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July 1, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
50:22
What goes on Inside the Fire House
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
We've got a special episode today.
We're going to be highlighting.
We're coming up in the July 4th weekend.
We're just talking about a lot of things in the last few weeks on just the U.S., America, just things that leadership, lessons, life.
And one of the things that some of you may not know about me was years ago when Lisa and I first got married and we moved up to a little place called Banks County, which is where Lisa is from, actually.
She grew up in a little town called Lula, just north there.
We were in a very rural county, and rural counties have volunteer fire departments.
Well, our local fire department was called Hollinsworth Volunteer Fire Department.
Well, I joined the Hollinsworth Fire Department, went to training at the school down in Forsyth, Georgia, which is where all the fire departments in Georgia go to their state training, especially the smaller departments and mid-sized departments.
They don't have their own training facilities and departments.
So I learned a lot.
We did it for about two and a half years.
We went on med calls, fire calls, and enjoyed it immensely.
But it also reminded me of how much work, like my father, who was a state trooper, that law enforcement, first responders, firemen, paramedics are just the heartbeat of our country.
And one of the things I wanted to highlight here is what they do, how they do it, and really some of the life lessons that you can learn from being a fireman and also what they go through.
And I had the perfect opportunity today to bring on Mario Porcelli, who has written a book, and I'm showing the book here, called Surviving the Firehouse.
It is a rookie's guide to surviving the firehouse and fire department life.
But if you really read into the book, it's not just for those who go into the firehouse and fire service, but it's also a lot of life lessons.
So we're getting ready to have just an old, good old Doug Collins podcast laid back discussion about life in the firehouse, life and lessons that you learn.
And really about those people that you see going down the road all the time and the lights flashing and you're not sure where they're going, but you know you'll be glad that they'll get there when they get to your house if you ever need them.
So Mario, welcome to the Doug Collins podcast today.
Hey Doug, thanks a lot buddy for having me on.
I really appreciate it.
I'm really honored that you asked me to be on here and I'm really super excited.
I didn't sleep last night because I'm going to be on with the great Doug Collins.
So hey man, I appreciate it.
Well, let's see if we can live up to that as we go here.
First off, let's get started.
Now, you're writing in your book, you talk about your time in the Orlando Fire Department, mainly in the Orlando Fire Department, but you're not from Florida originally.
Talk about where you're from originally.
Originally, I was born and raised in the Bronx.
I was born and raised in the Bronx in New York City and always wanted to be an FDNY firefighter.
But my parents moved down to Florida, and so obviously, you know, we were young enough, we came down with them and always wanted to be a firefighter, and so it was just a perfect opportunity.
And everything works out for a reason, and I'm glad I stayed in Florida.
I just love the state.
Yeah, but you know, and you held on to some of that Yankee roots, so the New York Yankees and everything else.
I mean, look, you got plenty in Florida that come down with you, okay?
Right.
I catch hell from my cousins up north all the time, but I definitely love New York City.
It's where I was born and raised, but I'm a Florida boy.
I'm a Florida boy through and through.
I love the country life.
I love the people here.
It's just great.
The water, everything.
It's a great place to be.
Well, let's jump in, because one of the things, and because I come into this, and I think I've told you, I come at it a little bit different.
Not only did I, you know, serve not like, you know, you did for a whole career in the fire service, but I served and went through training.
And still to this day, I train fire departments as well with sales and fire used to sell equipment, sell stuff, but also trained in hazmat response, which has changed so much.
I mean, the old job of firefighting that we knew of 50 years ago is just completely morphed into everything that we see going on.
And oftentimes, and I'll say it, I mean, I'm a son of a state trooper.
Law enforcement, police typically get the most attention.
We've seen this in the country, especially with what they do.
It's just a different form of their public service because they're confronting people, typically breaking law.
Firemen and paramedics in our first responder community are a little bit different in that.
And I think sometimes overlooked in what they actually provide and how they go about it.
What was it that drew you to firefighting?
I know you had some family experience, but what drew you to this lifestyle, which it really is a lifestyle?
I knew I did not want to work behind a desk.
I knew I did not want to be at the corporate level and Do spreadsheets all day and conference calls all day that pretty much lead to nothing at the end of the day.
It's a bunch of people getting together and want to hear themselves talk.
I did not want that lifestyle.
What I wanted was that I wanted that fast-paced, very high action, the camaraderie, the brotherhood.
That is what I wanted.
That's what I was looking for.
I knew I wasn't going to get rich from being a firefighter.
Hell, I was making $7.50 an hour when I first started.
And it was many, many years after that until we started getting some good raises.
It was really after 9-11 is when we started getting some raises.
But I was just drawn to that because I just love helping people.
It was a great job.
I did it for 25 years.
I would do it all over again.
Again, you're not going to get rich from it, but you will have lifelong friends for the rest of your life.
Even yesterday, I was hanging out with a buddy that I've known forever and ever.
I've got 40-year friends that I still hang out with today.
It was great.
It was just a great career.
My two sons do it right now.
They're full-time career firefighters.
I just highly recommend it for anybody that does not want to go into a corporate world.
Well, and you bring up something here, and Mario, I want to delve into this a little bit before we sort of get into it.
I told you to think of some good, you know, what I call war stories.
My dad, I grew up on the war stories, sitting in the state patrol.
I learned, here's a funny, I learned to drink what was cappuccino before cappuccino become really chic down here in Georgia, okay?
Uh, we would, I would go to the, the, uh, dad and his, uh, would be up at the state patrol station, which was not, but about 300 yards from where we lived.
And I'd walk up to dad with dad sometimes to the station when he was there, they'd be all drinking coffee.
And I know the firefighters have these rituals.
Well, you sit around and drink coffee.
Well, I would have my coffee cup and I'd go there and I'd put about, uh, half of it with milk, about a, Four cups it felt like of sugar, and then put just enough coffee in there to color it.
So I was doing the cappuccino thing way before and listening to the war stories going along.
But one of the things that I wanted to hit on here with firemen and getting into this, and it is a lifestyle, and you talked about the camaraderie that you feel.
One of the things is that today a lot of young people are coming out with that sort of a different mentality that you did, that they've got to strive, that only things that are worthwhile to these corporate or these managers or white collar, really firefighting is a hands-on and it's a very valuable thing in our community.
Do you feel like we've lost that work ethic in some ways that people look at?
I did a thought for today that said that there's no such thing as a dirty job.
You've always got soap and water at the end of the day.
Have we lost that a little bit, Mario?
Oh, we've lost it a lot, Doug.
There's no doubt about it.
So when I first got hired, and even up to the time that I retired, there were certain duties that the rookie did.
You put up the flag.
You made the tee.
You filled the eyes.
You did all the BS work that really nobody wanted to do, but it had to be done.
So you give it to the rookie.
And so you're the rookie.
You could be the rookie for a day or for five years until the next guy gets hired.
But still, when you're new, you help out with those duties.
So what we're seeing now, and this is the beta way.
Everything I'm going to tell you in this interview, you could have another fireman across me and 10 others, and we're going to battle that.
Everybody is a genius in my line of work.
We know everything.
Everybody has their own opinions.
They may disagree with me on this, but a lot of these young kids coming out now, they just feel entitled.
And now some of these fire departments are actually giving classes, and it shocked me to where, hey, you can't have this young guy or this young girl do this job anymore.
You have to do it.
If it's your assignment, you do it.
You cannot single them out and saying it's what they have to do.
But you know what?
Everybody wants to blame these kids.
I don't blame these kids.
I blame the parents.
It's the parents' fault that led them to this.
Why is that?
And I go back to this.
When I was growing up as a kid, if I did a sport, that was the only sport I did, and it was after school and you're home by 6 o'clock at dinner.
Now these parents feel like they have to do every sport in the world, and they're gone on the weekends, and this and that, and they entitled these kids.
And now they have to get a fifth place trophy for everything.
You're graduating from kindergarten, you're graduating middle school.
Hey, now you're graduating high school, which is the only thing you really should be celebrating.
But before, we celebrated just because you went to the bathroom for the first time.
And mom and dad is making a poster.
Hey, look at little Johnny.
They went to the bathroom for the first time successfully.
So when you take this and you do it for the entire 17, 18 years of this kid's life, you have molded them to be this person that now is entitled.
Now little Johnny wants to become a firefighter.
And now they bring this into the firehouse.
But we're seeing now that it's been destructive.
And we'll get more into the book later on, I'm sure, but I had to put a lot of that into my book on how to counteract what your parents have been doctored your whole life.
Right.
Well, and I think this is one of the...
And there is something in the book, and I took a few things, and I'm going to let you talk about some as well.
But you've led into a perfect segue.
And I'm not sure exactly what we're going to title this episode yet, but Brutal Truth from the Firehouse, maybe one of them.
Because this is something that I feel like a lot of people need to hear, is that work ethic matters, that getting in and starting matters.
And you talk a lot about this in your book, you know, starting out right, that first foot kind of thing.
But one of the things before we get into that, You talk about having a thick skin.
Now, somebody coming from politics and coming from Congress and being out there all the time, look, I get thick skin.
But talk about that a little bit in the real world out there, that not everybody's looking to give you a mental health day.
So, when you talk about thick skin, you know, we as firefighters, we were totally destroyed and butchered at the firehouse level.
You guys were destroyed and butchered at the national level, the world stage.
So, no, you guys have way thicker skin than we do.
So, this is what happened.
When you first join the fire department and you get hired at the fire department, there's massive expectations for you to perform.
And there should be.
Here's the problem.
The fire department doesn't give you a mechanism to be successful to meet those expectations.
So what do I mean by that?
And I brought this up to our training divisions and other chiefs.
I said, what are you talking about, Porcelli?
We do train these guys.
We teach them how to pull hoes.
We teach them how to run calls.
We teach them how to intubate.
We teach them how to do all these things and how to put out fire.
It's like, hey, Chief, that's the easy part.
I could train a monkey to do that.
That's easy.
You realize most people in the fire department, they get fired or written up not from a lack of job performance.
They all know how to do their job, and most of them do it great.
They get fired for a bad attitude.
They have a bad, crappy attitude that they came into the fire department with.
That's number one.
Number two, the expectations are set so high, like I said, we didn't give them a mechanism to perform.
So that's why I said, you know what, I have to do my part.
I want to do something to try to help these young kids out.
And this is another good example.
So one day, I'm at the firehouse and I'm washing the truck.
We had this thing to wash trucks every day, even if it was a clean truck.
It was the stupidest thing.
I'm like, why are we washing this clean truck?
We just freaking washed it 20 times yesterday.
But you just do it.
So you know what?
You do it.
So I'm washing the truck.
Here comes this guy.
He floated in for the shift.
And then I hear, hey, Porcelli, there's Johnny right there.
You want to watch out for him for the rest of the shift?
This kid's like 20 years old.
I'm like, why?
What's wrong with him?
He's got a bad attitude.
He's lazy, and he's just not cutting it.
I'm like, well, all right, whatever.
So I worked a whole 24-hour shift with him.
And what I realized, little Johnny was a great kid.
He was a great kid, great attitude.
He was just down on himself.
Why?
Because those expectations were set so high, nobody ever taught him how to survive life in the firehouse.
We just assume mom and dad is going to teach you how to do that.
Mom and dad don't know a damn thing about firehouse life.
They can teach you to come to work on time, how to dress properly, how to give a good handshake, but you're working in an environment with a very high testosterone level, just a bunch of athletes.
And I love these guys to death, but they just harp on you.
So now you have this kid right out of his mom and dad's basement trying to fit in.
But yet all that had to happen is some of the guys, it doesn't even have to be a senior guy, just some of the guys or girls take this person under their wing and say, hey, here's some of the do's and don'ts.
Here's how you navigate it.
You're not always going to win.
Just keep your mouth shut.
Do your job.
Have a good attitude and just help them navigate through the landmines.
And that was the problem.
So now you have a disaster unfolding before you.
Exactly.
And from our discussion, I think that's what sort of led you to write the book.
And I think that is something.
Let's talk about the book for a few minutes.
Because really, if you ever go pick this up, and we're going to, you know, look, get this out to firefighters all over the country.
I mean, I want them to, you know, because, you know, nowadays, podcast and everything else would be great.
But they can go pick up this book.
But you sort of start from the beginning, you know, from training all the way up to, you know, social media to, you know, how to do a budget.
I love the fact that you put a budget in here.
My God, if we could just take these two pages out and send it to half the members of Congress, it might understand that this is what a budget looks like, you know?
But I digress.
But is that sort of the purpose of when you wrote the book and putting it out?
Yeah, I wanted to help people.
So the book takes an individual that wants to become a firefighter all the way to retirement, but the real heavy emphasis on the first year, the rookie year, the probationary year, where they can fire you for anything.
You don't even have to have just coffee.
They can just fire you for anything.
And so that's why I wrote that, to help them avoid some of the pitfalls and landmines that I did.
A lot of those things that I'm telling people about in the book, those are my mistakes.
Believe me, Dougie, I'm not coming here telling you I was this great firefighter where I didn't do anything wrong.
I did everything wrong.
That's why I wrote the book.
I want to help these kids just avoid some of those problems.
And so what I did, a lot of these kids, they want to be firefighters, but yet, before they become one, they're realizing they're not going to get hired.
Why?
Because they do stupid stuff on social media, stupid videos.
They make politically incorrect comments, racially charged comments, sexual...
I'm telling you, these departments, they're going back to your social media accounts and they're looking to see what you posted and make sure that you're not going to do anything that's going to embarrass the department.
Drug use, that's a big deal.
You're going to get drug tested Not only before you get hired with the fire department, but before you start fire school or paramedic school.
So that's another one.
Another thing is getting in shape.
You can't start fire college or fire school weighing 300 pounds and just a fat slob who's never done two push-ups in his life.
You've got to get ready physically and mentally beforehand.
So I take them from the beginning all the way to the end.
And in the middle there, I kind of showed them how to do a budget.
Because this is what happens.
You see this with a lot of firefighters.
Most of us came from nothing.
We didn't have anything.
We weren't making any money.
I mean, back in the day, I was working for Sears and Roebuck, and I made $3.35 an hour.
We weren't making any money.
Now I get a paycheck where I'm making $7.50 an hour.
Holy cow, I'm rich.
I've got a lot of money.
And that's what these kids are doing now.
So the first thing that they do, they go out and get themselves a $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 diesel pickup truck.
All leather, Lariat, interior.
I think now they're like $80,000, $90,000.
So they're showing up with this brand new truck.
They're getting a boat.
And they're like, you know what?
I'm going to go and get me a house.
Because, hell, they're giving everybody credit now.
So now I can get me this new house with a pool.
It took me 30 years to get to where I'm at.
Well, these guys won it day one.
So that's why I had to put the budget in there.
Because it just gives them a blueprint, a guideline on how to be successful.
Then you have these guys in the firehouse.
Like I said, they're all geniuses.
They're financial geniuses.
They're marital geniuses.
Same guys that are financial train wrecks in their own lives and have been divorced 20 times.
But they're trying to give advice to these young kids.
Hey, kid, let me tell you how old Uncle Jimmy does it.
It doesn't work that way.
Oh, yeah.
And I think, you know, you sort of hit on it here.
And it's this, you know, we go back to it.
And look, we all had our sort of back, you know, comings up.
But for those of us in the gen, whatever you call it, X generation, you know, we were that last group between the boomers in the World War II and then the real millennials.
That was sort of that weird generation where, you know, we didn't have computers.
We didn't have phones.
You know, you went outside until dark and your mom brought you in.
I mean, those kind of things.
And it's hard to learn life lessons today in an insulated world.
And firefighting, and I'll move to a little bit in this conversation, because that was the one thing that I had known from being in the military now for over 20 years, but also from my dad being in law enforcement and time in fire, is that Firefighting first responders are the front line of bad.
Your tone does not go off and say, hey, thanks, Station 21. You're the best people in the world.
We want you to ride down to the Baskin Robbins and get 35 flavors.
No, your tone goes off.
Somebody needs you.
Somebody's in trouble.
Somebody is dead.
Somebody is hurting.
Somebody is burning their house down.
Somebody's trapped in that...
Explain that to the people out there who may not understand that.
Maybe they're in a corporate world.
They don't get it.
Maybe they don't understand the realities of what is going on.
9-11 brought that to light.
We'll talk about that maybe in a little bit more.
But the realities of what y'all go through...
But there's a big concern of mental health issues.
There's a big concern of folks in our law enforcement and fire and our first responder communities because what they see all the time is not the best side of life.
How did y'all deal with that and how can that, you know, sort of go over to other places?
Well, you hit the nail on the head, Doug.
When the tones go off, they're not saying, hey, Station 21, respond to the Bass Robins.
Get yourself a beautiful, nice banana split.
You know what?
You deserve it, and we love you.
It doesn't happen.
It's Station 21. So the way it would work is Tower 10, Engine 10, Rescue 10, Station 21, Rescue 21. Respond To a total shit show which is going on right now because you're responding to the worst moment in somebody's life that is going on right now.
Now, with that said, a lot of calls we go on are BS calls.
They shouldn't even call 911. Stuffed toes, headaches, hey, my fire detector is going off in my bedroom.
I don't know if I have a fire.
Well, do you see anything?
No.
Do you smell anything?
No.
Maybe you should just freaking change the battery.
All right, so you do have that part of it, and I can go on and on with that, so don't get me started with that.
You're seeing people at their worst.
It's like the cops.
You are seeing people at their worst.
And that's why it pisses me off and drives me crazy when I see on the news how, like law enforcement, they have a fraction of a second.
F that!
To make a decision, shoot, don't shoot.
Dougie, I can tell you right now, I've been in many, many of those situations at two o'clock in the morning where we are in a fight for our lives in a dark back alley.
We're screaming for help for PD to get there.
We need you here.
We need you here now.
So dispatch, not only they would respond PD, they would also send the next fire station over because a lot of times they would get there quicker and all hell's breaking loose.
So you're fighting for your life right now.
Now, on top of that, you have all these animals coming around you wanting to jump on top of you.
And this is going on all the time, day after day, day and night for 25 years.
After a while, you just have to call a timeout.
I need a break.
I've got to retire or I need to transfer to a slower station.
So you have those calls.
And then you have those other calls where Like I said, you're responding to the worst moment in an individual's life, where you're responding to a head-on collision with dead babies, dead moms.
You're responding to a house fire where somebody's trapped on the third floor, fourth floor, and you've got to get up there, and you've got to get them out.
It's just a bad situation.
Your heart's pounding.
Counting 100 miles an hour, your stress, your adrenaline is going.
And that's why a lot of firefighters have heart, lung issues, PTSD issues, law enforcement, veterans.
I get it, man.
I get it.
And finally, after all these years, the Republicans and the Democrats have realized, hey, this is a problem.
We have a high suicide rate.
We have these guys that are dying.
They can't even enjoy their retirement.
And finally, they've recognized it.
And 9-11 brought a bunch of that out.
Yeah, it was.
And I think this is the interesting thing that we have to deal with.
In realizing the stress environment that is here, but it is a valuable job that if people didn't step up to do it, And I think this is what we're finding, you know, on the other side of the house with the defund the police and everything else.
But I hear it in rural areas, you know, especially you hear it in a little more rural areas than you do in our suburban areas.
You know, well, how much are we spending on fire service?
How much are we spending on, you know, why do we need a new engine?
Why do we need to hire a new firefighter?
And the problem is, is people are short-sighted in the realization is, number one, you know, you can't predict the next car wreck.
You can't predict the next fire.
You can't predict the next drowning or whatever it may be.
But it's also a reality that it takes men and women who go into these professions to endure this kind of a mentality that is so different that, you know, you don't go nine to five.
You know, you're sitting there.
You could be eating supper.
You could have just worked on supper for the last, you know, hour and a half.
And the minute you sit down and take the first bite, the tone goes off.
And it's like, well, there you go.
And, you know, if you get back.
One of the things that you were involved, and I got two sort of different fronts I want to attack here as we go into this.
Number one, you were in the service from 1988 to 2012. So you had the majority of your career pre-9-11 in that sense.
You had about nine, ten years after 9-11.
Did you see a change in the perception, say in Orlando, of the fire service?
And you talked about getting more raises, stuff like that.
Did 9-11, for all the horrific parts of 9-11, watching those firemen go up in the FDNY again, just the bravery there, Did you see a change in perception of the first responder community after 9-11, or was it a short-lived kind of thing?
No, 100%, Doug.
100%.
So before 9-11, you go back to, let's defund the police, let's defund the fire department.
That kind of started before 9-11.
It just got brought to light now.
Management, city, elected officials, they never really liked us because all we did was we cost the municipality money.
And 9-11 brought that out.
They brought it out to where...
We started getting the raises, and we started getting better training.
We started getting way better equipment, especially with hazardous materials, rope rescues, because the federal government, they just had got hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money available to us.
We were able to hire more firefighters.
There were matching grants available.
And there's no doubt it significantly helped.
And this went on for many, many years afterwards.
And everybody loved us.
Everybody loved us.
But unfortunately, I really think a lot of people now forgot about 9-11, my friend.
I really believe that.
There's this great saying, never forget.
And I love that saying.
But a lot of people forgot.
A lot of people forgot.
No, but you're hitting it here.
I think it does come up.
Because, I mean, think about this.
It was 20 years last September.
20 years.
There are kids in college now, kids in high school, kids in fire departments that were born after 9-11.
They have no frame of reference for it in many ways, and I think that it affects us when we look at our communities.
One of the things is, and I know you've had some experience in both the smaller service and the larger service, and I remember being a part of a volunteer department.
We were smaller.
We had a lot of hand-me-downs.
I mean, this was the early 90s, and we'd go into schools, and you'd have some of the bigger departments that had a few more extra things, and it was always that sort of big brother, little brother kind of thing.
Has that gotten better, or is that still out there amongst the fire world?
Like in Florida, around the Panhandle area, there's still a lot of rural fire departments that are still very small and volunteer.
But Florida's just grown so much in the last 20 years.
A lot of those departments are gone now.
And now it's just most fire departments are just fully paid, fully professional firemen that are working there.
But the funding has increased.
But the issue is, any time the wind blows the wrong way, elected officials want to cut the funding.
Okay, everybody wants to cut the funding until you need 911. They're like, well, you guys don't do anything.
And I keep telling them, you don't want us to do anything.
When I have to do something, somebody's dying, or they're dead.
So you don't want us to do anything.
So the way we look at it, we're a cold spring, you know, that's behind the glass.
Break glass when needed, then the spring will go into action.
And that's the way firefighters and cops are.
It's the same thing with the military.
There are parallels there.
You don't want the military to do their job.
If they are, somebody's getting killed, okay?
And we don't want that.
So we're here just in case.
And again, first responders have just always been the punching bag for elected officials to just cut back, defund, etc., etc.
But again, things are way better now than they used to be.
And it went back, and I don't want to talk politics, but it is what it is.
It's just part of this.
It used to be, back in the day...
A lot of firefighters supported the Democrats because the Democrats, they wanted to fund us, where the Republicans didn't.
Well, it took 9-11 to now I see, wow, the Democrats, they were always on our side most of the time, okay?
Now you see the Republicans coming to our side.
And now you're seeing a bounce there, finally.
Because we really try to keep politics out of the fire department, but finally we see the Democrats and Republicans came together for a mutual cause with first responders, especially here in Florida.
And I think that's really important.
I mean, you look at it across the board, and it needs to be that funding that needs to be there.
One of the things you put out in your book, and I think this is, and it maybe sort of goes along with this topic, you put about choosing your battles.
And I think it goes back to a little bit of early on.
I see it in politics all the time.
Too many people in politics, podcasts, whatever, every hill is a hill to die on.
And that's just not true.
Every hill is not a hill to die on.
You find the very core principles of who you are, and that's the hills that you die on.
Everything else is negotiable.
You don't give in, but you say, look...
It's not the one that I'm going to just lose everything.
How did you see that in the fire service and how it sort of relates to life a little bit?
So when I was young in my career, and again, a lot of stuff in that book, they were my mistakes.
So when I was young in my career, I was just gung-ho, full of energy.
I wanted to just go, go, go, and just fight every battle and die on that hill because I had a belief.
And I thought, you know what, if I really believe in this, then I should die on that hill.
Well, as you get older, you tend to get smarter.
And I wish I had better mentors early on in my career so I could have avoided those pitfalls.
And so what I learned is, you know what?
Pick and choose your battles.
Don't plant that flag on every single hill.
Give up the hill sometime.
You'll get it later on when you take these other hills.
You'll get that last hill.
But give that up for right now.
And so what I learned in the fire department is that If you just let a lot of things go and you know how to communicate with people, you know how to communicate with the union leadership, you know how to communicate with the chiefs of the department and all the decision makers, you could almost get what you want.
And one of the biggest things that I learned is if I had a disagreement with the fire chief or the union or whatever, And we would have a big open forum where the chief or the union would have a, hey, let's all get together and present me your concerns.
That is the worst place you can present your concerns because now I'm putting you on a very defensive position and now I'm embarrassing you.
So what I learned, and it took me many minutes.
I'm a slow learner, Dougie.
So what I learned many years ago is that if I just pull these guys aside, so let's say the fire chief, if I didn't like something, let me pull them aside.
I hated wearing...
In Florida, full uniform, long sleeve shirts, pants.
It was just so hot down here.
Like, why can't we have shorts?
Or why are we doing it this way, that way?
So whenever I would see the fire chief, the main guy, I would pull him and say, hey, chief, let me talk to you for a second.
Away from everybody.
He says, hey, chief.
What's your mind frame with this?
Could we do it this way?
And he would show me and teach me a different side that I didn't know.
And sometimes I was even able to change his mind.
And the same thing with the union.
If we're in the middle of union negotiations, And I didn't like what was going on.
I wouldn't go to the union meetings and ask.
I would pull the union president or vice president aside, not even together, but individually and say, hey, let's go out back.
I want to talk to you for a few minutes.
And Doug, you can get so much accomplished that way.
But now, unfortunately, they all went in their corners.
And it's just constant battling a lot of times.
Well, it is, as you look at it.
For those especially, you made a comment earlier, and we have, of course, listeners across the country, across the world, that listen to the podcast.
Florida has just transformed so many ways in the last number of years.
When you started in 88, Orlando...
It was a growing city, but it was still known as Mickey Mouse.
It was still the Walt Disney World.
It was out more.
And it is really, you saw the city itself change in a lot of ways.
Growth, not only the building industrial complex that you have there, but also residential and everything.
What were some of the biggest changes that you say, if you have somebody Maybe they're a firefighter or maybe they're just a business owner in a part of the country that is growing now like Orlando.
It may be Austin.
It may be Charlotte.
It may be Nashville.
There's places like that.
What did you see in some of the things that you wish that maybe Orlando Fire or the Orlando community had done differently in that change?
You know, Orlando did great for many, many years.
I mean, to this day, Let me just tell you.
Orlando gave me everything I have today.
And I'm so grateful for it.
Okay?
But Orlando has grown tremendously over the last 20 plus years.
And we have always had great leadership in Orlando with the elected officials from the mayor down to council to the firefighters, the police departments.
We had great leadership.
But what's happened over the last few years, they've become very liberal, and they went in this very liberal direction, and now they're at odds with the first responders.
Dougie, I don't care if you're liberal.
I don't care if you're moderate.
I don't care if you're far right.
I don't care.
But there has to be balance.
There has to be balance.
And I feel like Orlando's lost some of that balance.
But they're way better than a lot of other cities, believe me.
Way better, like San Francisco, New York City, Chicago.
I mean, I'll stay in Orlando any day of the week.
I may not agree with a lot of Orlando's politics, but you know what?
They're not in debt.
They have a very healthy balance sheet.
We have one of the healthiest pension funds in the country, and it's because the leadership of Orlando and the union and everybody, they were able to come together.
We don't agree on anything, whether it's liberal, conservative, or whatever, but They didn't go too, too far left.
Nor did they go too, too far right.
It's that perfect, harmonious balance.
Now again, that could be debatable depending on who's sitting across from us, but it's a great city and they don't have a C or minus C D bond rating.
They do everything right.
But be careful.
You've got to do it right.
Now Disney went completely woke and crazy.
I mean, they just literally went batshit crazy.
It's like, wait a minute.
What happened here?
And Disney, they were a great company.
And they contributed a lot to the county, to Orlando.
I mean, Disney made what Orlando is today.
But they went so crazy, now they don't know how to bring it back to the center.
And that's why I don't say...
Far-right Republicans.
I don't say Democrat.
Give me a center moderate any day because I can talk to that person.
I can talk to that person.
I can negotiate with them.
And beautiful things could happen.
That's the way it looks.
Well, we've got a little bit of time left here.
I want to turn to some sort of the fun kind of things.
Right now, in movies, theaters, everywhere, Top Gun Maverick goes back to right before you went into the fire service, right before I got married.
We're all at 1986. We had the original Top Gun.
Tom Cruise seems to make movies that make people want to go into careers.
He made Top Gun, which, you know, everybody wanted to go be a naval aviator.
And then he made, he was in The Firm, everybody wanted to be an attorney.
Then he was in, you know, he drove in Days of Thunder, another Daytona Beach.
You know, he made everybody want to bring NASCAR into being.
Well, now Top Gun Maverick is back.
And, you know, the movies do create a lot of what we see is...
A lot of people will leave to be fired.
I'll bring up some of the classic firefighter, the backdraft movies.
Yeah.
You know, again, fun to watch.
What most people don't realize, and here's a spoiler, if you've never seen the original Backdraft, go watch it.
It's an interesting movie, and then it had the second one that came out.
But again, a little far back, just as a giveaway for the movie community, which I got to know very well, a lot of the fire that you saw in the movie was actually filmed on the floor.
They turned it upside down.
They were burning on the floor instead of the ceiling in a lot of these fictions.
How did Backdraft play?
Because it was around when you're in the fire service.
How did it play in the real firehouses?
When that movie first came out, I went and saw it with every other firefighter.
It was good.
What was realistic was the firehouse life.
It's like the show Rescue Me.
That was a great show.
That depicted firehouse life perfectly.
Hollywood, it's a little bit more difficult to do that.
And so what it did was, what pissed me off afterwards, is like once Backdraft came out and it finally came out on VHS or whatever the heck it was back then, the guys had played it 24-7 on the Firehouse TV. It's like, guys, we've freaking seen this thing a million times.
You know, enough is enough, you know?
But that's what they do.
So what it did was a lot of people wanted to join the fire department then because of that.
And it really, it helped out with the recruiting, is what it did.
There's really no great movies that have come out that depicted, you know, firefighters.
Like I said, the closest one was Rescue Me, and it was just a great show because it just showed firehouse life.
I mean, that's where it's at, right there, is firehouse life.
Well, if you think about firehouse life, I mean, in reality, that's 90% of your existence as a fireman.
Okay, it's going to be that day-to-day interaction in the firehouse, you know, waiting on a call.
If you're at a slower station, I mean, you might get one call, two calls, you know, especially if you're in a more different kind of area, maybe a more suburban area, rural area.
If you're in an urban station, you may be going eight to ten calls, especially if you're on the med unit.
And it's just a variation because firehouse life is those where it actually makes it.
All right, I told you to think about this and for what was, in thinking about firehouse life and thinking about, you know, calls or whatever, what is one of the more, I guess, Funny or different story, a family-friendly podcast story that you came out of your time that you just sort of go back to.
And if you get guys that get around and say, oh, remember this time kind of thing, that would leave it for somebody to say, this was something that happened to me in the firehouse.
I'm glad you said family-friendly because that just took away 90% of the stories that I have.
Now I'm down to 10%.
I knew that was coming.
I'm down to 10%, brother.
All right, so the one that stands out many, many years ago, C-Shift.
I mean, these guys are just a bunch of freaking knuckleheads, these guys.
They would always piss us off.
They drove us crazy.
They would eat our food, break into our fridge.
I mean, they were just...
You know, they just weren't good people.
But we love them.
We just love them.
We love these guys.
So it was Super Bowl.
Super Bowl Sunday.
We got off shift.
Well, these guys came in with a huge smoker.
They were going to have a massive Super Bowl party.
They were smoking pork butts, ribs, chicken, nachos.
I mean, all sorts of stuff.
I mean, they were going to do it up for Super Bowl Sunday.
And so they're all huge sports fans, too.
I mean, every conversation they had was about, yo, did you see the game yesterday?
This and that.
I mean, again, these guys are like 300 pounds.
I mean, you guys probably never played a sport in your life in their Monday morning quarterbacking and everything.
So they had this huge party that they planned, right?
And even some of the off-shift guys that came in was hanging out with them.
So what we did was, right before kickoff, and Dougie, when I say right before, I mean while that kicker's leg is back, getting ready to kick the ball, we went out to the street, okay?
I can't give names, but we went out to the street and we disconnected the cable.
Now this is years ago, all right?
We disconnected the cable at the street.
And you're not calling the cable company on a Sunday, and sure as hell, nobody's gonna come out and fix it.
So we disconnected it, snow all over the TV, and we could see through the screen, and they're, you know, hitting it, like, looking at the box, reset, nothing.
And they're like, yeah, screw these guys.
All right, so now they're livid.
They're on the phone, trying to call the cable company.
I mean, all hell's breaking loose with these guys.
So we left, and we timed it, like, okay, We came back to the station at the end of the game.
And when I say at the end, I mean just as the one-second clock hit zero and they're rushing on the field celebrating, you know what we did?
We connected it back again.
And there was their TV. And it's like, here you go, guys.
We never told them it was us until this day.
They never knew because they were afraid for our lives and they would kill us.
And we totally destroyed their Super Bowl party.
And we're glad we did.
Payback would have been heck on that one.
I can imagine.
We're glad we did.
And then there was another story.
This one didn't involve me personally, but the guys on a shift downtown at Station One, these are the big musclehead guys.
I mean, when they stretch, like, ugh, I'm tired.
You know, I mean, their biceps were bigger than their heads.
And so these guys were always working out.
I mean, these guys were freaking huge.
Six-pack abs.
These guys, I mean, they were ripped, right?
It's like, man, I wish I had that.
And so on the top of the refrigerator, they had all these protein shakes and powders and supplements and just all this stuff.
But they would drink this chocolate protein stuff like it was water.
I mean, it was incredible.
Because I guess, you know, these guys are working on it and they need their protein.
I don't know.
So anyway...
What these guys did was, because it was chocolate, they went to Publix, and they got a ton of Nestle Quick chocolate powder, dumped all this chocolate protein powder out to build their muscles, and put in the Nestle Quick chocolate powder, which is extremely high in calories and carbs and everything, and now these guys are getting fat, and they had no idea why the protein powder wasn't working.
Now whenever they did this, man, you can see the flop come on.
I had no idea why they were gaining weight.
I love it.
I love it.
Hey, real quickly, you made an interesting point.
In Orlando, like a lot of cities, did you have the stations that everybody wanted to go to and other stations that nobody wanted to go to?
Oh, heck yeah, man.
Heck yeah.
So early in your career, you want to stay busy.
You want to be part of the action.
You want to stay busy.
You want to work in the real nasty areas.
Because that's where all the action is.
But as you get older, your body's breaking down.
You're breaking down mentally and physically.
And you want to try to get to the slower stations.
Good thing about Orlando, there was a station for everybody.
Back when I was working at Station One, there was almost 30 guys there.
Between the chiefs and the firefighters and the girls, there was almost 30 people there.
So if you liked that environment, it was perfect.
Then they had the medium stations where you have 10 people And then you have the single company stations.
It was just a single man company where you have four people on there.
And so there was something for everybody.
Towards the end of my career, I wanted to remain slower because I just had enough.
And it worked out for me.
You can't go, go, go, dog, every day.
I mean, it breaks it down.
I see.
Well, folks, Mario Pacelli here has been talking, we've been talking Firehouse, we've been talking Life Lessons and everything else.
Mario's book, Mario, tell people where they can get this book.
It's called Surviving the Firehouse, A Rookie's Guide to Surviving the Firehouse and Fire Department Life.
Where can they get a copy of this book?
Because it's really worth a read.
All right, so Surviving the Firehouse, the easiest, best place to get it is Amazon.
Go to Amazon.
It's available in audiobook, paperback, hard copy, e-reader, whatever you want.
It's available for you, and I really appreciate everybody supporting me with this book.
It came out a couple years ago, and it was a great success.
When I wrote it, Dougie, listen, I was the last guy to ever write a book.
These guys in the firehouse, they give me crap all the time.
You're writing a book on how to be the best firefighter ever, but you were like the worst firefighter ever.
Yet your book became a bestseller in its category on Amazon.
How did you do that?
I said, freaking genius, guys.
You people are just lazy.
You knew everything.
You made all the mistakes.
I made all the mistakes.
You guys are just too damn lazy.
You knew everything I put in that book.
You just didn't want to sit there and write it down.
I just had a great editor that helped me through the process because a firefighter's grammar is not the best.
So I had to get a good editor with that.
And it's easy reading.
It's in my voice.
It doesn't read like an academic.
And we went back and forth with the editor where she was trying to make it sound like an academic wrote it.
And I'm like, no, it has to come from a firefighter because this is how we talk.
She goes, yeah, but you've got to take out all these curse words.
I'm like, no, but that's how we talk in the firehouse.
She goes, yeah, but just sprinkle it in there.
I said, all right.
So I gave her that one.
And so, like I said, it was a great success.
This book...
It will save, and it has saved so many jobs.
And that's the number one thing.
If you don't pay any, there's something in there for everybody.
And like what I try to tell the chiefs of a lot of these departments, every new hire that comes across, please buy them a book.
It will save you money in the long run.
It will save a job.
I wish fire colleges across the United States would buy it in bulk and just make sure it's mandatory reading because it will guide them.
It will save your job, make you just a better employee.
But...
But it's gone good so far.
I appreciate it, Doug.
No, it's good.
Folks, this is Doug Collins.
Glad you've been with us today.
Mario Pacelli, an Orlando firefighter there for 25 plus years, retired, wrote a book.
We've been having a great time talking about really the connection, what I want this podcast to always be, is between real life and how we live it and we live out our values because that is what living life's about.
Finding new people, finding new adventures, but learning As you go.
And here on the Doug Collins Podcast, we like to do that all the time.
Mario, thanks for being with us today.
Thanks for being part of the podcast.
Doug, thank you my friend.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you so much.
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