This episode dives into what it really means to “do safety” when your job is inherently dangerous, like military, police, or even things like aviation. The strategy has to be at least a little better than Live Fast, Die Young (that's the title of this episode, and for once it's not NOFX, but if you're cool, you know this one, too). Ben, Ron, David, and their guest James Kolozsi (who’s got cred from his time in the military, police, municipal, and oil & gas) kick things off with the usual eight minutes of bullshit or so, but eventually get into the meat of the topic: in some jobs, you can’t pretend risk doesn’t exist. Instead, you have to own it, plan for it, and train like hell to deal with it. James shares how, in the military, you don’t get to hit pause and fill out a risk assessment when things go sideways. Instead, it’s all about situational awareness, understanding threats (not just risks), and being ready to adapt on the fly. It's sort of about doing what you signed up for, too, but not applying that same logic to folks who aren't willing participants. The boys talk about how, in these high-risk worlds, safety isn’t just a checklist or a pile of paperwork—it’s baked into the core of operations. Training is relentless, and the focus is on building real capability, not just compliance. There’s a lot of talk about how this mindset is different from what you see in most industries, where safety can sometimes feel like a box-ticking exercise. The conversation also hits on the limits of procedures and the importance of sharing practical know-how; those “rules of thumb” that only come from experience. In the end, the takeaway is that in jobs where danger is part of the deal, you can’t eliminate risk, but you can give people the tools, training, and support to successfully adapt to it. And maybe the rest of the safety world could learn a thing or two from that approach.

Ian Madison rolls in with a background of ethically hunted animals (that's what he told us), evidence of like eight million Bad Religion shows, and some serious desire to talk about how traditional safety measurements are about as useful as a broken guitar string. Not a bass string, because a broken bass string is about as useful as the rest of them anyway. Seriously, though. Check out the video on YouTube to see what Ian has going on behind him. The episode title is one of the best punk albums of all time, The Process of Belief, from Bad Religion. It's a shoutout to Ian, and it's also a reference to the way we get hung up on our beliefs about what makes us safer and how we know. More on that in a minute. We've already had an episode on metrics, but Ian was driving this one, and even though it sounds like a lot of measurement talk and bashing on TRIR, it's really an episode about the things that take attention away from what matters. And bashing TRIR. Weirdly, Ian can get away with a lot more than Ron on that topic. Matt Hollowell and the CSRA get name-dropped for actually making sense, too. Not sure this podcast was the publicity they want, but you get what you get sometimes. The boys cover a lot of ground on this one: spiders, tailgate-to-person ratio, donuts and cheeseburgers, and whiskey. It moves almost as fast as Smelly's foot during Linoleum. And that's pretty fast. Back to the episode. It's seriously good. Like, just some dudes in a bar talking about safety stuff good. Ian has a way of simplifying concepts, smashing them into a story, and bringing people along in a way that makes a lot of sense. This episode has got a lot of exactly that. And the boys may have talked him into joining the Second Annual Punk Rock Safety Field Trip in LA this October.

Even though they're not really into punk rock, Michael and Taylor from Imperial Oil are pretty badass (and the title of this episode is a NOFX song that Michael somehow remembered, so we'll take it). And they're movie stars in a video from Energy Safety Canada about the 4Ds from Learning Teams, Inc. The Imperial boys are the first to tell you they aren't safety people - they're field ops guys just trying to solve some problems. Pretty fucking punk, right? Shit wasn't going the way it should, so they just figured out what would work. Not perfection, but progress. "If you just go in and do it, and you do it from a place of caring," people are going to be on board. What the hell are the 4Ds Michael and Taylor are talking about (5 if you count Provan, because he's a D for sure)? They're questions about what folks see at work that are dumb, difficult, different, or dangerous. Turns out talking to people about work does some other stuff too: like a 53% reduction in absenteeism and massive increases in time-on-tool productivity. Weird, right? Figuring out how work gets done and addressing it like an adult helps make work suck less. For a lot of people, punk rock is a catalyst for being heard, for building family, and for expressing how they feel. For the teams at Imperial, using something like the 4Ds was a catalyst, too. Sometimes, it identified some problems that looked a whole lot like the supervisors and leaders in the organization. Those are tough conversations (like how bass players and ska bands are the problem a lot of times, too), but the boys took the conversations on and did the hard yards to figure out how to make leadership better. Asking questions isn't the solution, though, and that's why you should check out the rest of the episode. Michael and Taylor have got a lot more to share about how they started learning about performance, labels, and leadership. They're pretty punk without even trying, and that's "The punkest mother fucker I ever did see. Ah hell, he's even more punk than me." Got a NOFX quote in there after all, punks. Shoulda gone for Propaghandi, since they're a Canadian band, but whatever.

"Sometimes work just fucking sucks" That's what David Strano said back on the Decline episode, and if you're not careful, saying smart things gets you volun-told for a guest appearance on the pod. David's a former touring roadie turned HSE director. That basically means he knows a lot about both parts of the PRS podcast, so the boys are considering just handing over the reins. Shit, he even knows what episode number we're on. It's a rare episode when there's not a NOFX song title involved, but this one goes way back in time with The Clash's "Career Opportunities" as a reference to shit jobs, success, and just getting things done in the face of a lot of competing goals. Since David has a real job (even closer to the actual work than Ron), we had a cool opportunity to talk about workplace safety as it's seen and lived with by folks doing work, especially those at the front line. David did 20 years of touring before Covid, and that's pretty rad. Except for the safety part. Nobody actually does that, apparently. It's wild west, as David says, and shit happens as you might expect. There's a big difference between compliance and looking for high-performance safety, but the reality is that compliance is still important, even if it isn't the complete answer. The boys talk a little bit about the difference between awareness and something mattering, too. And tolerability - like the idea that if you choose to work here in a high-risk industry, you've basically said you accept some level of risk. Later in the discussion, all of those ideas tie together in a conversation about where expectations from customers fit in. Priorities - like getting a facility opened on time - mean safety drifts back to the old school view of production vs. protection, even when we're focused on more contemporary ideas. FSMM isn't meant to be the real deal, but there are times when it sure looks and feels like it is. Anyway, it's an episode focused on how tradeoffs materialize at work, how having multiple folks with checkbooks shapes safety, and where compliance fits into discussions about front-line work grappling with safety as an academic abstraction. Have fun, punkers!

This week, the boys are talking about theory and practice, because, as the listener who submitted the question says, "fuck you, that's why." It's true, there's a lot of safety literature out there that's gotten more head-up-its-own-ass. Moralizing about safety is cool until it isn't, and the question is a good one (it was something like wanting to hear more about decision-making and doing things instead of recycling ideas as a career by itself). It can feel like things get way too academic and maybe even elite. That said, the boys argue that people don't need things "dumbed down" for them, either. The whole point of this little podcast is to be able to question things about safety. It seems like an awful lot of discussion, sometimes a little rowdy, is about whether something is "just theory" or if it's actually useful. Being useful is important, but asking who something is useful for is just as important. And being useful isn't something that just happens. It's based on theory, too. So there's the thing. Dave brings up playing bass with only 2 or 3 strings, which means that even though the guitar company thinks they're important, Dave doesn't. The boys talk about making sure front-line folks have tools that work - but people work in other places, too. That gets back to the "Who is it useful for?" questions. Solid quote from Dave on this one, by the way: "Theory isn't just pontification, like people sitting around on whiteboards just making shit up, proposing stuff." Theory is observing patterns that actually happen in the world, and then trying to come up with models about why those patterns play out, and in what situations it matters. Otherwise, how do we build tools and predict those patterns in a way that's connected directly to work. So principles aren't theory. They're underlying values and guides for understanding. Does theory matter? Do principles matter? Yup. But as important as they are, theories and principles aren't solutions by themselves. Maybe that's the disconnect: treating principles as solutions. If you're into the whole work-as-imagined thing, that's pretty close to describing theory. There's some disagreement between the boys about starting with the theory vs. starting with observations in the organization. Here's where you probably ought to listen in to see how the conversation pans out. Arguing about what punk rock is can sometimes just get in the way of the music. The whole answer is never in the book. It's probably not only at the point of work either. Like the description of this stupid podcast says, do shit that works.

"I think the context was kind of like, how do you go about trying to maybe introduce or convince your organization on some of the more contemporary ideas, when your organization is deeply rooted in zero harm and... Well, I think that's mostly it. Or something like that." It's our first *official* episode dedicated to a listener question, and Dave totally nailed the summary with the leadoff quote. So what happens when people in authority are focused on zero? Well, for one, you name the episode after the band Authority Zero. It's not super constructive to come out and say that zero harm is stupid. Feel free to give it a go, but the boys wrestled with where it's okay to agree on the big ideas - like don't kill people at work - and have an adult conversation about differences in how we get there. To our listener's question, though, the boys had a pretty solid discussion on introducing some punk rock in a Backstreet Boy safety world. Making the cost of trying something new low is important. We don't need to burn all the boss's shitty records just to have them listen to something new. Focusing on deep discussions of principles is pretty lazy stuff, and then you get folks worried that we're saying harm is okay. It isn't, but maybe we should be focusing on asking leaders how, if it's zero harm or it's not zero harm, what does that mean for what's actually going to change in my organization? Are there unintended consequences of having aspirations of zero? And if there are (and there are), then what should we do differently to sort that out? Getting to a discussion that's somewhere between shifting an entire worldview and being too far down in the weeds is a tricky balance, but we're trying to get to a middle ground. At least a little bit. The consensus seems to revolve around the idea that we don't have to lure leaders into the van with candy. It might just be that they haven't heard different ideas, and building from what they know to what they need is probably just fine. Maybe it isn't very punk rock, but not thrashing into a leader's office like we're in the mosh pit of contemporary safety is a better move.

It was sort of like a NOFX show. People had the wrong time, Ron rolled in when he felt like it, a lot of friends were there, and a few hooligans showed up to make sure we actually did something. Seriously, though, thanks to the gang for ideas and discussion. It wasn't quite as messy as inviting Fletcher on stage, but we've got time to work up to it. With the faithful there (and Ron later on), the discussion started out by asking: "Is any of this actually new?" There is a sense sometimes that there's just a bunch of rebranding going on. Maybe that's something the people with real jobs see a little bit more of. Speaking of real jobs, David Strano wins the quote of the day with "Work fucking sucks sometimes." Amen. All of this talk about safety can get lost without acknowledging that not everybody thinks about safety like we do. They probably shouldn't, because it would be weird. That means what we do in the name of safety has to actually change the work for the better. It probably also means that if you're doing safety, you should also spend some time actually doing work if you can. Not just a simple shadow for a day. Actual, real, work, at as many levels and departments as you can. The boys - really the guests on stage - talked a bit about middle managers, too, and how they can maintain a connection to work while trying to support innovative ideas. Safety can seem like the opposite of innovation sometimes, right? Innovation is risky, so there was some talk about how we set people up for successfully testing new ideas, especially ones that affect the safety of work. Anyway, give it a listen. It's a nice break from Ron, Dave, and Ben all the time.

First off, every new episode is sort of a surprise, but making it to Episode 30 is about 29 more than the boys expected. And of course the title is from a NOFX album. In celebration of Ron's (new) real job at a bit of a startup, we thought that talking about how you'd build your safety empire from scratch might look. The boys' discussion centers on starting with executive leaders to create a vision for what really good safety would look, sound, and feel like. There's - shockingly - a fair bit of BS in the middle, but the boys eventually get around to a few of the benefits of building things up in a small organization: there's room to do some experimentation, a chance to manage messaging about safety with a small crew, and the opportunity to come up with a solid 30/60/90-day plan (or 100-day if you use the Australian conversion rate). The consensus, if you can call it that, is that agreeing on principles around safety may not be enough. You need some specifics, and in a small group, that might come from consistently having in-person time between leaders and safety people. It might be asking folks what certain approaches to operations might look like to meet acceptable levels of safety risk and then giving people choices. There's more than one way to write a song, too, so it's not the end of the world. Anyway, when you get the chance to start from scratch as a band, there aren't a lot of people at the shows. It's a good time to figure out your tone and get to know your audience. Same in an organization.

Two-thirds of the dickheads on this podcast are consultants, so an episode about consulting seemed like a good idea. Also, there's a lot of chatter at conferences, online, and probably in bars that play ska music about how safety has just become commoditized and monetized. Usually, it's a consultant trying to sell something who's saying that. Ben, Ron, and Dave head into the dimly lit back alleys where consultants apparently live to look at the good, the bad, and the sometimes fucked up realities of bringing external help into organizations. The reality for many organizations is that more help isn't coming. The safety team isn't hiring, and folks are constantly being asked to do more with less. The boys think that's where good outside help is huge. Like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction. Sort of. The role of consultants as "force multipliers" isn't made up, but they should be there to sit in with the band when Ron doesn't show up, not hang out forever like Yoko. And if some chucklefuck has an answer before they even get to know your organization, you should probably show them the door. The crew examines why some consultants do better than others and how organizations can best use outside expertise (like a solid opener or a supergroup like MFATGG). Now that he has a real job, Ron adds a few points from the perspective of someone actually hiring consultants to help out. The short version is that if you're picky about who you let on stage, a consultant can be a lot of help. Watch out for the assholes that show up already knowing all the answers (or with nine dudes carrying horns - that's a ska band), though. Bonus: Includes discussions about snowboarding, basketball, and potential international deportation policies.

It's almost a theme at this point, but if you guessed the episode title is also a NOFX song, you're the winner. It's a pretty deep cut from the Backstage Pass album, but it gets right to the point of this episode - that culture shapes meaning. And safety can mean a lot of different things when we aren't careful to understand it in the context of culture. We could have gone with the Pennywise song "Society," but we didn't. It's cool if you like that one better. In this episode of the PRS podcast, the boys discuss the challenges of implementing global safety standards while being culturally sensitive. They highlight the importance of understanding local practices and adapting safety protocols accordingly. Ron shares some experience with a learning team in Malaysia and the cultural barriers that can make effective communication super difficult. If you only get one takeaway from this one - and that's a stretch sometimes - it's the need to standardize outcomes, not processes or even policies, as a way to aim for global consistency with locally relevant practices. Safety is very much affected by imposing Western safety norms on diverse cultures, and without a solid interpretation of local and societal norms, that can be dangerous. Ok, get to it then.

Hey, you guessed it - a title from a NOFX song. This time, the boys are talking about power. It's a pretty punk rock topic, because there's a lot of music about subverting power. The conversation starts with the same BS as usual - you're welcome. Eventually, it moves to the good stuff of complexities of power and politics in safety and the importance of decentralized decision-making and deference to expertise. The boys discuss the impact of power imbalances on team dynamics, communication, and safety, and links to studies and real-world examples. Really, there's a lot of evidence that supports how important it is for safety professionals to address these issues and promote open, honest communication. There's more to it than that, but you'll have to listen in!

Like the Sex Pistols song, but with more cowboys and stuff. There's been some talk of abolishing the health and safety regulator - OSHA - in the US. It's pretty punk to think of full-scale safety anarchy, but is that what would really happen? Maybe leaving safety performance up to companies wouldn't be so bad. After all, things were going great before regulation, right? It was a magical place where FSMM reigned supreme. At least sometimes. The boys haven't been good about predicting the future so far, so this episode probably isn't much different, but there are some solid points raised about what actually encourages safety in industry. Anyway, Reagan Youth probably has something to say about what sure sounds like "trickle down safety." Listen in and let us know what you think. LinkedIn is where all the most punk rock conversations are happening.

Ron is back! Turns out that even a punk band needs a lead guitar, no matter how simple some people say it is to play. In this episode, the boys stumble onto the topic of whether safety can be a simple formula. There are some recent publications that represent it that way, but it's sort of like trying to define punk music. There are probably a million ways to describe it, and in the end, it doesn't matter anyway. We've already covered safety metrics on PRS, but this is a little different. It's about simplifying safety to some two-dimensional BS. Also, the formula idea is sort of bad. Using made-up numbers, constants, measures of effort, or whatever else to arrive at a safety score is mostly wasted time and maybe just harmful. Listen to the pod for more inspiring advice!

Josh Bryant joins the pod for this episode because Ron's out doing real work, apparently. Joshie is a big-time safety and risk guy in the mining industry, and he's Australian, so this episode gets a Frenzal Rhomb song title to match. Not wanting to disrupt the norm of unpreparedness, the boys figured it out on the fly (even though it was Josh's job, and if he cared more, he'd have done it better). The topic: "What's going on out in industry with all this safety stuff?" The two guys without actual jobs are seeing a lot of the same themes, including an increasing awareness that maybe focusing all our effort on tracking safety numbers and stamping them out with bonuses or punishment isn't the best approach. Even though there is a shift in safety thinking, many of the folks doing work would say there isn't much change in how safety is actually getting done. That's mostly where this episode goes, including some pretty good advice (and some sketchy advice) from Josh on how things have worked in his company and industry. Josh doesn't play guitar, so PRS is just a bass and a drum kit until Ron gets back. How fucking punk is that?

Shit. Things are crazy, man. As the Bad Religion song says, "Los Angeles Is Burning." Link to the song below, if you're into that sort of thing. Seriously, though, if you're one of the 11 listeners and you're out in LA and need help, drop PRS a line at info@punkrocksafety.com. Punks help punks - always. In the middle of all the chaos out on the West Coast of the US, there are some really cool stories of resilience. So, that's what the boys are talking about in this episode. Resilience isn't something you have, it's something you do. Or maybe it's something you have. Shit. It could be either one, depending on where you look. Maybe that's why there are so many views of resilience. In the pod, we're talking about resilience at a system level, specifically how systems can deal with failure, etc., and maintain their core function to at least an acceptable level. Like how you keep the show going after Fletcher absolutely destroys your bass or drum kit. There's a lot of name-dropping and big words in this one, and that's mostly Ron's fault, but this is a topic where it's worth going back to Cook, Woods, Rasmussen, and so on. They're like the Sex Pistols or Ramones of resilience - everything after is built on that foundation. So, how does that work in a normal organization? That's what the boys try to solve in just under an hour.

Don't you think Punk Rock Safety isn't taking safety seriously enough? Making jokes about safety is surely a sign that some idiot doesn't care enough, right? Uhhh, no. And that applies to safety pros who are having a good time, laughing, and joking as they do their jobs, too. Why aren't people saying, "Whoa, this is fucking awesome!" when the safety folks come around? If the seriousness that a lot of people think is associated with safety was working, we wouldn't be fighting to get folks' attention all the time. If safety is supposed to be about valuing and connecting with people, then we have to bring in all the stuff that makes life interesting. That's a big part of punk, too. Connecting with people through a common story and supporting one another even when shit gets gnarly. Fun and serious aren't opposites, dude, and if it's boring even to the people doing it, what the hell chance do we have of being helpful? The boys talk about safety as the "fun police" and more. It's a super serious conversation. Pinky promise.

It's a Christmas miracle! We made it to 21. Seriously, though, this episode is coming out on Christmas or the day after, depending on where you are in the world. You're welcome. Man, some weird shit's been going down in the world of CEOs lately. We promise we have nothing to do with it. But this episode does. First, it's important to point out it's not a NOFX reference this time. It is a song from Crass, though, so this one's for you if you like old-school shit. There are a lot of references in safety about the importance of top-down support. Cool, what does that look like? If we want CEOs doing CEO shit, then we probably ought to figure out what that is. What does an executive leader owe us (besides a living, hopefully) for safety? CEO shit is a lot about uncertainty and tradeoffs, and just maybe most other folks don't see behind the curtain to what those tradeoffs are. That's probably where safety folks come in. CEOs are usually pretty good at a lot of things. Safety isn't always one of them, so hearing about the safety implications of leadership decisions seems important. Anyway, we probably solve it completely in this episode.

Sometimes bad shit happens to good people. We know it's weird, but here's another episode with a NOFX title. This time, it's a song about Tony Sly's (from No Use For a Name) death. Good dude and an awesome musician, but dead way too early. What about when organizations who are trying really hard to do safety stuff have an accident? Or a fatality? That can feel tough to reconcile, even though we can (and should) separate outcomes from building systems that effectively reduce safety risk. What do we do when there are emotional or political calls for something more? There's something unsatisfying about saying that sometimes shit happens. There's some tension there, and that's what the episode is about. The boys talk about who decides what a "good" organization is and what a "bad" outcome is. Dave - the lover of zero - makes a good point about understanding the difference between doing lots of things and an actual, meaningful change to work. How do we figure our way around failures of foreign, peeling back layers of monotony, and all that other stuff. We're biased, but we think it's a conversation worth having. You could be really good at safety management and have a fatality (and the other way around). "What if all organizations are just as fucked as each other?" Exactly.

We keep forgetting (except for now, because we're definitely mentioning it) to say that there's some evidence that Fat Mike from NOFX loves the podcast. We'd go so far as to say it's his favorite pod. We're the "Seal Team 6 of podcasts," says Ron, because there's no prep at all except Provan. That guy has always been pre-gaming. So, the boys take on the topic of evidence-based safety, whether safety is a science or if we're just doing it for The Cause (see, there's a NOFX reference). Who gets to decide what evidence matters? Probably Ron, because he was in school the longest of anyone. Is evidence saved for those things we don't agree with, because it sure seems that way sometimes. Safety is a little weird in that there isn't a lot experimental evidence, but that might be a feature, not a bug. It is a challenge though, and maybe something that makes it tough for safety professionals to know what to rely on as a sound foundation for practice. Not sure relying on this pod as a source of knowledge is best, but you should listen anyway.

Yet another NOFX inspired title, huh? Yep. We're a one-trick pony around here. The boys have finally gotten around to human error, which is a theme for this podcast anyway. Maybe there's a difference between fuck-up and error, though? It's been a "squishy" part of understanding safety, incidents, performance, efficiency, etc. for a long time. Mostly, Ron just likes saying "squishy." So, what is human error? Is it a legitimate concern or a red herring? Where does intent and context come into the equation? Somewhere in the mix of stupid conversation, there's some useful discussion on all of those topics and more. What do you think? Is error just a function of random variation or is it the dumb people that are causing all the problems?