Everyone Saw the Rescue. They Missed This. | Freedom Friday

A 16-year-old California lifeguard saved a 10-year-old boy from drowning in massive surf.

The country celebrated the rescue.

His mother celebrated something else: the training that made the rescue possible.

When people tried to give her son money, she redirected them toward the Junior Lifeguards program that had spent years preparing him for the moment everyone else saw on video.

That got Chad thinking:

Why do we spend so much attention on the rescue and so little on the readiness?

On this Freedom Friday, Chad follows that question from Junior Lifeguards and America's lifeguard shortage to CPR, Stop the Bleed, hunter education, emergency preparedness, and the invisible instructors who quietly create competent citizens.

He also tells the story of flipping a raft on Oregon's Deschutes River with his 70- and 74-year-old parents — and realizing that training he hadn't consciously thought about in decades was still there when he needed it.

The larger question:

What should every American know before they're handed a high school diploma?

Not politically.

Practically.

Because there's always a gap between the emergency and the professionals arriving.

Those minutes belong to whoever is standing there.

Freedom isn't only permission. Freedom is capability.

🎙️ IN THIS EPISODE

The California Junior Lifeguard rescue and the mother who pointed attention upstream; why training becomes invisible when it works; America's lifeguard shortage and disappearing youth pipeline; what stress does to decision-making; Chad's Deschutes rafting story; Sully's 208 seconds versus 42 years of preparation; CPR and Stop the Bleed; the extraordinary success of American hunter education; how Pittman-Robertson created durable preparedness funding; Chad's basic competency checklist; and why you should thank the person who taught you something that stuck.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The Power of Community Support
 05:37 The Importance of Training and Preparation
 10:13 Understanding Readiness vs. Response
 14:58 The Chain of Competence
 21:26 The Lifeguard Shortage Crisis
 28:49 The Unseen Value of Preparation
 33:43 Competency in Life-Saving Skills
 40:21 Funding Structures for Preparedness
 44:41 Essential Skills for Life
 50:48 Thanking the Unsung Heroes

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💬 If someone taught you the thing that stuck — swim instructor, Scout leader, CPR instructor, hunter-safety volunteer, parent, coach — tell them. They may never have found out whether their preparation mattered.

The rescue lasted minutes. The preparation lasted years.

HASHTAGS

#CompetenceIsFreedom #FreedomFriday #CommonSense #ChadLaw #Preparedness #PersonalResponsibility #Freedom #SelfReliance #CPR #JuniorLifeguards

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

America last week a mother in California turned down a pile of money, and not a little money, the internet kind. The kind that shows up out of nowhere when something happens to your family and a few hundred thousand strangers decide they have to do something about it. People started asking her, where do we send it? Is there a fund to go fund me? Where's the link? There's always a link. There's a link for everything now. I'm fairly sure there's a link for people whose links didn't work out the first time. But she said no. Now, when a mom turns down money for her kid, your brain starts filling in the blanks. Mine did. I assumed, you know, somebody got hurt. You assumed somebody was brave and it cost them something, and she's just too proud or too wrecked to take a check from strangers. But hold on to her, I'm gonna come back to her. Because first I want to tell you about a summer. Not this summer, a summer a while back, long enough back that I'm not putting a number on it on television for my own sanity. But in my family, the first year of junior lifeguards was mandatory. Not encouraged, not hey, this could be fun, mandatory. My mother is obsessed with water safety. The woman is seventy years old, and she stand-up paddle surf six foot waves in Hawaii and Mexico, which I'd like on the record to reflect is not a normal retirement. My dad worked for the Forest Service, spent his twenties as a mountaineer, equally obsessed with climber safety. So between the two of them my childhood had a theme. I didn't get a vote. I got a swim test. And it wasn't just us. It's the point I want to make. Every kid I went to school with did it. I didn't think of it as training. I don't think any of us did. It was just cold water and a lot of running on sand, and when he went home made a sandwich and forgot about it until the next morning. All right. Back to mother. So late July, just a couple weeks ago, in Santa Cruz, California on Seabright Beach, very popular beach. Surf had been coming in that had no business being where it was, really. A boy about ten years old gets pulled out. And grown men went in after him, more than one, and the water threw them back like they were nothing, pieces of trash. Then a sixteen year old lifeguard went in. And he did not come back out until he had that kid. You can watch it. Wave after wave. He grabs a breath, ducks under the brake, comes up, still holding the kid, goes under, comes up, still holding him. Longer than the video you saw actually runs. He brought that boy back to his family. So the country did what the country does. The clip went everywhere. People wanted to give him something, medals, honors, money. Where's the fund? Where's the link? And his mom said no. She said, and I'm quoting, he was just doing the job he loves. And then she told everyone where to send it. Send it to the junior guards program. The county program where he learned all of it, where the rest of those lifeguards learned it too. She pointed upstream, and as far as I can tell, nobody followed her finger. So it got me thinking. But hang on, first this. Folks, if common sense has become part of your weekly routine, Chadparkerlaw.com is your home base. Every week you'll find something new, whether it's my latest books, a new editorial, the gaily news, the free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto, or everything else we're building right here together. And if you've got a question, an idea for an episode, or think I completely missed the mark, don't forget you can always call or text 252 Chad Law. And I promise you, some of the best conversations on this show start with your messages. All right, we'll get into today's episode right after these words.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

When you need common sense, come see Chad Law. The boldest pundit you ever saw. It's true, too. It's hard, and the talk is real. Reality rules, and that's the appeal. Spreading truth. That's his card, opening eyes. Who needs a part when you do common stance? Then comes Steve Chad. He lays down the law when the lights get bad. So come where it's real.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

With common sense. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters: the red, white, and blue rainbow. And this is Common Sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts instead of outrage, where politics is just the start of something much bigger. Here, reality gets a vote, truth matters, common sense matters. Welcome home, America. So, guys, I didn't plan this week. Monday I came back from Montana and talked about a problem where we already know the answer. We've known it for years, and somehow the knowing hasn't turned into the doing. Then Wednesday I made the case with a straight face that a meaningful chunk of what's wrong with an entire generation improves the moment they walk out the front door and stand in some grass. And then this video shows up in my feed. The lifeguard saving, 16-year-old lifeguard saving a 10-year-old. And I'm sitting there watching the 16-year-old go under wave, holding another human being come up and go, and I realize I've been building towards something all week without even knowing it. So let's call this nature week. We might as well finish it with the lifeguard story. But let me tell you what actually happens in that video. A lot of people have seen it, but I need to make sure that we're seeing the same thing. The surf that day was enormous, not good day for boogie boards enormous, the kind that turns the beach into a different beach. A ten year old ends up in it, and people react the way people react. Immediately and with everything they've got. Beachgoers go in, another lifeguard goes in, and the ocean picks them up and puts them back on the sand. One adult after another. Now that's not cowardice, that's the opposite. Those are people running at a drowning child with nothing but their own arms and their willingness to try. It just didn't work. And then the sixteen year old goes in and it works. He times the brakes, he breathes when there's a chance to breathe. He goes under instead of fighting the top of the wave. And whatever the water does to him, he does not let go of that kit, not once. For a stretch of time that witnesses say went on considerably longer than the video actually shows. That ten year old boy, he went home to his family that afternoon. So celebrate him, please. I'm not here to complicate that at all. A teenager did something extraordinary the country noticed, and that is the country working correctly. That video deserved every view it got hands down. And we need to celebrate his mother while we're at it, because she did something I've almost never seen anyone do in this these modern times. She had every reason to take the win. Her kid is a national hero for about seventy two hours. People are lining up to hand her money. Nobody on earth would have blinked if she would have said thank you and taken it or gone on a talk show circuit or wrote a book. Instead, she said he was just doing the job he loves, and she sent the whole thing to the program that taught him how. She said something else too, something that I can't stop chewing on. She says lifeguards ought to be recognized as first responders. Sit with that a second. She's not asking for a check. She's asking for a category. Now, here's where my brain went sideways, and it's the reason we're doing an hour on this. Everybody covered the rescue. I watched that clip get passed around for a solid week. News hits, morning shows, big accounts, all of it. And I could not find one person asking the question sitting right there in the middle of all of it. Where does a sixteen year old learn to do that? And I'm not mad about it, not mad at anyone about it. Let me just say that plainly, because this show is not in the business of getting mad at the media for covering an amazing thing. Amazingly, they did. That is the story. A kid saved a boy, run it. But watch the tape one more time. And you'll notice there are two completely different things happening in the same forty seconds of footage. Same beach, same wave, same water temperature, same amount of courage, I'd argue the adults who got tossed had more to lose and went anyways. But there's one difference. One of those people had spent years learning what the water does. The rescue lasted minutes. The preparation, however, lasted years. And only one of those things ended up on television, which is part of the reason why I'm covering it. You see, we are magnificent at celebrating the response world class at it. We know exactly how to honor the guy who ran into the building. We know how to do the ceremony, the medal, the standing ovation, the moment where he waves and won't take credit and everyone cries a little. But we are sure terrible at celebrating the thing that made him capable of running into the building. Nobody throws a parade for a drill. There's no ceremony for the Tuesday you practice something you'd hoped you'd never need. I never in my life seen a press conference about somebody's swim test. And I promise you, mine deserved one. Nobody knows the name of the instructor who taught that kid to duck under a wave instead of trying to climb over it. His own mother had to go on the internet and tell us the program existed, and she still couldn't get the country to look at it. So that's the question I couldn't put down this week, and I want to hand it to you before we go any further. Why is it that we spend almost anything on the rescue and almost no attention at all on the readiness? Think about, go back to the water for a second, because there's a detail in that footage most people watched right past. He didn't fight the wave, folks, he went under it. And every instinct your body has says the opposite. Get on top of it, get above it, get air. It's the first thing they teach you in junior lifeguards. Instinct is what these grown men were running on. And instinct got them thrown back onto the sand like laundry. Somebody taught him that. Taught me that. Somebody on some cold morning, years before any of this, stood in the shallows and made a bunch of bored kids practice ducking under a wave over and over again until they stopped flinching. And I'd bet every dollar in my pocket that on the morning that lesson happened, not one of those kids thought it actually mattered. Again, I'm speaking from experience. So let's talk about what junior lifeguards actually is, because I think most of the country hears the name and pictures summer camp with a whistle. Folks, it is not summer camp. Depending on the program, kids start around seven, eight, nine years old. Teaches you ocean swimming technique, beach and ocean safety, rip currents, how they form, how they move, what they look like from shore, and the part that saves your life, which is that you don't swim against one ever. Rescue techniques, rescue equipment, free diving, the marine environment, physical conditioning that would embarrass most adults I know, and first aid in CPR. Not to mention where I went, we swam around the pier. Those are 11-year-olds learning CPR in a swimsuit on a beach before lunch. And in a lot of these programs, if you stick with it a couple of years and you're 16, 17, you become a cadet. Which means you're training under a real lifeguard and you're expected to lead the younger kids through the same drills somebody once dragged you through. Somewhere in America, right now there's a 17-year-old with a clipboard and a whistle who has more emergency training than half the adults on that beach, and he's being paid in t-shirts. So I told you guys my first year wasn't optional. What I didn't tell you is how deeply unimpressive it felt at the time. Here's what I remember: cold sand, running, a lot of running, which I'd like to point out is a strange thing to make an ocean people do, but nonetheless. Somebody yelling a number at you, somebody yelling a different number at you, getting into the water that was at that hour genuinely hostile, and repetition. God, the repetition. Same entry, same exit, same three things over and over until you could do them while thinking about absolutely anything else. Which at 11 I was. And I want to be careful here, because this is the part where a guy my age starts saying, back in my day, and everybody's thumb goes to the scroll. So I want to be precise instead of sentimental. It didn't feel like training, it felt like a schedule, really. It was the thing you did that summer. The way some kids had Little League and some kids had church camp. Nobody's parents were making a statement. There was no philosophy attached to it, it was just normal. And the thing being normal is how it gets done a thousand times without anybody noticing that it's doing something. That's the whole point. Which brings me right back to that mother. Think about what she actually did in that moment she did it. Her son is the most beloved teenager in America for about a week. People want to hand her money, real money, the kind that shows up fast when a video moves. And all she does is say thank you. Instead, she looks at this entire country's attention. This thing everyone in public life spends a career chasing, picks it up and hands it to a County Parks department program. Now, I've never met that woman, but I know exactly what she was doing, because she was doing the thing you only do when you've watched the process from the inside. She wasn't being humble. That's the read everybody had. I think everybody was wrong. She was being accurate. She knows her kid didn't do that alone. She knows there were mornings. She knows there were instructors. She knows there was a summer where he was seven and terrible at it. She's the one who drove him. She was sitting in the parking lot for most of it. So when the country said, Hey, how do we thank him? She said, You're thanking the wrong end of this. And of course nobody moved. That's the sad part. But it's not a scandal. Nobody did anything wrong. We just didn't have anywhere to put it. You can't give a medal to a curriculum. Now again, with any type of episode like this, I need to say things plainly because I don't want any of you to mishear me. I'm not telling you that kid isn't a hero. He is full stop. Training doesn't put you in that water. Training tells you what to do once you're in it, and plenty of trained people have stood on a beach and decided not to go. He went. I'm telling you he wasn't only brave. And the difference between brave and capable is the entire show. And once I pulled that thread, it kept going, but backwards. Because before you can be a junior lifeguard, you have to be able to swim. Which means before the program there was somebody teaching a small child not to be afraid of putting their face in the water. That's a person too, usually a teenager, usually in a community pool with terrible acoustics and a smell you can identify blindfolded for the rest of your life. And that person learned it from somebody who learned it from somebody. There's a whole chain of people standing behind every competent human being. We've made almost no effort as a country to know a single one of their names. And that chain is not doing great. Forty million American adults say they can't swim. That's about fifteen percent of us. And more than half of American adults have never taken a swimming lesson in their lives. Not didn't finish, never took one. Drowning deaths in this country have been falling for decades. They started going back up. Roughly forty five hundred a year now. Drowning is a leading cause of death for kids between one and four now. That's not a policy stat. That's a stat about whether somebody in your family ever took you to a pool. But here's where it stops being about swimming at all. Junior Lifeguards wasn't just a safety program. I keep using that word program, and it makes it sound like a service. It wasn't a service. It was a pipeline. My friends did junior guards, and a bunch of those same kids by high school had a great job. That was the good summer job. That was the job you wanted to be in one person in that tower. And the reason you could be in that tower at sixteen is that you'd been doing it since you were nine, by the time it was legal to pay you, you were already qualified. Which is exactly what happened in Santa Cruz. That kid in the water was sixteen years old and he was at work. He wasn't a passerby, he wasn't a good Samaritan. He was an employee. That was his shift. Which incidentally is why the metal conversation got a little awkward. It's hard to give somebody the key to the city for doing the thing on their job description, right? But very, very impressive nonetheless. So again, quick question. How's that pipeline doing? Well, there's a lifeguard shortage in this country, has been for a few years, it is not small. Roughly a third of America's public pools, and there are more than three hundred thousand of them, have cut hours or shut down entirely because they can't staff a chair. And the American Lifeguard Association's Outlook this year said something that stopped me. They said this isn't a cycle anymore, it's structural. It's not going to snap back on its own. The YMCAs report the worst of it. Better than two thirds of them can't staff lifeguards. And follow what happens next. It's ugly and it's simple. No lifeguards means no lessons. Cancel the lessons, you get fewer swimmers. Fewer swimmers over enough summers means more drownings, which is the exact thing the lifeguard was standing there to prevent. The head of health and safety at that association called it a snowball. That's his word, not mine. Cancel the classes, increase the drownings, period. So where'd the sixteen year olds go? Where are the junior lifeguards? Well, they went to school. And I know. That's not the punchline anybody expected. Here's the numbers, and they're genuinely strange. For most of the last century, somewhere around half of American teenagers worked in the summer. It moved with the economy, up in good years, down in bad ones, back up. Peak was 1978. Then after about 1990, it stopped bouncing back. Every recession knocked it down and it just stayed down. Here's the number that matters for us. For sixteen and seventeen year olds specifically, exactly the age you'd be standing on that tower, the summer employment rate is about 20%. Less than half of what it was in the year 2000. And before anybody in my comments start typing the word lazy, don't. The research does not say that. What it says is that summer school and year-round enrollment went from about one in ten teenagers to more than four in ten. It says parents got much more focused on college prep. It says entry-level jobs got more competitive. Nobody sat these kids down and told them not to work. We just told them something else. We told them that what they did with June, July, and August needed to go somewhere. It needed to build towards the college application. And I'm sorry, but sat in a tower and watched a bunch of tourists get too close to a rip current doesn't read as extracurricular for Ivy Leagues. And there's one more piece of this, the one that made me put my coffee down. The water parks in Wisconsin Dells, which calls itself the water park capital of the world, and I'm going to let that claim stand unchallenged, have become Visa dependent for lifeguards. Several thousand J1 visas a year, seasonal workers coming here to fill jobs that used to go to the local kids. And this year the Lifeguard Association flagged visa disruption as one of the reasons the shortage got worse. Because when you've narrowed your hiring down to one lane, a paperwork delay 4,000 miles away closes a pool in Ohio. Now, I want to be fair because there's a cheap version of this, and I'm not doing it, I never do. Nobody schemed. Nobody sat in a room and decided to outsource the lifeguard chair. The kids stopped applying, the chairs still needed filling. Somebody found workers who'd take the job, and the whole thing drifted a foot at a time over about 20 years. That's how things always go. Not a decision, a drift. But a job that used to manufacture competent American teenagers now largely imports competent adults from somewhere else. And the program that fed it is a summer expense some families look at and pass on. Which, and I'm coming back to this before we're done tonight, is worth knowing a lot more than most people do, because there's money sitting there for that and almost. Nobody knows it exists, so hold that thought. So here's where I landed. That kid in Santa Cruz is the last visible piece of something enormous. He's the part that fits in the video. Behind him is a program. Behind the program is a chain of instructors. Behind them is a job that used to exist for a certain kind of American teenager, and behind that is a whole idea about what summer was for. We got the video, we didn't get the rest of any of it. You see, we told a generation that the resume mattered more than the lifeguard stand. And that stand is where the country got its lifeguards. So why did it work? Not why did he go in? I don't think anyone can explain why a person goes in. Why did it work when the same water and the same courage didn't work for the grown men who tried it first, tried to save the kid first? Now there is research on this. I'm going to give it to you in about 90 seconds, because it is useful. But if I give you more than that, then we turn into a psychology podcast and neither of us want that. The people who train soldiers and pilots and paramedics start from one assumption. Under real stress, your thinking gets worse, not a little worse. Your judgment narrows, your memory gets unreliable, your attention shrinks down to basically a straw. So they don't train you to think better under pressure, they've given up on that. They train you so the correct action doesn't require thinking. That's what all that repetition is, thousands of times on purpose until the right move stops being a decision and turns into something closer to a reflex. There's a name for it. Stress inoculation. If your nervous system has already been somewhere similar, it doesn't panic when it gets there for real. Rand studied it for Air Force Pararescue. Emergency rooms are picking it up now because it turns out surgeons also have human bodies that dump adrenaline at the worst possible moment. But strip the science off and you're left with something your grandmother could have told you. You do not rise to the occasion. You sink to whatever you practiced. Beautiful theory. Let me tell you when I found out it was true. A couple weeks ago, my parents came out to visit, my mom and dad, seventy and seventy four years old, and it was one of those organ days where the whole state is showing off, hot, bright, the kind of day we're staying indoors feels like a personal failure. So we said, let's go rafting on the Deschutes. And it was perfect. You'd load into these old school buses to get out to the put in, everybody crammed in with their life jackets, strangers making friends, my parents having the time of their lives. My dad spent his twenties as a mountaineer, my mom at seventy, paddle surfs waves in Hawaii I wouldn't even go close to. These are not fragile people, they were thrilled. Now I'm a large man, I weigh about 250 pounds, and I say that with love because I earned every pound of it. And the rest of the raft was not. So our weight distribution was, let's say, creative. I don't think anyone caught it, I certainly didn't. And there's a class three rapid about ten minutes into the run. We hit it wrong. Really wrong. And the raft went over. We flipped the raft. My parents in it. And I want to be clear that that is not a normal thing. These guides run that river every day, all day, all summer. Rafts almost never flip. That's me telling you that in that moment nobody in that boat had any reason to expect what happened next. What happened next is that everyone was in the river. And I came up under the raft. And if you've never done that, a flipped raft has a pocket of air under it. It's dark, it's loud in a way I can't really describe, and the whole thing is moving downstream with you inside of it. That pocket is where people get in trouble. Because it feels like shelter. There's air in there, your body wants to stay, and you have to push out to the side away from the boat. And I did. And here's the part I've thought about probably fifty times since. I did not decide to do that. I didn't think about it. There was no moment where I assessed the situation and recalled a piece of information. My body handled it and told me about it afterwards. By the time I was consciously aware of anything, I was already out on the side of the raft in the current looking around for my parents, who were fine, by the way, both of them. Seventy and seventy four dumped into a moving river and they came up and swam the way you're supposed to swim and got themselves to the side of that boat like they'd been waiting all summer for somebody to ask. Because they'd spent their whole lives in the water, and because that's who they are. But that's why they made me do junior lifeguards in the first place. Some guy stood in the shallows a long time ago and made a bunch of eleven year olds practice getting out of the water from under things. And on a river in Oregon, decades later, he got me out from under that raft. I never used it once in between, not one time. Thirty some years later, it just sat there waiting. Now, there's a coda to this, and it's my favorite part. River guides, at least on that stretch, all live together, ten or twelve of them in one house for the season, and they have a house rule. If you flip a raft, and again, this basically never happens, you buy the whole house booze. The whole house. 1220 sums. So there I am dripping, everybody's fine, everyone's laughing, and I'm doing the math because I know exactly what happened on that boat. And it was about 250 pounds of what happened. So I went and bought that house enough beer and vodka to get them through probably a couple of weeks. Cheapest lesson I've ever paid for. And I'd point out that the only person in that entire story who suffered any actual consequence was the guide who did absolutely nothing wrong. Nothing happened that day. That's the whole event. Six people went in a river and nothing happened. There's no news story, there's no video, there's no fund, nobody got a medal, nobody got a call from a reporter, and the only lasting record of the entire incident is a liquor receipt. And every part of that outcome was manufactured. Twenty years of my parents being who they are, a summer program in the nineties, some instructor's stubbornness about a drill nobody enjoyed, guides who knew exactly what to do with a flipped boat. All of it fired, all of it worked, and the result of all of it working perfectly was nothing. You know the version everybody's heard. January two thousand nine. Two engines gone over New York City, and the pilot puts one hundred and fifty five people down on the Hudson River and every one of them walks away. Two hundred and eight seconds. That's what it was. From the birds to the water three and a half minutes. And Sullenberger, Shuly, said something afterward that I think is the most honest thing anyone's ever said about their own heroism. You've been flying forty two years, never had an engine failure, not once. And he described it as decades of small regular deposits into a bank of experience and training, and on that day the balance covered a very large withdrawal. Two hundred and eight seconds, forty-two years. Guess which one got the movie? Well, who knows? My river flip might be the next Hollywood blockbuster. And he kept trying to tell people over and over again that aviation is a team sport and he'd just become the face of something a lot of people made possible. Same thing that mother said in California. Nobody listened to Sully either. Because there is no footage of the drowning that didn't happen. There's no clip of the house fire where everyone got out because the family actually practiced the thing on the refrigerator. Nobody films the kid whose heart stopped at a swim meet and started again because the woman standing there had taken class eighteen months earlier and remembered where to put her hands. There's no video of the accident that didn't occur. That's the definition of it not occurring. And this is where I think we accidentally built ourselves a problem in this country. Response is incredibly good television. It has everything, a moment, a face, a before and after. You can point a camera at it. You can put it on a wall. There's a person to thank, and you can thank them out loud in front of people, and everybody feels great about themselves. But preparation has none of that. Preparation's greatest possible success is that you never find out it was even there. Nobody throws a parade because nothing happened. There's no ribbon cutting for the crisis that didn't arrive. Nobody has ever gone viral for a Tuesday where the training quietly did exactly what it was built to do. Nobody. That's a problem. But I'm not describing a villain. I have to be clear about that. Nobody chose this. There's no room where somebody decided the drill doesn't count. It's just what happens when the entire reward structure of a society, the coverage, the honors, the gratitude, the money, is aimed at the moment, and the moment is only ever the last five percent of the story. We're not ungrateful, we're just aimed wrong. And if you think this is about budgets, let me hand you the number that convinced me it isn't. Seven out of ten American households have a fire escape plan. That's good. That's genuinely good. Somebody talked to these families and it worked. Of those households, the ones who have a plan, fewer than half have ever practiced it. Oh, and when you ask people what their first thought would be if the smoke alarm went off in the middle of the night, eight percent say get out. Eight less than ten percent. Nobody has to fund that. There's no agency involved. There's no vote in any legislator anywhere that determines whether you and your kids walk out of your house twice a year and stand by the mailbox for 90 seconds. We just don't. Because nothing's wrong. Because tonight is like every other night ever has been. So it isn't a money problem, it's an attention problem, and it lives in your hallway. And here's what I keep coming back to. It's not the heroes, it's the other people. The ones who show up in every single one of these stories and never once get named. Because if they do the job perfectly, if every single thing they teach lands and holds and works exactly the way it's supposed to, then the result of their entire career is a series of things that didn't happen to people they'll never meet. No metric, no highlight reel, no clip. You want to know what's actually invisible in America? Not the hero. We see the hero fine. It's the instructor. And look, nobody's arguing against the professionals here. Thank God for the professionals. I want the ambulance. I want the guy. I want the ambulance. I want the fire department. I want a guy in a tower with binoculars and a whistle at every beach in this country. But a free country can't put a professional in every room. It can't. Not the ocean, not the trail, not the highway at two in the morning, not your kitchen floor. They're not enough of them, and there never will be. And honestly, a country that did have a uniformed professional standing in every room would be a country I'd want to have a much longer conversation about. So there's this gap. There's always a gap between the thing happening and the help arriving. There's a stretch of time that belongs to whoever is standing there. And there are only two things that can fill it. Luck or somebody who knows what to do. We've been running on luck. And I'd like to talk about the alternative capability. Capable at what, though? You may ask. That's the honest question. And I want to be careful with it because this is exactly where a show like mine usually goes off a cliff. This is the part where the host leans in and starts listing all the things kids used to know how to do. I'm not doing that. Half of what people put on those lists is nostalgia wearing a work shirt. Nobody's freedom in this country is currently limited by an inability to build a birdhouse or change a tire. Let's be strict. We're not talking about the skills that made you handy. I'm talking specifically about things you need to know so the seven minutes before the ambulance gets there aren't wasted. That's the category. That's the floor. Competency. And here's what I didn't expect when I went looking. We've already done this. Not once, but three times. Start with one already sitting in your kid's transcript. You probably didn't know it was there. Roughly 40 states plus Washington, D.C. requires hands-on CPR training to graduate high school. Not a video, not a pamphlet, hands-on dummy on the floor with somebody counting. That's a million and a half American teenagers a year walking across a stage already knowing how to keep a heart moving. Here's what got me. Alabama did it first in 1983. And as recently, about ten years ago, it was only 21 states. So this whole thing happened in the last decade right in front of us. Nobody thought about it. There was no national argument. I don't remember one cable news panel screaming at each other about whether teenagers should know CPR. And believe me, in that same window we found time to scream each other about literally everything else. America quietly agreed on one universal competency for its children, and then never mentioned it again. There's already a list. It has one item on it. CPR. Now the second one. This one happened even faster. Ten years ago, stop the bleed was not a thing. It didn't exist. It came out of Iraq and Afghanistan, battlefield medicine, licensed out through the Department of Defense, but for a very blunt reason. Bleeding is the number one preventable cause of death after an injury. Not to mention the most common injury, the most preventable death as well, meaning somebody who did not have to die. And you can be taught the three things to stop it in about an hour pressure, packing, and a tourniquet. That program launched in 2016. It has now trained more than five million people, all 50 states, something like 140 countries, five million in under a decade from zero. And again, no mandate, no federal law forcing anyone. A professional society decided this should be as ordinary as CPR and went and did it. One church basement, one high school gym at a time. The surgeons who run it call it the CPR of bleeding. They want it boring. They want it so normal nobody remembers the time before it. So that's two for two. Two competencies added to American life and living memory without a war over either one. But neither of those is one that changed how I think about this. So then I have to tell you about hunting. And stay with me because this isn't the segment you think it is. I'm not talking about guns tonight. I'm talking about a curriculum. And I'm talking about it because as far as I can tell, hunter education is the single most successful preparedness program in American history, and almost nobody outside of it has any idea it happened. Go back to 1949. New York State had a problem. People were getting shot in the woods, not on purpose by each other by accident in numbers that today would be a national emergency. And the State Conservation Department comes to a conclusion I find almost startling how plain it is. The practical fix isn't more rules about where you can hunt or when. The practical fix is making sure the people who are handling licenses too actually know how to handle a firearm. So they go to the NRA and ask them to build them a course. Four hours. That's it. Four hours of instruction. Other states watch at work and start copying it, then more of them than most of them. Now here's what happened. New York averaged 166 hunting accidents a year in the nineteen sixties. Since twenty ten, they average about twenty three. Colorado averaged around ten hunting fatalities a year in the sixties. Since 2000, about one. And my favorite, because the number is so absurd, Wisconsin in nineteen seventy, their dear season, thirteen hunters shot and killed. Thirteen. And seven of the last nine seasons was something like six hundred and ten thousand people in the woods every fall? Zero. Nationally, fewer than a thousand people are shot in a given year across the entire United States and Canada. Fewer than seventy-five die. A death rate that fell by an order of magnitude not because the woods got safer, because the people in them got competent. And it's still running right now. About 60,000 hunter safety instructors in this country, and a huge share of them are volunteers. Guys who take a Saturday every fall to stand in a room with twelve year olds and teach them the same four things they taught the last year. That's the one nobody's thanking. But that's not even the part that made me sit up. Because everything I told you before, this was about how preparation loses. It's invisible. It doesn't photograph, it never wins the fight for attention or money because it's the greatest success, is that nothing actually happens. So how did this gun safety survive seventy-five years? In nineteen thirty seven, Congress passed something called the Pittman Robertson Act in the Depression era. It put a federal excise tax on firearms and ammunition collected from the manufacturers, and instead of dumping it into the general fund where it would get eaten alive, they walled it off dedicated trust fund for wildlife restoration. Then in 1970, they amended it, and that amendment said some of this money now pays for hunter education and public shooting ranges. Ten, eleven percent, depending on what you're buying. Off the top, straight into the fund. Now think about what that actually did. See, what they did was they took preparedness out of the annual fight. Hunter safety education does not have to go to a committee every spring and make a case for itself. It doesn't have to compete for a line item against something with prettier pictures or more compassion. It never has to walk into a budget hearing and explain why it deserves money when, and this is the killer, nothing happened last year. It just gets funded every year by formula, whether anyone claps or not. These are the kinds of things we need. That's the answer. I mean, Kotec wants to pass in Oregon a measure or did pass a permit for inner tubes. But all that money goes to fighting invasive muscles that don't even come from inner tubes. Nothing for guards, junior guards, river, water education, water safety. She could have used that money to fund something that we actually deal with, which is river drowning deaths every year. So the question is, if preparation is so valuable, why don't we invest in it? Well, I guess sometimes we do. And when somebody builds the incentives right, it works so well that 75 years later the results are almost too boring to even report. See, we didn't solve invisible success by asking people to notice. You can't make a country pay attention to a thing that, by definition, doesn't happen. We solved it once quietly in 1937 and again in 1970 by building a structure that doesn't need anyone to notice. And because of that funding, hunter education is free or nearly free in most states. A kid can go take it and it costs a family basically nothing. The one preparedness program that solved its money problem is also the one that doesn't cost you anything. Think about that. That's not a coincidence, folks. And I'm not going to sell you a fairy tale. The excise tax is paid on all firearms and ammunitions, not just the ones bought by hunters, so it's not accurate to say hunters simply tax themselves, however much people like saying it. A lot of that money comes from people who've never been in a deer stand in their lives. Okay? And hunter education didn't stay voluntary. It started as something hunters wanted, and over time most states made it a requirement to get licensed. Both halves are true. And the second half is why it reaches everybody. But I'd rather tell you the complicated version anyways. The complicated version still works. That's all that matters. Results, not rhetoric, remember? So, with all that on the table, if your kid graduated tomorrow, walked out with the diploma keys in hand done, what would you want them to already know how to do? Not what would you like? What would you want to already be true before they're out of your sight? I've got a short list, and it's short on purpose because there's a finding in the research I think is the most important thing I read all week. More training is not automatically more competence. They've studied this. Advanced diving instruction, skid control, that kind of thing, appears to make crash risk go up in young men, not down. Because it hands them confidence faster than it hands them judgment. And you see the same thing in the water. Untrained people drown going in after somebody. There's a name for it. Something like half those attempts end up producing more than one victim. You see, courage plus ignorance is how the rescue becomes the tragedy. So the list stays narrow, and part of every item on it is knowing what not to do. Here's mine. CPR and how to use an AED. Immediate CPR doubles or triples someone's odds. And here's the number that bothers me most. In cardiac arrest that happens in public, fewer than 14% get an AED from a bystander. The machine is on the wall, half the people can't tell you where the wall is. How to stop a bleed, pressure, packing, tourniquet, an hour of your life, the most preventable death there is. Swim and read a rip current, not swim laps, not swim in the Pretty, survive water, and know what a rip looks like from the sand because the whole trick is not swimming against it, and that one piece of information is worth more than four years of lessons. A fire extinguisher and a fire escape plan. You have actually walked. Both of those are free. Both of them are sitting in your house right now doing nothing. Enough first aid to hold a scene for seven minutes, that's the real number by law. Seven minutes is roughly the national average from the nine one one call to EMS pulling up. Rural, it's about double. Those minutes belong to whoever's standing there. And what to do when there's a firearm in a room and it isn't yours. Your kid is going to be in that room, at a friend's house, at a relative's at some point, and it does not matter one bit what your family's politics are. Knowing not to touch it and knowing to leave is the same category as knowing not to swim against the current. That's it. That's my whole list. Which I recognize is a strange thing to spend an hour building up to. There's no eighteen point plan here, there's no common sense policy document. It's just a Tuesday afternoon worth of instruction, and it would cover most of the situations where an ordinary American is ever going to be the difference. That's it. Competency. It's some basic life-saving skills. And one more thing, because I said I'd come back to it. Somebody's already writing me about the cost. I know, I'd write me too. LA County figures it costs about six hundred and thirty-five dollars a child to run their junior lifeguard program. So they have financial aid. So does Long Beach, so does Solana Beach. Newport Beach built theirs specifically to remove the financial barrier. If you're already on assistance, you qualify automatically, and foster kids qualify outright. San Diego partners with a foundation for it. California State Parks has its own. And the Park Service runs a junior lifeguard program up at Golden Gate that is simply free. CPR is free at half the fire stations in this country. Stop the bleed courses are given away by hospitals, and Hunter Ed, as I just explained, costs almost nothing on purpose. Wednesday I said cost has become an excuse in this country more often than an actual constraint. Here's what it looks like when it's on your kit. The money exists. It's limited, it's competitive. Most of these have a deadline in February nobody knows about, but it exists. And almost nobody applies because nobody advertises it. And of course they don't. It's preparation. It never advertises. That's the problem. That's the thing that we've inverted in this country. We've got to get back to celebrating preparation. So look, I didn't come here tonight with a proposal. I don't have a bill. Nobody needs to pass anything. What I've got is the observation that we've done this successfully three separate times and should keep doing it. When we put CPR in the schools and nobody argued. We taught five million people to stop a bleed in nine years, starting from zero. And in 1937 and again in 1970, somebody built a funding structure so durable that a whole generation of American kids learned to be safe in the woods, and the death rate fell through the floor, and not one person alive can name the guy who did it. We know how to build competent citizens. We've proved it repeatedly. Question was never whether we could. Of course we can. We've done it. The question is which of these things we've decided matter enough to keep. That's the real question. And I keep thinking about the two mothers. The mother of mine, a long time ago, decided her kids were going to learn the water. It was not a discussion. It wasn't a value statement. She'd have been embarrassed if you called it that, honestly. She just looked at the ocean and looked at us kids and decided they weren't going to be helpless in front of it, period. So she signed us up, and we all went. And the other one this summer sat in front of a county that wanted to hand her something and pointed at a parks department program instead, the mother of that sixteen year old hero, that lifeguard in Santa Cruz. Same instinct, two different ends of the same idea. One standing at the beginning of it, sending in a kid, the other standing at the far end, forty some years down the line, watching what comes out. And neither of them thought they were doing anything remarkable. But they were. One filled out an application, a form, and the other declined to go fund me. And somewhere in between those two ordinary decisions, a ten year old boy went home to his family. And my parents and I swam up the side of the river, flipped the boat over, and enjoyed the rest of the raft. And the thing I didn't say about the raft, because I didn't want to make it bigger than it was, is that I've thought about that morning a lot since. And what I keep landing on isn't the river. It's that I don't know his name. I don't remember what he looked like. I don't remember his voice. I could not pick him out of a photograph of that summer if you handed me one right now. I just know some guy on some cold morning in the 90s made a bunch of 11-year-olds who did not want to be there do the same thing over and over again until we couldn't do it without thinking. That's what he gets. Some kid he can't remember either, decades later in a river he'll never hear about. He'll never know. He'll go his whole life not knowing. He doesn't remember me either. And there are a few million people walking around this country carrying something somebody gave them like that. Just sitting there, unused, waiting. Because remember, the rescue lasted minutes. The preparation lasted years. Let's get that kid's junior lifeguards instructor. Let's get the program medals and funded. Let's reward the people that make these heroes possible. We talk about freedom in this country mostly in the language of what we're allowed to do rights, elections, the document, what the government can't take. And all of that is real. I built a whole show on the premise that it's real. But there's a quieter half of it that almost never comes up. A free country is a country where nobody is standing over you. That's the point. That's the good part. There's no official in your kitchen, nobody assigned your stretch of beach, no professional posted up in the room. Which means the moments that matter most are always going to arrive while you're alone with them. Think about that. So freedom isn't only permission, it's capability. It's whether the person standing there, you, your kid, a stranger at the next table, actually knows what to do in the stretch of time before help arrives. And that capability doesn't get built during the emergency. The emergency is far too late. It gets built years earlier by somebody with no idea what they're preparing you for. And I think that might be one of the purest things a free people do for each other. Not the rescue, the years before it. Handing somebody a thing they might never need, and hoping like hell they never need it, and teaching it to them anyway. That is America. So here's what I'd actually ask of you tonight, folks, and it isn't a policy. Somebody taught you something. Maybe it was a swim instructor at a pool with terrible acoustics. Maybe it was a scout leader who gave up a couple hundred weekends and got a plaque for it. Maybe it's the volunteer who runs hunter safety at the fire hall every fall for a room of twelve year olds and their fathers. Maybe it was whoever taught you CPR in a church basement on a Thursday when eleven people showed up and she taught it like there were forty. Maybe it was a parent who insisted on lessons you did not want. Most of these people never found out whether it worked. That's the deal they took. They put the thing in you and then they let you walk away with it. They don't get a report, they don't get the clip, nobody's ever gonna hand them a check on television, which we should. If one of them is still around, tell them. Just tell them. Find the person who taught you the thing and let them know it's stuck. Because a thing that didn't happen has nobody to thank. So thank them anyways. I personally wish I could go back and thank that junior lifeguards instructor. Not from Santa Cruz, mine. And one more thing and I'll let you go into your weekend. If someone you loved graduated tomorrow, walked out the door with the diploma and the keys, all of it, what would you hope they already knew how to do? Don't answer me tonight. Sit with it. Ask it out loud at dinner and see what your family says. Because I suspect you'll find out very quickly that everyone at the table has an answer and nobody's ever been asked. That's the conversation. That's all I wanted. Which, like every night, leads me to our Reagan reminder. In August of nineteen eighty four, Reagan spoke to the veterans of foreign wars in Chicago, and in the middle of it he said something I hadn't come across before this week. He told that room that of the four wars in his lifetime, not one of them came about because America was too strong. He was talking about the military, obviously, but that sentence has a shape to it I don't think he'd mind us borrowing for tonight's sake. Nobody ever gets a parade for the war that didn't happen, or the fire that stayed in the fireplace, or the kid who got pulled out of the current before anybody's day changed. The whole point of being ready is that you don't find out how ready you were. That's the hardest thing in the world to sell, and it's the easiest thing in the world to quit doing, and we have quit doing it. But it's still the difference between a country that gets lucky and a country that's prepared. I don't think you can legislate that. I think it comes down to a few hundred thousand ordinary people who keep showing up to teach somebody something. And they've been doing it this whole time. We just weren't looking. And the system is inverted to reward the wrong thing. That's the show. Don't forget to find us on Rumble, on X, on Instagram, and Substack. If something in here landed, send it to someone, and if you see us, share us. And if you've got a story about the person who taught you the thing that stuck, I want to hear it. Call or text me at 252 Chad Law. Go teach somebody something this weekend. And more importantly, America, I'm Chad Law, and this has been Common Sense. Stick around while I reset the studio for about 10 seconds. Take all the questions that came in during the live show that you texted into 252 Chad Law. We'll be right back. Alright, everybody else went home. Phone's been going all hour on this one, which I did not expect. Turns out a lot of you have somebody you've been meeting to call. Let's get into it. Text from Renata ending in 3376. Mr. Kowowski taught me to swim at the Y in 1994. I looked her up an hour ago. She's 81 and still lives in the same town. I'm going to call her tomorrow. I'm a mess. Thank you. Well, now I'm a mess. Renata, call her tomorrow. Don't wait until Sunday. Don't wait until you figured out what to say. You already know what to say. You just said it to me. A stranger in a text message. And I'll tell you what she's going to do. She's going to be polite about it and say something like, Oh, that's so sweet. And then she's going to hang up and sit there for about 20 minutes with the biggest smile on her face she's ever had. 81 years old, and somebody finally told her it worked. Great job. Go make her day. All right, who's next? See here. Doug ending in 5041. 26 years on an engine company. I liked the episode, but I want to push back. We spend a lot of time managing bystanders who made things worse. Sometimes the most helpful thing a civilian can do is stand back and call 911. Doug, you're right, and I hope you heard me try to say that. That's the reason the list is short. It's not modesty. Confidence without judgment gets people hurt. Untrained people go in the water, and now you've got two victims instead of one. But I'd put it to you this way. Nobody's going to stand back. That's not a real option. People go, they go every time. They went in Santa Cruz, three or four of them all at once, and the ocean threw them right back on the sand. So the choice isn't trained bystander or no bystander. It's trained bystander or the guy who is going to try anyways and fail. And honestly, half of what I'd want taught is exactly your point. What not to do, when to stop, when the best move is a phone and a clear driveway. Twenty-six years on an engine. You've learned the pushback. Thank you for the hard work. All right, Marisol ending in 8802. Single mom, two kids, nine and twelve. The episode made me feel behind. Where do I actually start? You're not behind. You're listening to the show about it on a Friday night, which puts you already ahead of most people. Start with the pool. That's it. Whatever's closest. Why rec center city pool beach? And ask two questions when you call. Do you have swimming lessons and do you have financial assistance? Ask the second one out loud. They're not offended. That's a normal question, and half of them have money sitting right there unspent. Then, sometime this year, your 12-year-old and CPR. Fire departments do it free constantly and nobody knows. And tonight, genuinely tonight, costs nothing. Walk your kids through how they would get out of your house in a fire. There's two ways out, and where do you meet? Ten minutes, and you're already ahead of two thirds of American families. That's the list, Marisol. You're fine. Don't be so hard on yourself. Text from Trevor ending in 1157. Something doesn't add up. You said preparation always loses politically, but forty states passed CPR requirements in about a decade with no fight. Doesn't that undercut your whole argument? Hmm. Trevor's smart. That's a good catch. Um let's think about this out loud. I think the answer is that CPR in schools is free, costs a district almost nothing. An afternoon, a couple of dummies, usually a volunteer from the fire department. Nobody had had to defend a budget line. Nobody had to take money away from something photogenic, so it sailed right through. But it doesn't prove that the incentives are still backwards. I think it actually strengthens the point rather than breaking it. Because when preparation doesn't have to compete for money, America says yes almost automatically. We're not against it. We're just terrible at prioritizing it the second there's a dollar attached, which is exactly what makes the hunter education thing so interesting. That's the one where somebody solved the dollar problem permanently. But you found a small soft spot in the argument. Fair hit, I'll give it to you. Great job. Bill ending in 6294. Well, been teaching hunter safety in Michigan twenty two years, never been paid a dime, and nobody's ever thanked me on TV. A little emotional over here. Twenty-two years, Bill. Do the math on that with me. Say you get twenty five kids a season. That's five hundred and fifty people walking around Michigan right now who handle a firearm correctly because you gave up your Saturdays. You will never meet most of them again. You'll never find out which ones needed it. But I promise you, somewhere out there is a kid who did the right thing and is in the woods, and his mother has no idea your name exists. So thank you, seriously. You are the whole episode. All right, Ayana, ending in 4730. I have owned a fire extinguisher for six years, and I am now realizing I have absolutely no idea how to use it. Is there a pin? I think there's a pin. There's a pin, Ayana. And guess what? There's this little thing called YouTube now. You could probably put in the model number and everything and get a read-through in 30 seconds or less. There's a gauge on it. If the needle's in green, it's alive. If it's not, it's a paperweight you've been dusting for six years. And make sure you check the date. They do expire, which nobody tells you because of course nobody tells you. That's preparation. But that's a five minute job and you'll sleep better, so go do it. All right, Kirby ending in 0918. Serious question. What is Ronald Reagan doing right now? Where are you? Ron? He's usually asleep at my feet. I don't know. He must be upside down in the good chair, the one he's not allowed in. I've explained the rule to him. He's chosen a different path. As you know, my animals don't really love to listen. Apple doesn't far far from the tree. All right, that's the mailbox. Please, guys, go call your Mrs. Kowalski. Go find the pin on your extinguisher. Go be somebody's boring Tuesday morning that pays off in 30 years. And I'll see you back tomorrow for Saturday satire. God bless you, President Reagan, and may God save America.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:41

Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for this. It's so marvelous that you should change for me. It's wonderful. It's marvelous it's glance.