Episode 233: Supporting Firefighter Wellness: The Power of FirstNet by AT&T with Ryan Fields-Spack

Episode notes

How does FirstNet support firefighter wellness?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

How is AT&T revolutionizing public safety communications?

How does FirstNet offer unmatched priority and preemption for emergency responders?

Discover new opportunities within the FirstNet ecosystem for public safety innovations

Hear from Ryan Fields-Spack - the Associate Director of Responder Wellness at FirstNet , built with AT&T.

Ryan highlights the significance of a dedicated network for public safety. FirstNet ensures uninterrupted communication for police, fire, EMS, and emergency management during large-scale incidents. Ryan also talks about the benefits of FirstNet, including priority and preemption, opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation, and initiatives supporting firefighter wellness.

So take a listen to hear what he has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Kevin's intro at FDIC 2024 in Lucas Oil Stadium
2. 1:15 Ryan's path from Aurora Fire to FirstNet
3. 2:08 What FirstNet is: a dedicated network
4. 3:15 Why public safety needs its own network, from 9/11
5. 4:26 How FirstNet shows up for departments today
6. 7:04 Building products for the FirstNet ecosystem
7. 9:36 Acronyms explained, priority and preemption
8. 12:03 Small departments and large incidents
9. 14:56 Firefighter wellness and micro incidents
10. 21:16 What's next for Ryan in 2024
11. 22:39 Ryan's advice
12. 24:17 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is FirstNet and why was it created?

Ryan Fields-Spack explains that FirstNet is a dedicated network for public safety, separate from commercial carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T. Police, fire, EMS, dispatch, and emergency management went to Congress in 2012 asking for their own network because of challenges faced when combined with the civilian population during major incidents. AT&T was the only company to bid on building it, and it launched six years ago.

Hear it at 1:19

How does FirstNet work during large events when cell networks are congested?

Ryan Fields-Spack says FirstNet uses priority and preemption. Public safety users get moved higher up the priority list for the cleanest data connection. If things get really bad, the system will kick civilians off the network entirely, reserving it specifically for public safety. Civilians can still call 911, but FirstNet creates a high-speed express lane for first responders.

Hear it at 10:35

What happens if a tower goes down during an emergency?

Ryan Fields-Spack says that if a tornado takes out a tower completely, FirstNet is bound by contract with the FirstNet authority to provide temporary service as soon as the customer calls for it. The response operations group is on 24-7, 365, and will deploy what they call a SATCULT, a satellite-based cell-on-light truck, anywhere in the country within 14 hours. It's basically a portable cell tower that will bring them up and running.

Hear it at 12:56

Why is AT&T involved in firefighter wellness?

Ryan Fields-Spack says AT&T is a partner to public safety beyond just technology. First responders need to perform well no matter what is happening in their heads or at home. Micro incidents wear on people and can lead to burnout, substance abuse, marital issues, and even suicide. AT&T focuses on wellness because it is the right thing to do and they have the capability to shout that from the rooftops.

Hear it at 15:22

What wellness programs does AT&T support for first responders?

Ryan Fields-Spack describes three initiatives. AT&T partners with BoulderCrest on a program called Struggle Well for people who feel their flame has gone out. They support a Health and Wellness Coalition that brings leaders together to discuss wellness needs. They also work with O2X, which does one-day fitness-based courses on sleep, diet, and fitness around the country.

Hear it at 21:30

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 233 transcript

Supporting Firefighter Wellness: The Power of FirstNet by AT&T with Ryan Fields-Spack

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Ryan Fields-Spack

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to our Smart Firefighting podcast miniseries hosted at FDIC 2024. You will hear some stories from XPRIZE, AT&T FirstNet, and some other first responders. There are some great insights on wildfire technologies, connectivity during first responder operations, health and wellness, and much more. Enjoy the show. Alright, the first in our FDIC miniseries along Ryan Fields-Spack with FirstNet built with AT&T. Ryan, how you doing?

[0:32] Ryan Fields-Spack: I'm great, Kevin. How are you, sir?

[0:34] Kevin Sofen: Doing well. We are chilling in the middle of Lucas Oil Stadium, the home of the Indianapolis Colts, and there's like, I don't know, 40,000 people rolling to town, and I guess it's the dawn of the storm here on Wednesday.

[0:44] Ryan Fields-Spack: Yeah, we're sitting on, what do you think, the 15-yard line? Yeah. I could probably make a field goal from here.

[0:49] Kevin Sofen: Oh, I think you could. I proudly have, I hit like a 40 yarder over the winter break and my younger brother was a kicker in college and he could hit some pretty far ones. But yeah, I think I, it was fun to get out there.

[1:01] Ryan Fields-Spack: 40 yarder, I'm impressed.

[1:03] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, I know. I mean, my leg was sore for a week afterwards, but it was a good time. Yeah, but it was cool, yeah, being on the spot where, you know, Peyton Manning was throwing out routes and Marvin Harrison scored touchdowns, you know, back in the heyday, so.

[1:14] Ryan Fields-Spack: Pretty cool spot, yep, absolutely.

[1:15] Kevin Sofen: Well, so what brings you to FDIC and why are you here today?

[1:19] Ryan Fields-Spack: Yeah, we're here with FirstNet doing all things firefighting for FDIC. So I was a former firefighter and a captain with Aurora Fire in Colorado for about 10 years, and then joined in 2017 with FirstNet. Just for your listeners who may or may not be familiar, FirstNet is basically the fourth network in the country. So you've got the T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, and FirstNet, and FirstNet is dedicated specifically for public safety. So police, fire, EMS, dispatch, and emergency management. They all went to Congress in 2012 and they said, give us our own network because there are challenges that we face being combined with the civilian population when big, bad things are happening. And Congress gave them their own network. And AT&T was the only company to bid out and say, yep, we'll help, we'll build it. And that's what FirstNet is. And we're six years into it at this point.

[2:08] Kevin Sofen: So six years into it, what does that journey mean in terms of building out new infrastructure, new chips? Like, what sort of physically and digitally is this FirstNet experience?

[2:21] Ryan Fields-Spack: FirstNet is, I mean, kind of like I articulated, FirstNet is its own dedicated network. So the cool thing is, rather than building out what's called a greenfield cellular network across the entire country, where you have to go out and plant towers in the ground and provide the backhaul or the connectivity back, we were able to leverage the towers that were already in existence, but we put a new spectrum on the towers. So the radio waves that your cell phone connects to, there's a dedicated spectrum just for public safety. So the cool thing about that is you're able to grab that phone, and when you're at the Super Bowl, when you're here at a game, or if you're at an incident like Route 91, the Harvest Festival, it's isolated from the civilians who are trying to stream things on TikTok or Facebook or anything like that, and they have the highest amount of data and voice available to them and will actually even preempt people off of the network in total to really reserve it for public safety so they can do what they do best.

[3:15] Kevin Sofen: When you talk about reserving for public safety and needing to have this dedicated network for public safety, why is that important and what was kind of like, what was sort of the impetus of ultimately leading to being like, oh, snaps, like this is, this was a problem, we need a dedicated network for public safety?

[3:31] Ryan Fields-Spack: It's a great question. It started in 9-11, you know, with the horrid events that happened during 9-11, you've got all of those towers going down, the cell system didn't even work. Now, granted, it was 2001, excuse me. And when all that happened, the cell phone network wasn't great anyway, just from a technological perspective, but it was just completely down. Anytime there's an after-action report after a large-scale incident or emergency, communication is always number one. So they, meaning public safety, went and decided, you know what, we can't commingle with civilians on this. The original intent was let's build our own network so that our fire engine, our police car, anything else can connect to that network and have the data back that they need to use. So that was really the genesis. 9-11 report came out and said communication is a huge issue. How can we now move forward and improve on it? And police and fire came together and said, this is the answer. And FirstNet was born out of that.

[4:26] Kevin Sofen: Love it, and obviously you said it started and now it's not just a, okay, the towers are up and the cell phones are on and it's there. I've seen the extensive roadmap and all these other kind of nuances and kind of hopeful existing and future plugins about how to make the network stronger, more resilient, more robust, more useful to public safety. Tell me more about that sort of the roadmap and this whole kind of reinvestment and also kind of speak to like, what does that mean for firefighter? What does that mean for an entrepreneur when thinking about how to interact with FirstNet?

[4:59] Ryan Fields-Spack: Oh, totally. You know, when I left the fire service in 2017, we were pretty active. I mean, if you think about a fire engine, they've all got the computer screens that are set right there. So when a 911 call comes in, the dispatcher or the telecommuter takes that call, and then they send the information directly to that mobile data terminal sitting in both the police or the fire engine. It gives you your mapping, it gives you your ability to tag in that you're responding, and it gives the details of the call. In order to get that information to that MDT, you have to have the pipe of data connectivity to be able to do so that has exponentially increased in the time from 2017 until today. We utilize data at a huge rate. So using drones up in the air to live stream things that are coming back, being able to connect live data of an incident so that we can coordinate people coming in. The insatiable appetite for data is huge. So what's cool about that and to your question, we've been able to democratize a lot of those things. So if you think about, you know, I have three kids, none of them have a cell phone yet, but if I wanted to, they can grab my iPad and they can 1080p HD FaceTime grandma anywhere in the world, right? On a relatively cheap iPad with the communications and the technology that we have. Public safety didn't have that because there are so many rigorous rules set around the high standard of capability of public safety. An ax is way more expensive if it's a firefighter ax than if it's one you get at Lowe's or Home Depot. So by being able to bring the first net apparatus into this space and every one of the new phones that are out there have that band 14 ship set, have the capability to be first net ready, we're lowering the price and democratizing everything for all of public safety. So rather than 5.5 million people hoping to get producers or OEMs to build something, now the OEMs are building something for the 280, up to billions of people, brings that price down and then we are the beneficiary of it. So FirstNet was really the catalyst to start bringing that new innovation both on the cellular side as well as the product side.

[7:04] Kevin Sofen: And I wanna dig into a little bit more of the entrepreneur side and companies that are thinking about how to leverage this network, how to create hardware, software, data creation, data displaying in comms and environments or the high rises or whatever, all these different challenges that small, medium, large fire departments face. But for the companies that are thinking about creating within the FirstNet ecosystem, what are some words of wisdom or kind of suggestions you would say about what to consider and programs that exist or what to kind of think about as they're exploring that?

[7:39] Ryan Fields-Spack: That's such a good question, Kevin. You know, when you look at where we are today, if you're building something that's not an axe or not something that's just a physical tool that does a single job, If it has any semblance of technology in it at all, it's gotta have a way to connect to something, whether it's back to a server or whether it's Bluetooth to something else, there needs to be a pipe of data connectivity for those devices to be able to function to their highest caliber. That's what FirstNet provides. We provide a massive pipe of data and connectivity and communications that has that priority, the preemption, it goes to its own dedicated core, so that, to your question, People that are innovators and entrepreneurs and have an idea of how they can solve a specific problem for public safety can now leverage that and build to their heart's content. So we have some rules around it, so to speak, just in terms of security. We want to make sure that if you are joining into the FirstNet network, that you are at a specific bar with terms of cybersecurity, right? So we've got tools, we've got techniques, and we've got the ability for them to work specifically with a product team in AT&T so they can build their product to that level. But that bar isn't so high that you need to have angel investors to be able to help out with that, right? So it's great. And if something else, something as simple as building an app. You know, I was in the training bureau with Aurora for about three years, and we were doing paper logs filling out on the drill ground and it's pouring rain and these things get ruined, right? So why can't we take an iPad, put a case around it, and then just do PDF dropdowns and put it up to Dropbox, right? We're building this stuff from scratch. Now there's the ability to democratize that and have an app built for a specific purpose, put it into the FirstNet App Store and leverage the tools and the iPhones and the Samsungs and all of those throughout to be able to use that from a public safety perspective.

[9:36] Kevin Sofen: Man, that's really helpful context. And there was also, I almost want to rapid fire to, you threw a couple of phrases out there as you've been talking so far, but in layman's terms, band 14, layman's terms 101, what does that mean?

[9:49] Ryan Fields-Spack: Call me out on that stuff all day long, I apologize. Yeah, you think the F.I.R.E. service has a lot of crazy words and acronyms. So when I mentioned earlier that there's a dedicated spectrum that you're. your cell phone communicates to the tower. There's a number of different spectrums on there, 700 megahertz and such. There's a dedicated band 14 spectrum, which lies within those megahertz. And we've got 10 megahertz of up and then 10 megahertz of down. So basically the simple way to say it is we put a new radio up on that tower that broadcast band 14, which is specifically dedicated to public safety. So that came out of the legislation. They said, all right, we are going to give you this spectrum only for public safety to use, and that's what's being leveraged. Does that help?

[10:33] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, and then the other priority and preemption.

[10:35] Ryan Fields-Spack: Yeah, good point, and I didn't qualify that. So thank you for bringing that back up. So when you are utilizing your cell phone, say here during an actual game and Luke as well, everybody, especially during kickoff, has got their phone out and they are typically live streaming it to friends or family or whatever else, that first kickoff. So if you can imagine 70,000 people all connected to the internet nodes that are here in the stadium, that's going to create a little bit of a lag and a slowdown in the service and capabilities for them. By the nature of the fact that the pipe, the backhaul, the data that's going back to the servers can't carry that much data, right? So that's the challenge that we face all the time in these large scale events. Priority and preemption, where this comes in is you get a dedicated FirstNet SIM that is in your phone. And when everybody's trying to capture what's going on that kickoff, we will be able to move public safety higher up on the priority list. So we will get that first best cleanest data connection, and if things get really bad and it's starting to bog down even further than that, we will literally kick civilians off of the network in total. They can still call 911, but they're completely off the network and now it's reserved specifically for public safety. So that's the priority, and then the preemption is the ruthless preemption of kicking them off of the network. Think of it as basically a high-speed express lane for public safety to be able to access the internet.

[12:00] Kevin Sofen: It's like the speed pass at Disney World.

[12:02] Ryan Fields-Spack: Exactly, right?

[12:03] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome, thank you for that context. And yeah, I think just sometimes some of these things are thrown around and it's helpful to know, and again, how to operationalize it for entrepreneurs. And now I wanna switch it to the firefighter, the first responder, whether you're a small, rural fire department in Kokomo, Indiana, to a mid-sized suburb in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to a large metro in FDNY, all small, medium, large. What does FirstNet mean for them from an operational standpoint? They wake up and in my mind, it's sort of like, they have a phone that works. They are able to do their normal, they're able to run apps. They're able to just again, make comms. And I may be over simplifying, but in your sense of like, what does this mean for the firefighter? Kind of a, I wake up and I can have a little bit of peace of mind because this. What are your thoughts?

[12:56] Ryan Fields-Spack: Yeah, I mean, it's such a great premise to start discussing, right? Because especially on the small fire departments, I mean, you know this, 80% of our entire country is protected by volunteer or very small agencies. So sure, you've got the FDNYs, the LA FDs, Orange County, all of these big departments, which do a lot, but we wouldn't be where we are as a country today without the volunteer firefighters. So it's so huge and so helpful. And the benefit is, when they go to the AT&T store and say, hey, I'm a volunteer, and they get that FirstNet phone with that FirstNet SIM, they can feel confident in the fact that they have that priority, the preemption, the connectivity for when that bad incident happens. Because we don't just go to normal things. I mean, yes, we run calls for a medical problem. When the big bad incident happens, take the bridge that just collapsed in Baltimore. We were saturating the network as civilians because everybody was there taking pictures of it in videos and everything else. So a volunteer firefighter that's helping out with a situation like that can feel confident that they'll be able to call their chief, that they'll be able to call their dispatch to get more resources brought to bear on their behalf for that. So you've got that, really the capabilities that can be brought for them is really huge, and then it goes up to the larger ones as well. If you're an agency that has FirstNet and a tornado goes through your town, it takes out the tower completely in that area. And back in the day, you were just kind of waiting on them to come back and fix the tower. We are bound by contract with the FirstNet authority, who is the federal government authority over FirstNet, to provide a temporary service to that customer as soon as they call for it. So what this means is we have the response operations group, which is on 24-7, 365, and they deploy what we call a SATCULT. So it's a satellite-based, cell-on-light truck. In 14 hours, anywhere in the country, we'll have them on site, up and running, and it's basically a portable cell tower that will bring them up and running. That is the big difference, and that's really where FirstNet shines.

[14:56] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome, and I love hearing all that, and then even to now maybe even humanize it a little bit more, and this may be somewhat tied in FirstNet, but also, I know you had mentioned it a little bit when we were just passing each other, but you're doing a lot of work from just the firefighter health and wellness side. I mean, I guess when people hear AT&T or FirstNet, they may not think, you know, firefighter wellness. So, tell me a little bit more about, like, what are you doing from a wellness side and, yeah, just break that down a little bit more.

[15:22] Ryan Fields-Spack: Yeah, and we were talking about that earlier, so I'm glad that we're talking about it here with your audience today. Wellness is one of those things, we're doing a pretty good job about it. I mean, we all hear about taking care of your personal wellbeing and your wellness and meditation and a lot of those different things. From a public safety perspective, it's absolutely huge. So, yes, FirstNet provides the connectivity, we have the tools, we have all that fun stuff that we just talked about. But we are the partner to public safety at the end of the day. And it's not just a one-way street when you talk about the technology. Public safety needs to be able to perform well at their job, no matter what's happening in their head or back at home with their wife or their husband or their kids, right? So you know, I look, a quick story for you. When I was with the fire department, we run calls all the time, right? Hundreds, thousands of calls a year. All of those calls can be somewhat mundane, but we all in public safety have the one call, right? The one call that sticks with us no matter what, and we can be reminded of it at the weirdest times. So some people may be driving by an address that they pass all the time, and they always remember every time they pass it what it was like walking into that house, not knowing what they were gonna see on the other side of the door. You may have some smell that comes up, right? And that smell immediately triggers in your mind sitting on the front stoop of a house doing compressions on a patient with all the families sitting there watching you. A bee might scream, or your daughter might scream when a bee is chasing her, right? But all you may hear is the screaming of the woman who was in that domestic incident that you responded to that you couldn't help. For me, my reminder of that is every time that I'm holding something heavy and helping somebody carry something down some stairs, right, immediately when I do that, my mind shifts and I'm automatically back in that dark toy-ridden stairwell carrying the woman who was shot by her boyfriend out of the house, trying to get her to the hospital and failing to save her life. Those type of things stick with you forever. It's kind of the shell that we in public safety hold over ourselves, and it's what differentiates us from the realtor that's our buddy down the street, right? We are this fraternity and this sorority that has that as something that binds us together. But the challenge from a wellness perspective is we've got that one call, but we also run one, two, 10, 20 calls a day that are those little micro incidents that wear on you and degrade on you. So for myself, if I'm coming home after a long shift, after seeing some of the worst in humanity, and my wife has no care in the world about what I just went through, she's got three kids that need to be taken care of, and she's been by herself for the last 24, 48 hours. You don't get any closure, you don't get any release, you just gotta lock it in. And that agitation can lead to burnout. It can lead to substance abuse. It can lead to marital issues. And eventually, sadly, it can lead to people taking their own lives because they can't handle and have an outlet on the stress of things. So that's the challenge that we have. We're losing good people from all of those perspectives. And almost just as importantly, we're losing good people on the job that perform better as a result of that. So if you think about somebody that has marital problems, they're buzzed from the night before, and they're faced with a structure fire, one, two, three alarm, and they're acting lieutenant for the day. Are they gonna be better at performing the size up, assigning the incoming crews and everything like that? Or is their mind not going to be up to par to be able to perform that? So the way that we look at this from a wellness perspective is how can we facilitate having the discussion around bonus? How can we facilitate improving our response to those little micro incidents so that we're not kind of degrading that keystone of the shell around us so that we can perform better moving down the line in our job. So in a nutshell, we focus on wellness because it's the right thing to do. And because we have the capability to shout that from the rooftops vis-a-vis the FirstNet brand and our voice.

[19:26] Kevin Sofen: I love the word you said, micro incidents. And oftentimes, I mean, people are familiar with PTSD and there's these one or two or three moments or calls or whatever it may be, but it's that day-to-day grind and those micro incidents and they just kind of going into your daily life. And there's kids and there's school and there's soccer practice and there's emails and there's mortgages and it's just, we all struggle. Everyone has their own struggles in different ways. And yeah, I'm the first to admit and say that therapy is a fantastic thing. And sometimes it's maybe been demonized as being you're soft, you're weak. but my therapist always says the healthiest and strongest people are usually the people that are sitting in her chair frequently. And so I take pride in that and just really admire and appreciate you kind of bringing light to that and AT&T doing that because it's, again, it's just the human side of, and frankly, being a first responder is not only is it's incredibly, it's a difficult job in certain ways, but I know it's very rewarding, but it's incredibly selfless in the fact that you and other first responders risk your life to go and support strangers just because you want to. And obviously, it's a job, but you doing that, it's very selfless, so thank you for what you do.

[20:37] Ryan Fields-Spack: Thank you. Yeah, and that just goes back, you know, just to close that out and close that loop. To be able to have people have a servant's heart when they are faced with the same drunk on the same corner for the 20th time this month and not have an apathetic approach to that, we all get in the job with the servant's heart help that person, all those things that are clouding their minds, it's so easy to become apathetic and not care about that person. And when the end of the day, just like you said, you know, we want to be there to help. How can we make sure people are better prepared and capable to do so because that's what they got into the job for in the first place.

[21:16] Kevin Sofen: Well said. And I guess kind of two final things to wrap up here of, kind of interested in the rest of 2024 for you. I mean, any sort of things that you're really tracking, events that you're going to, or things that people should be aware of that you're involved with?

[21:30] Ryan Fields-Spack: Yeah, I mean, my new job is in wellness. I was on the Response Operations Group for about six years. I'm all in on wellness right now, so that is my full responsibility. So we have basically three objectives. We partner with BoulderCrest, so you can put a link to this, but BoulderCrest puts on a program called Struggle Well. We partner with them and they take the people that feel like their flame has gone out and show them what the next chapter in life is like. So Boulder Crest is fantastic. We have a great partnership with them. We have what's called the Health and Wellness Coalition. So again, we are helping to bring leaders in all facets of public safety together from a Health and Wellness Coalition perspective so that they can have a discussion about what's needed in public safety and how they can improve upon the wellness. So we've got that coalition going and then we work with a company called O2X. So O2X does one day fitness-based courses. So whether it's sleep, diet, fitness, O2X does a great amount of effort and we partner with them to help host events around the country. So yeah, I will be at a lot of different conferences coming up, we'll do a lot of stuff on socials and we're doing our best to help tell the story of public safety and what they need.

[22:39] Kevin Sofen: Love it, Ryan. And those are all things we'll put the links into in the show notes, we'll be on lookout for that. And then a final sort of thought from you of like, What's, I always kind of say it as a mic drop of sorts, but I would love to hear of like a thought, a quote, a challenge, doesn't even necessarily have to be public safety related or first responder related, but any sort of final thoughts or comments that you could leave us with here today?

[23:02] Ryan Fields-Spack: That's a good question. You know, when I was in the fire service, I thought it was unstoppable, especially from a mental perspective. I could run sick kids all day long. I could deliver babies and I could run shootings right after that. Things didn't, they didn't faze me at all. Post that six and a half years and I've got three kids and I'm seeing what the world is like right now and I'm seeing the challenges that come about with that. I've really come to appreciate what's really important in life, at least for me. Having kids and raising them up to really be productive in our society and good humans is absolutely huge. And being able to focus your mind on your kids when they're pulling on your pant leg you've got 500 other things going on in the world. If you can do that and focus on one thing at a time, be mindful about the one thing at a time, then you can move on to the next thing and the next thing, both personally and professionally. Keeping that focus, keeping that mindset, it'll help you go far.

[24:00] Kevin Sofen: That's where the wisdom that I will take myself because I need that as my wife and I are exploring that next step in our life. So appreciate that context. And Ryan, it was great to first connect with you at TSI and now seeing you here at FDIC and look forward to Cross and Passmore in 2024.

[24:15] Ryan Fields-Spack: Oh, it was a pleasure, Kevin. Thanks for having me on.

[24:17] Kevin Sofen: Thanks, Ryan. Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Firefighting Podcast today. If you enjoyed what you heard and got any value, please drop us a rating, leave us a comment, or reach out to us on social media. Have a great day, and together we can advance the future of Smart Firefighting.