Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Full Auto Friday - Round 142

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Rapid Fire Q and A to finish off the week: 1.  How to prevent going #1, and hopefully #2 on your first tandem skydive 2.  It's been 20 years since the invasion of Iraq and I keep hearing veterans complain that they were miserable and lied to, am I wrong to be upset about them complaining?  3.  I'm nearly through my fire academy and am consistently dealing with one individual not meeting standards, how should I address this as a leader in my class? Enjoy Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: ⁠https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive⁠ Check out the newest Cleared Hot Gear here: ⁠https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/⁠

All right, everybody, here we are. We found ourselves at another Friday. You know what that means. It's going to be Q&A. So let's just get into it. Full Auto Friday, number 142. How we got this high? I have absolutely no idea. But let us begin. Okay, I got the red smoke. Okay, Kathy, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. All right, here we are. As you can tell, if you're watching this video, it's a full auto Friday from the road. I'm in LA. I am recording some episodes for the upcoming project, Change Agents, which you probably see me posting about here a little bit. And I've actually had a few people reach out to me and say, hey, because you're doing change agents, are you going to stop doing your podcast? No, I'm absolutely not going to stop doing my podcast. This is something else that I wanted to do. I was presented

with what I consider to be a unique opportunity. So I took it. And broadly, it's a 25 episode series where we, and I need to emphasize the we, because it's certainly not just me doing this, but mostly the team at Ironclad are identifying issues. Maybe it's a social issue, maybe it's an economic issue, maybe it's an environmental issue. I don't know, maybe there's some way that it could be all three of those wrapped up. But sitting down, identifying an issue, identifying an expert, explaining the issue, letting the expert talk into their wheelhouse of what it is that they do, and then leaving people with actionable steps, should the particular issue that we chose speak to you. Obviously, there's more issues than there probably is time or bandwidth, so I don't expect

everybody to be riveted by every topic that we cover, but I thought it was a really cool idea, and I love the idea of leaving people with an actionable step that they can take should they be interested. So here I am in L.A. in a hotel room. Right over here. You can't really see it on the screen. That's the cuck chair, though, because I'm in a hotel room. And for whatever reason, every hotel has a cuck chair. And I feel like if I did another show, which maybe I will, called the Cuckchair Diaries, that they would have interesting stories to tell. But I don't know how you interview furniture. So I guess that leaves me just doing full out of Friday. On that note, I have three questions for today. two relatively short ones and the third one is a little bit longer so I figure I try to keep these at like 30 minutes because I have no idea how much people are interested in hearing what I have to say when it comes to a Q&A perspective. But here we are. Question number one. And then the third one I'm going to break up and kind of take it paragraph by paragraph because it's really important. It ends on my favorite topic, which is leadership. And I just feel like it deserves to have a little bit more time spent on it. So question number one. I've been listened to your podcast for a while now, and I'm a fan. I even make my fiancé listen when she's riding with me in the car.

She used to hate it, and now I think she may have a crush on you. But honestly, who doesn't? I digress. Super weird opening. I think, thank you, that she enjoys the content. I'm a vet and dealing with some post-traumatic stress issues. And my therapist said, I should do something that makes me feel uncomfortable. While I'm sure she meant hang out in a crowded space or sit with my back to a door for more than half of a minute,

I decided that I would hurl myself out of a perfectly good airplane. Well, I've heard you talk about the joys of skydiving and how safe it can be, and the thought of falling makes me more than somewhat nervous. My real question is, do you have any tips to calm my nerves before I jump? And how do I keep from shitting myself? And in turn, the guy who is strapped to my back and make sure, that I make it down safely. Easy answer to this one.

People may be thinking that I have a crazy strategy or a step-by-step that could help you relax or enjoy this more. But when it comes to either shitting or pissing yourself on a tandem skydive, of which I have heard of both, I have never had either of those happen to me. I have certainly been vomited on. Here is a turnkey solution to avoid that. Go to the bathroom before you go for your jump.

problem solved. I have found that if there's nothing to come out, that nothing generally will come out. So that's probably where I would start you on this journey. And the reality is it's going to be an uncomfortable environment for you. If you've never exited an aircraft in flight, it's going to be an emotional event for you. And that's okay, because you're actually exploring something that makes you uncomfortable, which I think is great. There's a lot of things you could have chose in between the examples that you gave and jumping out of an airplane, but I totally dig the fact that you're jumping in with both feet, no pun intended. But yeah, seriously, go to the bathroom,

and if you're feeling nervous, just be honest with your tandem instructor about it. As a tandem instructor, I don't worry about passengers that say, hey, like, I'm pretty scared right now. I have a little bit of hesitation or trepidation about this. No problem. I've got nothing but time for you, and we're going to get through it anyway. The people that worry me, and of the problem passengers that I have had, none of them have been women, and I think that's because women are a little bit more honest about how they are feeling.

It's always been dudes, and it's the dudes who say exactly this. It's no big deal. I'm not scared at all. It's like, fuck, here we go. Stand by for a wild ride, maybe. Maybe not. But just go to the bathroom. And I would say focus on enjoying the experience.

Once you get joc-d, like depending on what drop zone, you go to. But let's, in general, I'm going to. generalize here a little bit, a tandem operation. Once you get your harness on, the tandem passenger harness and you start walking out to the aircraft, it's going to be about 20 minutes until you exit the aircraft. And you're going to be climbing in a smaller airplane than you've probably ever been in your life and sitting in a way you've never sat in your life. And taking off through and you'll be able to be looking out the windows and it's going to be louder than commercial airliner. It's probably going to be a really weird plexiglass door that you're going to be able to see through

and you might be a lot closer to it than you're comfortable being. But before you know it, that door is going to come open, and people are going to exit this aircraft in flight before you actually have the chance to do so, because tammums are generally going to go out last. All of that should be brand new to you, or it is based off of what you sent in the email. So just try to enjoy it.

Just try to soak it in, breathe, don't hold your breath, and the two things that I ask of my tandem passengers, because it's actually my job as the tandem instructor to handle absolutely everything that happens, to include getting your harness on you, walking into the aircraft, getting to the ground safely, taking it off, all of those things. That's the tandem master's responsibility. I ask two things. Smile and relax. Now, the second one is more than most people can do. And that's okay. But I ask because I just want them to know what's important to me as the instructor. And really what's important to me is that they enjoy the experience. It's a very.

It's a really low barrier to entry exposure to something that I love very much. I have found it has been rewarding in my life. I have found that a lot of people really enjoy it. So I try to expose as many people as possible. But the Tandemaster is trained and they're going to take care of everything. And for you, just smile and relax. That's all you need to do. Hit the bathroom first.

Now, to go back in your email a little bit, you're dealing with some post-traumatic stress issues. You should, you know, a therapist recommends that you do something that makes you feel uncomfortable. And you mentioned two things that are very common. I don't want to say cliche, but they seem to be common among the veteran community. And that's crowded spaces. We're sitting with your back to a door for more than half of a minute.

I'm not a huge fan of crowded spaces either, but I don't think I was a huge fan before being in the military. So I kind of write that one off for me. It's just never really been my jam. I don't trust people. I don't trust humans enough to really feel super comfortable in large groups of them. No, you're back to the door. That's something that you could actually practice.

And if you wanted to, you know, both of those things that you listed because you listed them, maybe they are meaningful to you, maybe they're meaningless, but they're probably meaningful to somebody. Incremental exposure to those things, it can actually help. You know, it's okay to go into a restaurant and not expect that the world is going to come crashing down on you. Some armed insurgent is going to come in and challenge you and threaten everybody else while you're having, chicken fried rice. I don't know why the fuck I just said chicken fried rice, a hamburger, a steak, whatever it may be. But if they make you uncomfortable, those are things that you could incrementally expose yourself to before throwing yourself out of an airplane. You could go and

take a dance lesson with your significant other if you have a performance type of anxiety. If you're afraid of public speaking, you could go seek out an opportunity to do so. You could take an acting class. You could do whatever you want to do that scares you or challenges you. And this is not necessarily even veteran specific. But if I ask you right now five things in your life that you would be mortified to be asked to do, in my personal opinion, what I've just helped you identify are five things that you might get a lot of benefit from by attacking headlong or headfirst, I should say, not necessarily like an incredibly aggressive manner, but incrementally. So food for thought. There's a lot of things that you can do before jumping out of an aircraft in flight.

But if you choose to do so, do yourself, then everybody else of favor. Let's go to the bathroom first. Question number two. It's the 20-year anniversary of the Iraq War, and there has been a flood of videos from news outlets interviewing Marines and Army soldiers, and they are all complaining about the war and how miserable they were, and how they were lied to, et cetera. As someone who hasn't served, is it wrong that it gets me mad to hear them complaining about it so much? To me, they knew what they signed up for. That's why I like listening to spec operators on podcasts. I'm going to start with where you left off. Not all special operations

soldiers agree on their experiences in warfare. I know of plenty, and maybe they're not doing it in an incredibly public manner, that generally have espoused the same things that you talked about previously in your email. Maybe the spec op guys are a little bit more cautious on the platforms or the environment with which they'll speak openly about it, but it's a mistake to only listen to the voice of people from the special operations community. Because here's what I'm going to tell you. Their experience and the experience of people in the non-special operations communities are drastically different. And some special operations members, to include myself, I'm including myself when I say this,

don't have a great understanding of what traditional military life is like. I could talk to you at length about what the SEAL community is like. I know almost nothing about the Fleet Navy. Now, I don't know the pipelines and how much time other special operations soldiers spend in conventional, the conventional military, if at all, in their pipelines. So I can't speak to it. But be cautious listening to somebody who spent a lifetime or a career in special operations, letting you know how the military as a whole works. It's a different environment that we grew up in. And it's not indicative. of the experience of most people. So just food for thought on that one.

It's crazy to me that it's been 20 years since the evasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. I actually didn't realize personally that the anniversary had come until I saw some of the videos that you are referencing. What I didn't see were interviews from Marines and Army soldiers that were complaining about the war and how they were miserable and how they were lied to.

I have no doubt that there are videos like that. out there, but I don't think that they are all of the videos and I don't think that they're the vast majority. I can absolutely see it, depending on what media outlet you may be consuming this information from, that they might highlight those stories because people's experiences and opinions can be weaponized for gain from an individual or an organization. Am I talking about political weaponization? Yeah, to a degree, I am. But, could also just be used to grab your attention so they can sell you more fucking soap, which is basically what funds the entire entertainment industry, which for clarity is everything

that you see on your TV. I don't care what side of the aisle you land on and therefore what channel is in the background playing where you receive that passive feed of news that are all in the same rating system. They all get paid from advertising dollars. What they're trying to do is monopolize your attention. Just remember that at the end. end of the day. Now, to those videos that you did see where it was Marines and Army soldiers and they're talking about their experiences and complaining about the war and how miserable they were and how they were lied to, I can understand it to a degree for sure. I look back now with two decades behind me, which again, blows my mind that one, that I'm that fucking old

and two, that it's been that much time. And I've talked about this on the podcast. My dad and I argued about the invasion of Iraq prior to the invasion of Iraq. And I could not have been a moral like, we need to do this. This is what America stands for. We have to go get in there. We have to get the WMDs. And that was wrong. I have changed. I'm not going to say I was wrong. I have changed how I feel about why we went into Iraq, the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq, the military, the military industrial complex. And I'm not trying to throw shade on anybody or anything. I'm talking about how I have changed in my thought process in those 20 years.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that there were no WMD in Iraq. There was none that was ever found that I am aware of. The political game and from the military industrial complex, which directly tied to people on both sides of the aisle in government and has and probably will continue to, as long as the United States is fighting worse and has a military industrial complex. I think it's without question that there are those ties. So I can understand how two decades in the rearview mirror, you could have a bad taste in your mouth about why you were asked to do the things that you did.

I get that. Now, having said that, find a way. to reconcile that with yourself and do something with it. It is 20 years in the rearview mirror. And yeah, war is miserable. You know, even the Iraq war is a good example in March when we surged from Saudi Arabia and ended up living in the bird shit infested pigeon infested hangars at the Baghdad International Airport. It was miserable. We were eating shit food. I think I had one shower in 60, 70 days. I mean, I could have literally stood my camouflage uniform up. It was so salty and disgusting. I'm relatively certain that I burned everything that I took on that

trip with me. The sleeping conditions were horrendous. The living conditions sucked. The operating conditions were challenging. Yeah, it was miserable. It was also war. So I don't know what you were expecting. I don't think anybody should expect a five-star experience when you're in a foreign country in a kinetic operation, but maybe you should go into those experiences thinking that that might be a possibility. You know, whether or not they were lied to, again, I talked about how my feelings have changed over time. Do I think that there was dishonesty involved? Yes, I absolutely do. Is it something that I sit and twist my non-existent mustache about and look two decades in the rearview mirror and take every opportunity to completely,

complain about on a public spectrum? Fuck no. Because how is that helping me in any way, shape, or form? How is that helping anybody else, by the way? There are ways that you can have these conversations on platforms that allow you to actually at a very intricate level break down how you feel and why. Without becoming political, talking through the lens of what you experienced in your own life.

And I think that's the best way to do so. For the people who are living 20 years in the past, my advice to you is find a way to work through how you feel and do something with it. Or 10 years from now, you're going to be the same person making a video talking about 30 years ago. You're going to be no farther along in your life. And I don't want anybody to live like that. You know, I look at the job that I was asked to do. volunteered to do, that I would have stayed in the community doing had I not been medically retired. And it wasn't a political job. I did the best that I could to remove the threats that I

had access to wherever they thought that they were the safest, because that's generally where we would find them. I understand at a basic level, tactical warfare. Above that is strategic and operational, strategic, operational, and tactical. I have a sliver of an understanding of operational and no experience at the strategic level. That's air that I never took a breath of and don't have an understanding of what occurs in those meetings. At the end of the day, the Department of Defense, right? If you look at the overall architecture, there's a reason they call the person sitting in the chair the commander in chief. We execute the foreign policy of the United States of America.

I'm here to tell you right now. that if you are listening to me say this and you are just realizing for the first time that people's individual goals and aspirations get tied intrinsically to their political ones and that they can morph and mold over time, if you're just now realizing that, I'm not so sure you've been really paying attention to politics in the last 20 years or the 20 years before that. And that is by no means an excuse for anybody ever being dishonest in a political environment and an elected position, the president of the United States,

the execution of foreign policy, there's not an excuse for any of that. But your job had nothing to do with that. I'm sure, you know, at the end of the day, right, the policy that is said is going to determine the actions that you take. But if your experience was anything like mine, it was about doing the job that I was asked to do, and even beyond that,

it was about making sure that the people that were to the left and the right of me came back alive, that we were able to accomplish the mission and come back with everybody that we left with. I fought for the people that I was there with and for my family and the people that I knew. That's the most that I could possibly do with my service. Can we draw the dots back up all the way to the commander-in-chief? Sure, yes, you could. But I had a job, and I did my job.

Now, again, 20 years in the rear-view mirror, I have different thoughts about the people who made the decisions and set my trajectory. in the grander scheme of things towards the experiences that I have. But I take those experiences as a net positive. I'm a better person because of the experiences that I had. Did I have times where I was miserable? Yes, I absolutely did. Did I have times where leadership lied to me?

Yes, I absolutely did. Find me a fucking job where that's not part of the description at some point in time, regardless of wherever you may work and whatever industry that you may work in. It's going to be impossible. figure out a way to work through it so you can do something positive with it. Stop looking in the rearview mirror and complaining about something that happened 20 years ago. Fucking do something about it. Become a better version of yourself because of those things. Now, to the person who wrote this and said, it makes you mad hearing them complain about it because you feel like they knew

what they signed up for. I'd say in a post-9-11 world, you had much more understanding of what you signed up for in the early, you know, just right after 9-11, maybe not so much. Yes, the grand idea of joining the military and being part of the military, sure, you should always expect if you're going to join the military that there's a chance that you're going to have to do the job that you're training for. But we had had 20, nearly 30 years of peace where the military, I think for a lot of people, was being viewed more as a vocational opportunity or an educational opportunity. They had a chance to lift and shift from wherever they were starting and wherever they wanted to go.

And it was super valid. And it still is, by the way. It still is a very valid opportunity for both of those things, educational and occupational. And again, post-9-11 world, it's a shifting landscape. The odds of you being involved in a kinetic engagement, I think, are drastically higher than they were pre-9-11. And my point in all of that is pre-9-11, it was probably less in the forefront of their mind is what people signed up for. post 9-11 harder to argue that. So not everybody who found themselves in either Iraq or Afghanistan knew when they signed on the dotted line maybe two or three years before they ended up over there

that that was what's going to happen. They probably felt that way, like I said, because of the history of warfare in the U.S. and how long we had had a sustained time period of relative peace. So be cautious with painting with that one. It's a little bit more of a broom than a brush. Just food for thought. So last question. And I said, I'm going to break this one down by paragraph. And this one, again, is on my favorite topic, leadership. So let's get into a little bit. Specifically, this one's about a fire academy. So I'm going to read a little bit, talk a little bit. I'm a 21-year-old in the middle of a fire academy. My recruit class is on the back half of the academy and starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. At the beginning of the course, our class was divided into four companies, and they asked for volunteers to be company leaders. I raised my hand, and the company members that were assigned to me were constantly. competent dudes. We routinely run simulated house fires with live fires in a two-story concrete structure we call the burn building. While visibility in the burn building is absolutely zero, I can't even see my hand if I put it in front of my face due to the smoke, my crew of guys never missed a victim on search operations, never had issues finding and extinguishing fires, and were

pumped when we received the hardest tasks. However, a few weeks into the program, they removed all the members from my company and replaced them with just one person, the lowest performing individual in our class. He barely scribes, uh, creeps by on the written exams with an average in the low 70s, below 70 is failing. Is the worst physical performer at PT and can't seem to keep his head on straight during live burns. Since they replaced the members of my company with this individual, I dread the days we have simulated housefires. Today, we had one of those evolutions, and it was an absolute nightmare. We were assigned to search the entire structure.

The first two rooms, it went fine. I searched the first one. We leapfrog to the second room. He searched, but he came out of the room completely gassed. We hadn't even been in the building for two minutes. As we approached, the corner rooms, our standard SOP or standard operating procedure, is the lead van either goes left or right, and the man behind him goes the opposite direction of him. Then you meet up at the doorway to the next room and repeat. It seems very straightforward to me.

I'm not a firefighter, but it makes sense if one person goes left, the other one should probably go right. At this point in the academy, we have probably practiced this 100 times. However, every time we get to the threshold of the door, he grabs me and asks which direction I'm going, which direction he should go, and what he needs to do in the room while he searches. If I do not stop and explicitly walk him through step by step what he has to do. He won't even pass the threshold of the door to the room and will sit there yelling out my name till I come back for him. I have walked him through how to conduct searches numerous times, gain plans for searching each room, and have re-explained the objectives the instructors want us to complete while searching the room

over and over and over again. We are now consistently getting called out in hot washes for our slow search times. And when the instructors chew us out for our performance, I eat the blame for him. I feel like since I am company leader, I am responsible for these searches going poorly, but it's gotten to the point where I don't know how many more times or what other ways I can explain proper searches and have him or have it get through to him. So I have a few questions. And I hope that the writer of this email can watch this because I have some questions for you. But I also hope that in some way, shape, or form, this makes it back to the cadre at this fire academy. Or if you are a cadre in a fire academy right now,

that these questions will resonate with you. My first question would be for the cadre. Why did you remove the other members of this individual's team, which it sounds like there were multiple, and then replace all of those members with just one? Now, as somebody who has been in the cadre or in a cadre before, I have some assumptions as to why that may have happened. one, the team was probably performing very well, and that what they wanted to do was take the experience and performance that you had had because of your leadership in the way that you had structured the team and aggregate that out to the rest of class.

And in doing so, I feel like the cadre may have highlighted this individual as the lowest performer. From what you have described, you'd have to be nearly blind to not see it. And because of the performance of your previous team, perhaps they are putting this individual with you to see if you can elevate their performance via a different team or a different approach. That would be a question for the cadre. Is that why this happened? If the answer to that is no, I would say, well, then why did you make this change? Because making changes in personnel isn't a problem. But I think you need to be purposeful in the things that you do as a cadre or a staff. Second question, and this one is for you, the person going through this

training. From what you're describing, so somebody who is incapable of executing their standard operating procedures, which if they're anything like they were in the SEAL community, this is your playbook. This is your baseline foundation of tactics that you have to have an understanding of and you have to be able to execute. It's not about being creative on target. There's plenty of room for that, and there's plenty of ways to creatively solve problems. But if you don't have a standard operating procedure and everybody is left to just do whatever the hell that they want to do, as you can imagine in an environment where limited visibility, you're talking to each other only over radio. You may be operating in onesies and twosies often and disaggregate from the larger group.

Creativity in that environment is not necessarily a great thing because you have no idea where your people are in what it is that they're doing. Hence, standard operating procedures. Not that they can't ever be deviated from, but everybody on the team has to understand and know what they are. So I guess my question is for the student that wrote this and also the staff, where the fuck is the staff when this is happening? Now, I can understand performance being called out in a hot wash. No pun intended. I think that's the way that you used. Yeah, okay, we'll call it hotwash. I can understand your team, even though it's you and one other person being called out for subpar performance. But from the instructor cadre's perspective, how are you not seeing this? And I, identifying it with this student directly. That is the question that I would have for you.

You as the team leader are stepping up in front of this and accepting responsibility for subpart performance for your team, which is the correct move to make. Don't ever let that though substitute for the individual that works for you being held accountable for their actions. And to that, I mean, they need to be accountable to you, their leadership. And I think we're about to get into the things that you are doing to work on this. But just because you step up in front of that and you eat the bullet in the hot wash does not mean that there should not be accountability and responsibility for the team member or members that fell short in the execution of their duty. They need to understand where they fell short. They need to understand what they need to do

and improve upon. And they have to understand the standard that they are expected to hold. So, moving on. His skill-based issues pale in comparison. to the issues with his physical capabilities and performance. He struggles to complete 20 push-ups or running a mile without stopping to walk. After searching the entire first floor for him, doing all of the work myself, we were making our way up the stairs when he grabbed me and said he was completely gassed and couldn't go any further. In my head, I was thinking, what if this was real life and there was a family trapped in the next room?

We then made our way into the first room on the second floor. I let him sit in the doorway to catch his breath while I searched it, and I hear his low air alarm go off. This alarm activates around 1,200 PSI. He entered the structure with 4,300 PSI in his cylinder. I entered with 3,700 PSI. When his alarm went off, I checked my air, and I was at 2,400. I used to be a Division I swimmer, so normally it would be understandable he had significantly

less air than I did, but he hadn't done any of the work besides searching the single room on the first floor. I had to take over for the other five because he was immediately exhausted from that one room. Right before his alarm went off, I found a victim. Typically, when your low air alarm goes off, your instructor watching tells you to exit the structure immediately. However, our assigned instructor for this evolution was a real old school guy, the type you look up to and want to work for. When he saw the alarm go off and watched my partner get up to walk out of the building, he stopped him and said, that just means you got to put it in fifth gear, son, pick that victim up. I instructed him to grab the legs of the dummy while I picked up the torso. I called the command to lift, and he immediately dropped

the dummy crying out that he couldn't do it, which I expected because that's what happens every time we find a victim. So I had to drag it out by myself like I usually do. So many questions. Okay. So there is an instructor that is in this room watching this take place. Why is the cadre not handling this issue? What is the point of allowing this individual to continue? Are you just trying to get this person to a place where they give up so you don't have to justify the paperwork and shit-caning them? To me, something seems off here. If the cadre is visibly seeing this, And again, I've never spent a single day in the fire service. But it sounds to me like you are explaining the baseline skill is required to be a firefighter.

And this person can't do that. What in the fuck is going on? Why is this person not being removed from this training pipeline? If, like you said, this was a real fire and this individual is not even able to make it to the second floor, let alone help with a victim if they were on the second floor and likely would become a victim themselves what's going on here? Like at this point, I have less questions for the student and so many more questions for the cadre.

And my initial suspicion is that this has something to do with them wanting this individual to quit so they don't have to justify from a paperwork perspective or from a headshed perspective, shitting an individual. And I hope that that's not the case, but that's the suspicion that I'm working off of right now. This incident is just the tip of the iceberg.

but his email is already way too long, so I won't go into further detail with other examples. Me and my classmates discussed his performance today, and the general consensus of the class is that he is unfit for duty. It's nothing against the guy personally. He is actually very nice and a good guy, but it is completely obvious he is not cut out for the job. He gets extremely defensive when others call him out for his performance, and I don't know what else to do for him. I can never give him my task. I can never give my task my full focus because there is constant battle for my attention between the job I'm supposed to be doing and babysitting him. He stopped me during one of our searches today to ask what he should do, and I ended up missing a victim right in front of me while my attention was divided between conducting my search and keeping him on task.

A cardinal sin at this point in the academy. I was chewed to shreds in the hot wash for missing the victim and had to carry the dummy around with me for the rest of the, is a reminder of what I had done. I haven't felt that type of stinging disappointment in myself in a long time. I say all of this to raise the question of what do I say and how do I word it to him that his performance is completely inadequate. I hate calling people out for things because it makes me feel like I'm being a dick, even if it's something that needs to be said. I usually just tell him good job and move on because I do believe he is trying as hard as physically And I know that the skills just aren't clicking for him like they are for the rest of the class.

But it's at the point in the program where we are almost done with the academy and about to go out to the street. And I realize real life house fire, he would 100% be a danger to the firefighters around him. And it terrifies me that he may one day come across an actual victim or down firefighter and not be able to get them out. Fuck me. That last paragraph is rough. So I love the fact that you are viewing yourself as a leader inside of this academy, whether it be the position that they put you in or just how you view yourself as a young man. Right now, as you have mentioned, you're focusing on your time at the academy, and that's great.

And you're addressing issues with this individual that are only academy based. But you nailed it when you talked about what's going to happen if this individual actually hits the street. He's going to be a risk to every single person that calls 911 and he is the first responder to. He's also going to be a risk to the people that he is working with. And at some point, you will need to have a shift in your mindset and stop thinking academy-based and start thinking about what your career is going to look like. From what you have described me, there is absolutely no reason why this person should still be enrolled in this fire academy. And again, I have so many questions for the staff. Why is the staff not dealing with this issue?

How do you word it to him that his performance is completely inadequate? You sit him down and you look him in the eyes and you say, your performance is completely inadequate. And then you give him examples of exactly what you are talking about. not obscure crystal clear examples of what you are talking about. You're not being a dick. You're telling the truth. And it sounds to me like you have exhausted every other approach to this, which is why I'm recommending to you the direct approach.

It's okay to give people feedback that is going to be difficult for them to receive, that it's going to sting for them, that it might hurt their feelings. It's okay. and sometimes it's actually essential. I would even go farther than that and say most of the time, the thing that you don't want to say to somebody is probably exactly the thing that you need to say to them. This person does not need to be told good job

because they're not fucking doing a good job. From what you have described in this email, they're failing every aspect of the role and responsibility of a firefighter getting ready to exit the academy. me. If you consider yourself to be a leader, you need to lead people and not bullshit them. Because is he doing a good job? Fuck, no. He's not doing a good job. Why are you telling him that? Because you don't want to hurt his feelings? Okay. How do you think the feelings are going to be of somebody whose baby melts to their fucking crib because this individual doesn't have the physical

capacity or understanding of the SOPs of the fire service to actually make it to the same thing. second, let alone the third floor, and to properly conduct a search for somebody that might be left behind. You're going to say good job on that? I don't think you're going to. Do you think that the family of that particular child or whatever individual scenario you might want to set up or somebody loses their life is going to accept he was doing the best that he could? Fuck, no, they're not going to because he's not doing the best that he could. He might be doing the best that he could for himself as an individual, but guess what? He's not good enough to become a firefighter. And this is where we bounce up against equality of your opportunity versus equality of outcome.

Not everybody is created equal. Some people are better at things than others. Some people are like Elon Musk. They're super smart. And some people are like fucking slingblade. They're stupid as fuck. All right? I land more on the sling blade side.

So I make up for it as much as I can with hard work. and I'm super envious of people who are like Elon Musk. To think that everybody, or to say that everybody has the same capabilities, is to deny the objective reality that we all see every single day when we go outside and we interact with people. If we were all the same, we'd all be capable of doing the same things. Not everybody can play in the NBA. Not everybody can big wave surf.

and not everybody can, I don't know, be an Olympic level athlete. It just doesn't work that way. Some people get 1,600 on the SAT. Some people get an 800. You know why? Because we're different. And that's okay. But let's stop pretending that addressing that those differences is somehow wrong.

I would say ignoring those differences and pretending that we're all the same to protect people's feelings, that's what's wrong. And it's sending us in a wrong direction, in my opinion, as a country and as a culture. We need to go back to actually telling people the fucking truth. And sometimes the truth hurts because sometimes people do things that are stupid. And sometimes people do things that just aren't good enough. And that doesn't mean they're not a good person. It just means they're not capable of doing the job. Now again, to the cadre here, where the fuck are you?

This person is obviously not capable of meeting the minimum standards. Why are you not addressing that? Is it a policy at your academy that people have to quit? Like, are you hurting for bodies so much that you're willing to risk the public and fellow firefighters' safety and life so you can have a heartbeat that is incapable of doing the job at a firehouse? Like, I don't understand. But for the person who wrote this, address this directly.

will you potentially feel bad in doing so? Yeah, you might. It's a hard conversation. But I tell you what, you're going to come out of that conversation a better person than you went in as the person who's going to deliver it. And I'm not saying go in there and be an asshole and browbeat this person. Be direct. Be objective.

Base the things that you say in objective data, not subjective, like, oh, I don't like the color of your hair. I don't like the decision that you made. like this action you fell short and this is our standard operating procedure this is the number of times that we have covered this do something about it and the last thing i'll end with this is if you want to if you in the class are of the opinion and have talked about this and agree that this person is not fit to be a firefighter then you in the class need to do something about it if your cadre is unwilling to cut this person away due to performance metrics then i would come together as a class and I would approach the cadre and I would explain to them what you have

explained to me in this email and I wouldn't do it individually I would do it collectively. Why? Because you're trying to protect and uphold the standards of the fire department. Because at the end of the day, you're accountable to the people that call 911 and the person to your left and right. If you let this person slide through and don't do anything about it and later on down the road, you hear this person's just kicked down the road, can't, you know, Fire station to fire station to fire station. Let me tell you what that's going to terminate in at some point in time, them being directly involved in a catastrophic incident. And I hope that it wouldn't be the loss of somebody's life, but in my experience, that's the way this shit goes when it's not

addressed early. And you will spend the rest of your life regretting the fact that you didn't step up and stop it when you could. Sometimes being a leader is about sitting there with somebody else and telling them that they're not good enough, that they are not capable of doing what it is that they are trying to do. Leadership has got to be based in integrity and in trust. Telling somebody that they are doing a good job when they are clearly not doing a good job is the opposite of both of those things.

As a leader, you need to protect this person from themselves. Could they be butt hurt about that? Could they have hurt feelings? Yeah, they could. I wonder if they would choose hurt feelings over being burned alive in a fire. I think I know which way they would land. And I'll just close it out with something, again, about the staff. Where the fuck are you in this?

Like, this to me is, and again, I say all of this, I've never been into a fire academy. So I'm not necessarily sure how it works. But I have been cadre before. What you are describing this email is not invisible. You as the cadre allowing it to get this far are also failing not only the fire service, but you're failing the other students that are inside of that class because they are seeing this happen. It is unavoidable that they are seeing these things happen and it's not being addressed appropriately. What message does that send to them? What type of leader do you want to be? And that's all I got

for this Friday.