Episode 327: A Governance Problem, Not a Technology Problem: Inside Pratus with Roger Coleman and Sean Griffin

Episode notes

Every disaster review finds the same failure: communication. Crews on 9/11 passed handwritten notes. Agencies at the LA wildfires could not talk across radio bands. During Hurricane Maria, restoration trucks sat at a pier while their ship steamed away.

The pattern repeats because the lessons never reach the next operation.

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.

Roger Coleman served as a volunteer fire chief in New York's Eighth Battalion. Sean Griffin directed incident management at the White House for ten years across two administrations.

Together they built Pratus, the DisasterTech platform that pulls every data source into one view and uses AI to guide decisions. The US Coast Guard adopted it as its all theater common operating platform. The first mission: security for the 2026 World Cup and America 250 events.

Topics covered:

How a fire chief and a White House incident manager joined forces

What administration changes do to institutional knowledge

A governance problem, not a technology problem

AI checklists that cite the actual plan

The single pane of glass: Teams, Azure, Esri, drones, body cams

Communication failures from 9/11 to the LA wildfires

The Coast Guard contract, the 2026 World Cup, and America 250

Real time sit reps and same day after action reviews

The trucks left at the pier during Hurricane Maria

Gamified training and the edge hardware play with Darley

So take a listen to hear what they have 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 Cold open and Kevin's intro
2. 0:51 How a fire chief and a White House incident manager teamed up
3. 2:39 Flying blind: pagers, PDFs, and Google Sheets
4. 4:48 Building Pratus
5. 5:17 What administration changes do to institutional knowledge
6. 11:16 A governance problem, not a technology problem
7. 14:20 AI that carries institutional memory
8. 15:45 Lessons from the Navy nuclear program: immediate actions and checklists
9. 17:42 AI checklists that cite the actual plan
10. 21:42 Meeting people where they work: Microsoft Teams and Azure
11. 23:16 The single pane of glass: Esri, drones, cameras, body cams
12. 26:12 Communication failures from 9/11 to the LA wildfires
13. 27:28 The Coast Guard contract, the 2026 World Cup, and America 250
14. 33:58 AI-drafted sitreps with a human in the loop
15. 35:34 Same day after action reviews and Crimson Contagion
16. 38:03 The OODA loop and Hurricane Katrina
17. 42:19 One pane of glass on the fire apparatus
18. 45:27 Gamifying the platform
19. 47:24 A day in the life: preparedness, immediate response, sustained response
20. 53:53 Shift handoffs and getting briefed before you arrive
21. 55:56 The trucks left at the pier: Hurricane Maria
22. 1:00:47 Darley rapid command modules and the partner ecosystem
23. 1:04:14 The PACE method and the point guard of the response
24. 1:07:04 The Livingston, Louisiana fire chief and taking care of your crew
25. 1:10:52 Words to live by: be the best at getting better
26. 1:14:39 The next five years: hardware, the edge, and contested environments
27. 1:18:20 Wrap up

Questions answered in this episode

What is Pratus and what problem does it solve?

Sean Griffin describes Pratus as a platform that pulls every piece of data into a single view and uses AI to cut through the noise during active incidents. He says they built it to solve systemic governance problems, not technology problems, because institutional knowledge drains between presidential administrations and most crisis management relies on PDFs and Google Sheets that arrive too late.

Hear it at 5:50

How did Roger Coleman and Sean Griffin start working together?

Roger Coleman says he met Sean Griffin almost eight years ago through a mutual acquaintance. Coleman was a fire chief in New York covering Nassau County and mutual aid into New York City, and Griffin had served as director of incident management in the White House. Both saw that technology was not being deployed to solve real world problems in emergency response.

Hear it at 1:08

What was the biggest failure Sean Griffin observed during presidential transitions?

Sean Griffin says on inauguration day, eight years of institutional knowledge drains. Cabinet secretaries must go through Senate confirmation, so there is a gap from January through spring with no principal leadership in charge. By 2020, most people trained in the 2017 transition exercise were no longer serving, so the administration started the pandemic response on the wrong foot.

Hear it at 5:50

How is the U.S. Coast Guard using Pratus?

Roger Coleman says the Coast Guard just awarded them a major contract to be the common operating platform for all Coast Guard operations and for America 250 tall ship events around the country, covering over 100,000 individuals. Sean Griffin adds that the Coast Guard will use it for World Cup 2026 security across eleven sectors with maritime responsibility, tracking cutters and aircraft live and coordinating responses in real time.

Hear it at 23:53

What does Sean Griffin mean by saying Pratus is an AI-enabled OODA loop?

Sean Griffin explains that the OODA loop is observe, orient, decide, and act. Pratus continuously cycles through those steps in real time, so users are constantly observing, reorienting, making decisions, and acting on them. The AI helps with checklists and references governing documents so responders can make improvements during an operation instead of waiting months for an after action report.

Hear it at 42:18

Transcript

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

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Roger Coleman spent decades commanding fires in New York City. Sean Griffin spent years managing national security incidents at the White House level. Together they built Pratus, a platform that pulls every piece of data into a single view and uses AI to cut through the noise when time is running out. Today, we're getting into what it actually takes to make technology work in an active incident, why most tools fall apart in the field, and what public safety leaders should expect from the next generation of incident management software. Welcome to the Smart Firefighting Podcast. [inaudible 0:37] where we cover all things related to the future of smart technology for first responders around the world. Please enjoy the show and let me know what you want to learn about next. Roger and Sean, welcome. How are you guys doing today?

[0:54] Roger Coleman: I'm doing great, Kevin. Thanks for having me and Sean.

[0:56] Kevin Sofen: Good to have you guys. So kind of a jump right into it. I mean, how did a fire guy and a national security guy somehow combined forces to build this purpose-built software for both

[1:08] Roger Coleman: Public Safety and Defense personnel. I was lucky enough through a mutual acquaintance to meet Sean almost eight years ago and he knew I was a fireman. He knew as a Fire Chief for six years in the 8 Battalion. We cover Nassau County. We do get called into New York City, specifically for mutual aid, whether it's in the boroughs or for large events such as 9-11, we were first due. So having that, because 90% of New York states volunteer, when I moved into the 8th Battalion, I joined the fire brigade to serve my country. having a business background, but a community service background, because it's not having a business background, but a community service background, because it's not just the fire service, it's what I've done before and during and after the fire service, is in my ethos, the way I was brought up. So meeting Sean was a blessing because he brings such passion and knowledge in the emergency management space, where, for God's sakes, he was director of incident management for the United States of America in the West Wing under Obama for The great years in two years under Trump, 45, and left because technology was not being deployed to solve real world problems, right? It was PDFs and Google sheets. So when I met with Sean, I had a really, almost PTSD issue with getting called out one in the morning 10 a.m. whatever the time is but flying blind into a scene not knowing really where to set your how many gear how many how many trucks how many departments . What's the real ground truth on the game. We were flying blind forever and to many extent I mean the technologies some of the technology out there starting to help But when I met with Sean, it was really just a pager or a bluff on your phone that one, two, three maple streets house is got a fire call with no information. So anyone I met with Sean and he brought up a very large issue about, 70, 80, 90 sources to put a PDF in Google Sheets for the Joint Chiefs and the President. By the time he did so, the storm had hit, people were dead, and they were flying blind after the fact. , right? So he came and said, listen, we can solve a lot of these problems by using technology. And I'm like, yeah, man, we can. And my background is finance because again, 90 plus percent of New York State's volunteer. So my day job is in finance. So because I'm an entrepreneur, I saw Sean's incredible opportunity that he brought forth and he saw in me not only my service, but my business background is what led

[5:17] Kevin Sofen: Sean, as Roger mentioned, your background is in national security and some of the nuances with a bunch of data coming in and the inefficiency of PDFs and links and what did you see at the White House level about how agencies were communicating during crises that convinced you that something needed to be built differently?

[5:50] Sean Griffin: an administration, in this case the Obama administration to the Trump administration, the Obama administration had the benefit of eight years, right, of continued service. And one of the key events that happened in the, from the first to the second term in the Obama administration was Hurricane Sandy. Right? And, you know, arguably hurricane Sandy was important or essential for the president at the time to get reelected. Hurricanes, you know, disasters I- officials to campaign and raise money to, you know, to get into those are actually happening. As the saying goes, all disasters start and end locally. Early on 2017, you have a new administration and folks that followed closely what was happening in 2017. When I was at the White House in 2016, I was there during Election Day. I was at the King on Election Day in a Democratic administration, and there was a lot of surprise that President Trump or Donald Trump at the time before he became inaugurated, just a private citizen, a businessman, won the election. And you know, back door conversations with a lot of folks, there was less time that, you know, I think anyone really appreciated for building a cabinet, building a team to transition, right? So the folks who landed at the National Security Council from the Trump elect team, was a very small crew, right, and so we had to take all this knowledge that we've learned over the eight years. Frankly, all the knowledge that has been accumulated, you know, since FEMA had stood up in 99 in the Carter administration, right? Taking all this knowledge of what we learned and just in the asylum, and then eventually figure out how to get here. And those problems happen at scale. And the other problems that occurred is that there were different agencies who were responsible to deal with we created what was called domestic incident management, or enhancing domestic incident response policy, or PPD44. And we were proud of that we got Presidential Policy Director 44, because 44 being Obama's number. And we were going to carry that forward. So the first storm that we experienced was a tornado. It actually happened the day after inauguration. effects in Alabama and Georgia. So the storm had come through both Republican led states, the Republican governors at the time. And I remember a call from Reince Priebus, who was the chief of staff to the president. And he's like, what do we do? Right? It's day one. What do we do? So we rolled out the playbook that we use in the Obama administration. And we found that, you know, President Trump had a different style, which Doesn't make any correct. It's just he's a different person. Every boss has a different cadence and approach. What became clear pretty quickly is that the new team did not have the reps-in-sets, right? Part of it because new business came from business. They did not have government backgrounds. Unlike the Biden, for example, it very much was Obama 2-2 Right? So much of the folks who came on board to build out the senior team and the administration, the cabinet for the Biden administration were all former government. [inaudible 10:38] that people in business can bring to government, like higher orders of efficiency, focusing on being more effective, doing better with the monies that you have. Sometimes in government we just think, oh, we're just gonna ask for more funds and that's gonna solve the problem. Just throw money at it and that's what we'll solve. And what this fundamentally comes down to is, and I said this when I met Roger is that, we really don't have a technology problem, we have a governance problem, right? But technology can solve the governance challenges that we experienced from administration to administration. Because on inauguration, whatever that was, the January 20th of 2017, right, eight years turned into a pumpkin like the Cinderella, you know, all the institutional knowledge drains, and then you have to figure out how to manage continuity. The other key point is here that when you're doing administration change, you don't have a secretary of defense, you don't have a secretary of commerce, you don't have a FEMA administrator. Those people have to go through the Senate confirmation process. And so But even then, they're not in place until February-March. So you have this gap in time between the beginning of January through the springtime, where you don't have principal leadership in charge. So what we did to try and increase or improve the awareness of the new administration, we ran an exercise. We ran an exercise on Friday the 13th, one week before inauguration, where we had the outgoing administration, in this case the Obama team, and the incoming administration, the Trump team, sitting next to each other side by side. So we had Governor Perry sitting next to Secretary Moniz, who was the Energy Secretary. We had the great late Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense, sitting next to General Mattis, right? Judge Johnson, the DHS Secretary, sitting next to John Kelly, General Kelly, who became, as you know, the DHS Secretary and the White House Chief of Staff, who was then replaced by Kirstjen Nielsen, Nelson, who was his chief of staff at DHS. And what we did is we gave them all this knowledge, including the pandemic playbook, right? So the learnings that we had from H1N1, and frankly influenza in the Bush 43 administration, what we learned from influenza, H1N1, the Ebola crisis, and then Zika at the tail end, we had a playbook for a pandemic, and we handed all of that over, right? But fast forward, come 2020, or the end of 2019, the majority of the people that were in that room, that went through that training, that went through that handoff, were no longer serving in the administration. We had folks like the HHS Secretary no longer serving there, the DHS Secretary no longer serving there, the head of the Department of Interior, Ryan Zinke, no longer serving there. because you had this lack or gap of institutional knowledge, well of course we were going to start the pandemic off in the wrong foot because the people who were there didn't have the experience nor did they have the knowledge of the, you know, what's. The strategic national stockpile. You know, what plans in place that we have to deal with the global pandemic, right? Again, all these are a function of governance in a failure governance. But what we've built with Pratus is we're able to take all the institutional memory take all the institutional knowledge that lives in those policies, those procedures. and with the use of artificial intelligence you don't have to guess anymore, right? You can ask the AI, in our case Pratus AI, in this scenario a global pandemic, a fire, a flood, a hurricane, or the confluence of these things where you have, like Hurricane Sandy, you had snowstorms, that's why you call it Superstorm Sandy because it was more than just a hurricane. You had snow storms to the west that created massive flooding in West Virginia. And then of course the main news article that everyone focuses on is, the lights going out in New York City, right? And the lights going out in New Jersey along the shoreline, right? The beautiful Jersey shore to wait anymore. But even when you have eight years of robust infrastructure and folks that have the knowledge, we still make mistakes. And this is where the artificial intelligence, again, doesn't replace the human, but augments the experience that humans have, because people forget. I think about my time in the nuclear engineering world with the Navy in qualifying inside of the engine room, working on a reactor, you know, a nuclear reactor or a submarine or a surface ship, you have to memorize all of your immediate actions, right? For a stuck rod, or a leak in the coolant system, explosion in an electrical breaker, you have to memorize all those immediate actions, you know, turning knobs and so forth, trying to stop the bleed, if you will, right? You know, like applying a tourniquet type of concept. But then what also you need to do is pick up your operating plan and verify that you did all those things that you were trained to do. So in case you missed a step, right, you're able to then go back to it, Oh yeah, I needed to do these types of things. So, Pratus replicates that in a digital sense, where people are notified, Hey, these intermediate actions you need to do, go through the checklist, boom, right, all that's time stamped and annotated. But effectively what I was saying is that with Pratus and the artificial intelligence that we've built, while you're working on a nuclear reactor, you have to memorize all those immediate actions, right? Because that's how we're trained, right? You go through two years of school in the Navy nuclear power program, and if anyone knows about that program, it is very wired tight. There's no margin of error, and it's an extremely hard program to go through. but what it gives you is discipline right discipline to procedure right to you know fact check like when you doing lockout to ensure many people in the in the fire service are familiar with you got a lock on a breaker tag it out you know we'd always have a buddy system right so if I de-energize the equipment I got to tell the guy that's sitting next to me hey I just de-energize it right sign it off the list so there's always a check-in balance there. Same thing with, Pratus AI, right? Even though you're given recommendations and it says like here's your checklist for this type of incident, it's going to reference all of those governing documents and the ground truth. So you can click on it, open it up, it'll vector to the right page and say. Here it is, right? don't just trust me grow. It gets all vetted and verified. So as the humans in the loop are making those key decisions that are life or death that they have a way to back up here is my knowledge of an administration who may not have the same backgrounds and skills of coming from all government service, but they came from business. And we want them to be as effective as they were in business now a government service by providing them with tools that can help coach them, can help aid them through the crisis. You know crisis thankfully doesn't happen every day. These are what they call high impact, low frequency events or health events. They don't happen every day. But when they do happen, everyone expects you to get it right. The basic principles of crisis communication are, be first, be right, be credible. The last thing a senior leader wants to do is, or want to have experience. I mean, look at what happened in Palestine, Ohio with the train derailment in the Biden administration. You had Secretary Buttigieg He showed up weeks later, right, to Palestine, Ohio , because for whatever reason, his staff were not giving him the advice of saying, sir, you probably should take a visit Just like I did in, you know, when I was in the White House where you had, again, because disasters were political, in Louisiana and Baton Rouge, we had these massive floods, And so I called the Homeland Security Advisor and I said, Mr. Obama, President Obama needs to get to get down to Louisiana. Why? One, it's bad. We need to help out our citizens. But also politically, you had candidate Trump down there handing out aid and supplies. Right? And obviously the Democrats wanted to stay in power, so there was a lot of impetus to get down there. I'll give the Obama administration a lot of credit. They took the president off vacation, we did the advance, we got him down there, and ultimately, what we were there to serve to do is serve the people, in this case of disaster. The bottom line is that with our platform, from all these different crisis scenarios and situations, whether it's cyber incidents, wildfires, floods and hurricanes, extreme weather events, acts of terrorism. Again going back to 9-11, which Roger referenced earlier, one of the key findings in the 9-11 report was failure of imagination. And so what we're looking to do with Pratus is not to fail to imagine, but be proactive in looking forward's forward on what potentially could happen because these things, again, it's not an if, it's a when. And when they happen, we can provide the level of predictive intelligence, provide the level of observability to allow people to make better decisions with speed and at scale, and doing it with partnerships like Microsoft because our capabilities, but another thing that we have is meeting people where they work, which is why we've built into the Microsoft Teams Office 365, because every single government agency is using those tools. So if they can simply access these capabilities within the work applications that they use every single day, it not only reduces the battery, but it increases their competencies by taking advantage of our capabilities that we've built, practitioner-built, practitioner-led, inside of the ecosystem that they use every single day, it's only going to improve the safety factor for everyone involved. The responders, the people that they're trying to help, the citizens that are surviving from the disaster, and yes, the politicians who are trying to stay in power. This is helping everyone from the most senior leader to the most tactical leader in the field have knowledge transfer and understanding of what's going on, but through the lens of good governance and to be able to effectively accomplish their goals when responding to these catastrophes.

[22:55] Kevin Sofen: Well, Sean and Roger, thank you for both really setting that up in terms of kind of outlining a lot of the nuances that Pratus is bringing to the table and I love that you talked about from the knowledge transfer, that's a challenge organizations, not just government, but a lot of public safety departments. But I think what I wanna now kind of lean into a little bit more is truly the operational use case of the technology. And I've heard and seen this mention of this one glass and how this is a software that's running on Microsoft Teams and you're using it from a tablet interface or a computer interface in some capacity, could you sort of paint that picture and sort of what does this kind of one pane of glass look like and how is it pulling in these different data sets and how am I experiencing the product to where again it's allowing me to get the right information at the right time to make better decisions so we have better outcomes?

[23:53] Roger Coleman: I'll start and then I'll have Sean finish as a practitioner first responder, right? I have the ability to tap my cell phone, whether it's an Android or whatever the du jour is, because we're agnostic, we're not vendor locked. So I can actually get a bluff on an emergency and understand, have a common operating platform picture as to what to do before, during and after any hazard, Anything, active shooter, car wreck, fire, flood, hurricane, you name it. All that metadata that Sean was talking about, how we curated it from our high tech compute Azure stack to AI to geospatial. We're an Esri prime partner where we're bringing in Esri mapping, drawing imagery, cct cameras body cam you name it and we have the ability where to what they call a tl authority to operate where we can invite in dot power dot fire dot fire brigade a dot fire brigade b dot fire brigade c and so on and so forth biggest problem is communication the biggest problem is not also having the metadata to make decisions at the speed of decision. And what we've built Kevin is a platform where you can make decisions with confidence utilizing the OODA loop and Sean can talk to you more about that but it's a decision making process tree using technology to basically give you that visual, that compute and AI data and invite in the first responders that are going to be fighting it, whether it's your individual team or multiple mutual aid team to fight and communicate and to attack and to save lives and build resilience. For instance, the 9-11 was a horror show. We couldn't communicate with anyone. It was screaming, it was people running with notes, it was out of control bedlam for the first three, four weeks, it was just nuts. [inaudible 26:32] you No one could speak to each other because you had multiple fire companies with different radio bands with different modalities whether was the fire the fema EMT the air brigades the mountain brigades and so on and We have patented and built that platform where,where now you can do a duty roster and bring in the speed of an email and boom in comes a duty roster with areas of responsibility right so we can set up north west south east quadrants to surround and protect the hazard. This is one of the major reasons why the United States Coast Guard just awarded us a major contract for their all theater common operating platform and for us to be the security group for all ups and America all America 250 events around the country including the South tall ship the 250s. So, you know, we were given quite a huge responsibility with the United States Coast Guard. It is quite a, you know, with over 100,000 individuals, by the way. And again, we're leading with exceptional modality. And one more point I'll make before I end to Sean. We're practitioner led. Sean's a practitioner. I'm a practitioner. Many in our team are practitioner. So we're built by practitioners for practitioners. For instance, the Coast Guard loved our technology. They said, here's 122 some odd items. Can you put it into our into your platform lattice? We said yes. It took seven months. April 1st, we hand them on a silver or Platter, everything they wanted, bug freak, right? They work with it, and then in a very short period of time, it goes live all theater into their cloud. So all Coasties will be working in it, but they're already working to Sean's earlier point in the Microsoft ecosystem, right? So we're a Microsoft tool sets that we're delivering to the first responder. So they already know how to use Teams 365 co-pilot, right? It's quite remarkable what we built and patented.

[29:26] Sean Griffin: So for a specific to speak to what Roger was referencing, they decided that their initial operating capability. So we've built two main gate points for the Coast Guard. One is initial operating capability, the other is final operational So for initial operating capability, we focused on the support to those special events that are happening in. spring and summer. Principally, the world 2026 and so not all but most of the World Cup cities have a maritime nexus. So Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, for example. So all of those Coast Guard sectors and their port partners are going to be working a command post or an incident management team to manage the security and any potential response to those events, right? So it's starting with blue sky pre-event planning. So if you're familiar with the incident command system or ICS, one of the deliverables in an ICS format is in an Incident Action Plan or an IIP. So for events, you use the same principles and concepts, the same workflows within the Coast Guard's Incident Management Handbook, which essentially is their instantiation of the National Incident Management System and the Incident Command System. Rather than developing an IAP, you're developing an EAP or an Event Action Plan because it's a planned event, right? In this case, which is unprecedented, You're talking 11 sectors concurrently managing Super Bowl. So what the Coast Guard is doing with their port partners is they're identifying every resource, right? That each sector needs. So cutters, aircraft, Swift, rescue teams, and rescue, we're identifying every resource, right? That each sector needs. So cutters, aircraft, Swift, rescue teams, and rescue, we, in all things that the Coast Guard would need, [inaudible 31:48] all those resource Also when those resources are checked into the incident, which will also happen through practice. So those will be checked in once those resources are checked in and the operation is live starting actually with fleet week and which is 22nd May. So just coming up in a few months and two months from now in Los Angeles, they'll be able to see live all of their assets in real time. So if it's a ship or a cutter, they'll see it, moving through the water on the map live in our platform. They'll also be seeing the helicopters, for example, moving through the air in platform. So they have real time, blue force tracking, as they call it in the military, right? Personnel tracking moving about. And then if any of those assets, say for example, they have counter UAS capabilities on If we recover the drone and we find out that it was flown by a nation state, that's kind of important to know. And then also to have that coordinated effort from the field up through headquarters, all the way to the So in the platform, there's also what's called a sit-rep or situation report, right? Which will fuse all the data. The AI will do the initial cut on the sit-rep based on what it . And then the human in the loop within that command will then review the information, right, make the decision, send forward. It will then go up to the incident commander for that incident command post to do the final approval. Then it's post it to Pratus for all the way up to the commandant to see it, right? And that way, if there's a threat, for example, in Los Angeles and we want to be able to share that intelligence across the enterprise, they can do that in real time. So Boston. Miami doesn't have to wait. that they can see what's happening in Los Angeles as that cutter, for example, if it's prosecuting a counter UAS threat, well then obviously the rest of the enterprise needs to start looking for potential drones or other uncrewed systems that may also be threatening those other areas of responsibility within those sectors where they're tasked to provide that security for those special events. So we've very much been focused on the security of those special events, doing the planning for those special events, and then in the operation, be able to have real-time intelligence, tracking of what's going on. If something occurs, that practice is being utilized to organize and coordinate the response to any potential threat. And then lastly, again, on the forensics, on the. back end, when the prosecution has occurred, the mitigation has been verified complete, then they'll utilize Pratus to do all of that after-action review. So in the middle of the op versus waiting months down the line, because I don't know how many after-action reviews you've been a part of, but many times we do these AARs, we write the report, it sits on a shelf. Case in point 2019, Crimson Contagion. It was HHS's global pandemic exercise that they hosted in August of 2019. By the time we started experiencing infections in the West Coast in January and February, guess what wasn't published? The after action report from the pandemic exercise. So whatever goodness came out a national security enterprise, right? Into the public health enterprise. None of those learnings actually made it into the plans, into the procedures, right? Which is a failure of what? Governance, right? But the technology, because it's doing the forensics as the operation is occurring and making those recommendations on what to improve in real time, they can same day make updates to the plan. same day make updates to the procedures, right? And so you don't have to wait 6 to 12 to 18 months for the after-action report to be approved, you're doing it in the middle of the op when it matters and it's relevant, right? Because the threat doesn't care about your planning cycle. The threat doesn't care that it takes you 18 months to plan, right? In fact, if the threat actor is smart enough, they're going to exploit that. They're going to know that it takes you 18 to 24 months to do an exercise, and then learn all those findings, and then exercise the plan. That's a moment in time of vulnerability. In our case, we want to give us as much decision space as possible left of boom, left of bang, before the threat becomes realized. And the more reps and sets and the more improvements we can make in the up in real time, Roger mentioned the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide and act, that's effectively what we've built with Pratus. It's an AI-enabled crisis management OODA loop where you're constantly observing, Reorienting right constantly making decisions and acting on those decisions and then it all feeds back in real Time, so we've we have eliminated This frankly vulnerability in our in our homeland security enterprise Which has traditionally taken us months to years to plan for something? Right. This was the this was the observed failure in Katrina right? The observed a failure in Katrina is the national response plan, right, that was required by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5, which was the summer of 2005 and then a month later Hurricane Katrina happens in So no one had any opportunity to read the plan no one had any opportunity to operationalize the plan So when the hurricane came and the devastation was created Nobody was on the same page Right because again. It was a failed governance issue Right and I know there's authorities and you know, so the governor didn't make a request for the mayor's that make requests again another governance failure If the operational entities, the fire apparatus, the professionals who do the work, at least if they're coordinated and they're effective in the field and they can start doing a making the decisions at light speed. We're continuously learning, continuously improving ourselves in real time. Not waiting months to years. And ultimately, who benefits from that? Yes, the fire, law enforcement, protection services and all that. But ultimately who benefits from that is who? The members in the community who want to just go to the game and have fun, right? Because that's what it's about. And frankly, that's an effective deterrence method. Because if our enemies know that our decision cycle is much faster and it's faster than they can reiterate on how to exploit our vulnerabilities, that higher level of deterrence is only going to deter what? Our enemies from making, not only a threat, but striking, and having the consequence that they want to achieve, which is, you know, striking fear and terror into people so they don't go to the games, right? We want them to go to the games. We want our enemies to know that we are strong, and that we have the capability and the capacity to not only get ahead of the threat, but when it comes to our shore, we're going to deal with it, we're going to prosecute it, and we're going to make sure that Americans know that they're going to be protected and safe, regardless of on they're doing, whether it's the NCAA tournament, or it's the World Cup, or it's the Olympics that are coming up in 2028. So I really think that we're on something that is frankly unprecedented with our technologies. really trying to solve the systemic problems and risks that have happened with governance failures that we've observed because a lot of the things that like to say with an after-action report is they're lessons learned. Well they're not lessons learned if they're abstract thought if history repeats itself then we need to be prepared by reflecting on the past so that the next future up is being improved and ultimately more effective again to our mission statement saving lives, building resilience, and protecting communities through the use of our technology.

[42:18] Roger Coleman: Yes and a comment on what Sean just said right having that fidelity that information on one, single painted glass, you ask, Kevin. If that was in our fire apparatuses, because we all have the tablets, for us to be able to stage properly, to communicate with mutual aid partners, to plan it as towards the hazard, fire, active shooter, hurricane, whatever. We can collaborate as a unified entity, right, where we're all singing from the same sheet of music so we and we can deploy our assets, in this case, people, the firemen, firewomen, What? The wet stuff on the hot stuff or with any other type of hazard, whether it assets to protect and serve instead of flying blind would be amazing. Having our tech and a Darley of vehicles would be a game changer. It would. Oh, my God, I mean, I've been preaching to our battalions, not just the eighth about the need for the technology. And they're all saying, well, it's not currently available in our apparatuses. you know, we need partners like you, right, to help us succeed in our mission to saving lives and building a resilient infrastructure. So in this case, we're acting with, we're acting smarter so we can make decisions with confidence.

[44:23] Kevin Sofen: One thing that kept kind of ringing true as you were talking and I'm, I fortunately have just become a father and I have a dog and I think about how one of my duties as a dog dad and as a dad of a one year old is trying to set them up for success. And as you were talking about this platform and the challenge of institutional knowledge and the knowledge transfer and again the planning cycle, there's all these different factors at play and then obviously the overarching issue always being governance. And of course we can always point to governance is a failure, but that shouldn't be the reason why we continue to stumble over each other. But when I think of practice, I think of it's just this tool that's helping people be set up for success. It's just kind of it got everything you need. It's pulling in the right information. You got the checklist and it's helping the operator do their job better. Am I am I off base there? I'm curious when you hear that. I met at them. Think I'm trying to put myself in the shoes right on

[45:23] Roger Coleman: You're right on base. We're gamifying our platform as we speak.

[45:29] Kevin Sofen: Oh yeah, how so?

[45:29] Roger Coleman: Everyone wants to game right? We're gamify. That's what we're going to be doing for the United States Coast Guard. That's what we're doing for other DHS agencies that we cannot speak about right yet. That's what we're going to be doing for fire services and so on and so forth and so on. Gamification and oh, by [inaudible 45:56] So if they're if they're used to gaming again meeting people where we say where they work or meeting people where they know what to do and people like that philosophy. The critical part of our solution right, is bringing people together from an [inaudible 46:42] in this case, whether it's the United States Coast Guard, which is huge. I mean, think about it. US Coast Guard is one of the most lethal forces, the most humanitarian-driven forces on the planet using our technology.

[47:20] Kevin Sofen: And just to maybe dive into the Coast Guard just a little bit more. I know we've talked about it, but how are they using it? I know we've talked about it, if you could kind of paint a picture of. A day in the life of someone in the Coast Guard or a seaman in the Coast Guard kind of waking up and I am now interfacing with Pratus. What does that look like?

[48:03] Sean Griffin: , what that would look like. I would bucket into three main areas. The first being preparedness, the second being response, and the third rather being sustained response. So in the preparedness phase, that's where you're training, running exercises, right? So one, you're not just training on practice, which is part of your core competencies, but also getting position specific training, whether you're a planning section chief, incident, commander, a public information officer, a resource unit lead, Pratus will be used to walk those individuals through their what's called position taskbooks or PTBs and their job aids. So Roger mentioned gamified. We're effectively gamifying those position taskbooks. So instead of picking up a four-ring binder, you know, with 50 pages it says here's how you are a or a REZL, Pratus will walk you through a scenario, a real-world scenario, that is contextualized to your area of responsibility. So if you're in sector Mobile in the Gulf, or you're in sector Puget Sound in Seattle, that scenario to walk you through a training module as a resource unit lead or as an incident commander, those scenarios will be specific, and those vignettes will be specific to where you work. So not only are you learning practice, right, you're learning your job, right? You're learning how to do your job. And you're also learning it through the context of your local geography with your local concerns, right? So it's not just some generic training with a bunch of PowerPoint slides and bullet points that is the Charlie Brown teacher, the wah-wah, right? We want to remove the wah-wah, right? make it interesting and make it engaging and gamified. there once they and once they do their individual position training, they then enter an immersive exercise where with their entire incident management team those individuals will be thrown through either a same scenario or a similar scenario that will happen at scale. So something more significant, more challenging. Because that's where we want to learn the mistakes in the Blue Sky exercise where the risk is lower because there's not actual oil spilling in the water or fatalities in the river, there is a lower risk. But we want to communicate through the platform the seriousness, we want to contextualize it through these high-definition scenarios, through this gamification, so they can experience the realism even though it's in a synthetic environment. So that's your preparedness phase. Training, exercise, building competency, getting certified, and getting you competent in the position that you're going to perform when, you know, something for real happens. The second bucket is that immediate response, right? And so in ICS you call it the stem of the planning P., so there's a planning P, and the stem of that P, you have event notification. So the sector or a unit, you have a command center. The command center has a watch floor that's it's operating 24-7, honoring the environment, right? So the moment, an explosion happens, right? Pratus is going to sense that, it's going to notify the watch sander who's sitting in that command center, and it's going to, with the use of AI, help them better assess what's going on so they can take those immediate response actions I mentioned in the checklist, right? The Incident Management Team, the duty roster that Roger mentioned earlier, those individuals will receive the blast notification, right, multiple modalities in Microsoft Teams, SMS text, email, radio if they use it, pager if they use it, right, all the third party systems, they get that notification. And because it's tailored to you and your position that you're filling, right? And then for the escalated response, now everyone shows up, whether physically or digitally, right? You know, through Microsoft teams with Pratus, whether brick and mortar inside of an emergency operation center or command post, or with reach back across the enterprise, right? Well, they'll start going through the O of the which is building up that incident action plan and common operating picture, right? So we can identify our objectives or strategies or tactics, pinning those against resource requirements, right? What resources do I have? What do I need to order based on my requirements, right? And then once those resources are ordered and goes, and goes through the procurement cycle, then that work assignment can be applied, right? That ICS 204 form essentially can be applied to those individuals, within the operations section, whether they're flying helicopters doing swift water rescue or searchs and rescue operations and so forth. All of that is managed, and then they'll plan for the next operational period using the platform where they're trying to anticipate needs over the horizon every 12 to 24 hours or longer depending on how complex the operation is, but your typical planning cycle on a basic level is 24 to 24 right, or 12 and 12 as a night shift and day shift, right? So zero way to a 2,000 hours or 2,000 hours to zero eight in the morning, you know, a 12 and 12 shift. And so the other thing about that is if I'm off duty, but I'm the incoming relief for the next operational period, I'll be able to get briefed up on Pratus, right, or briefed up through Pratus, or I'm trying to understand like, hey, this is what happened the last 12 hours, right? When I'm incoming on the shift, these are the things that I need to look for, the challenges that we had to last operational period. So I can just pick up train or where however I'm getting into the office you know that amount of time that one hour to three hours that I'm commuting into the office is time when I can start learning about what happened the past 12 so when I show up I'm not getting briefed the first time right and better yet I'm educated with good questions. So, I show up to the command post and I say, hey, that you had this challenge on the in the last 12 hours. You know, what are your recommendations for me in order to make sure we can solve this problem so by the time you show up in the next 12 hours, it's already solved and we've taken it off the ledger, right? So that's really where Pratus, you know, again, preparedness, getting folks trained, educated, exercised and competent. The immediacy of a response from flashbang, boom, right, notifications, getting folks rostered, immediate checklist, this is what you need to do. And then by the time they're in the seat, they're able to go through that deliberate planning process, make sure that they have what they need based on their requirements to meet the objectives of the incident commander. And as the response sustains over time, the operation gets more effective because again, that continuity of knowledge, shortening the time for people to learn rotating throughout the op, and then having complete visibility on all of my assets, right? And I'll end with this sort of anecdote. So, in 2017, the hurricanes Harvey Irma Maria, I was responsible for leading a task force for power restoration mostly focused on the Caribbean. While we were also doing the southeast from Texas to Florida, but Puerto Rico was really having a challenge a 14-hour shift at FEMA headquarters at the National Response Coordination Center. I just left. It was about 10 p.m. I had gone to the bar thinking, hey, I can, you know, finally have a drink after 14 hours of continuous operation. But before the time I even put her, I get a phone call, right, and it was the esides the Western Area Power Administration, the crew boss, who said they left our trucks at the pier. What do you mean they left our trucks? I just got confirmation from the National Response Coordination Center that our trucks got picked up on the ship and are steaming to Puerto Rico. They weren't. Because that basic communication breakdown that Roger was talking about, nobody from the ship operator knew that the trucks were arriving that day. And so what ends up happening is, the ship leaves, it's an eight day steam. So that means those ships can't leave the port for another eight days, right? And when those restoration crews can't get down to the islands for another eight days, we just lost a week of restoration time, right? Which means the outages prolong, and the human suffering prolongs. Because of basic breakdown in communication, that would never happen with our platform. Because the staging manager, right, who's at the pier in Fort Lauderdale, would be able to see on the map, in Pratus, the trucks moving, right, in real time. And they can see and know that it's going to arrive in 12 hours or 10 hours or whatever, so that so that the port operator isn't going to let the ship leave without the trucks. I know this sounds trivial and simple, but when you're doing this at scale, when it's not just 14 trucks on a lowboy that's rolling from Colorado to Florida on time that misses the ship and can't get to the location where the work is being done, think about [inaudible 58:30] Action Report that they did for western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. The same lessons that they observed, again, lessons that we have ignored, in the hurricanes that happened seven, eight years ago in Harvey, Airman, Maria, at scale, failing to manage resources, they found that out again and it was deadly this time. It was deadly then, but it was deadly again. Why do we keep making these continuous governance failures when there's technology like ours? And we're not the only ones, right? But when there's technologies like ours that can help solve those logistical challenges, [inaudible 59:27] The reason why we started the company is because we wanted to stop this from happening we wanted to stop the human things that are solvable today with existing technologies, and particularly Pratus. And doing that with incredible partners like Darley and Microsoft, again, these solutions exist. And I'll use Roger's saying, unknown, untold, unsolved. So what we're hopeful to do with you guys with Darley designed to resolve the systemic governance challenges that we see repeatedly in every crisis, whether it's a hurricane in western North Carolina or deadly wildfires in Southern California, these things are solvable.

[60:43] Kevin Sofen: A little bit of a mic drop moment there, Sean. I appreciate that. And if anything, too, from a Darley perspective, from what you've seen, that we're building these rapid command modules that can be put into any SUV, fully upfitted SUVs. And that these are almost like a Lego piece that can go in the back of any SUV and truck and turn it into a mini command station and have access to redundant resilient communications through partners like DeGero and Starlink and then being able to have the different screens and connecting devices just to be able to make sure that you have connectivity. And a lot of the ways that connection with Microsoft being this opportunity to leverage these hardware partners, whether it's the Microsoft tablets or the Panasonic smart, the Toughbooks, and then leveraging these communication partners like DeGero and Star the link and Darley being a system integrator with the ultimate goal to be able to have purpose-built vehicles that enable operators to leverage technologies like Pratus. What are your thoughts in terms of kind of how this ecosystem is coming together, how Microsoft, Darley, Pratus, and all these other partners are ultimately working together and anything else you can talk about from this, again, the integration of all the pieces and how we're gonna continue to work together to bring it together. Roger, you're on mute there.

[62:04] Roger Coleman: We're the orchestrator, right? You talked about a lot of companies, right? A lot of people that are in there, Starlink, this, that, everything else, right? We're the orchestra that puts everything together, give you that one single pane of glass solution, right? There's no one that's threading the needle because we have the patented authority to operate all in the patented Microsoft ecosystem. Again, we're taking Starlink, We can take, you know, put it in the Darley, put our platform in Darley, put it anywhere we want. So you have that common operating platform, the OODA loop decision making process, the high tech compute from Azure Tech Stack, the AI, right, the ESRI geospatial drone, CCTV, body cam, you name it, the imagery. So it collaborates a decision platform before, during and after and you're all communicating together on one single pane of glass where you're chatting, talking, speaking and you're defining your areas of responsibility. So critical. Time is everything in any hazard. Any of your customers will tell you this would be a force multiplier for Darley or for anyone, for Elon Musk, anyone using our platform. And we're just being, we just went live a couple months ago with the Coast Guard.

[63:43] Kevin Sofen: Wow.

[63:44] Roger Coleman: Where do you see the others that are coming on board? And you know, it's, it's exciting. And that's, that's, that's, that's where we're at.

[63:54] Sean Griffin: You know, interestingly, they decided to tie the light sensor, like the motion sensor, to the electrical in the office, so that's why it keeps going up.

[64:05] Kevin Sofen: Oh good, hey, resiliency, we're still here.

[64:08] Sean Griffin: We're still here, exactly. There's an area on the computer, so we don't drop. We use the pace method, right, primary, alternate, continuously, emergency, if you're familiar with that, with emergency comms. I'm very excited about the partnership with Darley and what we're able to do together. Like you said, these are Lego pieces, right? Pratus is one of those Lego pieces. That's part of the entire Lego set, and when you put all these things together, they're extremely powerful capabilities. You know, to use Roger's point, you know, we are the orchestrator. I think in the basketball terms, a point guard, right? We're helping to facilitate ball movement around the court so that folks can shoot threes, you know, put layups and so forth. You know, whether that's fire apparatus down range or law enforcement blocking and tackling, you know, boxing people out of the security area. So we absolutely, believe that, [inaudible 65:05] right, have robust technologies to have better governance, ultimately better response so that we can improve life safety, right, both of the responders and of the people that we're assisting, right? Because the last thing we wanna do, like we saw in Hurricane Katrina, talk about failure of orchestration, where the Coast Guard gets tasked to do a search and rescue mission, the National Guard gets tasked to do a search and rescue mission, and the local sheriff's office gets tasked to do a search and rescue mission. So you have three different agencies, right, with three different jurisdiction responsibilities being tasked to do the same thing, and none of those three parties have visibility that they're all being tasked to do the same mission. Right? You have a local asset, in the case of the sheriff's office, you have a state asset, in the case of the National Guard, you have a federal asset in the case of the Coast Guard, right? That should never happen again, where, because again, there was no point guard, right? There was no Steph Curry on the court, facilitating the ball, right? And with Pratus, we become your facilitator, so that instead of sending three really expensive apparatus to go and respond to save one person, we can have three apparatus, save three people or three families, right? or three cars that need to be extracted from a high water incident and so forth, right? So not only are we better coordinated, the response is optimized and the safety again, every time you send somebody into the fight, that's risk to them in their lives, right? I'll never forget when I mentioned the Louisiana floods and I worked with the governor to Governor Bel Edwards at the time, to set up a meet and greet. I said, get 15 first responders, law enforcement, fire, a national guard to show up at the walking tour with the president so the president can thank them for their service in response to these floods. So the first thing I did is I went and the president was gonna show up and shake hands and all that stuff. And this fire chief was there from Livingston, Louisiana. And I went up to him and I said, hey, you excited to meet the President of the United States? And he said, yeah, my wife's really excited. I'm going to FaceTime and meet the President. And he said, you know, I've been doing swift water rescues, for the past week and a half. And, you know, my family, my eight kids, my wife, we lost everything in the flood. And it breaks your heart. These people are out there risking their own lives when their own families are victims of the storm. So we have to think about the life safety factor of everyone involved, and if Pratus can provide any role in that, certainly it's an honor and a privilege, and we've done our job as technologists, as business leaders, to provide these types of capabilities to keep people safe, both the responders, their families, and the folks that they're serving. Like that's, that's really what this is about, right, is the mission. That's the bottom line for us. And so for us to do with Darley, for us to do with Microsoft and all these other partners that you mentioned, it's just incredible, right? And it really helps you know, like my kids, I like to think, you know, they show up and they're like, Hey, dad, what do you do for work? You know, I'm not out there selling nonsense, right? We're, we're, we're delivering life saving technology that's going to help reduce human suffering, in many cases on people's worst days in a disaster.

[69:09] Roger Coleman: Taking care of your crew right as a chief or as a captain or as a regular fireman right it's a buddy-buddy system but the buddy-buddy system is very it gets very large very quickly and you've got to make sure that those that are there protecting and saving lives are also protected with the same tools and technologies that we're offering the others. Hence the duty rosters and all the other tools that we have. It only enhances our security. Me as a proud fire chief right there is that and we'll show you. I earned that baby and I'm I'm proud of it. I didn't get paid to be a farmer. I did it out of like the volunteerism, but I learned so much and that is take care of your crew. Right? And if you take care of your crew better, Kevin, you can take then focus on the mission because you know your back's already taken care of. We need better technology to do that and disaster tech, Pratus our platform, we'll [inaudible 70:25]

[70:55] Kevin Sofen: to ask, I mean there's probably about eight more questions that we didn't even touch on that I had presented here, and I know we're a little bit past an hour and 15 minutes here, which is amazing, but two questions I want to end with and wrap up here. And the first one I want to ask is, where do you see the platform is in five years in terms of whether it's the integrations, the AI, whether Steph Curry is a spokesman and talking about how disaster tech practice is the point guard. That's the first question I want to ask you both. And the second one, which I'll come back to and I'll kind of plant the seed is, what's one quote or word of wisdom that you both live by within your daily life or within your business operation? So a lot, you know, that's the second one, but the first, you know, where do you both see all things disaster tech practice in the next five years?

[71:46] Sean Griffin: Well, I'll just say, I'll start with the second. Holograms. Yeah, holograms, exactly. Yes. but I'll actually answer your second question first. And I am adopting it because I'm a great emergency manager and we like to adopt things from other people. But someone said to me that's that their motto and ethos is they want is they want to be the best at getting better. Which is a very succinct way of saying continuously improving what you guys do. And so as a company, the way that we get become the best at being better is frankly by being engaged with our customers, right? Being in the loop with them, because whether it's a soldier or a law enforcement officer or fireman, they're the ones dealing with the problem every day. And what's made our jobs and our company success is by being with the operator in the field, doing that iter so they can give us, good [inaudible 73:21]

[73:52] Roger Coleman: know that's the mission right whatever the hazard is you got it's a call dorm and that fire bell rings you're on it's game on now with our new tools it's game on and we know how to help you better and quicker safer and not. I don't and take care of the crew right so that's my quote you know it's someone somewhere is having their worst. And we're here to help. And it's a privilege. Like me working with Disaster Tech, I brought this on with Sean. I funded the company. And I've not taken a W-2 in almost eight years. Think about that.

[74:36] Sean Griffin: Yeah, as far as the product where we see it, we're right now a software company. Fundamentally, we will be a blend of software and hardware for sure, right? So you talk about contested environments, whether it's our military partners, National Guard, or locally domestic operators from the tactical and fire and law enforcement to the more strategic, is denied in contested environments. So we get a little comfortable because we just do, right? We have this ultra-reliance and anticipation that the Internet's always going to be there, that terrestrial communications will always be there. But now with space-based systems, right, even my iPhone, I can communicate via satellite, which is incredible. The penetration of satellite data link is greater than ever before. And so we want to have a package that we can deploy that you can roll off a Darley truck. Fully encapsulated equipment that you can bring anywhere. And I can do all the things that I can do in the cloud when the Internet's available or at the edge. And so I think about what just happened in Hawaii with the floods. You know, they lose...

[76:10] Roger Coleman: No alerts. By the way, no alerts for those floods. Go ahead, Sean.

[76:13] Sean Griffin: Right. Yes. So, you know, it's just funny. I mean, it isn't funny, but They were experiencing the crisis, and we see this happen all the time. But this is where the equipment play would be huge for us because then, you know, regardless of what's happening, you lose terrestrial communications, 5G, whatever, you'll be able to have that physical equipment to be all the fit to be able to do all the things that you can do natively in the cloud, but at the edge. the other capabilities with the equipment play would be doing advanced analytics also at the edge where you could fly a drone, you could stream that imagery back to that Pelican case of that Pelican case basically outfit right there at the edge, be able to do all that analysis. And then once you're able to connect back to the cloud at long haul data link communications through the undersea cables that we all rely on, then that. Then that information can be enriched with the broader operational environment. So you can provide that type of situation awareness and damage assessment to better rapidly perform needs analysis and to get the right things at the right place at the right time. So I really see that our company is going to evolve from I mean, we started as disaster tech. It wasn't disaster software. It wasn't disaster web app, it was disaster tech, right? And so, as we expand our offerings, we definitely see that hardware is going to take a much bigger place in our overall approach to

[78:14] Kevin Sofen: to be a piece of the puzzle, to be LEGO pieces alongside you guys, and I really admire the work, the craft, the passion, the journey. Truly, men of many hats, but truly, your backgrounds coming together. You've created this incredible solution that is just starting to scratch the surface. So on behalf of, I guess, humanity, thank you for what you both are doing. And I'm just excited to continue to see how this is going to be a real solution to many of the problems that public safety agencies and federal agencies face today. So thank you guys for what you're both doing and looking forward to a long continued collaboration and partnership.

[78:55] Roger Coleman: Right on, right back at you. Thank [inaudible 78:56] smarter way. Thank you for the time, Kevin. This has been great.

[79:15] Kevin Sofen: Likewise. Thank you, Roger. Thank you, Sean. Until next time, we'll be in touch and stay safe.

[79:20] Roger Coleman: Thank you.

[79:20] Kevin Sofen: 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.