#85 - What Really Happens When You Call 911 & How A Mandate Ended A 21-Year Career w/David Dahlin

No one knows what waits on the other side of the door. It could be a scared five-year-old with a head cut, a fentanyl addict out in a parking lot, or a welfare check where the smell hits two floors below. In this conversation with a 21-year Seattle firefighter, we step past the clichés and into the craft.

We dig into street medicine the way it’s actually practiced. He breaks down hands-only CPR and the hard truth that effective compressions are “beautifully violent,” explains why Seattle’s Medic One reshaped prehospital care, and talks candidly about Narcan—how it flips the receptors, why dealers “market” lethal batches, and what compassion fatigue feels like after the tenth overdose of the day. The most dangerous scenes? Often the quiet ones on the shoulder of a freeway, where kinetic energy makes reflective cones a survival strategy.

Then everything changes: he refused the COVID shot on religious grounds and was terminated alongside dozens of colleagues. He walks us through exemptions, deadlines, and why he sees the mass firings as an ideological purge. We cover the legal terrain—Groff v. DeJoy, strict scrutiny, and the Bacon ruling—showing how these precedents could reshape religious accommodation far beyond one department. This isn’t a rant; it’s a grounded account of process, principle, and fallout.

What comes after a badge? You'll have to listen. His closing advice? Show up fit, protect your mind, don’t make the patch your whole identity, and add value where you stand. If this episode moved you, share it with a friend, subscribe for more candid conversations, and leave a review with the moment that hit you hardest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Cold Opens: Decomp, Names, And Setup
• 2:30 Why Become A Firefighter
• 7:30 Life On Shift And Decompression
• 12:00 Trucks, Engines, And Real Workflows
• 19:30 Car Fires, Extrication, And Tool Reality
• 26:00 Vehicle Safety, Physics, And Driving Truths
• 35:00 CPR That Works: Myths And Methods
• 45:00 Street Medicine: Overdoses And Narcan
• 53:00 Roadside Risk: Highways And Limited Access
• 1:01:00 Cats In Trees And Firehouse Misconceptions
• 1:05:00 Hoarders, Mega Movers, And Heavy Lifts
• 1:12:00 Decomp Cases And Unthinkable Scenes
• 1:22:00 Seattle’s Decline: Drugs, Policy, And Culture
• 1:33:00 Fentanyl Waves, Compassion Fatigue, And Faith
• 1:45:00 Mandates, Exemptions, And Getting Fired
• 1:57:00 Lawsuits, Precedents, And The Long Game
• 2:09:00 Reinvention: Contracting, Integrity, And Grit
• 2:19:00 Identity, Transition, And Mental Health
• 2:28:00 Service After Service: Helping A Brother
• 2:35:00 Advice For Rookies And Closing Reflections

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

What's that like doing a welfare check on like a decomp body? I can remember we got out of the elevator, we forced the door, walked in. I'd never seen this before, never seen it since. Standing up. Dead. Standing up like over a stove, leaning against the kitchen counter. I was like, what? That part was creepy. David. Davey.

unknown: 0:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 0:38

What do you go with? Almost everybody calls me Davey. Okay. Um my dad was a Dave. My sister married a Dave. My best friend was a Dave. Oh God. There's so many, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting four Dave. So Davey stuck. It just stuck.

SPEAKER_01: 0:52

Okay. So All right, Davey. We I love, there's certain people that I absolutely love having a conversation with, and it's the majority of it's first responders because the average American has no idea what goes on behind firefighters, paramedics, cops. And so the reason I love sitting down with especially firefighters, first responders, is to just bring light to the community. Okay. What you guys are doing day in and day out, especially you coming from Seattle. You did 21 years of Seattle, so you got to see a huge evolution of the Seattle City change.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

And then I was also raised there. So I actually I'm now 51. I was 47 when I got canned. Okay. And so that was 47 years of growing up uh in the suburbs of Seattle in a bedroom community, watching how that grew. Yep. The town that I was raised in had one four-way blinking light. Okay. And now it is Costco Wholesales World Headquarters, a little town called Issaqua. Oh. And so we but back then we could go into town and you know the the the Seahawks were a brand new franchise in '76. But you could go into Seattle and it was reasonably safe and clean.

SPEAKER_03: 2:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11

And uh up until, you know, what it was at what it is now, and and when I was, you know, absolutely at the tip of the spear with all of that decline into the into chaos and and just anarchy. Yeah. Um so yeah, it's it's more than just the the almost 22 years, it's it was my whole life. Your whole life. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:36

You saw a huge evolution in Seattle. Come COVID. Yes, you refuse the vaccines, the shots. Yes. And you ended up getting fired over it. After 21 years of serving as a firefighter in Seattle, you ended up having to make the choice, which I want to obviously get into all of that. So, first off, thank you for the 21 years of service to your city and state. Unfortunately, they did not show the same love back to you, but thank you for your service. Well, thank you. Let's just dive into it, man. Obviously, we know where you're from, Seattle, but what made you want to be a firefighter?

SPEAKER_00: 3:09

Uh part of it was uh this is kind of the funny part. I never outgrew the five-year-old. That's a big red truck, and I want to do that. Okay, and and you know, we can dive a little deeper into it. And as my wife and I have talked about it, we we we've unpacked a little bit of it, that being the firstborn, being the the approval seekers, the the achiever, and and wanting to basically wanting to measure up. Um, I think that that also was a driving factor.

SPEAKER_03: 3:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 3:45

One of my biggest regrets that I have as an adult is that I actually didn't do military service. Okay. But I also know that had I gone that route, my world would be different. A hundred percent. Right? If I just with my personality, if I was, if I had joined the Navy, I would have either wanted to fly or been a SEAL, and if I could, if I if I failed at those, I would have get out. Yeah, yeah. You know, if I was in the army, I would have tried to fly or been a Delta. That sort of a thing. Now, I I I want to be very careful and respectful that I I'm not presumptuous saying I would have made it, but that's what have been my mentality is no, I it it's that or nothing. Yeah. And um you do those jobs, and you know, it changes who you are. For sure. And you know, wanting to be um wanting to be a husband and being good at it, um when you do those careers, the career has to come first.

SPEAKER_01: 4:49

Every time.

SPEAKER_00: 4:50

Unfortunately. And you know, I have a great admiration for the spouses of people that serve because they serve too. They serve in some ways in a more difficult way. 100%. Right? Um so yeah, it's it's it's that sort of stuff. And and those that do our job, um gosh, I really want to be respectful about this. When you when you look at the people that get deployed, you get a ramp up, you get your deployment, you come back, you get your your ramp your ramp down, or whatever the appropriate term is for that, where you kind of get debriefed and and so forth, and then you move back in and you're on your whatever it is rotation and cycle until it's time for you to get deployed again, and then you go for your another your other ramp up. Well, when you're home, you're you're pretty much home. Yeah. When you're doing the job that we did, you're never home. Now you come, you drive your vehicle back to your house, but you don't get that decompress time to come back down. So, so you know, you don't realize how on edge you are sure until um you're out. I've had a lot of surgeries. Um I'm the six million dollar man, if you're old enough to remember that show. They just keep putting me back together, right? And and so you're off on a surgery for for a few months and you're just going, oh, this is this is what it's like to actually sleep in my own bed from bedtime to when you wake up and get up and go to physical therapy, and you come back and you know, you go to the gym to work what you can that V PT would, you know, wouldn't do or whatever, and actually interact with your family.

SPEAKER_03: 6:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 6:37

But coming home, you know, after getting just the snot kicked out of you, um, you live in in are you in Meridian City Limits? Yeah. Okay. My station ran as many calls as the entire city of Meridian does in a year. Really? We were jumping.

SPEAKER_03: 6:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 6:55

Which makes it fun and makes time go by because it does. But at the same time, like you're saying, this is where a lot of guys I defend a lot more law enforcement and first responders and veterans because of that exact thing. Like everybody gives veterans this, like, puts us on this pedestal and thanks for your service. Oh my god, you got deployed, uh, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Cool. We did our part, we signed up for that. But I'm always like, what about the cops? That net it's every single day. Oh, cool, you get a couple days off a week. What about the firefighters that are running these shifts and they're X on this, uh, Y off of this, and it's just, it's just not. And then they're doing this for a career. Like, I did two back-to-back deployments. Okay. And so that was rough, but at the same time, when we were done, we were done. That was it. Like when we knew we were on our way home, we were on our way home. Like, we were like, oh, thank God. And then you get that decompression stage, and we get to get back through. Now, when I got back from my first one, we literally took 30 days off. The second we got back, got it, gave us 30 days of leave. That 31st day we came back to work, and they're like, hey, you're now detached from this unit, you're attached to that unit, you're deploying in six months. So we were like, Oh shit, like holy shit. So we were right back in seven months. I was on my way back to Iraq. Right. But then I was done. And so you look at you guys, and it is just year after year after year, toll after toll after toll, and and then you're never healing your bodies. I mean, the cancer that's coming out in firefighters and cops and everything right now is insane, the numbers that I'm seeing. So that's from stress, you know, inhaling shit your whole entire career, being in and out of those toxic environments. I mean, it's just first responders have it. I feel, and if I I lump every all the cops, firefighters, I feel they honestly have it way worse than veterans or active duty because we sign up, we know what we're going to, and so do you guys, but like there's no break for it. There's no time off. You're obviously you get your vacations and you get your few days off, but like for us, I mean, dude, there's guys that go five or six years without ever deploying. There's dudes. I knew I knew guys on my first deployment that were in 20 years and it was their first deployment. Right. So, you know, you could dodge shit and do things like that. But yeah, I give long our our first responders so much credit.

SPEAKER_00: 9:01

It's just different. And and I don't want to, it's it's the same, but it's different. And and and I don't wanna I hope that when I brought that up, it's it's I don't want to extend any disrespect to service. I'm with you. And and I'm I mean supremely grateful for for the job they do. I don't care if they're if they're a cook or a bottle washer or if they're going outside the line and the people going outside the line, they gotta come back and eat. They gotta cut you it takes an enormous amount to keep that machine working. Oh, for sure. And I want that machine really, really, really well working.

SPEAKER_01: 9:31

Um it's mind-boggling when you say that, because I have conversations with buddies of mine, and we're like, how does anything function in the military? It is run by the biggest retards in charge, and you're just sitting there and you're like, this guy isn't my boss and we're functioning, and now we're in a war zone, and we're like, hey, by the way, we've been out of water for four days, like shit like that. It's it's insane. I have we I've had so many conversations with vets like, dude, how does the military even function? It is mind-blowing to me.

SPEAKER_00: 9:57

And I thought I heard someplace in the I don't I forget where I heard it or read it, but it seemed like a credible source at the time. Um, that somewhere about 15% of the military actually goes outside the wire.

SPEAKER_01: 10:09

It's one really it's one, it's it's less than one percent actually ever see or do anything with the my source was very uncredible. I could be wrong. I'm sure the internet will fact check this, but uh yeah, I want to say it's less than one percent.

SPEAKER_00: 10:23

Oh, okay. Yeah. But there's I guess my my point to that is there's an enormous amount of important people doing important jobs behind the scenes that they wear a uniform to. That, you know, they aren't the guys that get launched off the aircraft carry. It's the it's the 300 dudes and dudettes that have to be a jet mechanic to make sure that the jet doesn't fall out of the sky.

SPEAKER_01: 10:44

It's it's the PFC that's out there six hours prior checking, yeah, you know, tightening, going over their pre-op checks and touching every bolt and every screw on these everything. Yo, there's so much that goes because you know I was uh I was an Amtracker, so we had amphibious assault vehicles that go in and out. So like our pre-ops alone, like you're when I was a crew chief, so you have your crewmen, and it's like, hey, we're stepping off in six hours, like start a pre-op now.

unknown: 11:05

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 11:06

So they're going through a whole and it's literally a checklist. Like you're checking the start, the oils, the temps, you're running, it's it's this whole entire thing, and that's just for our vehicles. So I couldn't even imagine like what goes into like running a battalion overseas, and then you know, and the the beans, bullets, and band-aids is what we always say. Okay, and so yeah, it's like, okay, who's in charge of that? Because we just show up places and it was like everything was there. We're like, oh fuck, this is great. So you don't ever think of it, especially when you're out sure patrolling, doing dumb shit all day, and you come back, you're like, oh God, there's hot chow.

SPEAKER_00: 11:33

Like, this is the greatest day ever. Right, right. When we were, you know, at in the firehouse, uh, in our department, the culture was the driver. Uh that was my that was the the role that I aspired to and and eventually earned. Um we are the ones that were ultimately responsible for Wow. I guess ultimately your lieutenant, the the officer's signature goes below yours on any letter on any form.

SPEAKER_03: 11:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 11:58

But practically, if there's a piece of equipment missing, the officer's looking at the driver going, Where is it? Oh yeah. This is this is your rig. Where is it? What's going on? And and hey, sometimes sometimes a ladder would break in a drill. And you get on the if it's a Saturday, you get a hold of the services, the commissary, and say, that goes to voicemail because they're not open. They're they're a 40-hour a week outfit. It's like, well, shit, what do we do? Do we go to a do we see if we can find one off of a spare rig someplace? You got to call your battalion chief. And if if there isn't any spares, you're running down a ladder. Now that's not the necessarily the end of the world, but everybody needs to be aware that if you go running to grab for just for sake of conversation, let's say it's it's it's a 35, uh, a 35-foot extension ladder. If you go run for the 35, think, hey, we need a 35. Shit, we don't have one. Uh plan B. Yeah. You know, you you got to think about that stuff ahead of time. Or, or, you know, it and sometimes it would happen on an emergency scene, we'd ruin something. Sometimes it would happen when we're training, when we're drilling.

SPEAKER_03: 13:05

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 13:06

Um, sometimes, gosh, you the saw started yesterday morning with yesterday's crew. We went out to check it and it doesn't start this morning. Well, I don't know. It doesn't. Four of us tried to get it started. It doesn't start. All right, guess the saw's out of service. Yeah. You know, and Murphy's law is that stuff happens when services is closed. You know, the good folks at services, they busted their tail trying to keep, you know, all of us, you know, ladder monkeys. We are really good at breaking shit.

SPEAKER_03: 13:36

Always.

SPEAKER_00: 13:36

I mean, really good at breaking shit. Yeah. And so you could argue that on a truck company, that that's kind of our our role. We're the in my every department runs a little bit differently. The nuances of City of Seattle was that your truck companies ran, it was a giant toolbox, 60 feet long, two drivers, and um we we it was a the extent of the water that we carried on that truck was two two and a half gallon pump can fire extinguishers and a few bottles of water. Really? That's all the water we carried on our trucks. Our engines, some people call them pumpers.

SPEAKER_03: 14:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 14:15

500 gallon tank, a PTO pump, and a whole lot of hose.

SPEAKER_01: 14:19

How fast can you blow through 500 gallons on a truck on a fire?

SPEAKER_00: 14:24

Fair question. I'm not trying to be a douche about it, but it really depends on what full blast. Well how fast can you burn through 500 gallons? Depends on what's what am I supplying. If I'm supplying a thousand gallon per minute um ladder pipe, do the math. Four minutes. Because as soon as it runs out, you've got a hundred gallons of water in the pipe getting to it, and when the water doesn't have when there's no water going into the pump, but you just dumped four thousand gallons of water on whatever you were spraying.

SPEAKER_03: 14:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 14:55

I mean, you can go through it really fast. Uh uh an inch and three quarter hand line in Seattle, that's that's a uh standard attack line, inch and three quarter. Run it at um the goal is pretty close to, I'm gonna get flamed for this one, but the goal is pretty close to 135 to 150 PSI at the nozzle. So the so the people on the pump panel have to do the mental math for the friction loss for how long of the lay is that and that kind of that sort of thing. Big fire, big water, little fire, little water. Okay. And you know, now we all had radios, so if the guy on the tip is like, dude, this this thing's too much, too hard, too, too much recoil, hey, throttle it down a little bit. All right, fine. I can the guy on the pump panel can reduce that that now because you don't want them fighting the the nozzle the whole entire time. Correct. But the thing is, is that like you and I are large people. I would call us full-size adult males.

SPEAKER_03: 15:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:53

Well, one of the things that happened about 20 years ago, well now 25 years ago, is is across the fire service, a lot of the physical entry standards were reduced. And they did this trying to be more inclusive to allow other people that wanted to be firefighters to be able to be firefighters.

SPEAKER_01: 16:09

Was this just lowering standards or was this more the DEI higher stuff? Was this implemented by them? Seattle, I feel, is like one of the tip of the spears, like right there with the case.

SPEAKER_00: 16:18

Seattle's gonna be tip of the spear on the DEI kind of stuff. This was this was one of the very early um the early steps of this. It wasn't necessarily, hey, you know, we need to go DEI. It was just sort of, hey, we don't have enough people. The only people that are passing our standards are almost everybody that's passing our standards, just really huge people.

SPEAKER_03: 16:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 16:41

And we want to be able to have other people on on the fire for on the fire department. So why why do we need that? That's a really good question.

SPEAKER_01: 16:51

I if if you're hiring a bunch of big ass dudes that are able to carry people out of fires, throw hoses over shit, move heavy equipment, pick up some hoarder that weighs 500 pounds in their house, like what is wrong with that? Why do we need to hire small petite people or women or minority like I agree? Like what what's I agree?

SPEAKER_00: 17:11

And and I like a meritocracy where there's a standard. If you meet the standard, you're gonna be you're gonna be welcomed. And the beautiful the beautiful thing about this that the people that are pushing these different quotas don't understand is that when you meet the standard, they don't care if you're black, if you're white, if you're purple, they don't care if you pray to Jesus, if you pray to Muhammad. They don't care. They don't care if you're gay or straight. What they care is you passed. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01: 17:40

You passed what I passed. Correct. Welcome. Yeah. I have no problem. I'm I'm huge on this. Exactly. Because of the whole females in the military thing, I am anti-all of that. But I'm a girl dad, so I'm I can't sit here and be like, oh, women can't do what men can do, which we're completely built differently. But it's like, dude, if some chick wants to try out and wants to be a ranger or a seal and she makes it, cool. You earned it. But the fact that we're lowering standards, because then what it's doing is it's undermining everybody that's already gone through it. But at the same time, it's like if I have somebody that didn't or met the low standards and now they're on a hose with me and they're on a call, I I'm not gonna trust that person. Yeah. So then you have doubt. Then you have doubt inside your team, which becomes cancer, right? And that starts to grow, and it's like then you just have this bad environment because we had to hire somebody because of their race or color, whatever it may be.

SPEAKER_00: 18:33

Well, and not only that, when you do that, you also have to change your deployment models. Because if I you're a big strong guy, so with with some coaching on maybe you already maybe you already know it, but with even if you didn't know anything, but you're you you what you show up is big and strong, with a little bit of coaching on technique and and how to do it, you could handle an inch and three quarter hose by yourself. It's not that hard. But if they're I don't care if they're male or female, but if they're five foot five and they're 110 pounds, that's half of your size and my size. Not not height wise, but that's half of what we weigh. So now you're throttling everything down, you're not able to fight the fire as effectively because Or you have to send more people because now you need three people, or you need two people, where you used to be able to only have to put one person. Now you still don't in the fire department when you're going into the in in that kind of thing, you still work as teams. You don't you don't send people out on their own, but it changes things because now you're you're sending more people if you're on the nozzle, I can be 15, 20 feet back and still be your partner.

SPEAKER_03: 19:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 19:52

Um and I'm helping work the hose around the hor around the corners or something like that, but you're the one who's just doing what needs to be done with the actual nozzle in that in that regard. Now I'm kind of talking a little bit out of turn because I was a truck guy, I was not a I was not a hoser. And but those in my career will understand that joke. That's that's that's kind of funny. Um there's there's a there's a friendly, you know, rivalry between.

SPEAKER_01: 20:17

I feel like the hose guys feel like they're way cooler because they're in the shit, but then you guys probably feel you're cool because they're depending on everything that you guys have had ready for them and get because you're on a rolling toolbox, like you said. So if your job isn't tight, then they're struggling.

SPEAKER_00: 20:31

And so and you actually picked up on it perfectly. That's exactly when it's done correctly, joking aside, on a fire scene, the truck is a support role. Absolutely. We our job, my favorite job in the entire my favorite role in that entire career is being on the roof of a house that's on fire, and I've got a chainsaw with a carbide chain on it, and I'm cutting a great big hole in that to let out the smoke and the hot gases. Because that what happens is it gets so hot and so smoky, even with all the gear on, the people with the hoses can't get to the seat of the fire to put it out. So we we call it a heat hole. Ventilation, it lents it out, but they have to be ready with the hoses. Because if you don't, what you just did is made a chimney, and now the fire is going to burn way more efficiently, way more hotter. Now you got a draft. Now you got a draft. So, but if you've if you've as soon as that lift happens, if the hosers are right there ready to go, and bang, it's it's uh it's synergistic. It's just it's a beautiful dance that that happens when it when it works well. And when it works as it's intended. And it's it's fantastic. But if we don't do that, they can't make access. Got it. Now, one of the other roles on a fire, on a house fire, uh, that a truck is gonna have is rescue, search.

SPEAKER_01: 21:47

So see, these are cool things. I didn't know any of this. I thought everybody kind of just I knew everybody has their roles, but I thought everybody was part of like going in, fighting the fire. But now it makes sense that like, hey, truck guys, you guys are just pressure, water's flowing, with tools already, all that good shit. And then you have so are the new guys the ones going in, or are those more of your experienced guys?

SPEAKER_00: 22:11

Uh it's typically not organized like new and experienced. It's it's typically position that you're riding on the vehicle has, hey, if you're riding number three, this is your role. You need to know that every single thing and you're supposed to a good person, even on an engine or a truck, there's number three, there's number four, there's you know we ran four person four-person companies, which is kind of a luxury. And it's NFPA standard to have four-person companies, but you find a lot of places are still only running three-person companies. Okay. Um, an officer, a driver, and one person on the what we call the tailboard, even though nobody rides on the tailboard anymore. What's a tailboard? Back in the you look at the old movies and the guys would would ride on the very back of the hang on to the back. Oh, okay. They're they're st they're standing on the back bumper of the of the truck going down the road and they're hanging. That's that's where that term tailboard came from.

SPEAKER_03: 22:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 23:00

So nobody rides that anymore because people fell off. Someone hit a bump and got hurt, and somebody died. Oh no shit. In Seattle. Yes. Yeah. Um, yeah. So year it was years ago. So now we ride in crew cabs. Can you imagine? Yeah, whoops.

SPEAKER_01: 23:16

And you end up losing one of your guys on a oh my Atlanta, dude.

SPEAKER_00: 23:20

I that would be it'd suck, right?

SPEAKER_01: 23:22

I mean unfortunately, and that's the stuff it takes for somebody like, hey, we should probably all sit inside.

SPEAKER_00: 23:27

Most most rules like that, they they've got a body attached to it. Right. Yeah. You know, um, so yeah, that's that's just kind of how that how that whole dynamic works. And and if we're doing it right, we're in a support role. Now, if we go on a rescue, like a vehicle extrication where we're cutting the somebody there's a car wreck and the car's got to get cut apart from around them, yeah. That's where the truck takes the lead, and your engine people, they're in the support role.

SPEAKER_03: 23:54

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 23:55

And because we carry those tools to actually cut the car open. Yeah. Um, Sawzalls, the Jaws of Life is is a particular brand, kind of like Kleenex is for facial tissue, and how even if you buy it from Costco, you still call it Kleenex. Hazer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 24:11

Okay. I didn't know that. I thought Jaws of Life, like that was it.

SPEAKER_00: 24:14

No, no, there's there's several brands. Okay. Um the brand that that uh Seattle used uh for the uh they were still using it when I when when I left was Homatro. And they're hydraulic units, they're hydraulically driven. They've got um different generations have made more advancements. Some people have gone to battery-operated tools where it's like a like a power tool battery that snaps in it, which is handy because you don't have a hose. That part's really cool, but those units, uh those tools tend to be a little bit bigger and heavier.

SPEAKER_03: 24:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 24:47

So another argument for being big and strong. I mean, those tools are not light.

SPEAKER_01: 24:54

Yeah, I mean, you look at the jaws of life, I mean, you're holding it, feel like it is like it's about that size. And you're just slamming, and then obviously you pull things open.

SPEAKER_00: 25:02

Yes, and and in the movies, they'll slam, and you gotta be really careful because you really don't want to do that. Why? Very rarely because you don't if the person inside is injured and you hit that thing and you jam the the spreaders into something, you're just jarring that whole car around. That's that can be dangerous and risk greater injury to the patient inside. That's not that's not good patient care. Yeah, yeah. Now, uh are there times where you don't have another choice? Yes. But those are rare. Where you that's your only option. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:38

And okay, let's talk, let's talk about um wrecks real quick. Okay. Because they I've been involved in some pretty gnarly accidents, like the wife and I, we've been involved in like not like in the accident, but happened in front of us and had to help pull people out and do some pretty messed up shit. What's it like dealing with car wrecks because they can be just a war zone inside of what goes on in there? So as a as a firefighter, like do you ever what's your mindset coming up on a pretty brat bad wreck? Are you do you do you usually know if the people are alive or the state of the passengers or the individuals in there, or is it kind of like, hey, we know there's a wreck at mile mark or whatever, we're just rolling up and taking care of it at this?

SPEAKER_00: 26:28

When you get to, you know, 50 yards from the vehicle or from the wreck, when you can actually start to see it, you can get an idea about what's going on and what you what you might need to do. The problem is the only people that see that are the people facing forward, and the person in the back seat that's gonna do most of the work is facing backwards. So they they get out like, oh, okay. And so it's good to have protocols, standard operating procedures. Uh one of the things that we were kind of a a theme in our in our department was we were really kind of a default was we take the roof, which means we take the roof off of the car. Okay. And there's if it's if the car is still on quote upright. Yeah. So it's on all fours. Yeah, it's on all fours. If the car is upside down on its lid, well, that might be different. We can't take the roof off, then that's not gonna do us any good. So now we have to cut the side of the car off, a sidewall removal while it's upside down.

SPEAKER_01: 27:30

How long does that take? I mean, I know every scenario is different be depending on the carnage, but how long does it take for you to get inside of a car?

SPEAKER_00: 27:37

A few minutes.

SPEAKER_01: 27:38

Really?

SPEAKER_00: 27:38

Yeah. Some of them are longer. Um we've had I was on one call that it did not go well. The we were in a reserve apparatus and we had old elect uh hydraulic equipment. The um the group, the crew that got the old apparatus, uh the reserve apparatus, chose not to take our first line equipment off of the first line rig when they turned it into the fire garage, the the shop for repairs, and go with the old equipment that was on the reserve apparatus. It's never in as good a shape, tolerances are worn out, not as powerful, not as modern. It was a completely different brand. That was actually that particular scenario, we were dealing with old Hearst um Amkus stuff. Oh what? Brand. Oh. And and the newer stuff that that all the front light rigs were running was was Homantra. Now it still worked, but it didn't work quite as well. We were also dealing with a car that was really poorly a cheap car. So you'd grab onto it and it would and the the metal would tear like aluminum foil rather than actually holding rigidity, and when you spread it, it would actually open a bigger hole.

SPEAKER_01: 28:56

Oh, so you're like peeling a a coat can open.

SPEAKER_00: 28:59

So it's just it's just rolling on itself. Correct.

SPEAKER_01: 29:01

What type of car was this?

SPEAKER_00: 29:04

I want to say it was uh I think it was a Hyundai.

SPEAKER_03: 29:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 29:08

Um I think it was a Hyundai. Might have been a Kia. Um but it was a number of years ago. Yeah. So, you know, it was I want to say probably oh oh five, oh four-ish. Oh, okay. So yeah, it it's they've gotten better. I mean, they they've gotten better, but still you start when you pull up on something like uh like a Benz or a Volvo, um you have a better idea. It's like, hey, it's gonna be harder to cut certain things because they're better constructed. But when we push on something, we're gonna get there's gonna be an ROI where we we push on something, it's gonna move. It's not just gonna tear a little piece. And so that part's good.

SPEAKER_01: 29:56

What are the best okay, so as a twenty one year firefighter of dealing with wreck. your whole entire career. Yeah. What's the safest cars?

SPEAKER_00: 30:02

Truck. Mass wins. Every time. Lugnet rule.

SPEAKER_01: 30:05

Really?

SPEAKER_00: 30:05

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 30:06

Okay. I mean that makes sense. That's why she I have my daughter in a truck. Like this.

SPEAKER_00: 30:10

I put three quarter ton suburban. Three quarter ton pickup. Mass wins. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01: 30:17

Every time. It's physics. What's the worst cars that you'd just seen mangled that mangled on the road as a firefighter?

SPEAKER_00: 30:26

I've seen them all pretty mangled.

SPEAKER_01: 30:28

I I it's it's really going to be the I guess my question I guess my question should be if okay you have kids. I mean they're they're grown now but if you have if you for everybody listening from a firefighter's perspective 21 years on the job what's what's one vehicle you would never put your kid in? Is there one that you ever roll up on you're like oh these people are fucked.

SPEAKER_00: 30:50

No not really not really it's it it's it's it's going to depend on how it hits. I mean I think what's more important is is and I know you're you're asking a different question I'm giving you a different answer but I think the answer is you teach your kids how to drive yeah and make sure that the that the vehicle that they're in is in really really good repair so that if they if you teach them good defensive driving skills they're going to be more equipped to avoid or minimize rather than you know oh shit we're we're just tatered. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah I I I probably want to go with that. It's I'm not trying to you asked a direct question I want to give you a direct answer.

SPEAKER_01: 31:33

Well no and I get it too different right because obviously there's a lot of safety protocols that go into making vehicles but I just I wasn't sure if there was one where you guys every time were like oh it's a Volvo oh this Hyundai like the get ready boys like it's I'll tell you that that your Volvos your Benzes your BMWs they're really well built sedans.

SPEAKER_00: 31:51

They really are they're they're they're for for your regular cars they're pretty awesome and well I mean when we had to replace my wife's car two years ago with the insurance money that we got from from the total it's like well for like a thousand dollars more than the Kia we got her a 10 year old Benz that had a hundred thousand miles on it and it was really clean.

SPEAKER_03: 32:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:20

She's in a safer car.

SPEAKER_03: 32:21

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 32:23

Does that make sense? Yeah. So and some of those cars I mean I I'm astounded I don't understand it why but you know there's a certain year mark where all of a sudden the bottom falls out on on the value of some of these and they're still really well made cars. They're going to cost you a little bit more for repairs. So they require a little bit more maintenance. Yeah. Not not because they're American car manufacturers most American drivers and consumers they're they're really negligent about taking care of their cars. Absolutely so you know if you buy one of those other kind of cars you're going to have to you're going to be Johnny on the spot with your oil changes and your services and things like that. But you do that the car's going to last a long long time.

SPEAKER_01: 33:08

Oh we're that's with her like you know being a new driver and we're sticklers on that. There's no reason like people like oh man 1200 miles on the strike I'm like this just getting broken in if you take care of it. I mean I got buddies I got a buddy that's got a tundra and he's got like 4000 miles on his tundra and he's never had a problem with it.

SPEAKER_00: 33:26

So yeah yeah I'm with Toyota builds real for for your non quote luxury cars Toyota makes a darn good car. Honda makes a darn good car. 100% they really do. Yeah. I think it falls off a little bit at at at Nissan you you don't know it but you kind of just dipped into my wheelhouse. My formal education is a bachelor's degree in vehicle research and design. Oh so yeah. That's random so that yeah it is so so I'm I'm and and I love I love cars. So and and most things mechanical we're not going to go there we're keeping you on track so I feel like you could probably go on a tangent about cars.

SPEAKER_01: 34:03

It's just fun to talk about yeah yeah I love I love the hilarious that we bring it up because you know it's just it's just a genuine question because I mean you obviously as firefighters there's nobody else tearing apart vehicles. Not like that. Not like you guys are so you guys know the ins and outs and what's safe for people and not sure. Interesting man.

SPEAKER_00: 34:21

I've seen some I've seen some of those well built sedans handle some amazing wrecks and you're just going that's all that happened? Wow. Cars totaled but metal and plastic can be fixed or replaced. Yeah the the human being inside it that's what's precious. For sure.

SPEAKER_01: 34:37

That's where it comes down to the importance of putting a young driver behind something that's I see I just the other oh she wasn't with me the other day I see this young girl man she's in this those little clown cars. Yeah I don't know what's the brand of them they're just like a little two seater almost smart car. Which is kind of dumb. And I get it I get it you know everybody's finances are completely different. I don't have throwing shade on anything but man that as a dad putting a 16 year old in that thing I mean it's just I'd be like take my truck. No like and I know everybody's situations are different. I'm not saying you have to put your kid in something but I saw I saw this young girl driving and she pulls up next to me and I'm like God man she gets even just T-boned or rear ended. Sure. Done.

SPEAKER_00: 35:22

Yeah physics doesn't masculine you just don't get to out physics physics. It's just physics. No so yeah I'm with you. Yeah. But that's that's uh when I was a kid the the Volkswagen cabriolet convertible was just what every teenage girl wanted. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 35:46

Yep. But yeah. Over your time working in Seattle is there a call that sticks out to you the most there's a handful of them.

SPEAKER_00: 35:58

Yeah. There's a handful of them. Like what? Well when it comes to the crummy stuff I I get to spend the rest of my life trying to forget about those if that makes any sense. Okay. Now there's good ones and my advice my recommendation to the new people approaching it is you're gonna have those good calls that just warm your heart. Like what so early on in my career there was we went on this this call to an apartment in a low-income housing thing and there was this little kid and you walked into this this apartment and even though there were stains all over the carpet and the walls looked like Beirut everything was neat and clean and tidy and hung up. So the occupants of the apartment didn't do all the stains and beating up the apartment. That's how it was when they moved in and and you can just by four seconds of looking around you can tell this is this is this is a family that's trying to make it make it and they're they're having they're practicing what they can control inside there, which is hey I'm picking up my room I'm vacuuming we're cleaning you know there wasn't like dirty dishes piled in the kitchen and and stuff like that. It was not a lazy household you had grandma that was there looking after the little kid. You had mom very clearly a single parent household but you had mom who was away at work and she had been called didn't have a car so she's having to take the bus from her job back because the little kid hit his head on the the oh coffee table. Okay. Couldn't come up with a word for a minute now he had a pretty good gash and he needed a couple of stitches now what had happened is that it was the day after his birthday and he had been given like a a boom box one was probably 20 years old for his birthday. And he was having fun he was dancing around as a five year old who just got a boom box for his birthday will do. Lost his bounce and hit his head and the kids you know mom the grandma's there she's parent she's like I don't know what to do like hey that's what we're here for. And mom is trying to get there. We're there pretty fast because our response time was in Seattle our response time are are crazy fast. And you know cold compress all right bleeding stop yep you're probably gonna need a couple of stitches no big deal and the kid's like oh you know he's hanging on to you like like you see like you see in the National Geographic where they pick up a monkey and the monkey's just kind of like hanging on to you and the kid's just hanging on to you and you can tell there's nothing but love from grandma. When mom finally gets there you can tell there's nothing but love this is not a this is not a uh an abusive situation in any way shape or form nothing but love from mom but this kid is just hanging on to you and he's scared because he thinks he's gonna get his boom box taken away because he hit his head. It's like no and mom is like no no no no that's an accident you weren't being you weren't disobeying you were being good you're doing and it's like that's heartwarming to me because I'm seeing I'm seeing a family come together there was an accident that was not from poor life choices or a sequence of poor life choices. It's just an accident stuff happens and you know we picked the kid up put him in an ambulance because they don't have any other way to get to the hospital which sucked because they were going to get a huge ambulance bill yeah but the kid needed a couple of stitches. Would have been nice to be able to send him off to a to a clinic where they could just you know stitch them up real quick. Yeah numb it up and stitch them up or even glue it you know whatever. But um yeah that was that had a happy ending.

SPEAKER_03: 40:11

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 40:11

Right? And and so that was one of the ones I hung on to for a real long time when you go through some of the other cruddy stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 40:19

For sure.

SPEAKER_00: 40:20

Also down there there was uh kind of a funny story uh in that same neighborhood so we go to uh a CPR call and this happened to be in an elderly Asian home and language barrier. Oh the only reason I bring up the ethnicity is because there was a language barrier. We know what to do you know all right we're checking no pulses okay boom we're beginning CPR we're hooking up the life pack we're doing our protocols for compressions and all that kind of stuff getting ready to hit it with life pack life pack says hey shock them because the life packs life pack's actually a brand but the the AED um they have a code in them a sequence the the algorithm is built hey if it's if they sense this rhythm shock or if they don't they have a a listing of rhythms that are shockable and then they have a listing of rhythms or lack of rhythms that are not shockable.

SPEAKER_01: 41:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 41:18

And if it's in that rhythm if it's in that rhythms off of the heart?

SPEAKER_01: 41:21

Correct. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 41:23

Now this the AEDs that we were issued didn't have the blippies on them. The paramedics carried those. Just to be real crystal clear I was never a paramedic I was an EMT. And so medics are on their way in but they're coming from a long way away. The closest one was already on another call. All right fine no big deal that happens really good CPR will keep will keep a body alive for a long time and one of the things that I'm very very proud of is as part of Seattle Fire Medic One, they are the world's leaders by head and shoulders in ALS pre-hospital emergency cardiac care.

SPEAKER_01: 42:02

Why what what why an at Dr.

SPEAKER_00: 42:06

Cobb and Dr. Kopus those two individuals that started it they both passed um but though that they were absolutely relentless in their pursuit of can we do it better? There was never any oh status quo hey we're doing pretty good it was no what can we do better? And they were constantly doing studies and how did that trickle down to you guys we got great training okay we got fantastic training and our medics are co-located with us in certain fire stations. So when I got to a different fire station that had medics in it we'd come back from a call and we're looking at the medics and what happened oh that was this this this oh okay so we had this informal continuing education that went on our entire careers which was great.

SPEAKER_01: 42:52

So that's the standard across states? Nope okay no well so you're talking about CPR I mean these guys are obviously you're learning from the two doctors that have passed right I mean well they they started the program yeah what are they trickling down that's so significant that you guys are keeping people alive or at least keeping the the body moving you know well the the the CPR like for one of the things that that we learned and and we were way ahead of like the American Heart Association.

SPEAKER_00: 43:15

So like if you go take a CPR class most likely it's going to be sponsored by the American Heart Association. Their protocols for what to do for CPR were about 10 years behind what we were doing. Interesting. After we would hey we're getting better saves better results with this technique we're moving to this and about 10 years later American Heart Association it's approximately 10 years. And I'm not trying to throw rocks at American Heart Association they've got a bigger ship they've got to turn absolutely and and so they're they're they're I just want to be careful I'm not that I'm not coming across like I'm trying to poo poo them. They're doing good work we were at a we were in a spot where because we were in the thick of it you know they could say hey well how important are are are the breaths what's more important the breaths or the compressions and what one of the things that found if you've if you've heard in the last few years they've moved to a hands only CPR as long as your airway isn't like this straight you get enough passive in and out now is it better if somebody can can use a bag valve mask properly in an ambu bag and actually push pure oxygen in at an appropriate time? Yes it's better. But if you stop compressions for even just a couple of seconds the residual blood pressure drops and it takes you 30 compressions to build that back up. So what they were doing is you're building the pressure up and then stopping so somebody could breathe. And then you're building the pressure up and then stopping so everybody so somebody could breathe. That makes sense and then they figured that out and they go this is no no don't stop whatever you do do not stop the compressions and uh that I think that was one of the things that kind of led to the development of what we nicknamed the geezer squeezer the um what is I don't even remember the what the real name of it is but it's this contraption that you'd you'd lift the patient's torso up slide this board under real quick and then you could it looked like a giant wishbone. I've seen the strap oops sorry and it strapped to there it connected and then you'd you take the plunger and you the way you'd turn it on it would give you the light that hey it's on take the plunger down to the chest and then you and that that oriented that that gave it its its orientation in space because we all have a different chest depth right so a little old lady versus you know you know somebody like you or me with a with a bigger chest okay boom that's that's the top hit and it and it just how nice was that we quit using them. Why they took them off didn't work uh we've I think they I think that was above my pay grade okay um but we were piloting them while they were doing their development uh our uh our oldest son is a cop locally and he says that he's seen them in use out here by some of the some of the rural areas so so it's it looks like it's a device that's got value and need some tweaking maybe well maybe they tweaked it but maybe our our department decided they didn't want to spend the money on it.

SPEAKER_01: 46:22

I see it used on a lot on like fentanyl overdoses the the paramedics are just like slap them on and I like I watched a video not too long the guy's sitting here like writing and the machine's like this body's on the ground like flopping around I was like holy shit like that is that is okay so let me ask you let me ask you this age old question. Okay. I feel like it's probably one of the most controversial questions in the medical world. Okay. Do you break the sternum or not there when you're giving CPR?

SPEAKER_00: 46:50

If you don't break the sternum this you cannot do effective CPR.

SPEAKER_01: 46:53

See I hear I've heard s different my whole entire life.

SPEAKER_00: 46:57

They're wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 46:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 46:58

You can't because the the the the chest we're we're Christians we believe in in intelligent design if you believe in evolution and we all came from an amoeba fine either way the argument's the same the chest cat the the the rib cage is a protective cage around the sensitive organs your heart and your lungs well if you you have to defeat that protection in order to squish the heart and you're squishing the heart when you're doing this how bad is a crunch for the first couple times? Oh it's it's snap crackle pop. Really?

SPEAKER_01: 47:43

Oh yeah it's is it the whole time I've given CPR but not correctly okay I mean if I'm being honest because when you're doing CPR correctly it's violent. Yes it is you are trying to touch their spine through their ribs.

SPEAKER_00: 48:04

It is beautifully violent. You're not you're not trying to touch you I don't know if you're I'm guessing you're exaggerating.

SPEAKER_01: 48:12

Yeah yeah yeah that's what it looks like like that's how hard you're not just like you see in the movies you're like one like the whole body is moving when it's done right like it looks like I'm just saying it looks like you're trying to touch this I know you physically can't but someone probably could but it looks like you know and and if you find that you know we go to nursing home and and you're doing CPR on a you know 99 year old lady that's 85 pounds you know your the first couple of compressions you're gonna you're gonna feel it's gonna go crunch crunch and if you don't you haven't broken that sternum so you're not giving effective compressions.

SPEAKER_00: 48:51

Now here's another thing that you might find is interesting if you ever see another person sticking their hands down somebody's pants during CPR that's that's how you verify if you're doing effective compressions. Why you're you're going for the femoral pulses oh okay okay so a rule of thumb this is not every but the good rule of thumb that we were taught about if your systolic blood pressure the the upper number okay if you can get a radial pulse you can get a femoral no you're well yeah but you're if you can get a radial good bet that your systolic is 90 or better. If you get brachial 80 if you can get femorals 70 if you can get carotid 60 give or take. Now I've come across petite Asian females where they're resting blood pressure just sitting there is 90 over 60. And you're just going, if I'm 90 over 60 I'm almost dead right and I don't have high blood pressure but but okay. So but the thing is is that with the CPR you can't get here because you're bouncing around too much you can't get here because you're bouncing around too much that you can get so you're supposed to use gloves because we're supposed to be gloved up anyway but loosen the belt get your hands down and go into the inguinal crease and you can feel it. Now when you're laying in bed just laying in in bed if you're fit you can look down oftentimes you can see the pulse yeah your pulse there that's what we're feeling for. Now we're not feeling for the area we're trying to find the the arteries the femorals to be able to and you'll say hey we've got good pulses with compression that means that whoever's doing the squeezing you're doing a good job. Okay. You're doing an effective job you are circulating blood.

SPEAKER_01: 50:53

That'd be such a gnarly feeling crushing some old lady's ribs like oh yeah well and you have okay yeah bring it have you ever and be like would you unlike especially an old woman or an old person an elderly person you know they're not gonna recover especially when they're in their 80s and 90s chances are pretty low but but you'd be surprised I mean knowing obviously you have to do CPR because it's your job to get there and you're gonna save this life. Right. When you that initial crunch I mean is it ever like do you ever get used to it or is it every time you're like oh God I think I got I think I got used to it.

SPEAKER_00: 51:29

It didn't bother me so much. I was really easy for me it was easy to make that step that this is life and death this is life and death yeah you know and and if we're gonna have any chance at saving the life we got to do this.

SPEAKER_01: 51:42

For sure uh if if somebody had a DNR do not resuscitate there's four okay no measures is that is that interesting um I mean especially if you show up and there's still some life or they're on their way out and you know they're uh do not resuscitate I mean do you just sit there and watch or do you have to like like do you feel obligated to help?

SPEAKER_00: 52:08

Well if they have a DNR that's properly filled out and you don't have family that's arguing that's the big one arguing to start resuscitating them? We've been we've been there we we've been on on on calls where we've got where we've got a valid DNR okay and and the DNR is something that's signed by a physician. For it to be valid it's signed by a doctor. Okay. So this is they've been evaluated that they're in um they can their mental capacity is such that they can understand what they're agreeing to. And look I'm healthy but I'm 95. I don't want to be a vegetable if my heart stops just let me go meet Jesus. Okay great. I'm for it yeah I'm battling cancer. Um I'm don't you know I'm tired of this chemo stuff and feeling like crap I just give me the palliative care stuff and let me enjoy the time that I have with my family. For sure okay there's a number of different reasons but but for a DNR to be valid at least in Washington I don't I honestly don't know what the rules are here in Idaho but in Washington they had state laws that were pretty clear about this and and hey if the DNR is valid we obey that and I can't tell you how many times okay we got this DNR we got a couple of adult children of the person of the other of the patient who's dying or has no pulse saying yeah this is good and then the other one comes rushing in the door they want to live I can't bear it without them and you're just going oh shit so what do you do in this scenario? Somebody gets to talk to the one that is reacting and try to say we have a legal document that says that we can't do this.

SPEAKER_01: 54:03

Morally how does that how does that suit you being a Christian man knowing that you got family members screaming to save their mom or dad and you're like hey we have uh do not resuscitate and then I mean as just a as a human in morals I mean is is there is it hard to fight that or or is that just your job and you have to accept that I'm I'm at peace with that the the the faith thing is is like good gosh if especially if there appears to be evidence that that they're a person of faith it's like go that's you're going to a better place.

SPEAKER_00: 54:36

Get out of this yeah okay yeah I'll with you on that so that's how I look at my brother man he ain't here anymore like dude right you know and so you know I see some of these people that are uh some of them that are very very dear to us that are like oh no I want I want to be saved at at all costs and it's like you're going to heaven it's a okay you got it you you got it well but but at the same time there's a part of me um I love my family I love my wife I want to be a good example I I fail at this frequently but I want to be a good example of of a follower of Christ um but when God calls me home yes sir uh that's that's now do I do I disagree with well if if I end up with cancer do I do I fight it? Do I go oh no that's just God saying saying I'm gonna go it's it's no I'm not saying that I but but I'm at peace when he calls me. The thing is when God calls me no efforts by man is gonna save me. I'm done I just want to live my life in a manner that that what I've done here outlives it. Yeah and add value while I'm here to the best of my ability and serve others. I'm trying every day I'm trying yeah right you know we all are who isn't you know we might think of a few yeah with you with you on that one so but yeah so that's that's uh that's kind of that did that kind of oh you know what we started on that story about that that older Asian gentleman so he has so so he has this this this heart attack and we're we're doing everything by the book and things are going really smoothly I know my job everybody's there is doing their job the medics are coming in and it's like okay everybody's ready for okay all for shock ready for shock clear and I look around stop what his wife clearly didn't speak a word of English like holding or something yes she had reached through us and was still holding like like his finger and oh my god what an amazingly sweet gesture uh yes zero judgment at all but we almost killed her shocked the living wadden out of her potentially I don't know if if where the electricity if if how it goes I don't know if she would have felt a shock but there's a reason they have everybody not touch the patient because there's that potential. Have you ever seen anybody get shocked off of shocking somebody I have not observed that uh everyone that I'm aware of people were clear when when a shock was rendered but then I'm starting to to try to get her off and and the gymnastics that were done because she just didn't want to let go of his hand. Poor old man and all I was trying to do is just just for a second you know just for a second.

SPEAKER_01: 57:52

It was it it's funny now um yeah not at the time probably not at the time you go from one body to two yeah yeah and if I recall correctly medics got there by the time they were wheeling him out he was talking really yeah shocks worked the meds that shit like that fascinates me that we can just zap the human body with god I mean how many volts are you guys shoving through somebody's chest when you're shocking. Well it's a lot of volts but it's not very many amps. It's you said it's a lot of volts not a lot of amps?

SPEAKER_00: 58:29

Okay so I mean I think I think the volts are kind of I think. Either way you're feeling it Google Ficar will correct me on that one. I I honestly don't that was not part of the things we had to worry about. Yeah you were EMT not paramedic that's part of it well yeah well they they would go in joules. Okay. Which are I gotta dust off the physics joules are a unit of energy but I don't re I don't know how many joules compares to how many volts. Okay I don't I don't know I don't remember what that relationship is. I'm sure an expert out there watching right now sitting in I want to say don't quote me on this I think the first shock was like 360 joules and then it went up to like 500 I th on the old on the old life packs I think how many what's the most you've ever had to let somebody ride the lightning on shock at them is there a standard like two or three or you if you get a pulse and then it fades out are you just winding it back up and let them ride it? The medics have the ability to override um what the machine will do.

SPEAKER_01: 59:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 59:27

When the medics would arrive the patches that we had we would unplug them from a machine and they had a a patch cord that would then plug the patches in but then we would add additional sensors on the b uh on the patient in different places. And so they would they have the ability to do a full EKGM 12 lead on their monster life path and then the patches that we put in place are then plugged in and it just uses those patches to deliver the shocks. So they've got the little they're they're about the size of a silver dollar the little stickers that they we would put in different places.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:00

Rip off all your hair when you try to take them off?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:01

Yeah, those. Yeah. God awful. And um try taking one of them life back batches off. Oh yeah. That's like take that's like peeling off a chest seal. Not as bad as peeling off a chest seal.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:11

So oh, like a sunken chest wound? Chest seal?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:14

Yeah. Like or yeah, like a like a yeah, chest seal for like a bullet or a chest wound or a stab wound.

unknown: 1:00:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:18

Those are pretty bad?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:19

Oh god. Because they're designed to stick through blood. Oh yeah. So so here. I'm sure though, that's the lease of your worries. Well, at that juncture, yes. But but you know, it's it's funny. I I I'm kind of shocked that that with your with your prior career that you didn't that you you didn't have an exposure to this. No.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:38

We had Well see, we're you don't you don't if we were putting them on, we're never dealing with it. You're you're out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:43

We're taking them off. Yeah, okay, right, right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:45

Like we never do like field trauma shit, you're but I'm just bleeding, start the breathing, out of here.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:50

Right. But at the same time, when you have lots and lots of blood, like you might get with a wound like that. Yeah, blood is really, really slippery until it's not. And it seems to like go from super slippery, like you just got a dumped of KY jelly just all over everything, and then all of a sudden it goes to sticky. Um, but it's gotta stick through that slickness. So yeah, those things are we've um one of the things I used to do is was some work with a uh civilian handgun defense class, and we would um all right. We'd one of the funniest things is going to the store and buying boxes of personal lube. Okay. Because we'd get to the point in the class where it's like, okay, everybody hold out your hand. Yeah. Great. Squish, squish, squish, squish, squish. Now manipulate your firearm. This is gonna mimic like you've just got blood all over your hands from.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:49

Yeah, we've done I've done that with Don Gish soap and other things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:52

Right, right. So we've done that, and then uh, but then we've also done, okay, here's a chest seal. You know, you're playing, I'm the victim, put it on me, and it comes off, and yeah, it's not fun.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:07

It's not fun. Oh, yeah. So, but those are those are some of the higher level stop the bleed kind of kind of classes and that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:14

But you know, um Sung and Jess Wounds are fascinating to me. How you can relieve pressure and what you can do. It's the the human body, man, like is is incredible at wanting to live and heal itself immediately, and then you know the right procedures and things like that. And I'm I mean, I'm you've seen you had a whole career full of dealing with that shit. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting. The body is and then like especially your guys' field of just you're not just dealing with people, you're dealing with all the trauma of the shit. So I mean, God, I can only imagine the tourniquets and the the patch, I mean, sunken chest wounds, collapsed lungs. I mean, everything that you guys are trying to assess immediately before an ambulance gets there to try to take somebody because everybody thinks like firefighters are just fighting fires. No, you're dealing with probably everything.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:03

So 80% of the calls, give or take, 80% of the calls that we would go on were medical in nature. Now that doesn't mean that we were dealing with a gunshot victim or a or you know, a fall or something. That was everything. That was the little old lady with chest pain, that was the dude that got into a into a knife fight at the at the bar. That was, you know, the 700-pound person that that can't breathe.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:29

So across the board. So 20% of the calls are what we call, they call them in our department, they would put them under the fire category. But if but in the fire category, you would get your extrications, your rescues, you would get fires, you would get going to a carbon monoxide alarm that has a low battery, which was the bane of our existence. Um change the battery, then call us back. Okay. Okay. Um so so that was everything else. Was a natural gas leak was considered a fire call.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:06

So, so really a very, very small percentage of the calls that we wanted was actually a fire. And then of the fires, you had car fires, you had structure fires. House fires, commercial building fires, lumber yard fires, those get big.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:21

Real quick.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:22

Real fast.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:23

So, as a firefighter, what's the most dangerous thing that you guys have to deal with?

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:29

It is not glamour. So are you ready for this? Car wreck on the side of a highway.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:34

Well, getting hit by other cars? Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:36

Statistically, I'm pretty sure that is I think that's still the number one.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:42

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:43

The kinetic energy of a vehicle going. I mean, we when we go to you drive through a school zone, it says 20 miles an hour. So, so I did this, I did this exercise for for the church that we attend. Um, because they very big, very busy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:01

What church do you guys go to?

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:02

Uh Rock Harbor.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:03

Okay, same.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:03

Okay. Yeah. She's a youth leader there now.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:05

Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:06

Um, so when we first started going there, they had volunteers out directing traffic and they weren't paying attention. And nothing against Rock Harbor. We love the church. Uh, but I actually did some math. I dusted off the physics and I said, here, you got a Honda Civic with one driver. This is what it weighs, going five miles an hour. It has 1,500 times the amount of energy as one nine millimeter bullet. I believe yeah. That's the math. Yeah. 1,500 now, it's well, is it a 147 grain moving this fast, or is it 115 grain moving that fast? Uh look, uh standard range ammo. Yep. We're looking at 50. Even if it had five times, that's all that's enough to take a Honda Civic moving at five miles an hour very seriously. And people are going more than five in the parking lot. For sure. And so um I submitted it respectfully, and I don't know if it had anything to do with it, but about a month later they had started having a professional service doing traffic control.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:11

Um, so um yeah, I mean it's Cars are scary. You don't under people don't understand the kinetic energy that and kinetic energy is the energy that can actually that that it any object has when it's in motion. Yes. So kinetic energy of a vehicle is absolutely staggering. You don't understand it. And so five miles, you people slowing down to 20 and getting mad, this is too dang slow in a school zone. Fuck you. You never seen somebody get bounced off of a car doing five.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:42

Especially a kid. Yeah. Well, frankly, kids got more rubber bones. They're more likely to be able to survive it than the crossing guard. But still.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:54

That's why it's so irresponsible for me, these people that like blow by the school buses with their when the signs come out. It's like, bro. That's like the one thing. Like, that's where I'm like, when cops are hunting those people down, I'm like, okay, 100% support that all day long. Because people don't realize, I mean, just like you're saying, they have that one um, it's on a slide where you they have the car seats and you buckle in and then it just they pull a pin and it just slides. And I guess like when it slams. Have you seen this? No, I haven't. They take it to schools and stuff, and it shows the kinetic energy of slamming into something in a car. So they'll put like two kids in it, like students in it, and they buckle them in like a seatbelt, and then they pull the pin. It only slides like five or six feet, but it's on like a track and it just goes boom, and just the force, you could see these kids how they're like whipping forward, and like they're all like, oh God.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:48

And that's just yeah, that's five feet. Yeah. Yeah. At 32 meters per second squared.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:53

So when you guys were on a call on the freeways. When you guys were on a call on the highway uh the whole entire time, I mean, are you just like waiting?

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:01

Well, one of the one of the things that we started doing is the LAR limited access roadway protocols that got implemented nationally or recommended nationally. I've noticed that when there's wrecks here in Idaho, they don't do it. Um I I grab another lane. A whole nother lane. Whatever we need.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:19

Like park your truck so they're they're going two lanes past you almost.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:23

Yeah. That makes sense. So whatever we need, whatever we need to operate, plus one more. And I know everybody in that traffic jam is screaming bloody murder. Sorry. I want my guys. They're no longer my guys. But when I was the driver of that vehicle, they were my guys.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:41

For sure.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:41

And I want my guys, I don't want to have to go to one of their wives and say, I'm sorry, ma'am. You know. Car plowed through everybody did it. Yeah, uh, because I wasn't doing my job. Or I did my job wrong, or I made a mistake. Yeah. I don't want that. No, that's not a that's not a you'd rather piss a lot of people off. I'd rather piss a lot of people off. Which is right. That makes sense to me. And you know, it unfre even doing that strangely frequently we'd have somebody plow into the fire truck. And you're just going, what are you thinking? It's insane. It is. And you're going, if that truck wasn't there, that would have plowed into us.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:20

That's why construction workers, cops, firefighters on the side of the road, like it's that's that's I would just the other day we were going, there's a cop on the side of the road, and he's out of his car. And you know how you just it shouldn't even be a law, you should just naturally get over when there's people on the shoulder. This car, as I get over, goes blowing by me, right? Gets into the slowly, and that cop's right on the shoulder, and I swear to god, it just barely missed them. Right. And I'm just like, what the right, you know, so it's just people live in their own world and they don't see this giant fire truck with lights, they don't see the cones, the flares, the police cars a mile back trying to get people over. They're just in their own world and they're just blowing down the highway, like pissed off at the world or whatever's going on.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:05

Yeah, it's it's it's pretty crazy. And and now I will say this one of things I've observed uh here in Idaho is I think that the drivers do a better job of for the most part getting over that one lane. Yeah. Where I came from. No. Nope.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:23

That's a mindset, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:25

Yeah, and I'm I'm I like it. I I like it. And and you know, I I've been driving in, you know, driving down the freeway, and and all of a sudden this semi almost cuts me off. I mean, just like, oh shit, I I gotta dynamite the brakes to keep from getting hit. And I'm like, and then I realize, oh, there's a cop. Oh yeah, good, sorry. Oh, yeah, but I couldn't see because of the semi, I couldn't see that that's why he was moving over. Right. And that's that's you know, if you've ever been on the side of a standing in one place and felt a big truck like that go by you, it rocks you. I mean it, and not only that, it pushes you, but then when it goes past, it can suck you back. Yeah, because the air that it's pushing around it, it's that's the aerodynamics.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:11

I um completely off topic with the with the the draft and the pull of a semi. I was uh on my motorcycle once and I was going through this course and we had these maps, and they were not like classified maps, but they were maps of shit that shouldn't be out. Like you just don't want them floating around the public, right? But they weren't like seeker maps or anything, it was just training areas and things like that. And I'm on my motorcycle and I felt something weird, and I like look behind all my shits coming out of my backpack, could come unzipped on the highway. Right. So I pulled my bike over and I go running back because I'm in this course, and like, how do I explain to my freaking staff? They're like, I lost all of our maps, you know. Long story short, but this this big rig went by and it was right on the white line, and it was so close, it actually sucked my bike over. Like the wind pushed my my street bike. I was so mad. I looked back down the highway, my bike's laying on its side, and I'm like, I'm in the fucking freeway trying to like leapfrog, trying to get maps and shit. I look, my bike's laying on its side. I was like, yeah, but it was all from an AT wheeler going by, and I was so pissed off. Yeah, I feel you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:14

Well, please don't try this at home, but um, or when you're driving, but you can actually draft assembly. Oh, for sure. Some people don't know that for sure. Because of and and if you get close enough, just the wind coming back will actually keep your car propelled forward. You can take your foot all the way off the gas. Sucks you in the city. If you've got the right, if you're in the right spot and the back of your car is shaped the right way, you can do that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:38

Yeah. So here's uh here's another random. I get it every time I talk to firefighters and put out polls. Have you ever rescued a cat out of a tree? Yes. Have you? Have you?

unknown: 1:12:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:52

How embarrassing is that? Or is it just like come with the nature of the job?

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:57

So, okay, there is a story. It was funny. We were talking we were driving over here. Uh my wife said, Oh, you're not gonna tell that one. And no, no, I think she said I should, and I said, No, I'm not gonna tell that one, but you asked, so I'm gonna tell you. Um I was a rookie, and we got a phone call on the back line at the fire station. The the what we used to call the third rail, which was the personal phone. It wasn't the business phone.

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:24

And one of the ladies that worked in the administration at our fire department, nice lady, was like lived in a her neighborhood was in our district. Okay. And she said, Um, I hate to bug you, but my kitten's up in a tree. It's like, all right, we'll go. And our lieutenant was getting prepared to tell her that you've never seen a cat skeleton in a tree.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:52

That's what I was saying. You've never seen a dead cat in a tree.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:54

Right. Well, the thing was, this was a kitten. Okay. And there was a bunch of crows around it that were trying to get to the kitten. Okay. Um, and my lieutenant at the time, um, good dude, but he was a new lieutenant and he was very nervous about being in charge. And I said, Loot, it's a tree. I've climbed thousands of trees. I grew up climbing trees. Let me just go get this thing. It's not a big deal. Well, I don't know. Now I'm on probation, so I'm trying to be respectful, but finally. All right, I want you to wear your helmet, and I want you to wear your bunking coat. Going, so my neck breaks if I fall? The helmets we we ha that's a different topic. Um anyway. So I did, and I'm climbing up. And it was nice to because it kept sapping stuff off of me, but I get up there, and if you ever chase a cat, or if you ever go up a tree after a cat, they keep going high. This one didn't. It was coming, it was trying to get to me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:00

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:01

So it made me see. Yeah, yeah. It was like uh so as I was coming up, it started making its way, you know. I reached out, I grabbed it, and shoved it inside my coat, and then climbed back down. So, yes, I I actually have gotten a cat out of a tree.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:15

So, yeah, I've asked their other firefighters that they're either so against it or they're like, yep, I've had to do it. Yep. What's a huge misconception that the public just doesn't understand about firefighters?

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:29

Um big one is that we actually pay for our own food. The when you know, so if you see firefighters that are shopping out for we we make and cook our own food and we pay for it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:44

What do you mean you pay for who? Individuals are all pulling together?

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:48

Yeah. We have we have a term call. Yeah, we yeah, we have a term we call clutch. You guys Yeah. So if you see firefighters that are out shopping at the grocery store and they're pushing their cart around, they're paying for that food.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:58

You don't have like an allowance or like a nope.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:02

So if you see so if you see the dudes, I've had people where I'm pushing the cart down the thing and come up to the cart, start pulling stuff out of my cart, going, what am I buying you for dinner tonight? It's like, you're not paying for any of this, sir. We pay for our own food. What? Yeah, we pay for our own food.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:21

You guys don't have a food nope per diem, nothing?

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:26

Nothing. Nothing. Let me tell you this. Oh, I'm so glad I asked that question. I had no idea. We pay for our own plates and our dishes and our pots and our pans and our silverware. Mm-hmm. That's mind-blowing. They will provide the building and the cabinetry. It is our financial obligation to put the plates in it, to put now we have house dues, which is like a monthly tax that we all pay, you know, 10 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever, and then that covers um toiletries and all that stuff. Nope, not even toiletries. That covers like coffee. Um, coffee is a big thing in the firehouse. I don't drink coffee.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:03

Yeah, I'm not a coffee drinker.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:05

I just don't like it. I love how it smells.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:06

I really've giving you the shirt then, because that's a C-State shirt.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:09

So okay. I I absolutely love how it smells. But my wife is a coffee everything. Same. Um at tw I'm gonna brag on my wife for a minute. When she was 21 years old, she was a store manager of a Starbucks in a market that they were pushing hard to open down in Florida.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:27

What 21-year-old do you know runs an entire Starbucks store? She was she was a rock star. Absolutely. She still is, but she was a rock star for them. Um good catch there. Yeah. I I uh I outkicked my coverage on that. So, and um so but yeah, that's that's how we pay for our own food. If we have uh, you know, if if guys want cable TV, we pay for cable TV.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:55

I can maybe see that, but that blows my mind. We pay for it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:01

We pay for the, you know, the the the the the pooled funds will bait will there's a list, uh, at least at our department, the pool, there'd be a list and said these are the items, and once a year they'd vote on them. Yeah, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, salad dressings, salt, pepper, garlic, you know, the the hey, what what seasoning and spices do we want on the shelf? And then uh if there was something unique, like if somebody was making something, they're not gonna put saffron on that, but if someone was gonna make a saffron dish, all right, tonight's meal, we gotta go buy a little bit of saffron so we can put it in tonight's meal. Okay, right, that sort of a thing. And so each each group, uh, we would call them platoons. So crew A, B, C, and D shift. We had four four platoons. And so we had our own group pooled money, and then we would, you know, dinners tonight is seven bucks a person. And usually what we would do is we'd round up if if the actual math came out to it's six dollars and fifty-five cents, we're gonna round up to seven bucks. And then that would build up over the course of the year, and then when we had a holiday meal, we had a little extra money so we could go buy, you know, uh a prime rib, or or you know, if it was gonna be if we were gonna be working Christmas, if the crew was gonna be working Christmas or something like that. And then the last couple years.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:31

This is mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:32

The last couple of years, um, man, did I have a world-class captain. Um last couple years of him being captain, um, he would encourage the other station captains, like, hey, as cap as station captains, um, to the crew that's working Christmas, you know, they'd each kick in my here, this is for your your Christmas meal, which was really cool.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:57

So So you're what I'm getting from this is if you're a person or and you respect the firefighting community in your area, that it would be. Are you guys accepting to like if somebody wanted to cook you guys like a Thanksgiving meal and come by the firehouse, or is that different on are you guys able to accept stuff like that?

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:15

It's risky because the hard part is we don't know if somebody did homemade stuff unless we really knew them.

SPEAKER_03: 1:20:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:22

We coming from Washington in the neighborhood that we are in, was somebody gonna stick pot in it? And now that now your fire department it and some asshole would think that that's a funny, regardless of your feelings on pot. Some asshole would think that that's funny, and now you've got a crew that's if if you if you put pot in the brownies or or in in the chocolate cake that you brought them, and now you've got a crew that's high, uh huh. That's terrible. And you're probably gonna get called out on a holiday.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:49

Uh are holidays okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:51

So what's it was it was kind of believe it or not, Christmas Day was usually kind of quiet.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:55

What's the busiest day of the year for you guys? Fourth of July. Let's talk about Fourth of July. Okay. One of my favorite things on the internet is watching people light mortars and lose hands. How often is that happening with you guys?

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:11

In in Seattle for the my entire career, fireworks had been illegal in Seattle. Okay. And in a town or two bordering, because my district actually bordered the next town to the north.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:29

So in in that that town was called Shoreline. In Seattle and in Shoreline, fireworks were illegal. So we didn't have a whole lot. People had to go a longer ways. And the people that typically were that dumb are the people that take the buses. They're not people that are getting in their own cars and driving two hours on a ferry ride to the Indian reservation where you can buy that stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:50

Interesting. So what made it so busy?

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:54

Um, people partying. Okay. And just up all night. And the fireworks that they could get, they'd light shit on the uh the beauty bark would catch on fire, they'd light bushes on fire, they'd light grasses on fire. Even though Washington is it rains a lot over there, the problem is that the plants that grow, they really need the water. And when the summers there are really, really pretty. It actually doesn't rain much in the summertime. And so what happen what you'd find is that the the grasses and the shrubs are used to getting water the other throughout the they they shrivel up and dry up really fast. It's just of the species and so forth. So we get bark fires and we'd get all kinds of, you know, it's it's a it's also a big party holiday. So summertime, it's light, really late, you know, so people are just partying.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:44

I couldn't, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:45

I mean, honestly, if alcohol didn't exist, you probably wouldn't need a fire department.

SPEAKER_01: 1:22:53

That's probably the most legit statement I have ever heard.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:58

Are the majority of your calls just dealing with somebody that's just done something A scary amount of calls that I've been on are uh either caused or magnified by alcohol.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:09

What is the dumbest call you have ever been on that was alcohol-related incident or just in general? Dumbest call. One that you guys showed up and you're like, what the fuck is going on here? We actually had a fair amount of those.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:27

It's it's it's I tell you we had a fair amount of them, but but I nothing really stands out because it doesn't stand out as unusual, if that makes any sense. To you. Yeah, it doesn't stand it's like, okay, yeah. I mean, we've we've had people call the fire department because their garage door wasn't working. Um we've had people usually now here's the here's the thing that is pretty cool. In Seattle, the dispatchers for the fire department are firefighters, they're not civilian dispatchers. And that is something that they have fought for because it's always on the chopping block with city council. They want to get rid of it because they think they can pay civilians less money.

SPEAKER_03: 1:24:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:12

And maybe they can't, I don't know. But when you have people that have actually done the job, they're like, yeah, we're not we don't fix your garage door.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:26

Because a civilian would just be like, punch the button and your your station's getting called.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:30

Well, the call said this, so I sent it, I sent a unit. Really? They they don't fix that. Oh, I didn't know. What are you talking about? You don't know. We're a fire department. We're not the garage door company.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:42

I've had uh other guests on that were like paramedics and things and firefighters, and they say the worst but the most common call is smoke detectors.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:52

We went on a lot of those.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:53

Beeping smoke detectors. Yeah, we went on a lot of those.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:55

Only because they're smoke detector batteries out, and so they called the fire department for that. Yeah. And and our now, the thing is our department, they'd send us. So we would go, and part of the inventory on our on our all rigs, engines and trucks, were you're gonna carry a handful of nine volts and a handful of double A's because people are gonna call it. And because this is a life safety thing, we're actually gonna put new batteries in it for free. Okay. So we'd show up, put new batteries in it. Believe it or not, we actually carried a couple extra smoke detectors on the rig. So if we put it in there and it was still not functioning, or if somebody says, hey, I don't have one and I need one, fine, we'll send a unit out and they will install it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:25:35

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:36

Mm-hmm. I mean, that's good. Yeah. I mean, if that's what this is, you know, Ben, one of the things interesting is that it's good if that's what the community wants their tax dollars to be spent on. Uh, yeah. Okay. And I'm not saying it's good or it's bad. It's up for the community to decide what do they want their tax dollars to spend.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:00

Yeah, but at the end of the day, the tax dollars are already spent, though, right? I mean, if you're going to change batteries on that or not, it's not costing the city anything more.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:07

Well, it's not costing them labor because we're still on duty, yeah, but it's costing them money to for detectors and batteries. Okay. Now it's it's pennies, but it's still adds up. It still adds up.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:18

So speaking of going in people's homes, I have this really weird fascination with hoarders. Yes. And I love talking to paramedics, firefighters, because obviously you guys are in and out of homes every day. And I got exposed to it in high school. Sure. I did a ride-along for two weeks with the police department because I don't know what possessed me to even think about wanting to be a cop when I was that young. But I got to go in a home and it was a hoarder home. And I I never experienced it before. I just thought everybody lived like how we lived. You know, and I went into this hoarder home, and to this day I can still smell it. Yeah. What is it like going into hoarder homes? And what's the worst one you've had to deal with?

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:00

Um you'll find some hoarder homes that been into a lot of them. But we I find that that some hoarder homes are actually clean. Where's a lot, just a lot of well, you you you you'd have seven decades of newspapers stacked, but they're stacked neatly, and there's trails. But where the trails are, it's vacuumed, it's swept. But there's so there's clean hoarders. There's cleaners. There are. Rare, but there are. But then you'll find hoarders where there's species, human and animal, on the piles. And you're going, okay. So you decided just to take a shit there. Or you took it someplace else and you put it up there. Okay. Uh there's usually food scraps, uh plates of uh leftover food all over the place, flies. When you get that with either feces or food, you get flies. So even flies come maggots. Yeah. So you'll see that. Uh right.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:16

Have you ever had to cut a hole in a wall to get anybody out of their home?

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:19

Yeah, Edmund. 750 pounds.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:24

Walk me through that day.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:28

Edmund had a hard time breathing and because he was really, really big and wouldn't get out of couldn't get out of his house because he was too big to get out and cut a hole.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:39

So once you cut the hole, how how do you where was he? In the back of the house or the front of the house?

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:44

Kind of the front room area. It was a small house.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:47

So you cut the hole in the front of the house. How do you get him out of the hole in the house?

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:52

With a stretcher.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:53

750-pound dude on a stretcher? How many guys had to hold that?

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:59

Uh all of us. Everybody that was there? Get a hand in there.

SPEAKER_03: 1:29:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:05

I'll tell you one of the things that revolutionized our job picking up fat people. Is this thing called a mega mover? And this thing is a tarp. It's a it's a canvas or or nylon kind of tarp with webbed handles that are sewn back and forth. So it it goes underneath the whole thing. You can look it up. We're gonna put one a mega mover. You can look it up. Um and uh 1500-pound capacity. But what it gave you is it gave you because a lot of times when you go to pick up somebody, here's the thing you and I are big guys, we're we're reasonably fit, right? If I go to pick you up, you're gonna have muscle tone that kind of braces yourself. Even if I, you know, if I were to not even in like a martial arts kind of capacity, but just hey, stand there, I'm gonna come in and put up, I'm gonna put you like in a fireman's carry, and I'm gonna stand you up on my shoulders. Okay, no problem, right? But part of what makes that easy is that you have muscle tone that braces and holds everything together. When somebody's passed out or when they're in that bad of shape, they're putting in sticks, and that's really all it is. So getting the trying to move somebody that's that limp, it's almost impossible. It it shouldn't say almost impossible. It really magnifies it. It makes somebody like my wife's size a lot harder for somebody our size to move. Your wife is even a little bit smaller than mine, but you get what I'm saying? It's it just makes it harder. So these mega movers were awesome because you could kind of roll them, shove a whole bunch underneath there, roll them back a little bit past it, pull the thing out, pick it up, and now you're walking them out like they're in a burrito. It's great. Absolutely fantastic. I'll tell you where else it's really handy. If you get into an active shooter situation, you can they come folded in like in a cellophane. Okay. Rip the cellophane off, unfold them, do a trifold, and then roll them up tight. Put like one little, like a thick rubber band or or something that can you can break easy on it. And the cool thing is that you can come up to somebody and whack like that, it unrolls and just goes flop right open. If someone's been incapacitated, if they've been like shot or stabbed or whatever in in a lower extremity and it's hard to move, get them up onto that thing and two guys grab onto that and you can take off.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:18

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:19

It's a it's a cool tool.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:21

Something's so simple, too.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:22

It is. Yeah, I wish I'd invented that. I'd be on a beach in Bora Bora and splitting time and not doing this podcast, yeah. I'd be doing this podcast, but it'd be a little bit different. But yeah, that it is it is a absolutely amazing tool. Because one of the things that would happen when people have a heart attack or a major medical event, they don't always have it in some place where it's easy to work work them. Okay, yeah. So, so like, okay, we're in we're in your home, we're in the upstairs, and there's a stairwell that we had to come up. You've got some cool decorations around this this room, but if if we had to do a CPR or work on somebody like that in this room, we couldn't really do it right here. So we'd have to furniture gets pushed to the to the sides real quick. If there's rugs, you know, this is a because it's a bear rug, it's kind of a three-dimensional rug. But if it was just a just a plain flat rug, we just leave it there. But with what that is, that'd have to be picked up and moved out so we had room because you've got the patient and six to eight people. Everybody's got a job, everybody's got a role when when it's moving smoothly. So then how do we pack them up and get them down that stairwell out into you can't take a stretcher up that stairwell and not make the corner? That was one of the things that we had with with hoarder houses that was so was so hard was getting a stretcher through some of those trails. So how do we get them out? Well, that mega mover was a big help. Oh shit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:03

So as a firefighter, I really want to get one of I want to I want to get like a forensics or like a hazmat cleanup person to come on the podcast. I really want to talk to one. Yeah. But even as a firefighter doing like wellness checks, did you guys ever have to do those? Gosh, yes. Obviously, you know immediately if somebody's dead in a house. If they've been there for long enough. By the smell. By the smell, or if flies in the windows and whatever. I mean, I don't know how Seattle is, but I know like I've talked to some guys in Florida, and it's like within a day. I mean, their house is just what's that like coming in, doing a welfare check on like a decomped body?

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:44

Um We were our protocol was that the police had to secure the scene until the coroner came to do their investigation. No, we were there to verify that they were dead. Okay. And if it's decomped, decomposed or decomposing in the process of you don't have to get that close. Yeah, it's they're dead.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:06

So you okay, so you guys, that's pretty clear for you guys, and that's more forensics and costs.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:10

For us, but but you know, sometimes we had to make entry. You know, I can remember going to a Seattle Housing Authority building, which is a concrete building, cinder blocks, they're usually somewhere between nine and eleven stories tall. And it's uh assisted living. Um not not assisted as in there's nurses and that sort of stuff. It's it's housing assistance.

SPEAKER_03: 1:34:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:33

Okay. So it's typically lower income, well, always lower income. Um and we're riding the elevator up as the elevator's going up. It's a slow old elevator, so it's it, you know, second floor, forever. Taking forever. And, you know, we're going to like the the fifth or the sixth floor or the seventh or whatever what it's like two floors below. It's like, okay, they're dead. We can tell. And it just gets the smell gets stronger and stronger as you go up and go, how did people wait this long? We can smell it in the elevator shaft two floors below. How do you how do you not call sooner? And uh world. Yeah, walked in, you know, we got out of the elevator, okay. We we forced the door. And I'd never seen this before, I've never seen it since. Standing up. Dead. Standing up. What? Yes. How? I don't know. What position? Uh like standing up like over a stove. Like, like, like, like leaning against the kitchen counter. I was like, what? But was that creepy? Yeah, that part was creepy. That was creepy. So you guys make entry, and then you just look around and here's this cover of the bear, color of the bear, and this was an this was a Caucasian individual. So their skin had already because here's the thing. When when a when a body first dies, the blood pool, it starts to pool. And that happens reason we call it pooling or um um uh lividity. Yeah, and that's where the blood from your capillaries and stuff starts to gravity just slowly starts to ooze down. And that happens over the course of a couple hours. So pretty quick, you you can even if someone's a person of color, like a like black or Hispanic or it doesn't matter. You can visibly look and you can see it's almost like a line. Yes, yeah. Yeah, it's like it like a stratosphere line. And and um if they're laying on their side, I mean it's almost like down their correct half side of their body.

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:41

100%.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:42

Yeah. Yeah, depending on on, you know, the line is somewhere about one third of the way up if they're if they're perfectly level. Now, if they're if they're at an angle, then obviously it's gonna pull down and everything down below is gonna be up. But yeah, it's it's it starts to see that. Well, but then as it decomposes, it it starts to turn yucky colors.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:02

And they were just standing there locked.

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:04

Yeah. Somehow they were locked. Just boom. It's like, whoa, that's weird. But they're dead. You know, and so now that that's the fascinating part, the funny part of this story. There's no smoking in this building. We call for cops and corner. Yeah, they're dead. On a radio call it was CNC. And that was just our code for, you know, we have a confirmed dead person and we need the police for security, and then the coroner would send, corner's office would send somebody out as soon as possible. Well, as we we're waiting because we have to wait until the cops arrive for scene security. And what gets out of the elevator is a very young, very enthusiastic rookie cop that's very, very petite, and an old guy. And the old guy gets out, as soon as he steps out of the elevator, he pulls a cigar out of his mouth or out of his pocket and he lights up the cigar.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:06

Is he a cop or a tenant there?

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:08

No, he was he was a cop. He was a cop on duty in uniform. And the other one just just march, march, march, march, march, march, march, march. Like, I gotta see that, and goes barreling into the room and comes running out in pukes. Really? So funny. And the old guy, and the and the old guy just stands back there, goes, Yep, smoking the cigar so he doesn't have to smell it. Remember my first body. One of those guys. Yeah, one of those. So it was that was funny how that kind of unplayed or uh unfolded, but that was yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:38

Did you that was crummy? Did you ever come across where pets chewed on that would creep me out? What's that like? I hear I hear dogs will start eating people like almost immediately within like a day or two.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:54

I've actually heard that cats will eat first, will eat sooner. Yeah, yeah. But um, there was one where where um I wasn't on this, so I can't claim that I was, and I won't. Um the dog had actually eaten the whole head. The head? Yeah. Yeah. Down like the brain stem.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:17

Is it weird seeing like a face or hands or fingers chewed on and missing? Like, do you ever just like sit over something and be like, the fuck? Like, and then you're just like looking at a little fluffy poodle in the corner?

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:29

Not really. No? No. I because I wouldn't sit there and sit over it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:34

Oh, I would have to, I feel like. I would I would want to I'd want to see all of it. And just looking at this like cat like over there in the window licking itself the nose is eating off its owner.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:44

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I I didn't I didn't have that drive to want to do. It didn't it didn't like make me puke. Yeah. But it it was, you know, it didn't give me nightmares. It just like, yeah, I don't need to see that. I don't need to sit here and dwell on that. So I'm fascinated by it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:00

We had. It's just mind blowing, so I don't think most people even realize like if you do die that your pets are definitely going to eat you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:08

Yeah. Unless they're, yeah. Eventually they will. Because you're you're they're hungry. It's it's not they're not gonna eat you before they run out of their own food. It's not that that they're if they're eating, if the pet's gonna be eating human, it's not because you're not gonna find food still in the pet's dish. Yeah, yeah. That's its last resort. You you are its last resort, but they're gonna get there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:31

The shit you guys gotta deal with is insane. This is why people don't, I mean, nobody thinks about this stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:40

So I debated, I debated whether or not we I wasn't gonna talk about this one, but I might as well. I vote yes. Because we're here. Well, you know, you asked the question earlier what's some of the worst stuff we've seen. And it's and and I wasn't trying to be flippant. Inevitably you go to a house party and somebody finds out that you're a fireman and they go, Oh, what's the worst stuff you've ever seen? And those are the people you want to punch in the mouth because they're doing, they're they're looking for a rise. And what I found is that about the I'm kind of a simpleton, but I try to be, I try to conduct myself with dignity in class. About the classiest way I've been able to respond to that is I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to forget about that stuff. Absolutely. And usually when when that response comes back, they go, Oh, they realize what they just asked.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41:27

For sure. It's like asking somebody, have you ever killed somebody? It's the same question. I and I I don't mean any disrespect by it, but I I like asking that question just because, dude, you're most Americans have no idea what you guys are dealing with. So it kind of just opens up the light to like, holy next time they see a cop or a firefighter, they're like, oh fuck, dude, I heard that story about this guy talking one time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:47

So, okay. So we've had um, it was like two blocks from our fire station. Call comes in at like 4 30 in the morning. And the reason that matters is that, you know, we're it's not two in the afternoon. So, okay, everybody's up, we're down at the rig. Address is here, and it's it's um it's a shooting, assault with weapons, it comes in an assault with weapons, aw, um, aww. Um, and they changed the protocol to a to a different call sign. I don't remember if they did it with by that time or not, but it was right about that time. But anyway, it was it was we had an assault with weapons. And I'm looking at the the and our protocol, because we don't, we're not armed, is we're we're hanging back a couple of blocks until police get there and declare the scene is safe. Okay. Now, there was a constant um misunderstanding between what scene safe meant. In the cops world, scene safe meant an officer is on scene. To us, that means that there isn't a bad guy still doing bad guy stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 1:42:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43:01

You know, they're either incapacitated or arrested, detained. Well, and we weren't mad at them about that. That was that was an issue that needed to be handled at at the higher levels, right? The higher ups, right? Because their radios, we didn't go cross. They had you had to go all the way up, over, and then all the way back down for those messages to come through to us. So we go on this call, it's an assault with weapons, but it's like two blocks from our station. I look at our look at the boss, I go, boss, it's right there on stone. We're staying here. And so, truck, medic unit, or truck engine, and medic unit, we're all there. Doors are open, engines are running, just idling, just waiting. Everybody's like, all right, you know, get your gowns on, you know the disposable gowns and the whole nine yards. We don't know what the heck we're getting into. And it's like, okay. And I'll tell you, there's kind of a weird feeling in the air. I'm I'm not a big ESP guy, I'm not really into that kind of stuff, but I will tell you, it there was, it was like, it's weird. Just a weird feeling.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:06

And uh we get we get the word, okay, secure. Come rolling in. Now I'm the driver, and one of my responsibilities when I park, when I stop the rig, is I need to put my wheel blocks down. Now that means I get out of the rig, go to the where the wheel blocks are, pull them off the rig, chalk the wheels. Then I grab my personal protective equipment, my rubber gloves, my glasses, my EMS. We are all issued a personal EMS uh bag. It's like a fanny pack. And we're expected to carry that in with us, to carry that with us whenever we go on a on a aid call. Some crews do, some officers are big on it, some aren't. I found that I wanted a little bit more than what the issued pack would carry, so I bought a bigger bag that was kind of a um 511 first came out with their shoulder, uh shoulder bags. It was a their small one, but but I want to say it was about you know that big of a cube. And I had a few extra things in it that I wanted to have that I'd learned over the history that wouldn't fit in my little fanny bag. And I like the fact that it would go over my shoulder better than around here. So I grabbed that and I'm so I'm the last guy of R4 coming in. Now, also in response order, when we had control when we're all leaving, the engine would go, then the medic unit would go, and then we would, we would follow, just as the truck, we would follow. And so I'm the third vehicle to park, and I'm the last guy. I'm walking up, and everybody in front of me know there was a number of police officers here. And so every time we're come around a hall, corner in a hall, there's two that way, that way, that way, that way. Okay. So we're just following this chain of cops all the way up. And are you familiar with MS-13? Oh yeah. Okay. So some MS-13 shit for brains had gone shining, like taking a butcher knife and hacked his way through the bathroom door. And you want me to say this in front of your daughter? Yeah. Okay. Oh well, okay. Hacked his way through the bathroom door. And then he cut this lady's head off. Set the head outside, right side up. And the tori the the the body, her body, the victim's body, was right about her waistline, was at about the threshold of the of the bathroom door. And then this idiot had gone in and taken a shower and come back out. And when the cops, by the time the cops had gotten there, I don't know why it took so long for somebody to call, because that was obviously took a while for that to happen. But he was obviously with the decapitation, that individual is is deceased. Yeah. And then when the cops came through, it was in an apartment, and you'd walk in when you came in the front door, you could see one bedroom this way and one bedroom this way. And the bathroom was like right here. And apparently he was the the bad guy was like standing on the bed, and when he made a motion towards the cops, the officer shot. And um, he was DRT. We had been called, obviously, we we hadn't been called for the decapitation because there's nothing you can do about that, but we had been called to verify is the bad guy dead or not. And he was he was DOA. Yep. And so everybody's like, yep, he's dead. All right, great, out. Now, as the guy who's responsible for all the equipment on the rig, I'm the guy that's walking around the scene at the end, making sure that all of our kits, because you now have two medics, an engine, and a truck company worth of everybody bringing everything. Suitcase, these, these giant pelican boxes and all kinds of shit is just everywhere. It's like, okay, everybody get all this stuff up. And you know, now you got the cops going, hey, don't step on that casing, don't step on this, it's all evidence, don't step on the all right, fine. So I'm not stepping on other, I'm just making sure I'm getting all my stuff out. Okay. My lieutenant is still in the room in the in the thing. The engines, they're all gone, the medics have gone out. And I'm still in the room in the apartment. And they go, well, what about the family? And I look at the lieutenant and we look at what family? Well, the family in the other bedroom. Are they alive? Oh yeah. Are they hurt? No.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49:15

This whole entire time?

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:17

Yeah. So um, we're guessing they didn't speak a word of English. Um at the time, my lieutenant spoke a little bit better English or a little bit better Spanish than I did. So he's trying to play Spanglish and charade to try to get this family. So, like, there's two kids, a husband and a wife. And we've got there's so much blood on the floor from the decapitated person that the whole room stinks like iron.

SPEAKER_03: 1:49:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:46

So you've you've been in an environment where you can smell that? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, very not a lot of people have. No, to you know immediately. You know it immediately, right. And now that's a smell, I'll never forget. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's one of those you'll never get out of you. And uh, so my boss goes into the bedroom and they close the door. Well, they had to close the door because the body's like in clear view of that. So they're trying to get in and out of that door without letting that family see what's going on here. Oh my gosh. And I'm like, great. So me and two cops are standing here stuck, looking at this decapitated head sitting on the ground that had been arranged right side up with this smell and the blood just continuing to just go, I'm going, great. So I had to wait for probably 20 minutes while they figured out what the heck they're gonna do. And once the other people had left, my other fire crew had left, the cops were like, no, nobody else is going back in. So it's just me and my old boss. Great. And you're stuck there? Yeah, I'm stuck there. Because I'm not gonna leave him on there by himself. And so the determination was made, we'll find some trash bags, we'll let we'll we'll put trash bags, put these people's belongings and clothes in a trash bag. But we also can't disturb evidence for the scene. So it's like, okay, what can we do? Then it's like, all right, can we grab something? I pull like a paper sheet or something out that I'm we're we're trying to put over, but again, not disturb evidence over what's going on. Blood's instantly soaking through it. Great. And so now we're trying to communicate to these kids, hey, we're gonna carry you out, close your eyes, don't look at this. You know, by the way, we're perfect strangers and we don't speak your language. So that's the shit. So, so grabbing these kids one at a time. I grabbed one, boss grabbed one, got them out, handed them off to somebody who was outside, still like, no, you can't leave. Well, if you leave, you can't go back in. Like, dude, what is this evidence? I get it, but that was one of those ones where I think the person was was taking that a little bit out of context. Yeah. Right. And so, but we got the family out. They went with an officer, uh, they they a police officer company then that did speak fluent Spanish, so that was great. So they were able to actually communicate what's a they got them to um shelter care, something along those lines. So um, but that was that was a real crummy situation to be just stuck in there with nothing to do to take your mind off the fact that you're standing over a decavitation. I'm standing over, yeah. That was this wasn't even an accidental and instant thing. This this individual had been absolutely traumatized and paranoid and clearly afraid for her life, justifiably so, and then ultimately lost it to a paranoid maniac. You know, not paranoid, but to a maniac. Yeah. Um and you know, that's part of the everyday. That's that's that's the that's the crummy part of the job.

SPEAKER_01: 1:53:15

What's your what's the best part of your being a firefighter?

SPEAKER_00: 1:53:23

Being being the person that gets called or gets sent when somebody's having the absolute worst moment of their entire life. And we and from the mo it doesn't always end it have a happy ending, but from the moment that we arrive, things start to get better. There's hope. There's hope, yeah. Yeah. Um I'll tell you a funny story. So we we go on this um heart attack call or cardiac chest pain call, and another another Asian community and uh uh family, and the Asian thing matters. It's it's part of what makes it so funny. For sure. Okay. And so we go through the process. It's it's the patriarchy of the family, okay. He's okay, he's he's stable in, you know, load up with the medics, loaded up into the medic unit, okay. He's uh he's on his way to even more better care. Awesome. We did our job. Yes, and then the daughter's there. It might have been granddaughter, I'm not sure, because she was pretty young, but uh I I'm gonna guess her in about probably mid-20s. Yeah. And it's like, okay, he's going, your dad or granddaughter, again, I forget the relationship. He's gonna be going to this hospital. Okay, do you need directions to that to that hospital? She looks at me, she says, Are you kidding? And I go, no. She says, I'm female, I'm Asian, and I'm crying. I've got no business behind a wheel. She knew. And I'm just going, and I'm going, um, okay, do you have a friend that we can call to drive you? She says, That's better. Yes. I thought that was to me, that was funny. And and she was the one that made the joke, so it's okay.

unknown: 1:55:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:27

But I thought it was pretty funny.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:28

Yeah. Valid. She she knows her roles. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:32

Recognize your limitations. Yeah, she knows her limits. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was pretty funny.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:37

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk Seattle. Okay. As a firefighter, because clearly we know how Seattle is and Portland and all these these wildly run cities, even in the California. How did you see Seattle change over the 20 years of being there? On the firefighting side of things.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:00

Sure. That's a that's a great question. And you know, it was kind of a slow decline, um, just as the city got bigger and and they were pushing more towards um population density, trying to draw policies and so forth that were, you know, political climate, uh countywide and so forth, were trying to like have higher population density and then have more services in there. And one of the things that's going to draw into you is you're going to have your mental health challenges. Okay. Right. And and but then what happened is the big shift was the permissive drug use. When they stopped fighting it? We stopped fighting it. When they stopped, when we started making it permissive.

SPEAKER_01: 1:56:45

And permissive as illegal or acceptable?

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:48

Well, they didn't even pass laws, they just didn't punish it. Okay. So, you know, I can remember, well, you know, one of the first instances, I'm sitting there and this this lady's like, she's a heroin user, and she says, Yeah, I'm having withdrawals. And the cop goes, You want me to go get you a clean needle? I'm looking. Do I need to slap you? She does not need another hit of heroin. You're facilitating giving her having more drugs. What's the benefit to that? I think the argument, and I'm not making sense. I can't make it make sense, but the I believe the argument that is that I have heard put out there is that, well, it's a clean needle, it's not a dirty needle, so it's gonna stem the the spread of HIV and hep C.

SPEAKER_03: 1:57:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:33

Um now on the surface, that sounds like a, you know, if A then B logical progression or logical argument. I just uh now I'm gonna I'm gonna share something here. When when it was first posed to legalize weed in in Washington for recreational use, I sat around a fire station with over 120 years of combined firefighting experience sitting around that table because I was torn at this. I was very much a goodie to cheese. I've never tried weed, I've never tried coke, I've never tried tobacco and alcohol. And I was 21 before I took my first drink.

SPEAKER_03: 1:58:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58:13

Okay, I was very much a rule follower in that in that degree. And I occasionally like a cigar. Never chewed habitually. Okay. Um but I asked I looked around and go, okay, this is a legitimate question. And with that 120 years of experience, not a single person could recall one call that they had been on that was either caused or aggravated by marijuana. Okay. I'm going, all right. Well, the libertarian in me says, well, if they want to do it, fine. So I went ahead and actually voted to for I voted for the legalization of marijuana in recreational use of marijuana in Washington. I've still never touched this stuff. Okay. That was absolutely horrible. And it was, it's the single biggest, it's the single vote I wish I could take back. It was absolutely a terrible decision. Why? Because it it opened the door for now. You go around there, see the thing is the rule says even when it's legal, you can't do it out in public. But now you can't go to a public park without somebody smoking or letting up a joint. For sure. And it's like, yeah, but it's and you look at them and go, would you stop that? It's legal. They tell you to fuck off. It's legal. It's legal for you to smoke in your house. It's not legal for you to smoke in a park. But it just became, oh, it's legal now. So now it becomes very, very permissive. And and people are um I think I was largely ignorant about what the risks really were for for weed use.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59:50

But what's the difference of somebody smoking a cigarette? Is it just weed's weed, and that's what makes it so much different? I mean, was there like an increase in problems and crime?

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:00

Red smoking is on the decline and has been for a long time. For sure. Right? For sure. You know, part of it's because they tax the shit out of it, so it's so expensive.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00:07

Well, I mean, is there that big of a difference of a dude smoking a joint in a park versus a couple old dudes playing chess at the park smoking cigars?

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:16

That's a that's a fair illusion.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00:18

Is it a preference? You just don't like the smell of it?

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:20

Um it's a it's a bit of a preference there, but it's also uh but it seems the thing is is that you now that it's more prevalent, we see it more in resulting in calls, in problems. Like what? Um people driving while high.

SPEAKER_03: 2:00:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:40

Crashing into shit. Yeah, crashing into shit. They're you know, now they're not driving not 400 miles an hour. You know, that's the guys on Coke doing that. But they're they're driving 12, you know, but they're doing it on the freeway. Yeah, you know, um that sort of stuff. And and so yeah, I I think it and that's tough because I do like cigars.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:02

So well, I mean, I get what you're saying, because like we've gone to Vegas when they were competing a lot and we were in Vegas all the time, you you can't walk the streets anymore, and it's like right, it's messy stinks like wheat, right? I get it, yeah, you know, for sure. But I just okay. Speaking of drugs, yeah, okay, fentanyl.

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:18

So fentanyl hits the market.

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:21

And I don't think a lot of people really think about the first responders having to deal with fentanyl and just narcamming dudes well, all day, every day. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 2:01:33

So let's talk a little bit about that. When a drug dealer, when a new batch hits the street, okay, we'd see whether it was opiate-based, so heroin or fentanyl, okay, we'd see a rash of calls go out, people with, you know, CPRs because they OD'd. And you have a lot of public interest groups are are the ones pushing for the first responders to carry the EMTs and the cops to carry Narcan. Uh, the the uh and even private citizens if they want to, you know, be be a good Samaritan kind of a thing. So now the good thing about Narcan is if you do give it and there isn't opiates on board, you're not gonna hurt them. It's it's one of those, it's not gonna hurt you if you don't have opiates. Okay. And it could save it, because what it does is it blocks the opiate receptors in your blood from being able to, to, to allow the opiates to bond and and do what they do. Um, but one of the things that would happen is that if you'd get a cr a a habitual user, a frequent user that would die from a batch of of either of those drugs, the drug dealers liked it because they could charge more money. Because it's stronger, more potent. Correct. Correct. You'd think it'd be, wait, we're killing our customers. That's bad. Throttle it back, boy. No, make it stronger. Because if we lose one, 12 more people will come buy it from us instead of jacked down the street because our stuff's stronger and they think they're ready for something stronger. That's fascinating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:03:09

So where does the human mind go at that point where it splits? We're like, oh man, this dude just OD'd on this. Like, how do I get my hands on that? Like, where do you where does your mind split and be like, yeah, that's the path of that?

SPEAKER_00: 2:03:21

I want that. I don't know. I I really don't. It doesn't, it doesn't compute to you and me. No. And but you know, at the same time, things like raising a family and having a home and paying taxes and contributing to society compute to you and me, and they don't compute to those people because they're looking for an escape. They want to get out. For sure. You and I go, no, this is we're we're here for a job. Whatever that some some of us don't know what our job is. That's that can be really frustrating for some people. For some people, it's like, no, I I don't know what it is yet, but gosh darn it, I'm working hard. I'm trying to be a good member of society, I'm trying to be a good community, a good, a good neighbor, a good friend. Yeah you know.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04:00

So is it crazy hitting somebody with narcam and then like they just and like come back to life as well, and they're mad as hell.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:09

Are they? They're mad as hell because you took their high away. It takes their high away like that. They would when the med, yeah, when the medics would push the narcan, they come up and then they go, get ready, get ready. Somebody hold his arms. Like, okay. And it's like they're coming up like this because you just took their high away. I've seen it gobs of times. Seriously. They were dead, but they were still experiencing a high and you took it away. And they're mad about that. And they're mad about it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04:44

And you're dealing with that shit every day. Correct. Did was there a shift in the time of you being a firefighter where it went from an average day helping an old lady, maybe a smoke detector call to where did you ever see a shift where it was like, fuck, this is like our ninth fentanyl overdose today? I mean, did it ever get that bad for you guys?

SPEAKER_00: 2:05:06

It wasn't well, the my worst day on that was we had four ODs inside of two hours in a two-block radius. Oh, so clearly a drop got made in the drop got made. It was a there was a couple in and I was on. It was three events, and I was on two of them. I was on the one where it was a couple that OD'd together in the in their car in a parking lot of a of a Shucks or O'Reilly's. Um, and that was a gob of us there working both of those people, because you need medics for both you need a batch of medics get sent for each. Even though it's one call, they treat it as two separate calls for staffing. So you got the staffing for one OD plus the full staffing for a second OD, even though they were in the same car, in the same parking lot. And then we got cleaned up from that, the engine went on one, and while the engine was on one, uh, we got sent out. And the one, the the final one in that rotation was oh, she's probably 22. She had a six-week-old kid, and she was DRT. We she was we couldn't get her back. Like, like she was she was all she was gone enough that we didn't even not that we didn't want to. She already had blood pooling. She had the livid the lividity that we talked about. She didn't have rigor yet, but she still had blood pooling. When you've got blood pooling, you that's you you don't bring that back.

SPEAKER_01: 2:06:35

She had a six-week old in her car?

SPEAKER_00: 2:06:38

In a crib. She's in a little basement apartment. As a as a I was so mad at the end of that. I was furious. Absolutely furious.

SPEAKER_01: 2:06:51

I couldn't even imagine. Like going into a home and having a little baby in a crib with an OD mom. And that's the shit you guys are dealing with daily. I wouldn't say that that one wasn't daily. Not you daily, but just our la our our first responders. Correct.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07:07

Absolutely. First responder community as a whole is dealing with that daily. Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 2:07:10

So as a man of faith. Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07:16

I hope they knew Jesus.

SPEAKER_01: 2:07:21

Is it hard? Yeah. Just because you know. Sure. Right? Because you you we look at things differently. And so when you're dealing with this these people in their absolute worst moments of their life, sure. Does it hit you differently being a believer? I mean, are you do you ever try to pray for these people or think about them afterwards?

SPEAKER_00: 2:07:47

Think about them afterwards. I did notice um you do get a condition that that we call compassion fatigue. For sure. Where you know your givea damn is busted. You know, and and in in full disclosure, and I'm not proud about this, but this is me being human, is there are times I wish that they didn't give us an arcane.

SPEAKER_03: 2:08:14

Why?

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:16

They made their choice. How many of 'em I mean how many times have you helped this one individual? Over and over and over and over again. Over again. And we're gonna see him next week too. If we don't, A shift's gonna see him. If A-Shift doesn't see him, D-Shift's gonna see him.

SPEAKER_01: 2:08:37

The mental illness that just runs rampant in our cities.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:43

By the way, Seattle does not have a homeless problem. Seattle has a meant it has a drug problem. Not a homeless problem. They have a drug problem. Because chronic drug use will lead to mental challenges. There are people that have mental challenges that turn to drugs because they're susceptible for it, and a dealer sees an opportunity for a repeat client. So one of the things that that political system did years ago was they closed all the mental institutions and turned all the people loose. Put them out on the street. And I, as a man of faith, I want to have compassion and I want to recognize that look, this is not Sparta. We don't take people that are a little bit broken or not perfect and throw them off a cliff. We don't do that. Everybody is precious in God's eyes. And that's why I say it it it I feel somewhat ashamed to say that I wish we didn't have Narcan, because there's always hope if that somebody's gonna get turned around. I've got a family member that got hooked on heroin. And the the the sequence of events it took for her to get out of that. So the numbers are not in their favor. No, they're not. And the the I I'm incredible, I I love her, I care about her, I'm so glad she's putting her life together. But she knows it. That she's gonna have lifetime obstacles from that series, that that period of her life where she was making those that series of choices, right? Um and so yeah, I as a believer, every every human is is precious and and and important to God. How do we as a civilized society, we need to have a place for the people that maybe can't function on their own. They need to have a safe place where they can be.

SPEAKER_03: 2:10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:10:36

We don't I don't believe in euthanizing and them harvesting their organs. Sorry, I'm I'm I'm not that guy. Um not I'm not sorry about that. No, I'm not that guy. And I'm proud to say I'm not that guy. I was trying to be sarcastic with the sorry comment. But what does that look like? And I'm okay with my taxes having to pay for a certain amount of that, you know?

SPEAKER_01: 2:10:57

I would rather my taxes, not all, but I would I would have no problem supporting if we had legitimate facilities that were helping these the drugs. 100% because it's it's what do we do with them? And and you mean I don't I don't know your exact words. Uh what you used um emotional fatigue, would you say compassion fatigue? Compassion fatigue. That's that is probably the best way of describing it because you're dealing with it day in and day out and day in and day out. I'd say five, ten years in.

unknown: 2:11:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:11:32

I'm just throwing a number out. Like you start to like, oh here's here's Susan again. She just OD'd ping. All right, see you next week, Susan. Like, yeah. And it gets to that point where you're just like, fuck, like, how many times are we gonna have to be here? It's just like the frequent flyers for cops. Yeah, we call them frequent flyers. The guy gets drunk, beats his wife again, they're like, they hear the address, they're like, Oh, it's Jeff. Okay, we we go, okay, get ready, he's gonna be a fighter. Right. Same shit. This compassion fatigue f builds on you, and I think that's something that the everyday American or just as in our society, we don't even consider because it's just you we want to hear it and be like, oh, you should care for everybody. But I mean, 20 years in, you're like, man, if like this is you're watching your city fund these drugs and and and not do anything for these people and just leave them out to the streets, and here you guys are cleaning it up.

SPEAKER_00: 2:12:19

Two blocks from my station, they opened up a wet house. Now, a wet house is a place where they let the it's free housing, and they let the occupants drink all they want while they're in there. Like, what is that helping? It's not. Now, here's the funny thing. There was a Malcolm, uh, the author's Malcolm Gladwell. Um, I think he's written four or five books. Uh I forget which one it was in, which book it was in, but it's a sequence of stories. And he talked about there was this cop, I want to say, I think it was in Vegas, but they kept having to pick up this guy and pick up the same guy over and over and over and over again while they got him into a place. My understanding is that it's mathematically it's a cost savings to provide these people with a how with a place where they sit and drink themselves into a stupor, you know, in an inside place rather than doing it on the because if they do it on the curb or on the sidewalk, then the drivers, the passers by call 911. Hey, there's a guy down there, I think he's dead. Okay, so now we go tearing up it the resources that it takes to go respond to that, pick that guy up, put him in an ambulance, take him to the hospital. Taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars, because he's not going to pay for it. Nope. So the taxpayers absorb the cost one way or another, from the medical care, from when he gets picked up, transported to when he gets released or self-releases, walks out of the hospital when he sobers up enough to walk out of the hospital. It's right back to it. And right back up doing the same thing over again. It actually ends up being lower cost the taxpayers to, hey, we'll give you a room, Charlie. You just sit there and drink yourself into a stupor there, and then when you pass out there, they don't call the night. They don't call 911. Problem is that the staff isn't, they don't hire staff to be able to evaluate that person. Qualified staff. So now the staff calls 911. Yeah, Charlie passed out. We don't know what to do. He passed out, he's drunk. That's why he's here.

SPEAKER_01: 2:14:26

He's on his fifth fireball bottle today.

SPEAKER_00: 2:14:28

Yeah. Second fifth. Yeah. So, so if you're gonna have that program, you need to have skilled people there that can actually make a quality assessment. Is this a 911 call or is this no, he just needs to sleep it off? Yeah, and that defeats the whole purpose. And it kind of defeats the whole purpose. So now we're back into this vicious circle. And and you know, to your point, I'm uh I'm good with a hand up. You know, you want to put people on welfare for a long time. I'm gonna I know I'm gonna make some people mad, but you want to put people I'm okay with taking welfare benefits and tripling them. But they sunset. You got two years. If you got kids, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna pray for free, we're gonna pay for free child care for your kids, and you're gonna go to class. And if you don't show up to class and you don't pee clean every other week, we're gonna send you to a vocational skill place and you're gonna learn something.

SPEAKER_01: 2:15:21

I'm with you on that, but I I yeah, 100%. I I mean I I I could get behind that, but uh there would have to be routine drug tests weekly, and it there would have to be a lot with it, but that's that's how you would help. I got two years to get my life on track. I got I'm I would rather pay for two years, and then once that two years up, it's done, rather than some family that's generationally been on welfare. Correct. Now the kids are on it because their parents were on it, and so that's just the cycle they're in, instead of being like, you got two years to get your shit together. Right. So here's all the resources, here's child care, here's that would be that would probably be way cheaper than just a lifelong than a lifelong dependent.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:00

Welfare dependent at 24 months, you're done. Or what whatever is determined to be for sure that you're done. Now, if you need to if you need to go to rehab first because you got to get clean, okay. I'm I'm fine. You want to I'll give you one on taxpayer diet.

unknown: 2:16:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:16:18

See, that that would I would rather my money be going to helping our own people than fucking Ukraine or Israel or any of these other shit ass countries that are just raping us on our taxes, and it's like, well, yeah. And here we are, the greatest country in the world. But I mean, yeah, I just posted a video the other day. This blind homeless woman's like, this this kid just go, he hears her screaming.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:16:41

The government shut down, there's no buses, she doesn't even know how to get home, she's blind. She's like, I just I the buses aren't running. Like, I don't he ends up giving her a ride, but I'm like, we have people living like that in our streets. 100%, and that's wrong. That's wrong. And we're just funding everybody else around the world. Like that that's where I could see where my if my taxpayers were going to that, okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:57

Sure. And if we stop spending look, I I don't know enough about what's really going on between Israel and Gaza or in between Ukraine and Russia to be able to make a hard decision on should we pick a side. The thing is, is that how about if we stay the hell out of it? That's what that's the side. Is I pick the side of the United States and worrying about us. Right. And if and if we've got if we've got vets that are and and the vet community is is highlighted in this one because you've got the stereotypical vet that's homeless and you know sleeping on the street, that's not okay to me. Now, I uh when I say stereotypical, I'm not meaning that flippant, but there's a stereotype of of you know that happened from that generation. And I think a lot of it happened from the guys coming back from Vietnam. You don't hear a lot of it from guys coming back that the guys went that direction after they came back from World War II. And I think a lot of that stemmed from how the soldiers were received coming back from Vietnam. And and one of the things I do appreciate about the difference between the the guys coming back from the whether it was GWAT or even prior to, even the people that were against the the efforts, they said we're against the efforts, but we're still supporting our soldiers. Yeah. And that was a big change, and I think that a change for the better. You could be against foreign policy. Fine. You can argue about that for them. Do it the right way. Let's let's bring about change. Let's bring about some education, let's make some good decisions. I don't want to be the world's big brother, I don't want to be the world's cop. There's no need to be. I I I don't want to do that.

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:38

You know, um we have enough of our own problems. If we do. If our roads were paved in gold and our infrastructure wasn't falling apart and everybody had a livable wage and we weren't getting absolutely raped on taxes, cool.

SPEAKER_00: 2:18:51

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:52

Okay, country needs us or an ally, a legit ally, cool, 100% support it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:18:57

But like this, how about look, if if if Joe and Martha, U.S. citizen, want to spend their own dollars to donate to Ukraine or Gaza or Palestine? I don't care which one it is.

SPEAKER_03: 2:19:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:11

Joe and Mary, U.S. citizen, write your checks all you want. Yep. Right? There's a GoFundMe. Go support it. But I'm curious, were there any countries around the world that sent us aid after the Palisades fire? How about any countries around the world that sent United States aid after the storms that hit the East Coast? Um and those are just in recent memory, right? No. No, I'm not saying that that I want to send somebody a bill. No. But I I want to take care of our own first. We got we got a lot of work we can do here. America first, that's how that's that's how my mind works. Like yeah, it I just it blows my mind. But when you you know when you talk about the mental health of of the first responders, I want to say it was 2018 or 2019 that suicide um overtook us for line of duty death.

SPEAKER_01: 2:20:04

Really?

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:20:06

That's a b it's more first responders were killing themselves than being killed in the line of duty. Yeah. Damn.

unknown: 2:20:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:20:16

That's a big I mean that's That's huge, right? Like what's the driving force behind that?

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:21

Um the stuff we see that we can't unsee. Yeah. And like you said, we get a career of it. The smells, the sounds. Sure. And here's the thing. In years past, there was a there was a machismo. Am I saying that right? I think I'm pronounced that there was a machismo in in in being a f a cop or a fireman, right? Tough it out, kid. You know. Well, we all have a different capacity for that kind of to process those kinds of things. Absolutely. We're basically you could you one way to sum up our job is we're paid to do, to deal with and see and handle things that the rest of the world doesn't want to do or cannot handle. Yeah. So you've got to have you got to pay somebody to do that. Just like you might pay somebody to re-roof your house because you either don't know how or don't want to. Yeah. Or it's too hard for you. Well, you're gonna pay somebody to do it. Well, you're paying for people to do jobs for society that you don't want to do. You know? Um you see some crummy stuff. I mean, we've we we you know when when I sat with Andy, we kind of laughed and we joked about the the the enormously obese person that lost, you know, a foot-long sandwich on their remote in their folds of fat sitting on the couch. Yeah. What? Oh yeah. People that are so fat sitting on the couch that they like you go to you help them up to get them to whatever whatever, and all of a sudden, oh, you're you know, you're taking a blood pressure, you gotta move the fat, and remote falls out of the folds of fat. Oh, gross. I'm so glad I'm wearing gloves. I wish I was wearing three pairs. You said a sandwich too? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:22:14

Just goes missing. How's that person like surviving? Like, how do they make it? Not very well.

SPEAKER_00: 2:22:18

How do they make money? They uh they're on assistance, they've got to be on some form of assistance, whether it's from friends, family, or from the government.

SPEAKER_01: 2:22:24

Yeah, probably from the government, and you're weighing six, seven hundred pounds. Like, how does that f that that that I have a problem with? I have kind of a problem with it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:22:31

Right? That is wild. I've been on those calls. Not just one. It's gross. Oh, for sure. You know what's the smell like? Horrible. Because when they go to the bathroom, even if they can make it to the toilet, you know they can't clean themselves properly. Getting them to bathe is is, you know. Impossible. Impossible. You know? No. I've also been to a call of uh of an older man that was having neurological problems, like uh like he had some advanced, I think it was advanced diabetes, so he couldn't really do a lot of stuff himself. And he got the poor guy's in tears. He says, I just want some help. This is somebody come over here and help me take a shower a couple times a week. That's sad. That that broke my heart because that's a guy who's trying and wanting, and he wasn't morbidly obese. He had a degenerative condition that he couldn't without assistance. And he was having a hard time getting his assistance to approve to cover somebody coming in more often and to increase the level of care that he would.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:47

And that breaks your heart.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23:48

I just can't. That's where it's like, like, how do we sit here and claim that we're the greatest country and we have uh we have people living like this? Uh millions of people living like this.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:56

I don't think we've got millions, but we got a lot. I don't think so. I don't millions a lot of people. Is it? It's a lot of people. But I don't know. I I I I'm not okay. Tens of thousands of people. Sure. I think that's pretty easy when you look at all the cities across the town. You know, across the country, yeah. They're predominantly in the cities. Mm-hmm. That's sad.

SPEAKER_01: 2:24:19

It is, it's it's terribly sad.

SPEAKER_03: 2:24:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:24:20

You know. I mean, I I saw a video in this this person's bones were sticking out of, I want to say it was their leg or their knee. Like it was bone. Like the body had rotten and died. Yeah. And is deteriorating there's flies all over it. And I'm like, we have people living like this in our streets. Correct. We do. They have sores. Yep. I saw a guy the other day. I think it was these three fingers were black, look like frostbite, like Mr. Deeds, you know? And he's yeah, you you you uh you posted that. I saw that. Yeah. What the fuck are we doing? Right. This dude's hand's dying and he's living in the streets. It's not dying, it's dead. Dead.

SPEAKER_00: 2:25:00

Well, at least that part of it, you know. And if he doesn't get that properly attended, it's gonna spread the rest of his body and kill him.

SPEAKER_01: 2:25:05

It hasn't gone septic, it blows my mind that it's it's that far gone where it's black and mummified. Yeah. Living on our streets, and here we are, like oh, here you go, Israel. Here's another billion dollars.

SPEAKER_00: 2:25:18

But the problem with that is there an enormous amount of people that are on the streets want to be on the streets. They want to be there because that what they don't want to do is they don't want to embrace the responsibility that it takes to get off of the streets. Yeah you know, because here's the thing. Jeff Foxworthy had a joke, we're all a couple of bad decisions away from hanging drywall for a living, right? And there's some humor to that, but but we could all make a couple of bad decisions and find ourselves in a real bad way. But the thing is if you the moment you decide to start making better ones, there are private organizations, not governments, that'll say, I tell you what, do you need a bed? Oh, a safe bed in in the basement of our church. We will give you three meals a day and a safe bed, but you gotta not drink. You gotta not whore yourself out. You gotta, there's a certain code of behavior that you have to adhere to. You adhere to this behavior, we'll give you a hand. We'll we'll you know, we'll help you get work clothes and you can go get on a work crew. It'll never happen. We'll we'll pack a brown bag lunch for you so that you've got a lunch and you could go to, you know, take the bus, get yourself to a work crew, and you can begin rebuilding your life. There are private organizations that will do that, and that's a beautiful thing. And I tip those are the people that you want to stand back and just cheer for. Hey, you decided to start making better choices. You know, I care about that. I I I don't the camera's showing, I'm starting to tear up a little bit because that's this kind of stuff that that you want to go, how do we how do we value that? Yeah. How do we put more energy into how do we put more energy, more emphasis into people that that are wanting to make themselves better? What's the percentage?

SPEAKER_01: 2:27:04

Because I mean, well, it's I watched this guy, he drives around, he's like, I'll give you a job right now.

SPEAKER_00: 2:27:09

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27:09

Get in, I'll give you a job, I'll buy you a flight to to Florida, you go through a rehab that I'll pay for, and then I'll hire you. And the majority of people are like, I'm good.

SPEAKER_00: 2:27:17

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27:17

I watched a documentary not too long ago where this guy followed kids around in like Huntington Beach or something like that, and he's doing everything he can to help them.

SPEAKER_00: 2:27:25

And they don't want it correct.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27:27

Straight back to he's even bringing them in his home. He's got these kids living on the like on his living room floor, right? And they just disappear for weeks and they'd show back up and they're on they're on the beach all slammed up, and and he's just like, what the fuck? He's like, I'm trying everything I can, and it's it's just this mental mindset. That's what's and you know, and I haven't I haven't dealt with it enough to know just the bowels of the homeless, mentally ill community that's on the streets. Sure. But it's it's it's it's really sad when it's like, how do we help people that just don't want it?

SPEAKER_00: 2:28:00

Sure. And that's the thing. Or just shit all over it. Well, you know, there's a book that I recommend to people that have basically kids and starting at about the age of your kids. Your kids don't need the book. It's a great book. But it's called Do Hard Things. With your daughters having won national championships in Taekwondo. It doesn't matter if it's synchronized pumpkin carving. They went, they they put the effort into the discipline to, when it wasn't what they wanted to do, when it was when it was Christmas Day, or when it whatever needed to do to take to do something with excellence, you have your as parents, you guys have done a marvelous job of showing your kids what it looks like to pursue excellence. Thank you. And and I think that uh I I one of the things I've told our sons is if you uh spend your life chasing happiness, it will elude you. It's gonna be like smoke. You can smell it, you can taste it, you can see it, but when you try to grab it, there's nothing there. But if you pursue excellence, happiness will find you. Now one of the important things is to see if you can, as believers, find joy in the pursuit of that excellence. Because joy and happiness are are some distinctly different things. 100%. Um I'm not a wordsmith. I probably would have a hard time defining the difference, but in my brain, in my heart, I can feel no, there's a difference between joy and happiness.

SPEAKER_01: 2:29:37

Joy lasts forever, happiness. You can buy happiness, you can't buy joy. That's when people say, Oh, money, money can buy happiness. 100%. And then you have these people who are like, Oh, money can't buy happiness. I truly believe you can buy you can buy that quick fix happiness. Oh, I got a new car, got a new truck, bought a home. Yeah, joy is when you lay down at night and you're Like, oh man. Right. Got a roof over my head. Yep. I got a healthy family.

SPEAKER_00: 2:30:04

Which starts with gratitude. Gratitude. Gratitude for what you have. Right. So, which which kind of is a nice way of bringing us back to what we first started, I think before the recording started, was I'm grateful for what I have. You know, yeah, we got we got a difficult hand dealt to us, but I don't believe that God gives us anything that we can't handle. Okay. Now we may have to lean on him to get through it, but is that a bad thing? I don't think so. So it's sort of looking at obstacles or events that don't happen to us, but they happen for us, and saying, okay, God, this is difficult. What do you want me to learn as a result of this? And I don't think, you know, you you hear the people that want to argue against theology about, well, how could a loving God allow a child to have cancer? I don't know, ask him. Yeah. But but what I think how I approach and respond to the challenges is a whole lot more indicative of my value system and and what kind of an example I can be.

unknown: 2:31:16

Right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:31:16

And I'm not claiming moral high ground here. I'm not saying I'm better than anybody else. I've I'm telling you, I've been so full of rage and anger over how that went down and what that did. Yeah, there are days that's really tough. There's days that's really tough.

SPEAKER_01: 2:31:30

Let's shift gears into that. Yeah. So that's we're we're kind of bringing that up. Walk me through the day that you were told that you were no longer allowed to be a firefighter after 20 plus years.

SPEAKER_00: 2:31:44

Okay. We had a little bit of a warning that it was going to come, that it was going to happen. So the day that we were told was actually October 18th and 19th.

SPEAKER_02: 2:31:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:31:53

Because that was the deadline to have the one of the available COVID shot sequences have their effectiveness. Because when you anytime you have a a shot or an inoculation of any kind, whether it's a vaccine or not, and there are I think there's legitimate arguments that whether uh whether or not it's actually a vaccine. They actually had to change the definition of a vaccine in order to have this fall under that criteria. So I choose to call it a shot, not a vaccine, 100%. But that's just me. So on August 8th, the former governor, now former Governor Jay Inslee of Washington announced a mandate of the COVID shot sequence for every worker that fell under their authority. And the day after, then Mayor Jenny Durkin of City of Seattle issued her own mayoral decree that all the city employees had to have the COVID shot sequence. You could apply for and when they were challenged with that, oh, of course you can apply for religious or or medical exemptions. Okay. So I filled out their form. They put out they put a form together and I filled it out. And um I put it under a religious objection. And the reason that I that I put on the form, our our union uh advised us to be as brief as possible. Okay, fine. I know guys that wrote pages and or paragraphs and paragraphs and cited Bible verses. Great, fine. Um our union advised us to be as brief as possible. To the best of our ability to understand and learn and know, turned out to be true, but for all the information that we could find on the available options, they had all been developed using tissue from an aborted fetus. I'm not okay with that. And that's what I put down in there. Um so that turned out to be true. Yeah. And um, there are plenty of people that are well, let's let's get back, let's let's stay on on track on that one, just because I don't want to lose the train. So that that mandate came out in uh on August 9th. I had we they had put a deadline on us to submit our form of the religious exemption. And I was actually a couple of days late on film on submitting my form, and I wasn't trying to be a stinker about it. It was just I wanted to I I wanted to make sure I that I used the right the right verbiage and kept it as short as possible. I needed to be complete but short.

SPEAKER_03: 2:35:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:35:15

And so I was also working an absolute metric ton of overtime. Why? We were a single income household.

SPEAKER_03: 2:35:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:35:27

Um let's back up for just a just a half a minute. We'll come back to that. Okay. So I met my amazing wife in 2013. Um we'd each been through a divorce, and she was a single mom working full time three-quarter time at Starbucks, supporting two boys. Okay. And doing a pretty amazing job of that. We met online at eHarmony. And we went we went we went back and forth um with some messages there. Um I really like the way she tells the story. Um, but anyway. So we started dating. Um, we dated for a couple of weeks. But one of the things is that we that we found attractive about one another is what we each had deal breakers. Like, no. Now the list wasn't like 49 items long, it was just really a few. Like, no, I'm this, this, this, this. These are these are the deal breakers, and I want to know what yours are. Because if if it doesn't work, you know, I was 36 when I found myself single again. And you'd go on a date with an age-appropriate lady, and almost all of them had kids. And so it's like, okay, I'm gonna sign up to do this. I'm not going, oh, those are your kids, we're just being married. No, no, those uh uh I'm gonna sign up, I'm in. And if they didn't want a guy that was all in, I wasn't their guy. And I just wanted to figure that out right away. So, as did she, she wanted to make sure that she was getting somebody that was all in, that wasn't just, oh yeah, I'm you know, here to shoplift the pooty off of a single mom. Yeah, you know, that kind of a thing. So um we got married in June of 2015. And the boys were going to a public school. They had just started a new school in a different area that for one they just completed their first year. Okay. And um but we decided that we really wanted to give the kids a stay-home parent. And because of what was going on in the public schools. Yeah. We were not uh were absolutely not against homeschooling. We ended up doing a form of homeschooling. Um, but in the beginning it was no. We got the kids going to this, we want to make sure that they don't come home to an empty house. So the second income for our household was me working overtime.

SPEAKER_03: 2:38:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:38:11

And so six months after we got married, she came home from Starbucks and she was a stay-home mom, and I was just working a lot of overtime. And it meant I missed a lot of stuff, which that part sucked. For sure. But when I look at the young men that that our sons are at 21 and and 22, I wouldn't change that. The the the the I don't look at it as a sacrifice, because a sacrifice means you gave up something better for something less. It's a trade-off. I traded off certain things, but what we got in the end was way better. It was better for them.

SPEAKER_03: 2:38:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:38:50

So if they came home with some cockamini crap that got taught in school, she was right there ready to wash that shit out of their brain. Yes. And, you know, um, we we were able to we had to adjust lifestyle. So it was um, we were not driving fancy new cars. We were we our vacations were a long weekend road trip, and that's it. Yep. Um, I wish I could have taken our kids on some more trips and done some more traveling with them, but we didn't have it. Yeah um I had some debt. She I had way more debt than she did to clean up after after the divorce. She had a little bit, but I also made a lot more money. So um we buckled down, scaled back our lifestyle. We didn't go out to eat, and within seven years, we had paid off all of our debt, every penny. Um, we were still renting, uh, and we had enough for a down payment on a house saved, and that's when we got canned. So um, thankfully, we had that little poke saved up because that's what kind of our transition. In hindsight, I probably would have been better to get a small business loan, but because the interest rate would have been lower. But we've Ramsey would kill us, but we've ended up putting a bunch on credit cards because we were just trying to get through. The winners have been slow. Um, we've had a slow winter ever every winter since um with being a contractor. Now I was raised in that environment. So, I mean, when I was seven, I was framing walls. When I was 12, I was setting dial and sweating pipes. So I was blessed that I had a skill set that I could turn to when a lot of my colleagues didn't. I had friends that were adamantly against um the shot sequence, some for secular purposes, some for religious purposes, that relented and took the shot because they said, I'm doing this for my family.

SPEAKER_01: 2:40:52

Okay, so back to the shot. Yeah, sorry. When they when they told you you had to get the COVID shot. Yep. And you're like, absolutely not, which I'm 100% for, like not getting the shots. Did you have a lot of support in the department or were you one of like few a few guys?

SPEAKER_00: 2:41:11

70 of us. Here's the funny thing. That's a great question. That's a really important question. So when that happened, uh, we were a union thing, and unions in Washington are very, very different than unions here. They're they're actually quite powerful because the government willingly gives them the control.

SPEAKER_03: 2:41:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:41:28

So um they called special meetings and said, hey, what's going on? What's this? What's that? And so there was a vote that was forced by one of the members. They followed Robert's rules of orders and they said, No, we're gonna force a vote. Okay, fine. It came back as a 70% give or take one or two. So a supermajority. Typically, a supermajority is 66%, two-thirds. Okay. It came back greater than a supermajority that the union should oppose the mandates. Now, that's not saying if an individual thinks the shots are great, great, go get one. Fine. But but the union came back with an extra high participation percentage. Just the percentage of people that vote is statistically very low. Even in our presidential elections, right? It's it's really a small number of people that actually vote. Yes. Same thing at the union level. At least in our union. But this time, a huge percentage voted. And it was overwhelmingly, no union, you must, union leadership, your executive elected members, you need to oppose these shots. And they didn't. They rolled over. Oh shit. They rolled over. I don't have any proof, but I'm absolutely convinced they took some form of a payoff.

SPEAKER_01: 2:42:53

Oh, every time. How many firefighters ended up getting let go?

SPEAKER_00: 2:42:57

70. Uh almost 70.

SPEAKER_01: 2:42:59

75.

SPEAKER_00: 2:43:00

They lost, Seattle lost 70 firefighters from uh uniformed number of about a thousand in the fire department. They lost 70. Uh-huh. How do you and they were already in a staffing crisis?

SPEAKER_01: 2:43:16

Like what I was gonna say. How do you restaff 70 firefighters like that?

SPEAKER_00: 2:43:19

And they've they've lost even more. So um I don't understand this shit.

SPEAKER_01: 2:43:25

Like, this is the stuff where Well, but that's the look. You look at the leadership and you're just like, what the what like how is somebody that's you look at the leadership. But I'm talking if you're the dumbest liberal on the planet, which the majority of them all seem to be the same, I'm not saying Republicans are any better. Right. But when you see these idiots in these in these positions of city count, whatever it is, and they're like, Yeah, we're gonna force the this is the this is for the greater good that we're gonna force 70 firefighters out of our community that we're already not staffed enough with. This makes sense. Like, that's the shit where I'm like, why are these people in this position? Well, they lied.

SPEAKER_00: 2:44:04

A few days before the deadline, the fire chief is is on record, went on video, like, yeah, we've only had six people that haven't applied for an exemption or or um have submitted proof of vaccination. How is this how was this fire chief? Is he is he a sellout? Oh, he's he's he's absolutely abysmal. Yeah, absolutely abysmal. He's a DEI hire and he's a and he's a DEI promoter. There you go. He came out of California. He actually was just past, he was in the running to go back to California to be the chief of LA City, and they didn't hire him. He's he's as he's as unethical and crooked as they come.

SPEAKER_01: 2:44:39

What's his name?

SPEAKER_00: 2:44:40

Harold Scoggins.

SPEAKER_01: 2:44:42

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 2:44:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:44:44

There's all I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 2:44:46

He's the guy that carries around a photocopy of a receipt of his like his great-granddad who was sold as a slave. And when you start to challenge him on something, he pulls that out and starts waving that in your face. That's that's Harold Scoggins. He's a piece of shit. Yeah, clearly. Yes. And our fire department, our once very well respected fire department that was aggressive, hard charging, did good things, has absolutely plummeted since he became chief. DI hires, man. I'm absolutely angry. I'm so angry at him. I'm probably more angry at him for what he's done to my old fire department than what he did to me. And you lost, you lost everything, right? You lost almost everything material.

SPEAKER_01: 2:45:31

Did you so your retirement I have how does it work?

SPEAKER_00: 2:45:36

Everybody's retirement, every retirement system is gonna be a little bit different.

SPEAKER_02: 2:45:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:45:41

So I was able to retain the value of my pension that I had earned. At 21 years, how many years did you do? 21 years and 11 months. So almost 22. 20 years, okay. Okay. I was able to retain that. But the problem is the way that it, the way that it builds or could build, I'm at a third of what I could have made. And we're taking a huge penalty drawing early. But my wife and I crunched the math and we went, all right, we're gonna take the penalty to draw early. So take a third and then a whole lot less than that. Because the taxes and everything else. Well, no, it is taxed, but there's a penalty for drawing early. Yeah. So we got the early draw penalty. It's like, now we we need the breathing room for winter time. Now we were, we've been blessed this last summer, the spring. We as a business, we were doing real well. Yeah. We we had um a pretty big job um that was we did we offered great value for the client, gave her an amazing product, and she's very happy with it. But it was a big pro it was a big job that we got a lot of it was profitable for our company. Good. Ethically What's the name of your company? Freedom Contracting Services.

SPEAKER_01: 2:46:55

And then you so that was a pivot. Yes. Did you know immediately when you were being canned as a firefighter, like that was that was it, or was there like this whole like oh shit moment where you guys were just trying to figure out life, or did you know immediately like, okay, this is the path we could take?

SPEAKER_00: 2:47:10

We we had the oh shit moment about oh crap, what's it gonna do? This and we're looking at what other options do we have. And that was that was the option. Because even though I worked overtime, I still never really pulled my foot all the way out of that world. I was helping friends or remodeling a house that I was living in or doing things like that. Okay. And so I had those skills and I had a pretty decent assortment of the tools that I would need. I actually I've had to buy more tools than I thought that I would have to buy in order to be able to do it on a professional level, you know, as as sole income.

SPEAKER_02: 2:47:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:47:49

Um, but we've managed that. We've managed that. Um, so yeah, it's it's uh a friend of ours sold us, uh sold us a trailer for a song and a dance, which was great. So I could put the tools in the trailer.

SPEAKER_02: 2:48:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:48:05

And um we had a pickup truck that could tow the trailer safely. And so it's like, all right, I'm now I'm a contractor. So we we originally filed in Washington because we were still living there. Yeah. And in Washington, you could file as a sole proprietorship, you know, at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night online. So we filled it out online. Boom, here's your number. Okay, great. Got on the internet, we got you know, contract, the appropriate contractor's insurances. We went down to the State Department of Labor and Industries, we filed that paperwork, and we were now my business.

SPEAKER_03: 2:48:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:48:37

And so we stayed as a sole proprietor because by the time we figured that out, it's like, look, if this really, if this really plays out and they don't balk and like invite everybody back after a month, then this is what we're gonna do, and we're gonna leave town. We're we're we're not gonna stay in Washington. Because at that juncture, you couldn't Washington as a Western Washington was reacting in such a way you couldn't go out to dinner, you couldn't go shopping, yeah, you had to show a vaccine passport everywhere. Everybody wanted to see your vax card. And, you know, so it's like, yeah, we're we're the the train was headed the direction that we were going to be relegated to second-class citizens and restricted. We could still buy gas at the fuel pump because you didn't have to go in and talk to anybody. And the grocery store would still wasn't allowed, still wasn't requiring vax cards, but that was it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:49:30

It was insane.

SPEAKER_00: 2:49:30

It was it was people had lost their minds.

SPEAKER_01: 2:49:33

Yeah, it showed yeah, I I was the best part about all of that is I got to teach the family if how people will truly act during these times and open their eyes up to it. And so it's most majority of these people are just they'll just go with the flow. Like we call it the 99%. Like when you get on like Facebook and Instagram and you're just looking at people's comments, you're like, man, these fucking people are morons. Like they're absolutely it's 99% of the world. You just oh yeah, I'm gonna put a put a mask on and I'm just gonna do this. Right. When the shots came out, it was the wildest thing too because we're we were already anti-vaxxed before. We were we were before the trend, right? Yeah. Because of shh, what our oldest got um just a routine vaccine. I don't know. How old were you, kid?

unknown: 2:50:23

Five.

SPEAKER_01: 2:50:23

Yeah, she was five. I'm driving back to Vegas. I was working in Vegas at the time, and the wife calls me and she's like, get the fuck here, screaming on the phone. She went in for a routine vaccine shot at five for school. Two days later, she has a grandma seizure that lasted like 13 minutes. Oh goodness. She didn't come out of it until the paramedic showed up, hit her with something, and then she came out.

SPEAKER_00: 2:50:44

That would have been value, most likely.

SPEAKER_01: 2:50:46

Something. I was um I was almost in Vegas by this point, and we get home, we go to the hospital, no answers there. We end up at Chalk's Children's Hospital through Christmas Eve and all this crazy shit. Look at all these kids with cancer. It was a horrible experience. Like you you want to talk about humbling, like sure being in going to chalk shows in hospital and seeing what these kids are battling is is that'll that'll check you real quick. And we do all the tests, the scans, everything, and the doctors go, Sometimes the brain has a hiccup, and you know, we just don't know. And my wife was like, fuck no, vaccine two days ago. Right. Like, let's put the pieces together. Right. So when all this shit came out, we were like, hundred percent no, you can just get fucked. We're not sticking anything in our kids.

SPEAKER_00: 2:51:30

You know, it's interesting because I can well let's let's talk about the smallpox vaccine.

SPEAKER_03: 2:51:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:51:37

Okay. So when it was originally happened, and and a lot of people want to, when it comes to the vaccine mandates, a lot of people want to point towards the Jacobson versus Massachusetts case where the Supreme Court ruled that you can mandate a vaccine. Okay. Let's look at the whole story. One, smallpox had a 30% mortality rate of people that showed symptoms. That means 30% of the people that got symptoms died. COVID had less than 1% of people that were symptomatic died. Okay. Two, the smallpox vaccine was what they call a sterilizing vaccine, or meant it worked. It actually stopped. If you got the vaccine, you didn't get smallpox. It stopped it. We knew by the time we were fired, and we have documentation that the city knew this, that the COVID shots did not stop people from getting COVID. Right? So and three, the last bit of that Jacobson ruling, if you don't want to take the shot, pay a five dollar fine. Have a nice day. And they conveniently leave that line out. So five dollars from 1905 adjusted to today's dollars, I think, I think Jacobson was 1905, is a little less than 200 bucks. Yeah. So so if you're gonna like cite, oh, the Supreme Court says, well, yeah, but you gotta cite what it all says. Jacobson, you could pay a fine. Now, one of the things that was so cool about the Iditarod, the origins of the Alaskan Iditarod race, is they had a viral outbreak in the Alaskan village of Ididerod. Did you know that this is the history of this? No. And so what it was was it was a truly heroic job because it was in the bat of winter, nothing could make it through except dog sleds. So one big ballsy dude and a bunch of badass dogs brought a real vaccine to those people. That's some gangster shit. That's some gangster shit, right? That's back when men had forearms this big because they were cutting down redwoods with double bit axes. But the point is, is that if you're I actually, the concept of a vaccine I think is absolutely beautiful. It actually works with God's creation of our immune system. You give it an introduction to something that's dead that can't hurt you, it develops, it learns how to recognize it and then builds an antibody system around it. But what's shitty about all the vaccines, and this is something I've learned since then, when you start peeling back the curtain and digging, is all the other crap they put in it. Yeah, it's not just the vaccine. Not just the vaccine. And they so so if you go, wait a minute here. A vaccine that has a six-month shelf life at room temperature is$20. But a vaccine that has a 24-hour shelf life and has to be refrigerated is$500. I'll take the$500 one because it doesn't have any preservatives in it. Yeah. I'm not opposed to that. But why in the world are we giving a hepatitis B vaccine to a baby? Baby. Babies. When what is hepatitis B transmitted by? Drug use and sex with people that have hepatitis B.

SPEAKER_01: 2:54:56

See, our youngest, after her incident when we had our youngest, the wife was like, fuck no. Right. Because then you start looking at these vaccines, you're like, oh, it's it's just uh it's just this vaccine. But then when you look into it, it's a cocktail of vaccines. Correct. And it's like, why are we giving infants brand new baby child to this world and we're poop boop-poop-poop. Right. And then we wonder where SIDS is coming from, where all these, all the mental, these kids have all these learning disabilities and well, and I've heard I've heard people argue, um, and I'm not an immunologist, and I'm not a virologist, I'm not a doctor.

SPEAKER_03: 2:55:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:55:34

And I didn't stay at a holiday in last night. But I've heard experts in this say, yeah, they're not the people that are they're not they're not against vaccines, but they say, yeah, we sh the immune system isn't mature enough to handle a vaccine until they're 10 or 12. So even if we are going to be looking at giving somebody a vaccine and it's doesn't have all the crap in it, why don't we wait until they're 10 or 12 or till the immune systems actually develop. Working. Working and can actually properly handle that.

SPEAKER_01: 2:56:09

Don't you let them get some breast milk in them and start developing first before we start pumping the shit. Well, it's the craziest thing to us is we know this family. Their dad's a doctor. Yeah. And they got all of their kids vaccinated in all of the boosters to go on a vacation. Right. And after we watched this, these kids developed so many problems. That'd be sad. They would break out with these rash-looking sores on their bodies, and they would throw our kids would come and be like, Oh, so and so it just threw up. And they're like, Yeah, I guess it's normal now. Kids were just throwing up randomly, and the mom's just like, Yeah, they just do this. And we're sitting here, like, right. We weren't seeing any of this, we weren't hearing any of this before the shots, and then now we're a year later, and your kids are constantly ill, right? Constantly having these problems and rashes and sores, sure, throwing up randomly. Oh, they're not sick, they just do that now. And we're sitting here like, what the f what? Yeah, and because it for a vacation, I yeah, I I don't want to like throw shade on the people that got your kids vaccinated, but y'all fucked up big time by doing it. And I know let's just trust follow the science. My biggest thing, my biggest thing in this family is if the government is telling me we have to do it, we are 100% not doing it. Because these people are like, oh, the government has our best interests. Yeah, that that that one's tough. That's the that's just how my work. Oh, you guys should really start doing this instead. Nah, I'm good. What's we're we're good, right? We're good. Why do I need to introduce something to my children? We're already we're cruising. Yeah, everyone's healthy. Right. The craziest part is none of us, I've never even had a COVID test. We were so like I we didn't play.

SPEAKER_00: 2:58:05

Yeah, I I had to get I know dudes had to get in. Like, I I had to get the test to because I um I came down, I had some symptoms, and they were they were harping on me about other guys at work that could have gotten exposed. And even though they were all vaccinated? No, this was before the vaccine. Okay. So this this was a full year before the vaccines were even available. So, well, because they started cutting now, it was probably eight months before they were available because I remember it was I got COVID, it was right before Thanksgiving. And I know it because I love Thanksgiving and I couldn't smell or taste anything, so that one sucks. Yeah, so um, and yeah, so they were like, they were harping on me, and I was like, I'm against because they're I knew that they were by that time, so that would have been fall of 20. I by that time I knew they were they were misrepresenting the data, and I didn't want to contribute to the data that they were misrepresenting, right? For sure. But I did it as a courtesy to my coworkers because that meant that if they got it from me, then they their sick time was covered. They didn't have to burn their own sick time. Okay. And because I couldn't point to anybody at work that I got it from, even though I was working overtime all over the place, they said, Oh, yeah, you got to burn your sick time. And I said, So you're making me burn my sick time. You're saying me I can't come to, even though I feel fine. Yeah, you have to say. I was mad about that. I was hot about that. So they weren't saying, you know, back at a time when the federal government was doling out slush funds for to cover people, the the businesses cover their expenses of giving people free sick time when they had COVID symptoms because they didn't want the spread of COVID.

SPEAKER_02: 2:59:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:59:53

Now, part of Mayor Durkin's mayoral director number number nine said if you don't take the the the COVID shots, you have Have to mask and uh uh mask and test. Fine, I'll mask and test. And so what ended up happening is my religious exemption was accepted. Like we received your uh because it was an email submission or online submission. Yep, I got an email back. Yep, we received your your thing. Uh stay tuned for what we're what our ruling is. Okay. A couple of days later, yes, your your exemption has been approved. Stay tuned.

SPEAKER_03: 3:00:28

Cool.

SPEAKER_00: 3:00:28

Okay. And then it came back, yeah, we're not gonna accommodate you.

SPEAKER_01: 3:00:32

Was there um when this all came out, there you couldn't like band together and do like this big class action lawsuit or anything like that?

SPEAKER_00: 3:00:40

You were just fired and that was it? Well, um we did try an injunction to stay uh in court, and that got uh that got shot down um because the judges in Washington were all it was state court and it was all liberal appointed judges. Yeah. So they were all radical lefties. So we started in a court in eastern Washington. Uh that's where it was filed, hoping to get a uh at least a better perspective. And the governor sent his lawyers over and they said, no, this needs to be tried in this to be heard in a court in in Olympia because it was a governor's pro proclamation, so we it needs to be heard here.

SPEAKER_01: 3:01:21

And your chiefs weren't standing up and fighting.

SPEAKER_00: 3:01:23

Oh no, the chiefs were rolling over. They were telling us we need to. Damn, dude. What a bunch of sellouts. Exactly. There's one chief that uh there was a couple of chiefs in that region. Um I believe the Tacoma chief stood up for his guys, Torriano Green.

SPEAKER_03: 3:01:38

Good.

SPEAKER_00: 3:01:38

Um Central Pierce, uh, which is a uh started out as a uh a collection of smaller towns, but they band together. Pierce is a county. Okay. So they did they put together a larger authority that's that's multiple small towns put together so that they could have better resources and and um cross-train and and you know, better better staffing pool. And Central Pierce actually hired a number of our guys after they got terminated.

SPEAKER_01: 3:02:04

And you couldn't get on with anything?

SPEAKER_00: 3:02:06

Uh I didn't I wasn't aware that they were doing that because basically when that happened, I made the decision. I disconnected from the the social networking that we had, and I said, look, I need to focus on my future.

SPEAKER_02: 3:02:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:02:25

I'm not gonna fight, I'm not gonna put effort into fist. I'm I have to get a business off the ground.

SPEAKER_03: 3:02:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 3:02:29

And in hindsight, I probably probably would have said, Yeah, I'll jump on with I'll get on with Central Pierce. And it would have been a couple of counties away. But um, we have a number of guys that did that, and and they say that the department, the the chief there is just super, super supportive. He's he's been great. Like when he was what they had a a lateral academy, which is a uh a reduced length academy. Basically, we know you know how to be a firefighter, we just need you to teach it, teach it the nuances of how our department does it.

SPEAKER_03: 3:02:56

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:02:57

That when they were having that graduation ceremony, that the the chief that was that was presiding over it was like almost tearing up because you guys had the stones to stand up for what you believe in, and we're happy to have you.

SPEAKER_01: 3:03:07

That's how I feel that like the whole firefighter community is, but it's it's it sucks to hear that these chiefs were such sellouts.

SPEAKER_00: 3:03:15

Here's the thing if if if everybody that voted against against the mandate had stood up and said, fuck you, I'm not giving you my bax card. They would have had two-thirds of the department or half of the department. They would have had to they couldn't have operated with that. That would have been but they didn't. Enough people folded, and then there was there's also a massive ring of fraudulent bax cards.

SPEAKER_01: 3:03:39

Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. So and that's where it goes back to like you you take that how how many dudes folded in in and just bitched out and didn't stand up for the against the shot. That's when people always ask when they're like, Do you think cops would ever turn on U.S. citizens and the military would ever turn on on us? And I 100% agree that I think our military and law enforcement would turn on civilians. 100%. There's no change, I will die on that hill. Because when it comes down to it, they're the ones that are gonna keep getting in getting paid. They're the ones that are gonna have, oh hey, we have we have subsidence and food and everything on these bases when they shut shit down. Right. So those guys, they folded because they don't want to lose a job. Right. So imagine when your job's on the line and you need all you have and you see this country going to shit, like how we're putting military in these cities and stuff, which I'm I'm 50-50 on that. But why like they're gonna do it regardless because you have half of them that are just too stupid to fight the system, and they're like, Oh, I'm a marine, this is our job, we're gonna defend it foreign and domestic, and this is it, because of the bullshit that they're fed. But like when it comes down to it, a lot of people will turn on people just to keep their job. Yeah, and COVID was a huge example of that because those motherfuckers were at home, bitch, I'm not doing the shot, and they ended up doing it because they didn't want to lose their job. And then look at how many dudes that started off saying no and voted against it, and then how many ended up at the end of the day stood on it. Like that's that's what it comes down to. Money, being able to provide for your family. Think about it. If our military, if we shut this country down and went into some martial law where you're not able to move, but the only ones that are still got mobility and able to get paid is the military, you're not gonna leave your job. No way. I don't I think a huge part of our law enforcement and military would 100% turn on us as civilians in a heartbeat, just to provide for their families. And it's hard to say like that I wouldn't. I mean, I wouldn't do it now, but if some young, dumb Marine like I was and be like, I'm doing it for the rights, and I'm a Marine. Right. You know, it's a mindset thing as well.

SPEAKER_00: 3:05:38

It's an interesting perspective. I see a lot of I see a lot of validity in what you said in your points.

SPEAKER_01: 3:05:42

Obviously, your more mature guys, those are the ones I think are gonna be like, mm, been around the block a few times.

SPEAKER_00: 3:05:47

I know this isn't right, but I think you're younger dudes that are well, and that's why why I think it's so important is to is to get those the the ideological zealots out of um out of those higher places in the military and the police and the fire. Because what this is what it has absolutely proven, because here's the thing they lifted the mandate in February of 23. That's I was canned in in um October of or in Nov I was we were all suspended as of October 19th. It took for me, it took them till November 22nd to actually process me out. So I was burning my paid leaves. I was collecting a paycheck and I did have health care for my family for that time until they processed me out. Um but in February of 23, so 14 months later, they lift the mandate. They didn't take any, they took one guy. You couldn't go back? We have people still applying to go back. They changed the civil service rules to allow people to come back.

SPEAKER_02: 3:06:52

And they won't do it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:06:52

And they won't do it. This is a it is absolutely crystal clear this was this was an ideological perch. They got rid of people that would stand up.

SPEAKER_03: 3:07:02

Oh shit.

SPEAKER_00: 3:07:03

Oh, no shit. That's what this is. And I hear I hear people, I I was had a conversation with a with a with a gentleman um who former Washington State Patrol. He was able to step away from a for different reasons, but he said, Oh yeah, they took all our guys back. Actually, no, they didn't, because our lawyer, um we'll get into that in a minute. Our lawyer is also representing a group of Washington State Patrol people who are not back. So we do have, um, it's not a class action, it is a mass tort, which is different. Uh I have learned an awful lot about legal terms in the last couple of years. So a mass tort means each person is an individual and represented as an individual.

SPEAKER_03: 3:07:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 3:07:48

So let's say, hypothetically, that you and I are both on a mass tort claim. And they come to me and they say, Hey, Davey, will you settle for 10 grand? And I go, Yeah, I'll settle for 10 grand. And you go, fuck you, no. Okay, I get my 10 grand settlement and you don't have to settle. With a class action, everybody has to agree to everything. So nobody gets it if one person's a holdout. Uh I didn't know that. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 3:08:17

So that's a better situation than then a black a class action.

SPEAKER_00: 3:08:20

Correct, but it it brings different challenges. For sure. Right?

SPEAKER_01: 3:08:24

Because if somebody sells out for little, then that's the standard.

SPEAKER_00: 3:08:29

Not necessarily. Okay. Not necessarily. But the thing is, is that class actions work well for let's just say hypothetically that that a whole bunch of Ford Explorer's engines blow up.

unknown: 3:08:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 3:08:43

So the guy whose engine blew up in his driveway is affected a whole lot less than the guy who's on a family vacation four states away when his engine blows up.

SPEAKER_01: 3:08:53

Going 70 down the highway.

SPEAKER_00: 3:08:54

Going 70 down the highway. But basically, they both get a new engine. Now, even though they're affected a little bit differently, they both needed a new engine. So that's where class actions kind of come in. Or or might be appropriate or more appropriate. But the thing is, is that I got one of my rookies, he was four years on. One of our guys on our lawsuit was a 30-year captain. He was not that far from retirement. So that's so the effect is very disparate. For sure. Very, very different effects on depending on where people were in their careers. Okay, that makes sense. Right? And so the damages are very, very different. The guys that only had a few years on, they've lost their entire career.

SPEAKER_03: 3:09:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:09:48

Now, have some of them pivoted and tried to get on a different department? Yeah. Have some of them said, yeah, I'm not gonna go through not gonna go through an academy again, or you you know where are they gonna go? So everybody's got these little different nuances about where they're at. But yes, we there are 36 of us, not all, not all 70. And like I say, when I say almost 70, I want to say the number that sticks in my head was like 68. 70. Well, I it it matters to me to be very accurate when we're especially when I'm talking about these kinds of things. That's why I said almost 70. And I think of those 68, I think two or three of them um initially got pulled off the line and then they relented and they went, okay, fine, I'll take the jab, and then they went back to work. Um now here's the thing. If people thought that they were gonna that we were calling their bluff, wouldn't that be great? If you know they got a call a week later, hey, we can't staff half of our fire department. Uh maybe we better rethink this plan, Bob. Nope, they just dug their heels in. So let me share something with you. In the city of Seattle, when they have um college football games at Husky Stadium, which is inside the city limits, when they have Mariners baseball games, when they have Seattle football, uh CF Seahawk games, and when they have Seattle Kraken hockey games, those are all inside the city limits of Seattle. Guess who provides the EMT coverage at those stadiums for those events? Seattle Fire Department. Now you are a huge chunk missing. Correct. And now what they have had to do, they are show short short staffed. They have to take engines out of neighborhoods that are paying taxes to have coverage, to send those people to staff the Husky football game.

SPEAKER_01: 3:11:39

These communities are like uproar over this that their their taxes are going to their department and they're going.

SPEAKER_00: 3:11:44

Why I said it. I'm not sure they know. I want, I would love it if somebody was flying a bloody plane around the town with a with a streamer behind it, telling, making sure everybody knew exactly what's gone on under Harold Scoggin's watch.

SPEAKER_01: 3:11:59

Oh shit. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't get it. It doesn't like make it make sense. Why why? What I mean, I get why. It makes sense. It's an it was an ideological purge. When you say that, that's the only thing that makes sense to me of why you would want to get rid of a huge portion of law enforcement and firefighters that are fighting that would fight the system. So that's where it's like, okay, what's next?

SPEAKER_00: 3:12:25

Now, here's the other thing. It's interesting in Seattle. The Seattle police guild, their union, they fought it. They didn't roll over. My understanding is their guys didn't get fired.

SPEAKER_01: 3:12:39

Yeah, and the cops got you guys on that one, huh? Uh-huh. Should have been a cop.

SPEAKER_00: 3:12:44

Yeah. Nah. You're like, fuck that. So um, you know what I what I would consider doing here is is uh depending on where we actually get to land, because we're still renting. Yeah. Um, wherever we do get to land here, uh, I would really consider joining a local sheriff's posse.

SPEAKER_02: 3:13:01

Really?

SPEAKER_00: 3:13:02

Oh, absolutely. I would.

SPEAKER_02: 3:13:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:13:05

I got a I got a friend that I reconnected with, um, it's part of Waihee County. Uh, cool. And and it's like, that'd be kind of badass. So um I'm still in pretty decent shape, you know. Um, I can get the job done. So that'd be kind of through the academy at 50. How old did you say you were? For the I'm 51. For the acad for the posse, I don't know if you have to go through the academy. For the posse. Oh, really? Yeah. Be if I go be like a sworn deputy, that's that's different. But I think for the sheriff posse, I I don't know. I need to look into it. We have got other things on our plate that are far more important for me to before I look into that. But there's a part of me like, that'd be kind of cool.

SPEAKER_01: 3:13:44

I got a guy you need to talk to. Okay. Yeah, one of my buddies. He's uh you guys need to link up. He runs a small contracting company too. And he's he's always struggling, like needing help-wise, got people to just fill in for him.

SPEAKER_00: 3:13:56

And but yeah, it's it's um we're I'm a one-man show. We don't have employees, um, and we do that on purpose. I keep my quality control really high. Yeah, yeah. And um I try really hard to bring to there's a lot of great colleagues that I have that that there's enough work to go around. I don't feel like anybody's really competition, really. There's gonna be jobs that I miss out on because they pick somebody else, but um I try really hard to to separate ourselves from from my colleagues with with just high customer service, good communication, that sort of stuff. And, you know, what I will share, and I I don't mean disrespect to the people that are legacy here, but when you come from a place where we came from, what I'm finding is that the the contractors that c that are coming here from Seattle, maybe the Portland market, some places in California, their standards, they're used to dealing with higher standards. And so the delivery of the their work standards are different. Oh, it's kind of shit here. Well, here's the fun, here's the funny thing. People around here, when they built the house built home builders here, they don't understand what flashing is. They don't know how to do it, right? I come from a place where it rained eight months out of the year. If you don't flash write, you're back on a warranty. You gotta learn how to flash write. That's just one example.

SPEAKER_01: 3:15:18

Well, they're just cookie cutters, man. Like, because you know, my wife does real estate and she I'll go to some of these new new new builds, million-dollar build, yeah, million and a half dollar home, and I'll walk them through like the fuck. And she's like, babe, you have no idea. Just how things are terrible. How we were just at a house a couple weeks ago and yeah, eight hundred thousand dollar home and like the drain pipe that comes off the house into the ground. It was it was like nine inches off. I'm like, how do you this is almost a million-dollar home?

SPEAKER_00: 3:15:45

How do these how do you how do you explain that? How do you excuse that away? An explanation is uh yeah, we need to fix it. Sorry it happened. This is why we think it happened, but we're gonna fix it. That that's an explanation. How do you excuse it? Yeah, it's just what we're gonna that's what we're gonna do. Just get a flexible tube that goes into it, you know. Right. So yeah, it's it's stuff like that. So, so you know, if you decide to to invite us out to take a look at your project, we run our our business model a little bit different. We put a lot of trust in our clients first. Um and and you know, if they're gonna trust us to to come into their home and work on their home, um, I feel I need to be able to show them some trust too. Yeah, absolutely. So that's just kind of how we roll.

SPEAKER_01: 3:16:28

That goes a lot, that goes a really long way. And that's how you build a really good clientele as far as referrals.

SPEAKER_00: 3:16:32

I was blessed that before we left the the Seattle market, within six months I had more work than I could handle because of my lifetime of relationships and people who trusted my skill set and my integrity and those. But you know, then sometimes I do wonder maybe we should have stayed there and stayed busy throughout the winter. But but we're incredibly thankful and happy to be here. We really, really are. We want to be great members of the community, we want to be great neighbors. We, you know, we we like it here. How long have you been here? Uh three and a half years. Okay. I moved the wife and the youngest over here on Memorial Weekend, and then I had to go back to finish a project, and I was back there for a month staying with a buddy. And then on July 3rd, I showed up with the pain train and uh and got after it. Got after it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 3:17:26

Good for you. Yeah. What's been your biggest learning lesson? Making a transition, you lost your career at 21 years in, extremely hard pivot, you picked up and moved states. What's been your biggest learning lesson from all of this?

SPEAKER_00: 3:17:44

My wife's got my back. Fucking hey, right? You know. Um without it, it it it wouldn't have it wouldn't have happened. Hopefully she knows I've got hers, but without her having my back, it's you know, she runs the books on the back side of the business, she runs our marketing, so she's the one that's constantly scouring the different social media channels, you know, people posting up on Facebook or next or this, that, or the other. So she's she's working on that, trying to and and then we've got a we've got a pretty basic website, and we've got a um a couple of different Facebook pages that we that we use to to post up, you know, these are samples of jobs and and and try to use that for for marketing. So we're not paying for marketing service. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 3:18:26

So but yeah, and uh um, it's good knowing your wife's got your back, huh?

SPEAKER_00: 3:18:31

Uh-huh. It is pretty awesome. It is, it is. It really is. And and dude, it's been trial by fire, right? 100%. So um it's it's a relationship that we've we've had arguments, but that's marriage. Um that's business and marriage. It is, it is, right? And and go to business with your with your spouse, and and you're gonna learn a whole other side of your spouse.

SPEAKER_01: 3:18:52

We've worked together, Britt and I have worked together longer. We've worked together longer than we haven't. So out of 17 years, I think That's awesome. Three or four of them that we haven't worked together. Nice.

SPEAKER_03: 3:19:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 3:19:03

That's good. And there's been some learning lessons.

SPEAKER_00: 3:19:06

Sure, sure. You know, and and and and I'm gonna say, look, most of the time it's me that's stepping in it. Every time, you know, every time. Um, there's only been a couple of times where she's going, yeah, I kind of dropped that ball. But it's been when she drops the ball, it's always been minor. I'm the one that made sure it up pretty big, right? So, but it's been a big blessing. Um you know, I just recently we had an interesting conversation because we're trying to unpack some stuff, and I'm not trying to get all touchy-feely about it, but um, we did talk about mental health with with the fire service, and there's something I I I think might be might be worth mentioning because it it does, it's on me like like a weight on my shoulders. It just never leaves. So I'm gonna start with a story from when I was about 22.

SPEAKER_03: 3:19:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 3:19:56

So I got out of college, I did the college thing, and went got out of college, bounced around just a little bit, and I was working on a construction crew for a friend of the family, and I was the junior man in the crew. So we were in a um working in a neighborhood that was kind of hoity-toity, uh, in Bellevue, Washington, if you know Bellevue in relation to Seattle. Bellevue's kind of like Bellevue is to Seattle what Eagle is to Boise. Okay. Okay, it's it's pretty swanky. And we're working on a house that had a house fire. And the crew, being the junior guy, you know, a few minutes before 10, they'd send me, they'd pull out a couple of bucks and they'd send me to local 7-Eleven to get coffee. They wanted coffee, but they weren't going to spend five bucks on Starbucks. And I remember walking in, and I'm walking up the counter, and I got these coffees in the tray and so forth. And this young lady that was age-appropriate pulls up and she's dressed in the nines, and she's got her little BMW, and she looks at me up and down and and then kind of scoffs like I'm some sort of a third-class citizen. I'm in work boots. I'm in work clothes. And one of the things that I've observed that really hasn't changed. Now, being a fireman, it is very much a blue-collar job. I have been pooped on, spit on, bled on, and peed on all in one shift. By the end of the day, I was in my, I was in a borrowed t-shirt and underwear underneath my bunking pants, and that's all I had because that station didn't have a washing machine. So I couldn't wash my clothes. Like, I can stick them in a bucket with disinfectant, but they're gonna go home wet. Yeah. It's like this is dumb. Anyway. When our society as a whole, I'm not saying individual, I'm not saying you, I'm not saying any one person, but as a whole, our society still looks down on people that do blue-collar jobs as well. Absolutely. And and the you see the stickers on some trucks, the the dirty hands, clean money is sort of like a little bit of a protest to that. But every time I see somebody put out, oh, hey, I want somebody to do this and this and this and that, that's reasonable. All right. Now I don't reply to this because it wouldn't be good for business marketing. But it's like, hey, wait a minute. That price is reasonable. The price that I charge is reasonable because should we be I haven't taken a vacation in since our honeymoon in 2015? That's the last vacation I took. Um should my kids have to shop at thrift stores because uh I'm a contractor? Should should that guy over there should should his wife um have to drive a 1974 pinto because he's a plumber? Should you know, should that guy over there that that pumps out septic tanks should should should his kids not be able to play use sign up and play youth soccer? Absolutely not. Those are individuals that are that have skills that that computer programmer doesn't have or that banker doesn't have. Do you know how to use when I say you, I'm not saying you personally, but does this individual's hypothetical person, do they know how to run the tools that I have?

SPEAKER_02: 3:23:11

Nope.

SPEAKER_00: 3:23:12

Nope. They could cut their arm off if they tried to start a chainsaw. You know? Um and and so I would really like to see people look at their blue-collar trades, the people that do the blue-collar jobs and and and look at them a little bit differently and quit trying to tell them that they can't charge a fair dollar.

SPEAKER_01: 3:23:35

Or they need to lower their price to meet your expectations.

SPEAKER_00: 3:23:41

Maybe you should find a way to earn more money. Because, you know, I drive I've never I've never bought a new a new car or truck ever in my whole life. Um in full disclosure, when I was brand new in the fire department and I did the stupid young kid move, after I got hired with the fire department, I went and bought a Harley. I bought that brand new.

SPEAKER_01: 3:24:05

Okay. At least it wasn't a four-most thing with like 25% interest. That's the marine thing to do.

SPEAKER_00: 3:24:10

Okay, all right. No, it was a Harley. And I sold it a year and a half later so I could buy a house. Okay. Um, but that's my only new vehicle I ever purchased. Ever. So I drive a seven-year-old three-quarter ton pickup. I take good care of it. It looks nice, it looks professional and clean. It's got 150,000 miles on it. I'm not in the market to buy a new pickup truck. I don't have a$10,000 wrap or paint job on it. It's a if money was no object, dude, I'm putting some 35s and a six-inch lift on that bitch because I like a big jacked up truck. No, money is m money does matter. You know, my wife drives a 12-year-old car with 100,000 miles on it. Now we bought it two years ago, but it had 90,000 miles on it, and it was 10 years old when we bought it. Um we don't live in extravagant. We don't go out to dinner, hardly at all. What the person that goes out to eat is me. On Friday mornings, I meet the men of our Bible study group for breakfast.

SPEAKER_03: 3:25:24

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_00: 3:25:24

Which is really, really cool. It's a wonderful opportunity for me to sit and fellowship with other people that have the same values, and and it's that's wonderful. That's the going out to eat that we do. Um so I have your business owner. When you're comparing prices of business owners, do they have like real insurance? Do they have are they paying are they paying legitimate employees? Are they actually paying their employees properly? Are they paying workers' comp insurance on their employees if they have employees? Um are they able to put anything away for retirement? Are they a lot goes into it? There's an enormous do they pay legitimate as much as I hate taxes. I I on our interview, I've I've I've said that I'm willing to pay taxes for certain things, but we pay taxes and every day. I don't take cash and give a cash discount. I know plenty of business owners that do. I don't. I would 100% I 100% would. Just because of the government. Right. But but we choose now here's the funny thing. I've been audited once. Yeah. Now we won that audit, but that was absolutely excruciating. Oh yeah. And they come in like bullies. You know, they the way they come in, I want to meet them at the at the front door with a bat with a baseball bat wrapped the barbed wire. No, I I mean, in in in reality, they should have to be the one that finds the error, not say you prove that you didn't make any errors.

SPEAKER_01: 3:27:07

That's how it should be. For sure. But we've gotten so soft and let the government in the aspect of our business and personal lives that they own us now.

SPEAKER_00: 3:27:15

Yeah. So, you know, but we choose to run everything by the books.

SPEAKER_01: 3:27:20

That's what and that's longevity. Yeah. That's where you build a reputation, that's where people know how you're running and that's what that's what lasts the longest. When you're firing from the hip, especially in the contracting world, I mean, you'll get by and you'll make a bunch of money for a bit, but it gets outed. It does. For sure.

SPEAKER_00: 3:27:36

It does. So yeah, we're we're playing the long game with this. Yeah. So yeah. Um love it. But that's that's us. And and you know, the uh the lawsuit that we're doing that we're dealing with, it's a wrongful termination lawsuit, um, or however you want to describe it. I don't know how that uh legally is, but but um the funny thing is the law firm that's helping us, they're great lawyers, but they're a small firm. And they can't afford to do it on contingency. So we're paying as we go. And, you know, um, there's a handful of us that that there's a few that have been able to to be able to keep up with with what's with what's asked. Yeah. And there's a handful of people that haven't. We started a nonprofit called, if I may, um Seattle Fired, F-I-R-E-D.com. Great name. And um if anybody decides that they would like to learn more about us, we have a website. You can go there. You can learn about who we are, and and um if people have questions, we're a 501c3 um nonprofit. So if you ch if people choose to donate to help us with the legal fund, and that's all it's going to, it's not going to anything else. Um they'll get a they'll get a receipt that they can deduct from their taxes, um, which is huge. Um we've got we're fighting back. And right now, we have them dead to rights. I hope so. We have them dead to rights. We have it in their own hand. Emails that they have. But now it's the long game where they're just gonna drag things out. Correct. And they've hired an outside counsel law firm and and you know, big highfalutin kind of thing, and they're they're very much dragging their feet. Oh, yeah. They'll just they'll just make you guys run out of money. That yes, at this point in time, it's an arms race. That's the big big boy game. That's their goal. And so um our goal is to be able to withstand that. Yeah. We just have to outlast by one inch above the treetops. We just we just gotta be able to outlast them.

SPEAKER_01: 3:29:46

Oh, I hope it works, man. Because you guys deserve it. What a shitty, what a shitty situation.

SPEAKER_00: 3:29:51

And the thing is, Bam is it's not just we're not just fighting for us. Because If we get rulings that are in favor of what vindicate what what we what we did and and and rulings against them for their behaviors, here's the thing. It doesn't matter what your faith is. That's a ruling against uh religious discrimination. That's it doesn't matter what your a victory for us does nothing but strengthen the individual. It lets it it and their individual freedoms of other people, even if they don't share our value system. Right? Thomas was it was it no who was it that said one of the founders was is is quoted as saying, you know, I may disagree with what you said, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it. Right? I mean, as Christians, um, I'd love to have a theological conversation with you about it. I actually believe that the cornerstone of Christian of all Christianity is the freedom of choice, whether it was the choice to or not to eat of the fruit in the garden. That's everything. That's that's it. Yeah. It's it, but we have agency, we have accountability for our choices too. But that's what Jesus is the grace for that, right? So, so if you want to choose to worship differently than I do, fine. Absolutely. I want you to have that right. Our nation was founded on that. And and, you know, when when I'm gonna stand up and say, yeah, I'm not okay with using uh tissue from an aborted fetus. Um but you guys I sorry, I'm I'm not I'm not letting you profit off of that.

SPEAKER_01: 3:31:56

This is a hell of a battle that you guys have, though, because if you win, that opens up the floodgates to everybody else that got fired for religious exempts. Yep. And the state's not gonna let that happen. Uh that's why we're in federal court. Even probably worse, huh? No. Really? We're we're that's gonna that's gonna fuck a lot of companies. Which I hope it does because they should not have been fired for any any reason.

SPEAKER_00: 3:32:22

What we have is we are tracking other rulings. Okay. One of the things that happened a year and a half ago was the Groff v. DeJoy decision. And that was and that was at the SCOTUS Supreme Court. Okay. Ruled nine to nothing, unanimous. And Mr. uh DeJoy was the postmaster general at the time. That's why his name is v. DeJoy. But Mr. Groff was the plaintiff. And he worked, uh, I believe it was in Pennsylvania. He worked for a letter carrier. He was worked for the mail uh mail department, uh postal service. And he did so because the mail doesn't get delivered on Sundays. So he knew that he could have that job and never be asked to work on his Sabbath. Great. Well, the post office outfit that he worked for, the the whatever it was, they picked up an Amazon contract. And so now they said, Hey, you're gonna deliver on Sundays. And he said, Well, I'll trade with people as best as I can. So he would trade off if he was assigned to Sunday, he'd trade it off and he'd work somebody else's other day. And then he said, you know, hey, let's, let's, I'm gonna go ahead and transfer to a different postal office that doesn't have a contract with Amazon. Okay, fine. So he transfers. And now he is back to not having to worry about working Sundays. And then that one picked up an Amazon contract. Now, my understanding, I could be wrong, but my understanding is that ultimately Groff resigned, he wasn't fired. But he still sued. And he won. And what it did is it and not only that, there was also a ruling at the Ninth Circuit, um, which we are in, with the Bacon case. Now, the Bacon case, great name, is a group of Spokane firefighters, the the lead plaintiff or the named plaintiff, Michael Bacon. And when that was ruled on by the uh Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals at the appellate level, that's where they get the three-judge panel. They said you have to use strict scrutiny when you're evaluating, did they accommodate you or did they not? Strict scrutiny is the absolute hardest standard for the government to meet. Now, earlier, the Groff decision that I mentioned was telling you the story about, revisited the hardened case, which was Trans World Airlines from 1970s or 80s or something like that. And they didn't overturn it. What they did is they clarified it. And they said, you have to prove undue hardship. You can't just claim it. What is undue hardship? And if you're a company of a certain size, undue hardship, the bar that you have to meet is a whole lot bigger. Now, I'm speaking a little bit out of turn from a lawyer standpoint because I'm not using the right legal terms. I don't understand them. When we talk to lawyers, sometimes I got to go to the dictionary and go, what was that word?

SPEAKER_01: 3:35:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:35:36

Right. So I'm doing my best to relate to it.

SPEAKER_01: 3:35:38

You've done a lot of because you know a lot of cases.

SPEAKER_00: 3:35:39

So you've you've just consumed your life. We have, yes. We fortunately it hasn't, I haven't, it hasn't had to consume mine, at least that area of it, because we have other people in our group. There are a couple of people that that's what they do. And they are they they've got alerts on different court dockets that pop up. Um my wife, Becky, is she's tracking all different court decisions and what documents are filed and this, that, and the other thing.

SPEAKER_01: 3:36:06

This shit's gonna be going on for years.

SPEAKER_00: 3:36:08

This is gonna be going on for a while.

SPEAKER_01: 3:36:09

Not even just yours. I mean, just correct just cases across the whole U.S. This is gonna last decades.

SPEAKER_00: 3:36:14

Eventually, this COVID vax, COVID shot stuff is gonna make it to the SCOTUS. Oh, for sure. Eventually it's gonna make it. Now, here's what happens. If if you get stuff doesn't make it up to the SCOTUS until you usually, until you get, hey, the Fifth Circuit ruled this way and the Ninth Circuit just ruled differently. Well, now they gotta go up the mom and dad because they can't they they disagree. That's that's one of the ways that stuff gets kicked up to the SCOTUS for them to weigh in and basically settle it once and for all. Yeah. So we've been tracking a lot of these different cases. Um, some of it the state court level, some of at the federal court level. And every once in a while you'll get one that doesn't go, I'm gonna I'm gonna whoops, I'm gonna say our way.

SPEAKER_03: 3:37:05

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:37:06

Even though it's not, we're not a part of it, but basically that doesn't support our argument or our approach to this. Okay. What we have found is that that has been from uh activist judges, and that seems to get it overturned on appeal. Where it can't get overturned on appeal is when it's at the state level, the st the highest court of the state, and it's not in federal court. That's where they get a little bit that where it can get a little sticky. All right. Um but we're pretty positive that as this unfolds. Yeah, you guys you guys have got a mountain to climb. We do, but the dam is breaking. Good. The dam is breaking. It's it's it's cracks here, cracks here.

SPEAKER_01: 3:37:49

Just chips, that's all you need in little chips away.

SPEAKER_00: 3:37:51

Yeah. Chip it away, I think. And patience. And we have to be willing to outlast them. For sure. Now, you may never met a group of more stubborn people than firemen. We could be we could be met Marines, bro.

SPEAKER_01: 3:38:03

Yeah, yeah, okay. Stubborn with like a little hint of the tism.

SPEAKER_00: 3:38:10

Okay. Nothing. Right, right. Well we've we we've got one of our guys is a Marine. Uh he's perfect. Yeah, yeah. So, but we're we're 36 strong.

SPEAKER_01: 3:38:20

Um but if it's your belief and this is how you truly feel and stand, like why would you not fight it?

SPEAKER_00: 3:38:27

Because it's easier to not fight it and take it. No, not no, you know. But but yeah, I mean, well, that's why. But we we don't in our family, we don't do the easy route. We do the right route. Yeah, right. And, you know, one of the things that I that I I I sent you, I should have sent it to you sooner, uh, you know, uh was the retirement letter that I sent out uh as I was, you know, thinking my email access was gonna end. And it was basically, look, I have an obligation to my sons as a father to model for them what it looks like to stand up for your beliefs in the face of adversity. 100%. And if I'm gonna do that, I will stand toe-to-toe with you and I will trade blows. 100%. You know, and I might be spitting chiclets, but your kids watched. But they're gonna watch, and they're they're gonna see, they're gonna see dad fight.

SPEAKER_01: 3:39:20

Yeah. That's my biggest problem with these people. It's like, what are you showing your children? Right. You're you're a coward that just bent the knee. You got on your knees and kissed the freaking feet, and you're like, oh, okay, just because we don't want to lose money. And your kids are watching that. Right. Like you just set the example for your children to just bend over, take whatever the the government's gonna give you. Like, that is one of our things in this home. We fight it. No, 100%. If it, if if we truly feel about it, oh, good luck getting in my wife's crosshairs. You are done. Like, she's fought ginormous hotel chains in one by writing letters and making it look like she was a lawyer, and they're like, All right, we're cool. Like, yeah, she because that it goes down the principle at the end of the day. How my children have to watch me right sit there and just bow to somebody. No, absolutely not. When I know I'm I'm a hundred percent right, dude. There's been times where it cost me some big shit, and I was like, this is no way, right? This is how I this is how I feel. That was one of my big problems in the military. That was why I couldn't I couldn't do a full career because there was things that I believed in. I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Right. And I'd fight it on everything and be like, shut the fuck up, get in line. I'd be like, no, right, just because I'm a number here, absolutely not. I'm glad, I'm glad you um you guys are fighting it, man. And you're doing it for your kids, and you're doing it for your the other fellow firefighters and everything else. It's it's it's it is, but it's it's actually it's not limited to that. It's limited to everybody. Everybody, yeah. Everybody. This is just gonna start momentum of every other things. And you guys aren't the only ones and the only and the only state and all these other states. This is happening everywhere. It just needs to start cracking away at this dam and pieces of it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:41:01

So it'll happen. We're gonna get there. We we we do have we do have faith, yeah, right. Um, and that's it, that's the beauty of it, right? You know, there are there moments of massive frustration. The the emotions run the gambit. I mean, they really do. Um, you know, sometimes it's it's elation. You know, we get you know, a friend that that uh wasn't in our union, wasn't one of us, he was a 911 dispatcher on the police side, but um they settled with her. And uh so happy for her, yeah. So happy for, you know, um, so that's good. That's all important stuff. Yep. That's what you need. Yeah. And and just not, but we celebrate that, and and you know, unfortunately, we can also be our own worst enemies. If there's nothing to do, we will create an emergency. Um and we've had that happen a little bit recently. And it's like, all right, guys, calm down. We're in this together. We're not here to see through one another, we're here to see each other through. We are, if we're gonna get through this, we're gonna do it because we stay together. Yep. Um I heard it attributed to an African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with many. This is this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. Oh, for sure. This is a marathon. And and I have um four or five guys in that group of 36 that I have some kind of a connection with.

SPEAKER_03: 3:42:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:42:33

You know, one of them was a rookie under me, one of them was a guy who was a rookie with me at the at my first station, just on a different crew. Then there was, you know, other guys that were at my my station, my final station.

SPEAKER_03: 3:42:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:42:49

We have, and I pick up the phone and I call them every five to six weeks. Now it's not like, hey, this is my day to call everybody. It's just, hey, you know what? It's been a few weeks since I talked to this guy. And I pick up and go, how are you? What's going on? How's your family? What's new? Speaking of rookies, yes. Last question for you, and we'll wrap this up. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 3:43:12

What's a what's a piece of advice that you would give to the young guys wanting to become a firefighter?

SPEAKER_00: 3:43:20

Um be ready to think it through. First of all, it is a dirty, nasty, gross job. And you have to be ready to do hard, physical, sweaty, gross, yucky work. It's not, you know, calendars and kittens. It's it's a very, very gross and dirty job. You're in the trenches. You're in the trenches, and you're gonna see things that that um the rest of the world pays you so that they don't have to see and do. So we we've touched on some of that. Um the mental health aspect of firefighters or first responders uh is I don't think it's anything unlike what it is for the military. I just don't have personal experience of walking in your shoes to be able to compare the two. But you're gonna have to take good care of yourself mentally. You need to take care of good care of yourself physically. Yeah. And um I've had 15 surgeries. Most of them were from my job. Not all, but most. Um, and you know, I, with the few exceptions, I showed up fit, ready for duty every day. And what you don't know is you don't know what that next call is gonna be. Is that next call gonna be a band-aid run and you can yawn through it? Or is that next call gonna be you're gonna have to find a strength inside of you that you didn't know that you have, or your partner on your tailboard doesn't go home to his family. Never mind the strangers that you're serving.

SPEAKER_03: 3:45:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:45:07

Um, and because you don't know what that next call is gonna be, you can't plan for it. You you shouldn't show up going, oh, you know what? Um, I'm really tired today because I stayed up last night, you know, with my girlfriend. Um, that's disrespecting the people that share your patch that you serve alongside of you. They expect you to show up and bring your best. Yeah. Show up and bring your best. Now, I was the first person in my family. And being a fireman is typically, it's a uh historically, it's a it's a legacy career. You your dad did it, or you did it, cause your dad did it, because your uncle did it, your granddad did it, that sort of a thing. I'm the first one in my family to do that. So I didn't have that context of somebody looking at me saying, hey, get ready for this. Um I sent you an email. Uh would you get a chance, you can review it and you can see it, and we can talk about it again if you want. But I put together a rookie guide. Now, it's kind of long. It's big print, but it's like 40 pages. And it's basically a collection of lessons. Some of them I knew and I'm glad I knew, and some of them are I learned the hard way. Some of them I learned by watching other people learn the hard way. Like, yeah, I don't want to do that. But it's basically it's a, it's a um, it's an approach that, hey, these are some things that you need to that would be good for you to remember. It is a job that is, you know, a hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress, which is both good and bad. Change only for the sake of change uh brings frustration and undermines the group. But change because you need to, if you want to get better, you have to grow. In order to grow, you do have to change. For sure. So work on you. Be the best version of you that you can be. Now, one of the things that worked out really, really well for me is that, and this is something that a lot of people in service struggle with. And that is that transition out. You have a few different groups. You've got people that transition out because they retired, they did a full career, whether it's military or fire or cop or medic. You have people that did this group is smaller, or excuse me, this group. This group is mostly the military that did four years, eight years, and then they're done. So their their earning isn't complete. They still need to transition to go do something else. Well, have a plan for that, even if you're in the military, right? Sometimes you have the people that their careers are ended for them. Like one of my uh a police officers that gets shot in the line of duty and now he's in a wheelchair. Maybe he can go do admin work, but he can't he can't roll that cruiser no more. No, right? Um now the people that their careers are ended for them when there's an injury. Everybody can see that. Even if it's a PTS, it's it's it's it's like, no, no, you're we we can see that. And then we have this new group, which is us people that we weren't injured, we just it was a political. Yeah, it was it was a political force. That's a very, very, very, very small number of people. Um but those are so so you really have like three categories. Start planning for it. Um and your reputation is is the only thing you really have, and it's gonna go ahead of you. So if you have the reputation of being a shit bird, that's gonna go ahead of you. Now, I have a guy that I know, I consider him a friend, that he owned the fact that the first few years of his career he made a mess of his reputation.

SPEAKER_01: 3:48:51

That's a small community, too.

SPEAKER_00: 3:48:53

It is. You know, in in our in our department, he made a mess. But he had a come to Jesus moment and said, you know what? I've made some serious mistakes and I need to make some changes. And I have so much respect for what he did. When he said, you know what? I'm not happy with what I see in the mirror, and I'm gonna make it better. So he went to a different place, he put himself at their mercy and said, I know nobody wants to work with me because I've made a bad, uh, a bad history, but I'm coming because I'm looking to make a change and improve that and correct that. And he's now an officer in the fire department. And I'm so proud of him for making that decision, right? And he's a good dude. That's what it takes. Yeah, and and and and and so um the your reputation is huge. Um one of the I've struggled with some of the the generational things with because it seems so much even out in the in the construction world, it seems like the new people don't, the younger, they don't want to work. And that's a challenge. But at the same time, there is somebody else helped point out to me that there is a potential benefit to that. He said it's kind of the why generation. That's that gentleman, Paul Pentani, he runs a transition to a podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Um good stuff. Um, but he talked about what he and I were talking, he was like, the millennials have a different approach to this. They do want to know why. They don't just blindly follow. They're very, very smart, and they want to know why. But the other thing that's going to be interesting with this next generation is they they aren't they don't make it their identity. And that's a double-edged sword, whichever path you go. Because I made a decision before I got terminated, years before, that I needed to make sure that my identity wasn't I'm Davy, I'm a fireman. My identity needs to be first, I'm a Christian. Second, I'm a husband. Third, I'm a father, fourth, I'm a friend. After that, somewhere, you can throw in the fact that my vocation is a fireman. And for I think for the people that struggle with their transition out of service, they make whether it's the Marine Corps, the Air Force, firemen, police, they they I they make their identity that. And that makes for a harder transition. So I would encourage uh try to find the right relationship. And I hate the word balance. I hate the word balance, but try to find the right mix, the right relationship of when the days are shitty, you're there because the guy next to you, not because I'm all that in a bag of chips. When when you're dealing with that crappy call and that crappy job you gotta do, you're there. I'm there because I don't want to make my tailboard guy do all the shitty work. Yeah. That's you know, um, it's about the guy next to you. For sure. That you're serving alongside of because you're there. I got your back, you got mine. You know.

SPEAKER_01: 3:52:32

Yeah, it's a big thing. I we deal with it a lot. Like, you know, having an organization for over 12 years, it was crazy in the beginning days because we were pulling dudes out of hospitals. I mean, their amputeed sutures are still healing, and guys are pulling guns out of guys' mouths. Now we fast forward 20 years, and a lot of these dudes are still struggling. So it would like we you take a step back and it's like, okay, how are we struggling this bad after 20 years that there's been hardly any change in a bunch of these dudes? And I truly feel it comes down to their identity because at the end of the day, oh I'm I'm an army ranger, I'm a soldier, I'm a marine. It's like, no, you're not, bro. It cool. It was a title that you held for four, eight, twelve, twenty years, whatever it is. Cool. Fly your fly your flag, put your sticker and your hat on, rep. Awesome, be proud of it. But it's not who you were. Like, I never there was a time in my Marine Corps when I started I started despising the military. I I left my uniform at work. I rode every day to work. I'd got dressed at work at the end of the day. I got undressed and I drove home in my civilian clothes, either on my bike or my truck, did not matter. I never brought my uniform home because it was a job to me. Right. And I would get so much backlash, you're not a job, this is this is life. You're a Marine for life. And it's like, no, fucking not, bro. Like, I'm I'm I signed this dumbass dotted line because I had nothing else to do because I was gonna fail at college and I needed out of my little podunk ass town. So I I joined and went to war. Like, cool, did it, time for me to move on. Right. And so that's when it like people are like, Man, did you struggle transitioning out? I'm like, I didn't struggle. There was tough times of figuring life out, you know. And I went on a contract and went right to Afghan on the private side. But it was never like this. What am I gonna do with my life now? Because and it's the same when I say it's the same with athletes, it's the same with cops, firefighters, and people that are in a career, right? And something that they built their whole life around this image of being somebody, they forget that it's a job. And at the end of the day, you can be fired at any moment, you can lose everything for a stupid decision, and you could write it out for 30 years, right? But it's it's a job, and then it's just like everything, it just becomes part of who they are and their identity. And I'm a huge advocate for time to find a new identity and start a new chapter because that's and then it's like, bro, you're you're sitting here telling me about you're struggling and you're on the edge and you want to kill yourself about your buddy that died in Iraq in 2004. Right. I'm like, fuck, like, I can't help you at this point. Right, you need you right the trips that I'm sending you on, the therapy, the clinics, the retreats, the bonding, all of this is not going to work until you look your ass in the mirror and go, okay, who am I? What's this new chapter I need to start? Because if not, you're always gonna be a victim. Yep, you're always gonna be, well, I was I was a marine and I did my time and now I have nothing and I'm struggling. And it's like that that's why. That is why. Because you are just the soldier, you're just the sailor in your own eyes, and that's the pity party that you put on yourself. And instead of being like, damn, dude, did my time, served my country, fucking hey, man, it was badass. Best friends that I've ever made in my life, the craziest, wildest shit I've ever experienced in my life. What's next? Right. There you go. It's like the the and I explain it is that identity crisis is the exact is like the Napoleon, like, I could throw a football over that mountain, you know, and he like it's the same shit. It's the same as the guy sitting at home wearing his Letterman jacket at the bar, and he graduated in 2003, and he's like, Yeah, back up. We went to States my senior year. It's like, did you, buddy? Cool. Like, what have you done since? Right.

SPEAKER_00: 3:56:07

Well, and that's and that's something that my wife and I are are absolutely committed to is adding value. And one of the greatest ways to get past your own, to get out of that is to find somebody else that you can add value to. Okay. So uh I'm gonna uh again, I'm gonna be very candid. Um couple of weeks ago, God put something on my heart. Now, most of my adult life, I thought it'd be cool to go do a mission trip. Never quite, never had that that tug that just got right into you and said, no, this is the one. A couple of weeks ago, I'm going, I got a friend that needs help. And I really felt, I don't know how any other way to put it than God put it on me. And I chose to say yes. So one of the guys that was with us that got canned, he moved his family to Virginia. Now, I honestly, Eric's a friend. He was one of my rookies. I have a great amount of pride for, you know, he worked his way up to being an officer in the fire department and and and was doing a good job. Well, Eric, his wife, and their three kids are living in a 22 or three-foot Terry travel trailer and have been for three years. Now, I'm not totally versed in what decisions led him to that. I don't care. That's not my job. I'm sure he he's a good human. I'm sure he was doing the best decisions with the information that he had for what was best for his family at the time. That I'm absolutely certain of. But it gets down to single digits in the wintertime over there, and they've been living in a Terry Travel trailer. This sucks. So I said, you know what, honey? I'm gonna go help Eric. Now, we I put the put the message out to the folks on our email list from our our group. I said, This is what I'm gonna do. I left Eric off the list. I said, Eric, send me pictures, send me drunks. What do you got? This is the shit I do. I build stuff, right? Now he has a metal building on his property and a slab poured in the metal building. Awesome. That means I don't have to worry about exterior or anything. And I said, I'm gonna drive out there and I'm gonna build out a living quarters inside that. It is not gonna be the Taj Mahal, but I'm gonna get you a bathroom with a shower and a sink and a toilet and a door, and I'm gonna get you and a fan, and I'm gonna get you a bedroom, and I'm gonna get you a kitchen, and I'm gonna build the the way the building is structured. We really have only one format. We're we're kind of locked into it. We don't have any options. It's like, all right, it's this. Um, and then there's gonna be a loft area above it for his three kids to share a bedroom. And you know, I kind of laugh because I go, I don't know, I can't afford to pay for this. We're going into our what has historically been our slow season. Um this is gonna have to this is gonna take a God thing. But I'm gonna walk on faith. And you know, within a couple of days, I had people said, I got your travel costs. Awesome. Thank you. Now I've just this morning I've submitted a request for donations for materials to um uh 84 Lumber, who has an outfit here. They do a lot of charity work with vets and and first responders. So we're gonna see where that goes. But right now, this is a God thing. It's gonna take me three weeks. It's a three day drive out there, and it's gonna be a three day drive back.

unknown: 3:59:59

Um

SPEAKER_00: 4:00:00

Um, I've got a handful of people that said, hey, I'll come help. Um but I'll tell you the best way to get your eyes off of your own pity party is to put them on somebody else and do good for somebody else. 100%. And we are big, my wife and I, we're big in personal growth and mentorship. I'll tell you this much I'm a better version of me every day that I read from something from a growth book where I learn how to be a better version of me for 15 minutes in the morning. And if I do that, I'm a better husband to her, I'm a better dad to our kind to our kids, um, I'm a better member of our community. And if we look at mentorship as I have a couple of mentors in my life. All they are is people that have similar values that are on the path that I'm on, they're just farther along. Yep. Now, my main mentor is way farther along. Way fruit on his tree is fantastic, amazing. But he started somewhere. He started somewhere and he started as a hot mess, but he started somewhere. And so I kind of vision it. I have a hand up to him. Now he's got a hand down to me because I've said, hey, I'm working. I'm trying. And as long as I'm trying, he's right there with me. And but at the same time, he's not better than me. He's just farther along in the same path. But part of that is that I have to have a hand back for the guy behind me on the same path. I'm not better than the guy behind me. We're just on the same path. I'm just a couple steps ahead. And if I do that, dude, that's helping each other out. That's what this is about. We get one, I believe we get one chance through this life. And we're we're we're here to learn something. All right, God. What do you want me to learn? What do you got? What value do you want me to add to somebody else? How do I do that? So um, and I'm not saying that story to say, hey, I'm I'm I'm I'm awesome. Look, dude, I'm plenty of stinker in plenty of other places, right?

SPEAKER_01: 4:02:25

I mean, um, but but it's the fact of your offering and the fact that you're doing it and you know, trying to make a difference and seeing who wants to help along the way. And that's all it takes. It's just an idea and a thought and somebody acting on it. If more people thought that way, a lot of things would be a lot of people would be getting helped, you know. And so, I mean, we all know people that can encourage bl bless a lot of people. Sure. And they choose not to, because it's just their path, and they see how miserable they are and their their families are, but then you see somebody that doesn't even have the shirt to get off their back and they'll do anything for you, and they're some of the happiest people to ever meet.

SPEAKER_00: 4:02:59

Right. That's back to the joy thing, right? You know, I'm I I'll tell you, I'm sitting here trying to organize this thing, and I'm I'm I get kind of excited when I sit down, like, okay, here's the materials list, so here's my takeoffs. What else am I gonna need? What are you? You know, it's like, oh crap, stop. I gotta stop this for a few minutes and I gotta get an estimate cranked out. Yeah, you know, that sort of a thing. And then, but I I can't wait to get back to that because I'm helping somebody that I have a relationship with. Now that's that makes it easier to the people that are willing to just go out and and help perfect strangers. I tip my hat to you. I I haven't done that quite yet.

SPEAKER_01: 4:03:29

You know, it's gotta start somewhere. Sure, you know, and and that's where that's what it takes. And you never know who's gonna see what you've done. The people on that list and anybody that's donated to it and helped out, and then they're gonna see that and they're gonna be like, damn, okay, I I can help this person. Might not be on that level, but it might be helping an old lady mower lawn. Exactly. Something so simple. And so that and that's what it takes, man. And that's what I think is really gonna have to take a huge turn in this country to get it back on track is just people, neighbors helping neighbors again, and just the reaching a handout. Yeah, you don't need to have money to help anybody. You can help by sharing somebody's posts that's in that in need, you could help by bringing them a can of food, and it doesn't matter, inviting them over for dinner. There's so many nice gestures that you can do that'll change somebody's life that you don't even realize when they leave your home or leave an event or whatever it may be, and they'd be like, Man, like that they could spark something. Uh get it going. I mean, it's Christmas is coming up, and you know a family that's struggling down the street. Go get some gift cards if you're able to. Go get them, help them get a Christmas tree for their kids. It's something sure. Just little gestures like that that can go a long way and just to give somebody a little bit of hope and to get their little their life changed around just a little bit. That's all.

SPEAKER_00: 4:04:43

It's it's you know, my wife was was talking with me about, you know, faith and hope with the biblical definition is is different than than hope in pop culture. Oh, for sure. Right? And and and I need to make sure that I I keep that in mind. Right? Just remember that that's right. You know what? Hope with a biblical definition is is a pretty special thing. It's not just a, oh, I hope the Seahawks win this weekend. You know, it's it's not that stuff, though. You know what I'm saying? So um well, dude, this is a great conversation.

SPEAKER_01: 4:05:23

I really appreciate it. We just hit the four-hour mark, so no kidding. That goes by quick. It does. Everybody, everyone's like, holy shit. I have guys that come over and be like, oh, well, I'll knock out like an hour, an hour and a half. I'm like, yeah, okay. The three hours later, like, holy shit, I had no idea. But well, Davey, I appreciate the conversation. I hope everything works out with the lawsuits and the firefighting, and then obviously your your your new business and your new adventure and chapter that you guys have started. We're in our own new chapter as well, so I know the struggles and how it feels, and it's it's crazy, but it's fear is what brings change. Usually, yeah, scared is what brings change, and and sometimes you don't choose it and you're put in situations like you, and you gotta pivot. And so instead of rolling over and being a victim, you're like, hey, cool, I got a wife, and I have these young men that are watching me and my and my wife, and we're able to build and do something.

SPEAKER_00: 4:06:17

So well, and on that on that topic, and we're we're bringing it to a close, it's it's it's amazing that um the experiences that prepared me for this were absolute hell. Absolute hell. We didn't get into it. I'm not saying we have to, the my relationship with my dad. And and all what prepared me to be able to do what we did, I wouldn't have been able to do it had I not been through that. Yep. And so you never know what's what the lesson is, the crummy thing you're dealing with today, you don't know what you're being prepared for, why you're going through that, but there's a reason. Always. There's a reason. And and we're never given anything we can't handle. Uh pray for a stronger back, not a lighter load. And uh yeah. Oh, well, thanks, dude. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01: 4:07:15

I appreciate this.

SPEAKER_00: 4:07:16

Likewise, I appreciate it too. I'm rooting for you, dude. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01: 4:07:19

I got uh I got a really good buddy of mine that I won I want to get you in contact with on as far as maybe I don't know if you need any extra work, but he's always always hit me up, seeing if I he actually came in and re he we did all this together real quick and so um we slapped it together.