PODCAST · education
Combustible
by CTP Group
A fire service leadership podcast.
Episodes
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Audiobook: NIOSH LODD Report F2025-09 DeKalb County, Georgia
On September 8, 2025, a master firefighter died after becoming disoriented while trying to evacuate a warehouse at a commercial structure fire.
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Episode 116 - Leading Neverland
Everybody likes to have fun. But what happens when the allure of having fun gets in the way of personal growth? Or for the growth of the organization?
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Episode 115 - Great Leadership in Not-so-great Movies Vol. 1
We’ve talked before about leadership in movies like Moneyball and Saving Private Ryan. But what happens when there’s great leadership in a movie no one wants to see? Who talks about those moments?
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Episode 114 - The Game Has Changed with Greene County Fire Chief Rodney Wiggins
On September 4, 2024, Greene County Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Chris Eddy was tragically killed at a tractor trailer fire. In this episode, Fire Chief Rodney Wiggins, who was at the fire when the trailer exploded, sits down with us to talk about his theories on why the trailer suddenly exploded,...
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Episode 113 - Perseverance and Endurance
Antarctic Explorers, the British Prime Minister, and a recruit that wouldn’t give up.
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Episode 112 - Sean's Team with Fire Chief Pat Kenny
One word to describe Fire Chief (Ret.) Pat Kenny’s story is heartbreaking. But you could also describe it as raw, honest, inspirational, optimistic, and most of all…a call to action. In this episode, we talk to Pat about his son’s mental illness, Sean’s suicide, and the helplessness that he and…
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Episode 111 - Parallels and Extreme Ownership with Chris Welchel
For this episode, we sit down with Chris Welchel, co-owner of the Towing and Recovery company Welchel Enterprises, to talk about leadership; specifically the concept of “extreme ownership.” What it is, how to walk the walk, and how to get your followers on board. But along the way we also end up...
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Episode 110 - Do We Need To Demystify Leadership? (Part 2)
This is the second part of our discussion on whether this podcast’s focus on the challenges of leadership are discouraging the next crop of leaders from stepping up. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, go give that a listen first.
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Episode 109 - Do We Need to Demystify Leadership? (Part 1)
This episode grew out of a discussion while hiking that maybe we have talked about great leadership to the point where anyone starting out on their leadership journey may think good leadership is almost unattainable. Have we elevated the discussion to mythic proportions? In our pursuit of sharing...
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Episode 108 - The Most Sacred Leadership Principle
On this episode, we examine the crash of a B-52 in 1994, and the events leading up to it, through the actions of two of the four USAF officers killed: the pilot whose disregard for safety led to the crash, and the copilot who had tried to have him grounded. This is a story about missed...
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Episode 107 - Substitution In Decision-Making
We hijack Daniel Kahneman’s idea of substitution and apply it to decision-making in the fire service. How reliable is your decision-making on scene if your brain unknowingly substitutes a logical question with an emotional one?
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Episode 106 - Is Emotion the Charging Elephant in the Room?
A recent discussion with one of our listeners led us on a discussion of what part emotion plays in our roles as firefighters and our responses on this podcast.
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Episode 105 - Falkland's Law (with guest host Scott Sellers)
This episode is about delaying decision-making. Or maybe it’s not. We really don’t know what to think of Falkland’s Law, but we have a good time not getting anywhere.
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Episode 104 - Lē'•der•shǐp' (noun)
We talk about it A LOT, but we’ve never really tried to define what we think leadership is. In this episode, we discuss various definitions of leadership; what we like and what we don’t like.
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Episode 103 - What Would Ted Do?
Whenever you lose your way as a leader, you can always ask yourself, “What would Ted do?”
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Episode 102 - Building Experience And Turning It Into Expertise
In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise? We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of...
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Episode 101 - Bob Maynard Part III - The Black Box
In Part 3 of our interview we pick up where we left off and get into how we evaluate accidents in the fire service, what we might be able to learn about that process from the airline industry, how to remove dominoes, and we give Bob “The Questions.”
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Episode 100 - Bob Maynard Part 2: Purposeful Non-Compliance
Bob is the first guest we’ve had to show up to the recording with a powerpoint presentation. And while that gave us a chuckle, it’s a presentation filled with concepts that blew us away…and it’s a presentation that he threw together the day before. There’s a lot here, and we barely scratched the...
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Episode 097 - George Cowgill on Resigning, Retiring, and Leaving the Birmingham Fire Department
Former Birmingham Firefighter George Cowgill posted a very personal account of his time as a firefighter and why he’s leaving that behind. If you’ve read it, you’re probably not surprised that it went viral, which is how we came across it. In this episode, we interview George (in Birmingham) by...
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Episode 096 - We Debate What the Hell a Psychological Contract Is (and Whether You Can Break One in Good Conscience)
Like the picture above, psychological contracts can be binding, circular, heavy, old, rusty, and sometimes broken. Before this episode, two of us hadn’t ever heard of a psychological contract, but apparently we all have them. What they really are, who you have them with, and whether or not it’s...
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Episode 095 - Know Your Enemy
Fire is where the glory is. They call us firefighters, not building fighters. But fire isn’t really the enemy, is it? How well do you know your enemy?
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Episode 094 - Every...Single...One
Murder holes, force multipliers, and obstacles. All of them are components leading to what very well may be a unified theory of firefighters.
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Episode 093 - We Solve The Pay Problem
Spoiler Alert: we don’t really solve the pay problem. That would break a long-standing tradition on our podcast of not solving anything. But there are virtual arms races in some regions as departments raise salaries to compete for what seems to be an ever-shrinking pool of firefighters. Pay is…
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Episode 092 - That I May See
What happens when lightning doesn't strike a house, and you don't act like the other firefighters?
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Episode 091 - The Pathfinder Part III
And we wrap up our series on The Pathfinder with Part III, which picks up right where we left off at the end of Part II.
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Episode 090 - The Pathfinder Part II
We think that the Pathfinder concept is such an important one, that we actually recorded two separate episodes trying to get it right. But each episode went different directions, so they both ended up being valuable to the discussion.
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Episode 089 - Damned Sweet
What do a fire recruit, a 70’s sitcom, and Walt Disney have to do with regret?
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Episode 088 - The Pathfinder
Every organization has those persons who push the organization from the inside. They advocate passionately for change, but while they’re doing it they can cause discomfort for those around them. They challenge long-held assumptions. They champion new technologies and strategies. They hold up a...
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Episode 087 - The Ship of Theseus
This isn’t really an outtake; it’s just a topic that wasn’t really large enough to devote an entire episode to. Bill, all by his lonesome, talks into the mic about the paradox of The Ship of Theseus and what that means for organizational identity…and maybe all of us.
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Episode 086 - Be Wrong Or Do Nothing?
A listener asked us: “At what point is a wrong decision actually worse than no decision at all?” It’s a great starting point for a roving conversation that gets into whether results matter in that calculus. We also rehash our earlier debate on the nature of luck in the fire service (Episode 082),...
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Episode 085 - On Hallowed Ground with Eriks Gabliks
The National Fire Academy is the home of the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial; hallowed ground for any firefighter. To borrow a phrase from President Lincoln at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA (just 12 miles north of the NFA), the memorial on the NFA…
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Episode 084 - For Bill Smith, A Battle Buddy
On June 6, 2021, Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Smith gave his life while saving others who got caught in a rip current off the Alabama shore. Two of our podcast crew (Shane and Bill V.) worked for Bill Smith for years before Bill retired as Deputy Chief of Operations for Dekalb County and...
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Episode 083 - What's Better: To Be Liked or Respected?
As is the case with many of our episodes, we didn’t set out to make an episode about this. It actually was just a spirited conversation that we were having when we realized we should hit the record button. Is it better to be liked or respected? What is the relationship between the two? And what…
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Episode 082 - Firefighter Luck
How do we as firefighters deal with luck? How honest are we about what part luck plays in our successes? More specifically, how much do we count on the same luck at our next fire? That’s where we start anyway, and we don’t exactly see eye to eye about it in the beginning. But that discussion…
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Episode 081 - What Do You Do When You Don't Get Promoted?
You make the case that you’re the best person for the next step up; only you don’t get chosen. What do you do then? When does a natural amount of disappointment turn into an unhealthy perception of being slighted? How hard is it to get behind the person who got promoted instead of you? And what...
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Episode 080 - Joy, the Job, and Some Questions from Austin Kohler
For this episode, we talk with “backstep” Firefighter Austin Kohler, who is only a few years into his career in the fire service. We ask him what he enjoys about the job, and what he didn’t expect about it. And about halfway through, we give Austin the upper-hand and let him ask us questions…
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Episode 079 - Planning, Preparation, and Pivoting with Louie Bruno
The book Leadership On The Line says a plan “is no more than today’s best guess.” So why do some in our profession get so attached to their plan that they can’t see when their plan has lost all chance to succeed? In this episode, we sit down with Louie Bruno to talk about planning and…
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Episode 078 - The Tenth Man
What you’re about to hear wasn’t really ever intended to be an episode. It was a side conversation that took place during a recording session in December 2019 that we just happened to record. We sat on it for over a year, but we’ve decided it’s something others should hear. It’s about what to do...
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Episode 077 - A Challenge for 2021, Hal Moore, and Buried Treasure
We’re issuing all of our listeners a challenge in 2021. It’s only nine minutes long, but the effects could last for many years to come if you’re willing to take us up on it.
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Episode 076 - A Better Version of Yourself?
We’ll wager there isn’t a firefighter in the fire service who isn’t an advocate of training. But when you call that training “higher education” you start to get somewhat mixed reactions. Make higher education a prerequisite for some promotions, and now you’ve probably got some real disagreement....
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Episode 075 - A Risky Episode: Building Your Team of Rivals
How do you figure out if someone is good for your team? Good for the organization? Good for you as a leader? What does it mean to build a diverse team, and how can different skillsets, talents, and perspectives be beneficial? Can they fill in the gaps that the team has, or that you don’t fill...
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Episode 074 - Ten Rounds of Undermining and Custom Turnout Gear
When you don’t agree with a decision made above you, is it wrong to let people know you don’t agree? For this Ten Rounds we discuss whether telling those you are supervising that you don’t agree with something undermines authority or whether it actually helps you get that thing done. Then, as is...
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Episode 073 - Screw-ups Are Your BFF
No matter how hard we try to avoid them, screw-ups are going to happen. When they happen, we shouldn’t avoid acknowledging them. Don’t wear them like a badge of honor, but own them nonetheless. You’ve already paid the price for the lesson; you might as well get the benefit of learning from it. In...
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Episode 072 - Ten Rounds Of Managing Expectations
At the end of our last recording session we only had twenty minutes left to record, which isn’t enough for a full episode. So Hatch suggested we do Ten Rounds. It’s simple: any one of us can talk for two minutes uninterrupted on any topic we want. When the bell ends that round, someone else can...
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Episode 071 - Sizing Up The Size-Up
We all should be doing a size-up as we approach any scene. And if you’ve got other units responding with you, someone is ultimately going to be required to give some of what you’re seeing and thinking over the radio. So how important is the size-up? How good are you at giving them? How important...
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Episode 070 - We Get A Lawyer with Lance LoRusso
In this episode, we sit down with Attorney Lance LoRusso to discuss the dangers of something almost all firefighters engage in: social media. And you can’t talk about social media without talking about the legal ramifications of firefighters taking pictures and video on scene. Even if you don’t...
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Episode 069 - The Boots on the Ground
There is a central concept that runs throughout Pete Blaber’s The Mission, The Men, and Me: That you should always listen to the boots on the ground. We really like that idea. Colin Powell said something similar when he described his “bias was toward the guys in the field.” But we also recognize...
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Episode 068 - Flippin' Firefighters with Todd Edwards Part 2
This episode is the second part to our conversation with Todd Edwards. We pick back up where we left off last time: with Todd’s view on how to approach the problem of underperforming firefighters in your station. Granted, if you’re good at rehabilitating firefighters, you usually get sent more...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A fire service leadership podcast.
HOSTED BY
CTP Group
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Combustible have?
Combustible currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Combustible about?
A fire service leadership podcast.
How often does Combustible release new episodes?
Combustible has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Combustible?
You can listen to Combustible on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Combustible?
Combustible is created and hosted by CTP Group.
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