[00:00:00] This week on the Crisis Lab podcast, we're diving deeper into the challenges and opportunities in emergency management with part two of our discussion on rethinking the field. In our last episode, we explored how we can move beyond resilience to embrace an anti fragile approach. Today, we're tackling another critical challenge.
Misinformation, disinformation, and the erosion of trust in disaster response. From hybrid warfare to social media echo chambers, the information battle has become just as crucial as addressing physical crises. We'll unpack how misinformation affects disaster recovery, why trust in institutions is faltering, and how emergency managers can modernize their strategies and strategies.
to engage communities effectively. It's not just about identifying problems. It's about finding solutions that empower both practitioners and the public. Joining us is Todd DeVoe, a seasoned emergency management professional. Together, [00:01:00] we'll explore how we can rethink our approach to communication, rebuild trust, and prepare for the challenges of a rapidly evolving landscape.
We could just further exemplify the idea that, you know, as a emergency manager, I, I get where people get fixated on the name because they think just emergencies, but everything that we've just talked about in the last sort of half an hour is everything that could be impacted by disaster. And so this is where if you're in the field, you have much more of an opinion and a voice and you should participate.
In my opinion, and discussions around all of these items and all of these topics, just to be a part of the conversation in your community. And I wanted to turn quickly to trust in government, because you mentioned that. And obviously I've been watching from afar in terms of the double hurricanes that hit in the Gulf, and it's been really interesting for me.
I'll just give my sort of outside perspective and I'd love to hear your thoughts, but it's been interesting for me to watch in [00:02:00] terms of the sort of myths and disinformation campaigns that are happening and the reaction to them across the board, because in the international space and especially with international organizations, they put millions of euros and dollars into understanding this hybrid warfare concept, right?
The aspects of hybrid warfare and how societies are undermined through social media and information and miss and disinformation and all that. And there's a lot to be learned. And I think this was, you can say what you want about the United States, but I think this was a really solid, concrete example of how that is now coming over into the disaster space, right?
We generally think about it in terms of security. And in terms of somebody who's trying to create instability inside of an area that is intended, right, and, and, and from a security aspect, and then, but now you see it really in a disaster, I think really clear about the way that sort of this [00:03:00] misinformation, disinformation is going around and how it's undermining trust in government.
And that was something that it was really, to me, was obvious looking on the outside. Maybe it was not as obvious for people on the inside. But the one observation that I took away from that was we've learned a lot in the international space about how to deal with that. I'm not sure that, especially in the emergency management community, we have given enough thought to that.
In terms of how we would respond because we're still very structured in our approach, press releases, go to the website, look at what FEMA says, there's an FAQ, all this sort of stuff like that, that's out there. But you said yourself, you rarely see an emergency manager getting the airtime. And I think we have not been moving at the speed of information that's required in the future.
And one conversation I had was when it came up and we were talking about it, somebody really understood it and they said we had the same problems when we [00:04:00] put body cameras on police. Right. Nobody really wanted to do it. It was a bad idea. We don't need it. It's not necessary. And yet at the same time, it proved to be extremely helpful because you actually got to see what was happening.
Things were going on. It was evidence and there was transparency. And that's where, I'm not saying merchant managers need to wear body cameras, but what I'm saying is, why are, let's move that forward a little bit to say, okay, instead of just giving a press release from an EOC in my khakis, go out to the areas where you're delivering aid, aggressively appeal to Gen Z, be like, here's us doing our work.
Here's where we are. We're live feed, we're streaming, we're online. We're showing you these things. You obviously have to take care of security and everything else like that. But at the same time. We need more rapid response to the information space. And I'll use another anecdote from conflict and I'll pass it over to you.
But what we have seen is the number one requirement when you have had a territory has been occupied in this [00:05:00] case, like Ukraine has been occupied for a while, the number one requirement that you have to have is information. That is the first thing that you provide to the community because they're being told the war is over, Ukraine gave up.
NATO collapsed, all that sort of stuff like that. That's the first thing. And so one of the very first things is coming in and telling people, no, everything's fine. It just took time. We're here now and we're still in the fight. And that's one of the biggest things that I think we can learn from this experience is those communities need rapid information as much as possible.
And they need to see something because they've been shut down. From no power, no water, no food, all those sorts of things like that. And it's very much the same situation. This is why I always say like coming, we can learn a lot in terms of emergency management, conflict and stability, because I use emergency management as a way to create stability and post conflict operations.
And this is where, these are very strong parallels between the two. What are your thoughts on that?
One thing I didn't talk about earlier is the emergency management network, which is a network of emergency managers who are writing. About these topics, [00:06:00] you can find us a sub stack, or you can find us on LinkedIn as well.
And I think there we're trying to create a culture where we can have a conversation about such things. And yesterday, oddly enough, I had two conversations about mis and disinformation. One was on the region nine podcasts for I am region nine. And the other one was on LinkedIn. We have been dealing with mis and disinformation for millennia.
The Romans used it, the, we, the, we had the yellow journalism in the 1800s. So the, one of the reasons why we had the Spanish American war was due to misinformation or disinformation coming from yellow journalism about the issue of the explosion of the main in Cuba. Still to this day, people say, Oh, did the Spanish blow us up?
No, I think what ends up being, they found out it was like a boiler explosion, just a bad mishap, but the, the war hawks used it to go to, to get us into war. This isn't new. The newest part about it is the rapid [00:07:00] availability on your phone or on your computer to find information. And one of the things that we need to do is teach critical thinking more at grade schools.
Start, not start at college with your first philosophy course. You need to start at college. We need to be doing this on grade school, teaching people how to see what the angle is and why this person is saying this particular thing, whether it's a politician or whether it's a meme or what's the why behind the information that's being posted.
Bringing this out of politics into emergency management, I think is interesting. And one of the things I find fascinating are conspiracy theories. I love conspiracy theories in the sense of, as a, like if somebody who watches, I don't know, some sort of TV show about weird stuff, because I find it fascinating and like how people believe them and how they grow.
And one of the best stories I've ever heard. Heard in many years, and I forget his name and I feel bad that I'm not going to be able to credit him. There was a guy who's pretty [00:08:00] much a born in the performance side of things and he created this concept of Birds aren't real. Are you familiar with that Kyle?
Birds aren't real. Yeah. He made this thing up wholesale. Like I said, the birds aren't real. And then he paid 50 actors to come to New York city to with protest signs, saying birds aren't real. And it grew to a thousand protesters. And this thing is this moment is taken up with movement. It's taken on its own fricking world.
And he's come out and said, I made this up. This is something I made up. From my head. And then the conspiracy theorists are like, no, the man got to him. He was telling the truth and now he's sold out to the government. And, and it's holy crap. So this is completely made up, but they get their lives as their own.
And no matter how much truth you add to the, to it, it, it, it doesn't, it doesn't break the mold of the falseness that's [00:09:00] out there that I don't understand. The, the boy part I don't get, and this is why I think I'm fascinated by is. Why, once something takes hold, it's impossible, almost next to impossible, to break?
The moon landing, John F. Kennedy, you name it, it's whatever conspiracy is out there. The other side of it too, is if you tend to believe in one conspiracy, you're more likely to believe in all the conspiracies that are out there. I think that's a fascinating part of it as well. And I've, I have not done any independent study.
I've read some books about this and, or listened to some podcasts that are listened to some documentaries. It's just, it's, it's mind boggling how conspiracies move forward. That's what we're dealing with. Right. We're dealing here is how do we give the proper information when you have now the lack of trust in government, right?
So anything covered from the government has already looked at suspiciously, right? You have the lack of trust into big business, right? So if it's coming [00:10:00] from the, the traditional news media today, people will don't trust it. Right. Rightfully earned in some cases here, especially in the United States. I don't know how it is in Europe, but some of the news media outlets, the major ones have spread bad stories and haven't gone back and, and, and fix them.
So I think that's interesting. So you've seen it. Uh, or if it's a, if it's a story like in the New York times, it makes the front page and it ends up being wrong. They put, they bury like page eight to say, Oh, sorry, that story that we ran a month ago is wrong. They don't come out and put it on the front page.
So now there's lack of trust in the media, in the traditional media sources, whether it's news, radio or television, right? Those areas are trusted. So now people are looking for more information, but they're looking for an alternative sites. And then we live in this world of the echo chamber. Right? Because if you don't believe, if I don't like what Kyle's saying, I just delete them.
Right? So now I never have to hear anything that you say, Kyle. And it's, boop, no longer on my face. And I'm never going to see him [00:11:00] again. But I believe in what Bob says over here, and I'm going to get Bob's posts all the time, telling me everything I believe. So they don't look outside the echo chamber. So we have that problem.
And I don't know how to break that, Kyle, to be honest with you. Because as much truth as we told, I, I, I, And one last story is I had a citizen come to me the other night and she said, Hey, I see all this stuff that's happening in North Carolina and Tennessee. She's like, when we have a disaster here, is FEMA going to come in and take over our city?
No, that's not how they work. And, and I talked to her for a good half hour and she walked away, not really believe anything I said. She's the hope that's the truth. When have I ever done? So she believes that conspiracy over. The truth. And, uh, this guy, friend of mine, gave a, uh, an interesting analogy. He took a cup of clean, cold, clear water, and he goes, this is a beautiful cup of clear water.
I'm like, yeah, absolutely it is. And he goes, so he takes [00:12:00] chicken poop, right? And he puts the chicken poop in the water, and he starts stirring it, and he goes, this is what happens when you have conspiracies added into this cup of water. The cup of water is saying truth. And you go, but I have critical thinking here, right?
I can take a look and I can find out what the chicken poop is and what isn't. So he goes, okay, so that's the strainer and he strains the chicken poop through the strainer, right? And the water comes out and it's just cloudy, ugly water. And he goes, do you want to take a drink? And I'm like, that is a great analogy of when we have conspiracies added into the conversation, as much as we do to clean that.
They're still going to be tainted water and people not necessarily want to drink it. And I don't know how we do a better filter, how we do a better job. But again, I think that it starts way earlier in this conversation, not after the disaster occurs, building that trust with your constituents prior to.
And that way, when that water comes out, we can clean it up even better and make [00:13:00] it so it's a clean cup of water again. And so you can drink it because yeah, truth does get cloudy sometimes.
Yeah, I think that's all accurate. I think just looking from the outside in my sort of only add on to that is that most of the steps that are recommended for countering this information and things like that, or there's distance from ourselves, right?
So it's, we need to increase media literacy for the public. We need to create fact checking and verification for the public. We need to debunk things for the public. We need to promote. Transparency and tell people we're transparent and we need to adjust the algorithm. So they're, as you mentioned, they're just not diving off the deep end into the next conspiracy sort of rabbit hole.
And the harder things, when I was listening to you talking, and it really just comes back to the communities, I think at the end of the day, absolute trust requires absolute performance. The government has to perform. We as emergency managers or city administrators or whatever have to [00:14:00] deliver on what we're saying, or you just feed that mechanism.
And if you can't deliver, you got to explain it. You're there with the people, you're accountable to the people, accountable to the community. And if you want trust, you got to earn the trust. And because we're not present, I think coming back to your original point when we started the podcast, if you're not present, how can they ever trust what you're going to say?
And you have the exact same experience of what you just had. I'll be right, see you in six months or a year. That's the experiences we have. So it's good that you're getting out and you're talking to the citizens and things like that. But it's going to be a long road back in my opinion. And it's, I think you're right.
It's been around for a while, but I think in our sort of little community emergency management, this is one of the few times that Even from outside the States, you're seeing FEMA get pretty hit hard, like really hard on their performance. I haven't seen that in years, even if at all, if I can remember, but then they've been taking a beating over this response.
Yeah. Very interesting.
Even Katrina, when [00:15:00] you could say that's probably one of the low lights of, of the FEMA response time. The majority of the people were happy to see FEMA there. This is a different turn in the, in that page of the book of the residents Chasing FEMA out North, they left North Carolina, they had armed people surround them in Tennessee.
Now, no one drew arms or anything like this, but they were wearing.
So, so it's just interesting to see that there's that level of distrust to the front of government. And I don't know, I don't know why this has occurred by this is like, where did we make that turn to the distrust? I don't know if it's bad information that's being shared via social media saying that this is occurring.
The people are already saying that, Which didn't make sense to me that FEMA was coming in to take property from the mountain people in North [00:16:00] Carolina. Not sure exactly why they would do that. So I don't understand. That's some of the stuff that we, I think we have to understand a little bit of the fears.
That the people have of government, like, why are they fearing government so much? And where is that coming from? We've we, as a nation, the United States specifically, we've always had a great love hate relationship with government. It started in 1776 when we said we don't no longer want to be part of the British government.
But even before that, there was people leaving society to go live in the mountains. The, the Appalachian mountains were, were basically settled by people who didn't want to be. Touched by the government. The moonshiner is a great example of people who, the tax man, those that would call all the people, right?
The moonshiners would be hiding from the tax man. And so there's been, there's always been this interesting relationship between the people in the government in the United States. So I'm not shocked by it in the sense of saying, [00:17:00] okay, there's this distrust, but I'm perplexed by the concept of. Why, on the disaster relief side of things, I've never seen that pushback the way we have today.
And normally it isn't because of them coming to help, it's normally because they feel that there wasn't enough help being given. And now we're seeing the other side of it. We'll do it ourselves. So it's interesting that I think this is gonna be something we're gonna be studying for a little while.
Hey there, just a quick pause in our show for a second.
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Now let's get back to the show. The irony behind that too is we have the mantra of all disasters are local or they all start and end locally. And then yet you have the paradox of when it is state and federal assistance coming in and wanting to have a coordination officer and then wanting to have donor coordination and all sorts of aspects, you implement programs to be able to do that.
It's an interesting aspect that sort of blends all this together because one thing I observed from, of course, being in Europe, right, observed for externally from thousands of miles away. Is the, the interesting sort of aspect of where it's, you can't blame FEMA. And then as soon as the heat starts cranking up to 11, it's, Hey, look, it's all local, right?
And it's like the opposite reaction, like, Oh, FEMA is doing as much as they can. And then, [00:19:00] Oh, no, sorry. It's the local entities that should have managed better. So there's a bit of a, sort of a disassociation that occurred. And, and then the second thing I would say is, And this is not really the most appropriate term, so I'll caveat that.
But what I noticed was that, especially in the disinformation space, when things are clearly disinformation, that took a while to get ramped up to counter the narratives. And then the speed of execution of countering those I think was, could be improved, maybe that's something we'll identify, as you say, and observe and try and improve on in the future.
And then the thing that is, just a thought popped in my head when there's all these discussions going on is. Are we actually going through a form of, like, victim blaming for that? Because we're saying it's your fault you don't understand that, what FEMA's responsibilities are. We've told you a hundred times.
And then what, but it's also the aspect of, it's your fault for spreading disinformation.
I want to say it's our fault as [00:20:00] emergency management professionals that the public doesn't know what FEMA, what we do. That is 100 percent on us, not on the residents. So I want to make sure that, because it's our job to educate, right?
Like I said, for too long. We've sat in the room, type it on the keyboard. We haven't gone out to the city council meetings. We haven't been an important part of that conversation. The fire department does a wonderful job of doing a great going out and doing pancake breakfasts and the fire prevention week and giving every little kids, little red hats, all that kind of stuff.
The police department does a pretty decent job of public education programs like this. We don't, so it is our fault 100%. I'm not blaming the resident or the citizen of not knowing what we do or what FEMA does, right, or what the system is. We're doing a terrible job of educating that. I wanna make that part clear.
But yeah, I think I was gonna say, I'm not saying you specifically, right? Yeah, no, I'm not saying you [00:21:00] specifically. What I'm saying is I saw lots of reactions across social media from merchant management, community reading into things, and then it was really like we almost. We're, we were getting very close.
Let me put it that way. We were getting very close to victim blaming about, and then that's okay. We should probably just take a pause and then think about what we're doing. Because like you're saying, it's, we have that onus, that responsibility of making sure people understand the role and responsibilities.
But if we were once the heat, like I said, once the heat turned up to 11, it was like, it's all local level and you guys should understand what FEMA does and does not do. And that's where I, the reactions that I started to see across the emergency management community, but yeah, good.
Yeah, no, you're not. And I just wanted to clarify that.
That's okay. I didn't mean to interrupt you on your thought process. Yeah, no, you're right. We're weird, right? Uh, we're, first of all, we're all human, but we're weird when we, when we go out and say things like, Hey public. Why are you being stupid? Like, why are you believing [00:22:00] that, that meme of the, of whatever that's out there over what we're telling you?
And then they get, we get angry with them and then it causes, uh, kind of conflict. And I know we haven't gone to that step. I was being a little hyperbole on that, but our hyperbolic, but the idea here though, is yeah, I mean, we, we, we are pretty close to that of going, Oh, the residents that I serve, they're so whatever.
Right? And, and I want to, I want emergency managers to understand if your residents aren't educated on to the fact of what we do, whose fault is that? We have people that are out there that are really busy with everyday work, whether it's going to work, coming home, feed their family. Some people are on the margins of having to work two, three jobs just to make sure that they could put cereal on the table in the morning.
We have their, let alone being able to put disaster kits together. I've had this conversation with people and they're like, Oh, I have a disaster kit, but I could barely afford to feed my family as it is. Why are we doing programs to help them? [00:23:00] And it doesn't have to be expensive. I want to go back and do this for a second.
It doesn't have to be an expensive program. We can do things for the community that doesn't cost us millions of dollars. But at the same time, it's just, we aren't out there doing it. We're not out there doing these things and it's not put it on disaster preparedness expo on the parking lot of a target once a year or something like that, that you can bring helicopters and fire trucks and stuff like this is really cool.
That's not. That's not community outreach. That's a, that is a feather on your cap. So you can turn around to city council and say, Oh, look at this great thing I've done. It's, it is getting out there and being part of the community. And I think that will help with this information, right? Because they're going to, they're going to trust what you have to say.
And you know what? And there's always going to be that 10 or 20 percent that no matter what you say or do, you're not going to be able to get to, you're not going to be able to reach because we have that. ingrained in us the idea of independent, screw the government. I'm going to go into the hills and [00:24:00] live by myself.
And you know what? I'm actually not worried about a lot of those people because during the disaster, they're probably going to be far better than majority of the people. They're going to be all those people. You're like, Oh yeah. All those crazy preppers that are living off the grid. Oh, I would love to have more of them.
I'd love to have more of them. They're telling me, Hey, I don't need your help. I got this. Awesome. I'm just checking in on you. You got it. Alright, cool. You keep being you, mountain man, and do it, right? We used to promote that, right? We used to promote victory gardens during World War II, right? Hey, we don't have enough food at the grocery shop because we're sending it over to all the men overseas.
Alright, get some seeds and grow a garden. We expect that of our residents, make sure you have plenty of water store. We expect that of our residents, these things. I think we need to be promoting some of that in a more economic way. And again, talking about the people that are socioeconomically not well off.
Those are the people who should be working with closer, even closer to help them have these things. [00:25:00] And we can put programs together. We have one, a program in California called Listos. It's reaching out to the Hispanic community. And the idea of is, isn't having you come to a. 24 hour CERT class, it's taking the training to the street.
And once you get three, four people on a corner, a walk and don't walk. And we're going to go over disaster preparedness for you. I think that's an amazing idea. And things like this, and that's, that is truly community outreach. Is every day thing. It's not a once a year disaster preparedness expo. And that I think you should still do the disaster preparedness expo.
Is there cool. Right. But that should either be the kickoff or what you're going to do for the rest of the year of getting into the community or the end cap of this is what I've been doing all year long and invite every time that you have those contacts, invite them to the disaster preparedness expo, because those are cool.
Those are great community events. Do those, but also do the other things. That's the only way I truly believe this, Kyle. That's the only way that we're going to be able to [00:26:00] defeat misinformation and disinformation. Again, it has to be that trust building. I know I've said like I broke a record probably three or four times during this interview, but it's the way to do it is to go through and build that community trust early.
And again, you got that 20%. Don't worry about that. They're going to do their own thing. There'll be fine. Let's work on those that the rest of the 80 percent of the community that wants to be involved, that wants to make sure that their kids are safe. That wants to make sure that they're, that when the earthquake does occur, that there's going to be, I say earthquake because I live in California, that there's going to be services for them to be able to go to, to be able to make sure that they're safe, they're worried, they definitely are worried.
And a lot of it that the reaction that we're seeing in North Carolina and Tennessee, I think is fear based reaction. Yeah, I would feel the same way. If everything just, if I had a mud wall come through my city and destroy everything in my community, and I knew that there's no way in or out, I'm stuck up there and there's no helicopters [00:27:00] flying to come bring me services.
And I'm like, I'm on my own. And then finally, a week or two later, after we're trying to figure out what's going on, you show up and say, here's 750. You're like, what? I get that animosity and the fear. But because we didn't explain, this is just to get you by for today. We're going to be here for you for the rest of it.
We're going to help you recover. It was like a shock to the system, I think. And I think that's where a lot of that came from. So I get the reaction, but again, it's because there's no, there was, there's no relationship. There's no relationship between the resident and emergency management, right? Where there's a relationship between the resident and police, good or bad.
And, but at least there's something there they understand. So there's no relation, they, they don't know who we are at the end of the day.
I think to a certain extent, I'll just make a quick comment and then I'll ask you one last question, see how quick you are on your feet to answer this question in a sort of concise way.
But [00:28:00] I think the answer is on your t shirt, right? Civil defense. If you're really looking at being anti fragile and we want people to understand what the work requires. Whatever happened to our sort of civil servant idea, mentality, like they have in many of the European countries of it's not conscription, you have a duty, right?
So you have a one year, two year duty after high school or whatever the case is, and you can work in the emergency management preparedness in your own community for 12 months or 24 months and just be part of that. And then that sort of civil service coming forth and getting people to understand, contribute back to your community, come back to your society, get the on the job training and build out professions and grasp and understanding.
And a lot more people will start to understand. It's an interesting idea in the many nations now within the context of a larger, not to get too far on the scary side, but larger conflict in Europe or whatever the case. Are looking at how they have reinstated conscripts and how they [00:29:00] reinstate people in a civil servant sort of capacity to be able to support their communities and just across the board.
And it's all rolling back to the old civil defense days. But of course, you can always comment on that. But the question I wanted to ask you before we end the interview is what is. In your mind, emergency management 2. 0.
Emergency management 2. 0 is realistically, I want to go the other way a little bit. I think it's going to be emergency management 3.
0 is that. I think we need to go back, and I've written about this as well, to the civil defense model. One of the reasons why I have the shirt on, though, but I truly believe in it. And so much so that I'm trying to bring the logo back as a positive. We've seen variations of it, but people, Oh, that's so old fashioned.
That's a dead logo, whatever. The reason why I think civil defense works is because we do ask the community to be part of it. We taught it in high school. [00:30:00] We taught it in elementary school, to tuck cover and hold on drill, even though they're fantastically Ill prepared for anything that will be coming, but like the kids thought about it.
1950s, uh, as an example, the United States and the height of the cold war there, people were building bomb shelters in their backyard. I'm not saying that we have to go that far, but just use this as an example, building bomb shelters. There's my school that I went to in the seventies and the eighties, we had a bomb shelter in our basement and then the fallout shelter several was there and we knew what that meant.
We. Up until, I don't know, I would say the early eighties, we were still doing duck covered hold on drills. I had no earthquake issues in Buffalo, New York, or in Albany, New York, where I grew up and went to high school, but we did duck covered hold on drills. Right. Because we were looking, we were in the war at that time, the cold war.
I think civil defense is, is a way to bring community back together. The victory gardens, like I saw before, the community gardens, things like this, that, that were really popular. [00:31:00] You have, I have a helmet over here. Somewhere in my head in my room. That's the old civil defense helmet It was the fire brigade and the communications team, which is basically your RACIES team today.
The fire brigade, they weren't, their job wasn't to go out and put fires out. Their job was to help with fire prevention. Things like this. So there were these jobs that were, that the community said, we have these jobs that need to be filled. They're filled with volunteers. Even the air raid warning warrant warring guys, right?
Those people, that's the community type of stuff that I'm talking about, that we need to build up again. If we're looking at a whole community, truly all community disaster preparedness and disaster resiliency is, is doing that. And that's some of the stuff that I really believe that we should do. I do want to talk a little bit about your idea of civil service after high school.
I don't believe in forced military service. And there's a couple of reasons, and that's just my own and you're a former military guy yourself. And we've seen that not work well, especially after [00:32:00] Vietnam in the 70s, where the morale of the troops were very low because they didn't want to be there. I think a full volunteer military, especially the United States is where it's at, and we haven't had a problem.
Even when the war broke out, more and more young people joined the military after 9 11 than before, because they wanted to do their part for the war. We won't have that problem of having the roles at what a war breaks out. I think where we have problems is during peacetime because no one knows what to do with troops and there's morale issues.
And that's a, we don't want to have that happening and forcing people to be in that world. Isn't great. Now, what I do say is we force you to do two years of subsurface, whether you choose to go into the military or you choose to do what I would like to see. And I know they've played with it, with AmeriCorps, uh, it's like the idea of a Peace Corps, if you will, for America.
I love that concept. I love the idea of maybe even keeping it local. Where you do two years working in your local government, whether it's where you stay locally, like if you stay here and like Orange County [00:33:00] and you work in Orange County, California for two years, or if you go out into other communities, we have the conservation core here in California, which normally is.
Which is a sad thing in a sense, and I say sad, because anybody can join the Conservation Corps, but it's a lot of it is you're seeing lower income individuals join the Conservation Corps and they do great work. I worked with them in multiple disasters. They are a wonderful group of people. They're dedicated and there's a way for them to learn job skills and whatnot.
We should be having that, not just for the people who can't do it. Can't afford to go to college, right? Cause a lot of them, that's the kids I spoke to, but for everybody who should serve a couple of years, whether whatever socioeconomic status you're sitting in, they get a little bit dirty building sandbags for flood fighting and things like this, I think is, it would be great.
I'd like to see more of that being done. I'd like to see that done a little bit more nationally speaking. I think that's really important that. Doing at [00:34:00] least a couple of years of service is critical. Whoever will ever come here in the United States. I doubt it. It's a dream that we can hold on to. Uh, but I think that we should, if they don't make a mandatory, I think we definitely should reward, highly reward people that are going to go into the AmeriCorps or the conservation core with.
College scholarships, uh, other job opportunities, uh, giving them points on civil service tests, uh, for, for federal and state jobs, giving them an up saying, Hey, you were part of this. You've given back to the community. We're going to give to you just like we do to our military veterans with extra points and things like this on tests.
I think we should do that for those that those kids who did not want to go into military, but we still want to give back to the community and give back to the United States by giving them some special privileges and I'm all a hundred percent behind it.
Yeah, I think there's, there's new and creative ways to make that work.
It doesn't have to be the old model that causes so much friction in society, but there's new and creative ways of getting the younger generations into [00:35:00] public service. I'll just leave it at that. And I think it's going to be something that it would be effective across multiple domains, even just their own individual preparedness.
And we constantly talk about emergency management, not enough staff and people and, and all that stuff like that. And, and so there's plenty of ways to, to get that done. People to try and do it, but you're absolutely right. It has to be a structured program. There has to be a reward to it in terms of, you can't just say skills, right?
Nobody wants to have a free internship, right? So it's gotta be, it's gotta be a program and it's gotta be funded and it's got to lead somewhere for people to actually want to participate in it. But anyway,
we got to pay him. It should not be free. I'll. Give you an example, my son, he's just 21, he's working for the U.
S. Forest Service as a wildlife firefighter. And he's not getting paid a lot. People keep coming up, oh, he should go to this service or that service and get paid more. So for him, it's not about the, the pay. For him, it's about, number one, doing the firefighting stuff, which he's very interested in doing. But the other one is, it's just, he feels he's giving back to the United States by [00:36:00] giving back to the community by being out there on the front line.
And he'll do it for a few years and he'll figure out what he wants to do after that or maybe he'll even stay with the Forest Service. I don't know. But on the other side of it too is, but we do have to pay these kids. We should pay them well. I think he's getting paid, I don't know, something like 15 an hour or something like that to, to put his life on the line for, for lighting fires.
But I think we should pay them better for sure. And that's a whole other conversation. But I think that would bring, also bring more people into wanting to do these jobs. If we pay them a decent wage, this is a government, this is not private industry. This is government. We could afford to do it, but that's a whole nother story.
Yeah, absolutely. Todd, good to have you on the podcast on the show. Really appreciate you giving us some time. We did go long, uh, but it's really good to just stop by once in a while, check in and see how things are going and what's happening in the community. So appreciate your time.
Absolutely. Thanks Kyle.
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