Episode 325: Become Dangerously Competent: Training, Hazmat, and AI in the Fire Service with Jake Ryks - The HazMat Guys

Episode notes

The fire service has spent years turning hazmat into either a horror movie or a checklist. Jake Ryks thinks both are wrong.

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.

Jake Ryks is a firefighter and hazmat specialist with the St. Paul Fire Department, assigned to Squad One and Hazmat One. He writes for Firehouse and builds education for The HazMat Guys .

His mission is to strip the mythology out of hazmat and put basic chemistry and pragmatic operations in its place. This conversation moves from what the fire service gets wrong about hazmat, to why preparation beats bravado, to where AI is actually useful on a hazmat scene.

Topics covered:

Why hazmat reads as scary, and how a knowledge gap creates the fear

Going from boring to puzzles, and what makes a good hazmatician

Teaching abstract chemistry through tangible metaphors

The misunderstood idea that hazmat is slow, and why life safety still comes first

Why the fire service comes second to the unprotected civilian

Rising to the occasion versus falling to your level of training

A 2014 house fire rescue and pride in preparedness

Mental health and becoming dangerously competent

Owning mistakes, and the training saw that hangs on Jake's locker

AI and tech in hazmat training and operations, plus an early look at the Haven app

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.

Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro
2. 1:28 Making hazmat training engaging
3. 10:19 Changing how firefighters think about hazmat
4. 14:35 Rising to the occasion vs. falling to your training
5. 20:52 The importance of competency
6. 29:38 Accessible online training
7. 34:08 AI as a tool in the toolbox
8. 45:48 Upcoming shows and projects
9. 52:16 Words to live by

Questions answered in this episode

What is Jake Ryks' advice for firefighters who struggle with mental health after a bad call?

Jake Ryks says the best way to harden yourself against mental health struggles is to become dangerously competent at your job. He explains that many firefighters he has spoken with struggle because their ticket got pulled and they were not ready, and they know it was their fault. His advice is to train so hard that if a bad outcome happens, you can say nobody else could have done it better.

Hear it at 20:58

How does Jake Ryks make hazmat chemistry accessible to firefighters?

He breaks down complex concepts into digestible metaphors and analogies. For example, he explains polymerization by comparing a monomer to a bag of loose chain links that become connected chain, releasing heat. He says the fire service does not need to know why, just what is happening and what that means on scene.

Hear it at 6:58

What does Jake Ryks say about the fire service and risk?

He says the fire service can never forget that firefighters are less important than the unprotected civilian. That does not mean operating recklessly. It means being hyper prepared, hyper trained and hyper aware so you can take risks that nobody else can take, safely.

Hear it at 12:50

What is Haven and how will it help hazmat operations?

Jake Ryks says Haven is a new app being developed that will integrate AI models, allow uploads of SOPs and SOGs, and provide quick reference guides. It will also have plume modeling and let you use your phone as a fake meter for training. He says it will revolutionize the way they have accessibility to that level of training.

Hear it at 37:03

How have reference materials changed in hazmat operations over the past decade?

Jake Ryks says a decade ago you needed a library of physical books and had to compare three references to make a decision. Now digital systems cross reference all those materials and let you search instead of flipping pages, drastically streamlining the process of gathering information.

Hear it at 34:08

Transcript

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

Ep 325 transcript

Become Dangerously Competent: Training, Hazmat, and AI in the Fire Service with Jake Ryks - The HazMat Guys

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Jake Ryks

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 the Smart Firefighting podcast the, Kevin Sofen here, where we cover all things related to the future, the future of smart technology for first responders around the world, of basic chemistry and pragmatic operations. Jake is

[1:28] Jake Ryks: And thanks for having me, dude. I appreciate it. [inaudible 1:30] standardized hazmat curriculum, is notoriously dry and boring, people don't want to [inaudible 2:58] Really the core [inaudible 3:59] a healthy respect and a healthy [inaudible 4:33]

[5:58] Kevin Sofen: curious about how you're seeing that kind how do you make this kind of education of truly understanding [inaudible 6:32]

[6:58] Jake Ryks: some of my best friends in the world that work with them, but at the time I was [inaudible 7:02] someone and just and be like oh I'm so smart and you are just a stupid fireman and you know it's so easy to get into that framework but what they did and what I now try to do and what successful hazmat instructors try to do is say hey I understand that you're a person that probably maybe took high school chemistry maybe that might be pushing it and this is a thing that's intimidating to you because it's outside of your normal wheelhouse, what I'm going to do is take these concepts and break them down into digestible, be it metaphors or analogies, or ways that we can take non-tangible concepts and make them tangible in the human world. Well, a perfect example of that, to give you an example. We talked about polymerization, or I just wrote an article of Fairhouse about polymerization, the situation that's happening out in Garden Grove, California. Polymerization happens because there's something called a monomer and then that monomer can become a polymer and what that is a monomer is like a bag of loose chains. It will chain links but they're not connected to one another and then what happens is through different chemical processes those links can start to link up to each other and then all of a sudden these loose links become connected chain and when that happens, it releases heat. And so, in the most rudimentary form, that is taking a super high level chemical process, a polymerization, and how these monomers become polymers through this molecular bonding, and just making it a thing that the average firefighter can say, oh, I can picture a bag of chain links, and I can also picture a chain in a bag. And I can picture the fact that they're changing between those two things. Okay, I mean, we could break down the idea that it's exothermic and blah, blah, but foundationally the fire service doesn't need to know why, it just needs to know that this is changing to this and this is what happens in that moment. And so that's just a small bite-sized portion of how we make these difficult hazmat concepts accessible to the fire service. And when you make it accessible, we can break over that hump and now get to puzzling and as soon as you get to puzzling the fire service is rooted in puzzling. What does the fire service do? They arrive that they've never seen before and then they solve the problem, right? That is the, like, if. say, what makes a fireman or firefighter? They're a puzzle solver, right? They arrive on scene with a set of tools and then they see something they've never seen before and they try to solve it and that is what hazmat is too. You just have to get over the hump of understanding some of these concepts.

[10:19] Kevin Sofen: And throughout your time within the fire service and with the HazMat Guys I'm curious if there's been a moment where you've seen a firefighter's training fail them in a situation, not because they didn't try but

[11:00] Jake Ryks: lean on to for the sake of this example is the idea hazmat is slow right so everyone purposely slams on the brakes when they show on scene of a. From a ten thousand [inaudible 11:25] might be and as a result somebody dies, we have failed our primary mission. And so that's the biggest conceptual gap that I see in the fire service as a whole. Hazmat is slow, so that means show up and pop out the lawn chairs and hang out. [inaudible 12:11]

[12:25] Kevin Sofen: and then in addition to that do these other steps along the way to ensure that you are focusing on fire and the protection of life. So I mean how do you see that balance with wanting to ensure that we are protecting firefighters and protecting whoever is maybe needed to be rescued with also making sure we're doing it safe and responsibly and balancing that hero culture dynamic.

[12:50] Jake Ryks: Okay, I'll give you my take here and I'm not going to mince words. The fire service can never forget that we are less important than the unprotected civilian. If we ever lose that fact, we will lose what makes us great. That is a huge concept that we can't let go. That does not mean that we need to operate recklessly. It does not mean that we need to operate without understanding or beyond the scope of what is reasonable, but if we ever lose the fact that we will foundationally lose what makes the fire service the most trusted occupation in the world. And we cannot forget that. So what we can do is be hyper prepared. We can be hyper trained. We can be hyper aware of our circumstances and with that we can accomplish both goals at once. But what happens is if we don't do that preparation and we still want to have aggressive stance towards operation we can find ourselves in a bind because if you don't do the work before the game day to make sure that game day goes smooth what happens is that you can overe-extend yourself for a goal without the training and understanding foundation to make that possible in a safe way. But the more you prepare, you prepare, the more you can leverage that preparation when it's time to actually act. And so, that is the way that we overcome risk benefit analysis. It's not by taking risk, it's by being so hyper prepared and capable that we can take risks that nobody else can take.

[14:35] Kevin Sofen: This may or may not tie to this quote the other day. If you don't rise to the occasion, fall to your lowest level of training, what are your thoughts on that quote

[14:45] Jake Ryks: Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think that they're exactly the same thing. Rising to the occasion means living up to the training and preparation that you did up to that point. The best you could hope for is to rise to your level of training or I guess in that case fall to your level of training But all you have to give is what you have to give and so up to that moment you have Seven people from a house fire. I was able to rescue three children from that fire and I remember obviously it was a it was a big deal I ended up winning some accommodation for it and whatnot, but I remember talking to my wife afterwards and this is you know I don't know a decade of me being in fire service and- and really not just like technically being in the fire service but really dedicating my life and I remember me and my wife talking and me saying if I never do it ever again all the time was worth and that hits hard and I think that if the fire service would have that mentality we would have a lot more dedicated firefighters and we would have people that believe in the importance of training at a at a different level. Because it's not about what skill I do every single day. It's about what I'm capable to do when the chips are down, how much time, how many reps have I put into these skillsets prior to the moment when you happen to get your ticket drawn. Because when your ticket is drawn, it's too late to hope that you would have practiced and prepared. So that-

[16:45] Kevin Sofen: going into figure skater mode, right? Right when that happens, right? When you're about to skate for the gold. I mean, you just gotta go, almost let it be muscle memory. And like you said, actually, I agree with that notion of the rise into the occasion, fall into the training. It really is the same thing if you are willing to continue to embrace that training mindset and not get in complacency and continuing to put in the work and do training each and every day on some of your strengths and weaknesses to be prepared for that moment. You had put in a lifetime worth of work, but particularly a decade worth of work to ensure that Jake at that moment was-ready to perform and save those children. So I mean, kudos to you for what happened.

[17:26] Jake Ryks: And the thing that I want to instill in the fire service [inaudible 17:31]

[18:31] Kevin Sofen: talking about how being over-prepared, and how you continue to put in this time, and you don't, that time put in to become over-prepared for the task is not time lost, it's time that you will mentally be prepared for when that task may or may not happen. And a lot of the times we hope we never really have to use these skills, but like you said, you're sitting at that table feeling that peace, knowing that if something were to happen, you're prepared. And even if you put in 50 hours towards a particular task and end up never using it. That's not time lost, it's time invested in just that continued work ethic and mindset that you could do it and also I'm curious too with how that sets like a ripple effect with your peers. I mean showing that kind of living by example of like you may never actually use that particular skillset but it is another tool in your tool shed and I'm curious how that mindset has with maybe what you've seen with yourself and your team or what you've seen with maybe other firefighters that take training as seriously as you do, particularly with hazmat or really anything within the career. Do you see that continue to evolve in a positive way in the 2026 light of the culture of embracing over-training, not over-exertion, but continue to be hyper-vigilant with training for all the knowns and unknowns?

[19:54] Jake Ryks: Yeah, I think that it's the reason that it kinda goes back. to the classic thing that maybe your parents told iron and you become better because they become better and it becomes this like revolving door of positivity and competency, but you have to be, if you want to be a high performer, you have to surround yourself with people that aspire for the same goal. If you don't do that, it doesn't matter how good you could be on your own. You will never reach your true potential unless you are surrounded by people that have the same mindset.

[20:52] Kevin Sofen: Drop the mic there and end the podcast now. Well, I couldn't agree more.

[20:58] Jake Ryks: Let me add one more thing to this. As we talk about this idea of the importance of, competency. And this has become a little bit of a through line. And some people that listen to a lot of things I put out may have heard me talk about this before, but people that follow me know that I went through the center of excellence last year, almost a year from now perfectly. And so I have had my mental health struggles and I've had them publicly. And I do that so that other people know that it's okay to do that, and it's okay to be public about it. But I truly believe in my heart of hearts the greatest thing any member of the fire service can do to harden themselves against mental health struggles is to become dangerously at our job because I've sat with dozens if not a hundred of people in this career field that because I've sat with dozens if not hundreds of people in this career field that have talked since I've opened up this world of like, mental health discussions, I've talked to so many people and the through line I continually feel and hear, it was my time, my ticket got pulled and I wasn't ready and it crushes them because they know that it's their fault and that is brutal, and it's true. The honest-to-God truth, you wanna sit in those conversations and say, no, it's okay, it's okay, but the reality is it's not. The public trusted you to be prepared for their emergency, and you failed, and that sucks. But what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna whine and cry about it, or are you gonna get back on the horse and you're gonna train your ass off so that it never happens again. And so what we can do as members of the fire service, or any emergency response service for out, it could be police, it could be EMS, you have to train yourself to be so competent that you know whatever comes, if the outcome doesn't work out the way that you want it to, you can say, nobody could have done it better. What I did was the most that could have happened and unfortunately, yes, this person died or this bad outcome happened, but nobody, else could have been there and caused a better outcome. That was just the way that it happened. And you can rest easy in that idea that it wasn't your fault. And that's how you persist in this career.

[23:21] Kevin Sofen: Everything in your possible control, you did whatever you could to ensure the best possible outcome. There may have been some things out of your control, but that's kind of that balance of where you need to learn to live with, where if you put in the work, if you have trained and you have made sure that you're over-prepared and hyper-vigilant about being competent, you can sleep easy at night. And I [inaudible 23:49] a year ago, may or may not apply for what you're doing today, but I think that's that mindset of kind of never being complacent and continuing to be hungry with who you are, [inaudible 24:14] in the chair and you find yourself fidgeting, you find yourself biting your nails, whatever. Like, I perceive that as signs of growth. I perceive that as signs of you putting yourself into a situation where you may feel uncomfortable. And I think it is important to continue to put yourself into uncomfortable positions. And I'm curious as we continue to build on this and after this, I'm gonna do a little bit more tech talk, but putting yourself into uncomfortable situations by design and continue to acknowledge that, hey, maybe I'm not where I wanna be. And this, you know, obviously like you mentioned too about you had your ticket called, you weren't prepared, that sucks. Okay, what are you going to do about it? How do you, how have you talked to others about how to sort of look yourself in the mirror and say, you know what, that's okay. How do we, again, go through a crawl, walk, run journey to continue to get to where you want to be. Whether that's through, again, the proper training and I think a lot of it starts internally. You can't help others if you can't help yourself and I've learned this too even becoming a father recently about I can't help my son and my wife if I'm not myself, you know, as strong and mentally prepared and myself and physically prepared. So I'm curious, you know, as both a firefighter, a father, how have you embraced that and what would you say to others?

[25:50] Jake Ryks: The best way to overcome these problems is by not denying that they're real. I think that we have this culture now that so often wants to coddle and, it's not like I want to coddle you too, but in a way that helps you, not in a way that regresses you or holds you where you are. And so I often would say like, well what is actually loving? like is it actually loving to say no it's okay it's it's fine you did really good and you're like when everyone full well knows that's not true right the actual loving thing is to hold people accountable and the actual loving thing is to. Is to take them aside and say. How are we gonna solve this problem. How are we gonna make sure that because I care about you so much. I never want to see this happen to you again and that's what real loving behavior is. It's not patting them on the back and saying you did really good. Everyone knows you didn't. That's fine.. It's okay to make mistakes but we can't just bury them under the rug and pretend like they didn't happen. I talked about this when I did the weekly scrap recording and you know I had this situation where I you know to compress the story quite a ways I made some mistakes on a fire scene where I flooded some saw's early on in my career and as a joke the guys at the station made me a training saw which was like an old woodworking saw that said Rick's training saw on it and to this day you go to my locker right now it hangs on my locker because, I have to remember that I could always have a bad day and I'm not gonna bury it and hide it like it's never happened I'm gonna say I'm gonna own that when I come into work I say oh I need to train today because I don't want that to ever happen again and so the way that we work. Through these problems is by acknowledging them acknowledging that they suck and acknowledging that you are accountable to them and then making a plan whether that's personally or with a group with a mentor, I think the mentor system is massive. You have to have someone to lean on. Ideally, you would be mentoring somebody and you would be being mentored by someone. Everyone should have that relationship dynamic in your life. And you have to, like, so if I borrow that back, you have to acknowledge it happened, you have to acknowledge that it sucks [inaudible 28:15] I don't know if this is unique to him or someone else taught it to him, but it's this idea that we all have a certain amount of mistakes. Say you have 100 mistakes for every task that you want to perfect in the fire service. The more you train, the more likely those mistakes will happen in training and not on a fire scene. So if I, know I'm going to fail to force a door a hundred times, and I forced 5,000 doors on the training prop, the likelihood that those hundred mistakes there and not on fire scene are much higher that is where you're you're going to make you're when there's not

[29:38] Kevin Sofen: because of them. Make those hundred mistakes in training, not That's it. I love that. And you, we've talked about this a little bit. You talked about tech training and deploying tech in certain ways and a lot of the audience that we have here is people kind of interested in how tech is applied in public safety and looking at the overlap between technology. adoption and change management, and I'm curious to steer the conversation a little bit more there now with, within the work that you're doing today, what level of technology are you using to better deliver training services? Or it may also be even just while on the Hazmat, on the Hazmat scene. I know there's a [inaudible 30:25]

[30:55] Jake Ryks: that I manage the online learning platform for the HazMat Guys so we really focus on trying to make accessible training because ultimately much of this Training is the gold standard but in reality it's just not accessible it's not either financially accessible or from a time perspective it's just difficult to get everyone's schedules to align and it's financially costly to bring out a instructor or whatever. So how do we make accessibility? And so even if you're getting technically not the gold standard the accessibility of the training makes this super powerful because now you might have only had access to a super high level trainer you know once a year once every couple years now through some of these learning platforms you can get accessibility or you can get access rather to super high quality training in sitting at your house sitting at the fire station through these online learning platforms and so that is where the value and you have to accept it isn't gonna be as good as in-person training it just can't match the physical connection of an instructor and a student in a accessibility super charges the ability One thing I'll say, and I have no association with them, it's not a sponsored deal by any means, I use Kahoot! all the time in class. For those people who aren't familiar, it allows you to put quizzes on a board, and then have your students with their cell phones answering multiple-choice questions. I've actually taught entire classes built around that platform. So it's like, I want to teach you about physical and chemical properties, we're gonna ask a question and then after every question I'm gonna talk for five or six minutes explain why this question makes sense or why it doesn't or what okay you got it wrong why did you think this and then we talk about that instead of just like giving you a piece of knowledge to remember we're gonna talk about wait you got this incorrectly but why where is the thought process break down and how do we identify this very hyper personal incorrect answer right which is which is a really awesome way to teach some of these concepts because it takes it off the page and makes everything just a conversation and in a lot of the ways those classes will end up being you know half them talking half me talking and that's great right and taking down some of these concepts and making them really accessible so I love Kahoot! for that Kahoot! is just a what I have taught a couple classes in like the middle of nowhere where nobody has cell phones I didn't even know that was a thing like I taught it this I teach has whopper for industry which is like a like I was at a dairy facility and I was out in the middle of Wisconsin and nobody like half the class didn't have a cell phone and I was mind blown by this is okay I guess we won't do it like this right so that's one thing to consider if you're teaching in central Wisconsin don't count on technology as an accessible tool yeah only foot only

[34:06] Kevin Sofen: only flip phones that had snake on it.

[34:08] Jake Ryks: Yeah, for real, I couldn't believe it. And so then now we'll talk operations. We'll get in a little bit more of this when we talk about AI, but operation when I first started doing Haz.mat, you know, a decade ago ish, you had books, it was like a library. Oh we need to grab the book, oh grab this now we gotta compare these three reference materials to make sure that this information's accurate before we make a decision. And like foundationally, like it's like a computer program and it cross-references all those references and I can search for it instead of flipping through a ton of pages. It just like has streamlined the process of reference materials so drastically that it's almost difficult to even like compare the way it was to the way it is now. and that's only gonna improve more with AI like I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, but the biggest advancement in operational tech has been gathering information There's some other ones, but that's the vast majority of the best way that it's impacted us.

[35:14] Kevin Sofen: I've seen a few platforms that have that where you can just upload a bunch of SOPs and past documents and then that's a great example of how AI can be useful You have thousands of pages uploaded and you don't need to have it queryable to the internet or anything else, it's just queryable to those 10,000 pages of information and then you can just sort of have it be a chat assistant. You're like, hey, based on this scenario, what should we do here? Based on this happening, what should we do there? Is that some of the nature of how you're seeing that? Of being able to access intricate SOPs from page 47 of some random document?

[35:53] Jake Ryks: Yeah, that's one way to do it. And some sort of AI platform that you can inquire about a tactic is totally... it just They'll never be a time at least in the current state of AI where you don't need to have a qualified person to run that information past you still are always gonna need to have a Technician that has a human brain that can say wait Does that make sense and it can work together and it can be like I've heard Bobby my boss at the HazMat Guys refer to it as having a really but stupid teammate, right? So like you can't trust in the same way as you could trust like a total peer but he can look through documents really fast and give you a bad guess. And that bad guess can probably prompt you to make a better guess. And that's generally how AI has been useful at this current phase. I'm sure there'll be a point where singularity happens and it's way better than us. And you know, that's the inevitable future.

[36:58] Kevin Sofen: Narrow link, we're all just talking to each other without actually opening our mouths.

[37:03] Jake Ryks: But as it sits right now, it's a tool in the toolbox. It's a good tool in some references. I mean, I guess I can tease [inaudible 37:14] anywhere, but it's going to be a tech integrated. It's going to have AI models. It's going to have the ability to upload SOPs, SOGs, kind of like you were talking about. It's going to have the ability to do quick reference guides and multiple things. It's going to be super awesome. I've seen the all the working prototypes of it and stuff and or the betas and it's it's sweet. It's going to revolutionize. There's not anything that's like it currently. and we're kind of using these points that you say well what could an app do or a platform do in like fantasy land yeah and then we just talked to this guy who is a really good software engineer and say can you make that happen and all too often we found that he can be interested answer is usually yes and so we're super excited about it's gonna be called Haven so there you go there's your exclusive drop I might I literally might get in trouble, but I'm excited for that.

[38:20] Kevin Sofen: That's okay. Dude. I'm excited to hear about all things Haven and just to continue to now dive into the overlap of AI and hazmat particularly and obviously AI within your daily life as a firefighter. Where do you see artificial intelligence as a force multiplier or something that can enhance I mean you see all these different headlines it's actually overwhelming at I subscribe to all these newsletters and you see the Pope's message with the co-founder of Anthropic about the AI doomsday, but using AI for good and then just how AI is being used in warfare to then AI as a productivity tool, as an executive assistant. From the simplest thing to the most advanced thing, it's sort of like your brain can explode as mine has at times thinking about all the possibilities of AI. But to keep it very simple and pragmatic, and from what you see today, you just touched on a little bit about AI for good for Hazmat operations, and then maybe something you think that is something maybe still a couple years away. I'm curious, what are you daydreaming about when you're thinking about this topic?

[39:32] Jake Ryks: I think that there will be a day in the not so far future where you're able to, agency, upload your SOPs and SOGs in totality, reference a known library of physical and chemical properties, maybe even a standard response grid that comes from like an entity like the NFPA 470 or something like that, and then you're able to go. Hey Haven, You we're at a refinery and they're having a leaky tank It we suspect that it is product XY. Z We've currently evacuated the facility. What should we do next and it says Well based off of NFPA for 70 and your SOP P 2.1 dot for you should do XYZ next and then you should do XYZ next and then you should do XYZ next and then instead of spending all this time making an IAP or doing all these things it'll at least give you a response framework that you can start saying does that make sense or does that not make sense and I think as this increases in accuracy it's gonna become more and more and more that you don't have to do anything to that to get an accurate response plan. And then it's a matter of saying all right well we went in and we did objective one we found this our meters said blam and then you upload that into the system and it says okay if it found this and this that means yes it is actually the commodity that you thought it was. And then now go to this point in the decision grid and I mean it there is an awesome part about it and there is a dangerous part about it, right? We want to constantly be thinking firefighters. We want to be constantly be thinking has mathematicians. And if we pull away the thought from ourselves, once again, we can over extend ourselves in a risky situation if we don't actually understand why still believe that we must know why and Then we can use the tool to help us down that pathway, but if we don't understand why fundamentally we leave heavily exposed to the potential of You know being in a riskier situation than we should because some computer, some computer system said go do this user All, sounds good, right? We, don't want that. So we still have to have thinking response personnel, but these systems are gonna drastically make the

[42:23] Kevin Sofen: process easier and a [inaudible 42:28] It I think we'll probably get to that point, which

[44:16] Jake Ryks: yeah and i think that like you could do whatever you want to test the system the test will always have to be a trained and competent individual or team to bounce the ideas off like we'll never i mean we don't even trust a scientifically published book for reference material in hazmat right like the gold standard is you know three forms of reference if you're using a book right? So it's like that we're talking about a book that was produced by, you know, doctoral level scientists and like, I don't know, we better check it against something else. There's no way we're going to take an AI, you know, produced field and then say, okay, this is definitely true. So I think that is [inaudible 45:01] You know that the other thing about Haven that kind of leads into you talk about training is like that app is also going to have Mach plume modeling and the ability to use your phone as a as a fake meter to be able to Say, Oh if I lift it up Is it is heavier than or lighter than air if I move it down is it heavier than air? Like you should have all these things what we can draw That says this is where the releases and then now your people in real-3 Go walk around your firehouse and look for the leak using just their phone And so it's going to revolutionize the way that we have accessibility to that level of training

[45:48] Kevin Sofen: Man, I'm looking forward to Haven, I imagine that you guys and other people in your team will probably be at the Hazmat FRI or AFC show sometime in Baltimore later this next month.

[46:02] Jake Ryks: So once again I think that's probably the teaser which is I think that's when I won't make it this year, but I think they're gonna officially announce Haven there. Well, I mean, they're gonna announce it again because

[46:31] Kevin Sofen: for you the rest of this year. I mean, you've got this other show you mentioned that you're kind

[46:38] Jake Ryks: kind [inaudible 46:48] services. And so we've partnered with a lot of podcasts podcast to kind of make this conglomerate so that we can, you know, collaborate and share each other's stuff and have really high quality content. So he, him, Tyler and Bob from the Hazmat guys have kind of made this conglomerate called Command Media Network. And for the launch of the Command Media Network, me and Tyler are starting this new show Out of Service. And it's going to be kind of like a segmented show. So it'll be like four or five segments a week and it's just going to be quick. Some of the things are like, guess how much this piece of fire equipment costs, right? Like different stuff like that, just a little bit, less serious, just more like joking around, shooting the shit like you would at the firehouse.

[47:45] Kevin Sofen: Dude, that's epic. And then on top of that, rest of this year, any events or things that you're tracking as far as beyond the Hazmat show, what else is on the radar for us here?

[47:57] Jake Ryks: Heart of the Lakes Fire Conference in Minnesota and Alexandria, Minnesota in September just attending, but I don't know I might buy a booth and stuff. I'm looking at that considering to just so I can give out some swag. I love giving out stickers and hats and whatnot. Good for the heart, good for the soul. Yeah, makes me feel good and then I'm teaching a few times before the end of the year. No big travel planned, at least not on behalf of the business, which is good. My wife likes that. I used I used to travel quite a bit more than I do now I'm just so busy doing podcasts between hazard class and then co-hosting the HazMat Guys and now out of service, and then doing my buddy's podcast like this, yeah, I stay pretty busy just sitting in my studio at home.

[48:43] Kevin Sofen: That's a good thing. It's a nice thing about the modern world where you can still be crushing it in a lot of fronts without having to get on the plane every day.

[48:53] Jake Ryks: Yeah, I don't miss that. And there maybe will come a day when I'm doing that kind of travel again but as for right now you know I got two young kids and I like to be able to go to their games and hang out with them and so maybe someday I'll be back on you know beating the road to death but for right now I do most of the work in the studio at home.

[49:14] Kevin Sofen: That's good stuff. So in the nature that you've got a bunch going on and wearing a bunch of hats and I respect that from one juggler to another Two kind of final questions, one, and I'll kind of ask these together and you can answer them. What's something right now that's keeping you up at night and what are you most excited about, is sort of a two-part question. And then final is sort of what's a favorite quote or words of wisdom that you live by. So we'll start with what's something that's both keeping you up at night and something that you're really excited about? Evan.

[49:51] Jake Ryks: Yeah, well that's the thing I am super excited about that because I think people are gonna just be Mind blown by what we've been able to accomplish but keeps me up right now is Well, actually, I'll give you I was gonna give a broad scope answer, but I'll tell you the very specific one This is kind of stupid, but it's also very true So we just purchased all new hoses and nozzles at my fire department And I was asked by our administration to lead the rollout all the training for every company every shift for my Entpire department. So just about 500 members and I'm gonna come off shift in the end of July ish and I'll be off shift for a few months to go into a 40 hour week for the first time in a Long time and I did I feel a lot of weight to make sure that goes well We're switching from automatic fog nozzles to Smooth board nozzas better hose. It's awesome. It's such a great transition But this is a once-in-a-care thing it's drastically gonna change the culture of our fire department and I feel a lot of weight to make sure that it goes right yeah ironically I'm kind of known online as a hazmat guy but I consider myself much better at firefighting that I do at has Matt so I take it very seriously and I lot of weight of developing all those lesson plans and how I want to ...project to make sure that the hose and nozzle roll out for my fire department goes well. What I'm excited for is quite honestly the same thing. It's going to be a cultural shift in our department and I just hope that I can process justice and live up to the expectations that my administration had when they asked me to take on And yeah, beyond that, the shows are wonderful. I'm super excited. Like the guest lineup that's coming on hazard class. I filmed seven episodes last week and the guest lineup. That's coming up is just ridiculous. Super excited. The show is growing super fast and it's just it's so exciting to be able to have these conversations with people that I you know, I now consider friends a lot of them and you know, just having the opportunity to even meet them. let alone have long-form conversations and call them friends on the backside

[52:12] Kevin Sofen: on the backside, it's just a real privilege. Good on you, man. We'll continue to keep grinding, I respect that.

[52:16] Jake Ryks: Yeah, and then in terms of quotes, it's not an exact quote, but it is a concept that I do genuinely quite literally live by. And it comes from a good friend of mine who I work with at my fire department, and he told me that if you're ever faced with multiple choices, whatever the one that you want do the least is probably the right one. I try to make my decisions based off that almost exclusively. The thought process being that if you're considering it and you don't want to do it, there's probably a reason you're considering it despite the fact that you don't want to do it. So the human urge to resist discomfort or something like that is what holds you back from making some of these hard decisions that are probably the right decisions and you know if it wasn't a good choice you wouldn't even consider it if right if it was uncomfortable and overextended you or whatever was but it was bad you would never a right but deep down inside of you know that this is the right choice you just really don't want to do it because of XYZ reason and so when I when I'm faced with a field of decisions, I really try to say which one don't I want to do. And if I'm considering it, that's the one I'm gonna probably choose, because that's the one that's gonna ultimately lead to better outcomes and it's gonna lead to a life fulfilled.

[53:46] Kevin Sofen: Yeah man, sometimes you gotta eat the frog first, even though you don't want to.

[53:50] Jake Ryks: Yeah, that's it.

[53:51] Kevin Sofen: Dude, well said, I mean, I think that's something I need to continue to apply in my life where, again, there are those decisions that come through and it's like,, I don't know if I really want to do that. I know I should do it, but I think it all comes back to your earlier point of personal accountability and continuing to put in the work of training and continue to become competent at your task, whatever that task may be, and the more competent you are, the more prepared you'll be. And if you are over-trained and over-prepared and all of a sudden something doesn't work out, you can at least go to bed at night knowing that you did everything in your damn power, free will, to make sure that it happened. And as long as you can control what you can't control, and you can live and die a happy man.

[54:30] Jake Ryks: That's it, yeah, that's the hope.

[54:32] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, the hope. Well, Jake Ryks, it's been a damn pleasure. Really enjoyed talking shop on all things life and leadership and training and touch of tech, so good on you, appreciate all the workitored doing for public safety and excited to. Excited to hear about these new shows coming out and look forward to continue staying in touch and see what the rest of 2026 has to hold for you.

[54:54] Jake Ryks: For sure, thank you, sir.

[54:56] Kevin Sofen: All right man, take care.