Mike Binney (Firefighter Sleep Research, Shift Schedules and Start Times) - Episode 1134

Behind The Shield

James Geering

Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Fitness

4.9 • 667 Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 130 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Mike Binney is a Battalion Chief at West Metro Fire Rescue in Lakewood, Colorado, with over 15 years of operational experience. He holds a Master of Public Administration in Emergency Management and Policy from the University of Colorado and recently earned his Master of Public Health in Health Informatics from Yale University, where he also served as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Bioethics. His research focuses on firefighter health and wellness, leveraging biometric data and predictive modeling to better understand sleep loss and operational fatigue. He was recognized as IAFF Local 1309 Firefighter of the Year for 2024 and received the Dr. Gerald Gordon EMS Instructor of the Year award from the EMS Association of Colorado in 2023. Mike’s work connects frontline experience with academic rigor, advancing data-informed insights across the fire service.

Mike’s most critical work includes volunteering in his daughter’s kindergarten classroom and making pancakes for the swim team. Known lovingly as “Dumpster Dad,” Mike is known across his home for eating all manner of snack foods (mostly mini-corn dogs and dino-bites) before they can be thrown in the trash.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay. Okay. Correct. Yeah, I just, well, it was some of the guys who were in Training Academy had listened to your podcast a bunch and said,
0:20.9	you got to go, you got to reach out to this guy and talk about the work you're doing.
0:25.6	So that was how I was like, oh, maybe I could talk about it instead of just me talking to myself about it.
0:35.1	Yeah.
0:48.2	Absolutely. I'm happy to be here.
0:59.0	So I am in Littleton, Colorado, just south of Denver, on the southwest side of Denver. Yeah, that's where I'm at.
1:06.0	So I was born in Portland, Oregon. We moved to the Denver metro area when I was six months old. We have been here ever since. My dad moved here for grad school from New Zealand. We've been a couple generations deep on the North Island of New Zealand.
1:30.1	Everybody else on my dad's side still lives down in Tauranga and Auckland and a couple people up in
1:35.3	Wanaka, which is very cool. Someday I'll get the family back down there. My mom on the other side of the
1:42.0	world is from New Jersey, two very different places to be from.
1:46.1	And so my mom was from a little town on the south end of the Jersey Shore called Cape May.
1:51.1	And I grew up going there pretty much every summer.
1:53.7	We'd go there and my red hair would get burned.
1:57.1	And I'd spend a lot of time in the shade after about the first week.
2:00.8	I've got a little brother, but he's bigger than me.
2:04.8	He is a super smart data nerd and works in the defense sector doing computer stuff.
2:13.3	And he just refers to people as the client.
2:15.5	So that's about all we get to know about his job.
2:17.7	But he's very smart and very cool.
2:19.6	He's four years younger than me.
2:21.9	So it was nice to beat up on him while I could.
2:25.0	But now that's definitely not the case. Yeah, we would do Christmas down there every couple years.
	...

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