts in policy and advocacy.
So it's an honor to be here talking about these these things related to wildland and
first responders as a whole.
And I'm happy to happy to have had the conversation.
Thanks so much.