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- [00:00]
John Mills
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Jacob Goldstein
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John Mills
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- [01:36]
Jacob Goldstein
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- [02:13]
John Mills
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- [02:18]
Jacob Goldstein
See paypal.com risk management for details. Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein, this is what's yous Problem, and my guest today is John Mills. John is the CEO and co founder of a nonprofit called WatchDuty. John's problem is how do you build an app to warn people when they're in immediate danger from a natural disaster? To be honest, this is sort of a problem that I would have thought the government had solved already. And of course there are government warning services, but as we've seen in recent disasters, fires in la, floods in Texas, those government systems can and do fail. And in 2021, John and his colleagues launched WatchDuty to fill the gap. At WatchDuty, paid employees and volunteers track public information like firefighters radio chatter, and they provide near real time updates on the WatchDuty app. So far, WatchDuty has focused mainly on fires, but they just rolled out coverage for floods as well. WatchDuty was a key source of information for the LA fires in early 2025, and today millions use the app and those users include, interestingly, a lot of professional firefighters. There's a lot that's interesting about this story, but as you'll hear in the interview, one question I kept returning to is why wasn't the government able to do this? How did WatchDuty succeed where the government had failed? John started WatchDuty after he moved to Sonoma county in Northern California. At that point, he'd already built and sold a few software companies and he told me he got interested in fire after having a few close calls at his house in Sonoma.
- [04:22]
John Mills
A month after I bought this place in 2019, there was a couple acre fire that my, one of my neighbors about a quarter mile away lit, unfortunately. And I'm in my office here and I hear a helicopter flying over, which is normal, and then it keeps flying around. Then I'm like, I don't know what it is. And then I go outside, look at it, and another one shows up with a water bucket on the bottom. And that's when I realized I was in danger and something was happening. So I didn't smell anything, I didn't see anything. And all I heard were helicopters flying overhead. And that is how I was alerted to my first fire.
- [05:01]
Jacob Goldstein
And did you have, I don't know. What are there, are there alerts where you live? I mean, you live in what, Sonoma County? You live in Northern California. It's not like you live in Alaska or something.
- [05:12]
John Mills
It's a great question. And look, there are alerts everywhere. But as you have probably seen from the news in the Palisades and Eaton fires, the alerts leave a lot to be desired. And so those men and women are doing the best that they can. But the infrastructure that they run on and their bureaucratic processes do not allow them to do what the National Weather Service does when a tornado touches down, when it touches down, they press the button that is it. No one has to get called, no one passes go. It is an event that is happening. Fire isn't treated that way. And so what I've noticed is that like you'll get alerted at some point if the fire keeps growing, but they're in this habit of like, oh, it's not that big, it'll get under control. And while they were right, it's a disaster for the people who live right next to them. Right. So like that's a large scale problem if the fire is coming towards you. Even if it's a 20 acre fire, that can still change your life or take it.
- [06:09]
Jacob Goldstein
20 acre fire meaning small. If it's the acre you live on, it's a big deal to you.
- [06:14]
John Mills
That's correct. And if it's on the neighbor's acre coming into your acres, you better believe you want to know about it. But that's not the practice that they have, unfortunately.
- [06:22]
Jacob Goldstein
And so do you think I'm going to make an app? Like how do you get from there to the app?
- [06:29]
John Mills
That fire was in November of 2019. I did nothing. Well, it's not true. I didn't do nothing. I started building sprinkler systems, I started guarding my home and I started preparing. So I realized I got myself into a mess. Didn't really understand much about this, but I was learning, I was researching, I was talking to people, I was understanding it. And then a 50,000 acre fire showed up from the dry lightning storm that passed over Northern California in 2020. People remember this as the red sky day and it looked like Blade Runner out there. And so I had to evacuate my house for seven days. Stated a friend's in Fountain Grove by the way, who almost lost her House in 2017. Irony of the whole thing. And I was watching from across the hill and I spent day and night listening to fire service radio chatter on the Internet, researching, learning, watching fire cameras and just trying to figure out what is going on around here. How do I get my bearings straight? So that's what really triggered me. House was spared, thankfully, land was spared. It ended a quarter mile from my property, a different direction from the other quarter mile fire that was away from me. And that's what it really spurred me to start investigating. And so I joined my firewise and Fire safe community groups. I went on ride alongs with fire chiefs, man. After talking to chiefs, you realize that like every Silicon Valley techie who shows up is like, hey chief, have you thought about drones? And they just roll their eyes like, oh my God, yeah, I have a drone. I got it. Right. And so, so yes, I'm in there chatting with them and they were talking about their new 911 dispatch. And they're like, oh, we can get text messages now. And I'm like, that's super cool. Thank God, it's about time. And I asked them, I was like, what about photos? And they're like, no, we can't do that. I'm like, what do you mean? You don't get a photo?
- [08:14]
Jacob Goldstein
Literally just text a photo? Yeah.
- [08:16]
John Mills
Oh my goodness. Like, how did you even buy this? They're like, look, we're actually kind of bummed, but like, we spent a lot of money, it took five years to get it. And once it rolled out, it didn't have what we needed. And I'm just like, we are all in danger here. Like, I need to help. And that's when it hit me. I realized that they weren't going to be able to solve this problem. I realized who was. It was the same radio operators that I listened to during my fires who I was going to band together, build an app, and build a distributed department of emergency management. And that's how it all came to fruition.
- [08:50]
Jacob Goldstein
So when you say radio operators, like, who are these people? Who are the people you're banding together with?
- [08:58]
John Mills
So when I went through my second fire, you listen to the radios yourself. They're fire service radios. I have a radio here at my desk, but you can also hear them online on like broadcastify.com for example. And so people broadcast fire service radio up into the Internet so we can all hear it. There are people who live in these areas. My area, reading NorCal, strange places that are constantly getting burned down. They had realized the same thing I had realized. They only realized it before me, that they were their answer for their community. And so they started staying up 24 hours a day during those fires that were happening. And they started to broadcast what they were hearing to their users on Facebook. Some of them had groups with seventy thousand, a hundred thousand users on Twitter. This is where everybody went.
- [09:48]
Jacob Goldstein
So I just wanna be sure that I'm clear. So these are just people who, it's not their job, they're not getting paid. And what they're doing is sitting there listening to firemen on the radio, firemen on their walkie talkies. And these people know how to understand what they're saying. And they're just filtering that information and sharing it on Facebook or Twitter. And that is this sort of bottom up emergency management system that's what's happening?
- [10:13]
John Mills
It is that analog and that simple? Yes.
- [10:15]
Jacob Goldstein
That is wild. Okay, so these are your people. So you, you, now you, you. What are you going to do? You got your people, you got your idea. What is your idea?
- [10:25]
John Mills
Well, the idea is that these humans, men and women who do this are the key. They have been distributed across the west, doing this on their own, on their own volition to be of service, really. And so it hit me like a ton of bricks. There are sometimes you see something you can't not see again or unsee. And that's when I was like, oh, my God, if I can convince those people to join me and we build our own emergency alerting product and app, we can change the world.
- [10:55]
Jacob Goldstein
We know now. It did work. It is working. I mean, were there things that went wrong in the middle? Like, once you have the big realization, is it smooth? Are there things you still have to figure out?
- [11:10]
John Mills
I mean, we're still figuring things out, but the implementation was not very hard. My background is in engineering and software that was easy to build. I built the app in 80 days. I wrote most of the code myself with a bunch of other volunteers because I was unemployed at the time, in between companies, just selling my last one. And so I said, this is my time in life to provide value and have impact here. And so the next challenge, though, was actually convincing the radio operators that I'm not some Silicon Valley tech bro trying to capitalize on their disaster.
- [11:41]
Jacob Goldstein
So you have to convince them. I mean, the interesting one to me, once you start building this thing and it starts to work, is what do. What do fire departments think? What do the, you know, government. You know, fire departments, government organizations have jobs called public information officer, right? They have people whose job is getting information to the public and to be sympathetic to those people, like, they want to make sure that the information is correct, that people aren't yelling fire in a crowded theater, you know, so to speak. Right?
- [12:14]
John Mills
And so I use the analogy all the time.
- [12:16]
Jacob Goldstein
I thought I was so clever.
- [12:19]
John Mills
It just came to me. I'm in this business,
- [12:23]
Jacob Goldstein
and so I don't know, what are those interactions like when they find out there's some random guy building an app that a bunch of random guys on the Internet are using to provide information respectfully.
- [12:34]
John Mills
So what I was told by the people who were talking to me, who were, don't do this. We'll figure it out, et cetera, et cetera. We got this covered. And it was just a bunch hoopla. They didn't want my help, obviously.
- [12:45]
Jacob Goldstein
Told by fire departments, essentially, by.
- [12:47]
John Mills
By the government fire departments. The fire departments that I was working with loved what I was doing. This makes a lot of sense, telling
- [12:53]
Jacob Goldstein
you not to do it.
- [12:54]
John Mills
The emergency management people that I was, I was interacting with. Yeah. So they told me not to do this. I did it in 80 days. So, anyway, the app launches August 11, 2021. Seven days later, there was a pretty big fire in Lower Lake county through a mobile home park. And it moved very fast. It was wind. It burned this mobile home park down, unfortunately. And watch duty was. Was there. And we were very popular already because here was the key. Those radio operators already had tens of thousands of followers. Combined, they had hundreds of thousands of followers. Now, in Silicon Valley, you'd call this influencer marketing, but I refrain from using that term. That's. These are. These are my friends, volunteers now, employees. Right. And so that's how we got it in everyone's hands. So this fire lit off. All of a sudden, everyone's using watch duty. We're putting out intelligence no one had seen. And it was everywhere overnight. Well, that upset emergency managers and certain fire officials who were much higher up in the ranks. We got on a phone call where I had a. I had a now retired battalion chief have his face right next to the camera on zoom just screaming at me. I mean, it was wild. What was he saying?
- [14:10]
Jacob Goldstein
What was he screaming?
- [14:12]
John Mills
We've gotten in the way. We're putting people's lives at risk. And then the sad part, which is a real bummer, and I will say publicly, because they do it all the time, is that there's something called an F mag grant. It's an emergency grant for funding from either state or the Fed. And so since we published that the forward progress of the fire had been stopped, which is true, and is FOIA able, because it came across the radio that the people up above the Macau OAS already had watch duty and they didn't hear the radio traffic, but they saw it on watch duty and they blocked the grant.
- [14:47]
Jacob Goldstein
So basically, this fire department didn't get money that they would have gotten because you showed that the fire had stopped and they didn't want people to know.
- [14:55]
John Mills
Correct. Which is. It's a bummer for many reasons. The first thing is that forward progress stop just means the fire isn't spreading. It doesn't mean that the interior is not lighting on fire and you're losing houses. So forward progress stopped as, hey, it's not going to move. We'll be okay. You could still lose a house. It's still a disaster. So that's kind of a bummer. The reality is though, like we told the truth. Yeah, that's what happened. And so we're getting told that we're doing something wrong. And I'm like, but is the truth wrong? And that's a really hard thing to grapple with. Like we knew it was the right thing to do morally and ethically. But I feel bad that they didn't get their grant because it might have had relief for that area. And so, man, it's really twisted and torn internally. But we knew it was the right thing to do. We kept doing it.
- [15:46]
Jacob Goldstein
There's an idea here that's really interesting to me. Like California is not a resource starved state. It's a rich state that has high taxes and is the home of Silicon Valley, is the greatest source of technology in the history of the world. Why? Why didn't anybody do this before? Why didn't the government do it?
- [16:09]
John Mills
Yeah, it's a great question, one that I ask myself all the time. It's frustrating that we do pay taxes and yet our roads are falling apart, teachers are paying for pencils, firefighters can't get engines. This is a bummer, right? This is like public infrastructure that needs to exist. And so I think there's something interesting we can look at as a good role model for us and what we do. And it actually comes from the alert and war industry, but it comes from tornadoes. Okay, so the tornado warning system is a role model for watch duty. And let me explain why.
- [16:41]
Jacob Goldstein
And this is public, just to be clear. This is a government system.
- [16:44]
John Mills
Yep.
- [16:45]
Jacob Goldstein
Okay.
- [16:45]
John Mills
Yeah. And we have built great things before in this country and we will build them again. And so this has been around for a very long time. After the Second World War, we had all these air raid sirens. They were like, what are we going to do with these damn things we put up everywhere? Well, NWS is like, I know what we can do. National weather use these four, correct? Yes, I know we can do with these. We can use these for alert and warning for tornadoes so brilliantly. What they did is they set up similarly a distributed network of spotters. They're weather spotters. When those people who are anointed by the NWS are near a tornado that touches down. And actually now we can actually almost know from space, from satellites if we can get up. Anyway, besides the point, this is a history lesson. Someone will call the NWS office who's a spotter and say, tornado touchdown in my back field. It's about this Latin long. Well they hang up the phone and they press the button. Do not pass go. Do not wake up the judge, the supervisors. It is happening, we know it's happening. And I can see it.
- [17:48]
Jacob Goldstein
Sirens go off all around where that tornado is and everybody knows. Go to the basement.
- [17:54]
John Mills
Actually it's funny what they do. You know what they do? Take a guess.
- [17:57]
Jacob Goldstein
Get in their car and go chase after it.
- [18:00]
John Mills
Okay, some people do that. But the average human, good point. Average human goes on their front porch and looks out the window. They all want to know where it is, right? I love the social science around doing this stuff. It's so fascinating. I would do the same thing. And apparently they say the sky turns like a greenish color when they know it's close.
- [18:18]
Jacob Goldstein
So why don't we have that for fire? So we did it for that. Like what's the problem?
- [18:22]
John Mills
You tell me. I do not know. But anyway, I'll pontificate with you.
- [18:26]
Jacob Goldstein
I mean, so there's some interesting idea to me about like bottom up versus top down, right? When I think about, you know, whoever. When I think about the kinds of software people sell to the government, right? It's. I picture this very old fashioned system, you know, like the military contractors of the 50s or something where they like come in and they pitch some very expensive thing. And of course none of it's going to be off the shelf. They're going to build it all from scratch and it's going to take a long time and it's not going to be that good. Right. And the thing that's interesting to me about the thing that you built is how bottom up it is, right? It is so profoundly bottom up rather than top down. And it seems like the government is not set up to build bottom up systems.
- [19:09]
John Mills
There's something that you hit on right there that's actually the problem. Software will not save the government. We need bureaucratic process change. So what I mean by this, it's very simply put because I now have people who are competing with me, they think they're a competitor, let's put it that way, because they're going to go build a software product and give it to the government. But the government, especially in these, in fire, has a bureaucratic process back and forth. Works with the sheriff. The sheriff actually does the alert and warning, not the fire service. It's a game of telephone. The process is broken. It's not a weather spotter who makes a phone call, then they unilaterally press the button. There's too many parties at play. And that's where the delay comes in and that is why software alone will not solve the problem.
- [20:00]
Jacob Goldstein
Still to come on the show, John and I talk about the LA fires of 2025. We talk about floods, where watch duty is today, and more. When you own your own business, you own every decision. Now own the card that rewards you for it. The Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business card brings the best Sapphire Reserve benefits to business owners who expect hard working rewards. Designed to meet the needs of business owners at scale, this Pay in Full card elevates your travel experience and offers premium benefits and value toward business services that'll take your business to the next level, fuel your business and maximize rewards. With 8x points on all purchases through Chase Travel, 3x points on social media and search engine advertising, annual partnership credits and more. Make every journey more rewarding with a $300 annual travel credit and access to a network of airport lounges. Whether you're looking for pre flight productivity or time to rest and recharge, Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business it's the card that gives back all you put in. Learn more@chase.com ReserveBusiness Chase for Business make more of what's yours. Accounts subject to credit approval restrictions and limitations apply. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA member FDIC run a business and
- [21:24]
John Mills
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- [21:26]
Jacob Goldstein
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- [21:27]
John Mills
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- [21:55]
Jacob Goldstein
okay, let's talk about the LA fires of 2025. Tell me about what it meant for for watch duty.
- [22:05]
John Mills
I mean look, here's the way, here's the way I try and talk about this and look at it. So leaving LA behind for two seconds. If you look at Northern California, even more farther north than I am, I'm in Sonoma County. These areas, including mine, have been ravaged by fire over and over and over again. And so if you go to like Klamath river area, Siskiyou and Del Nora counties, we have more subscribers than there are citizens in those counties. That is how deeply penetrated we are in these areas.
- [22:33]
Jacob Goldstein
What does that mean? People subscribe on two phones. They subscribe for the county over what I don't know. What does that mean?
- [22:38]
John Mills
The county over. That's exactly right.
- [22:40]
Jacob Goldstein
So everybody has it. Everybody has it the way everybody has
- [22:45]
John Mills
Chrome, the text messaging app on your phone. Yeah, it's insane, right? It's wild. And so we've already been like the lifeline for these, these communities, including my own. Now let's bring LA back into the situation. We never thought this would happen, never wanted this to happen. Right. Like, we were there to meet the moment, but oh, my goodness, you know, 16,000 structures destroyed, 32 people killed. I mean, it was a colossal calamity of errors. And frankly, it was a fire, it was a hurricane with a fire inside. So this is not me throwing shade at, you know, the firefighters. I mean, it's an unstoppable force.
- [23:22]
Jacob Goldstein
When you say hurricane. Because it was so, because the winds were so high and that was so bad.
- [23:26]
John Mills
Yeah, it just, it just runs and runs and runs and you cannot stop fires like that. So we were built for scale. We knew, I'd say three or four days in advance that a PDS was coming as what they call particularly dangerous situation. It's a level of Red Flag above Red flag Flag, it means high winds, dry fuels, low relative humidity. Everything is ripe for something real bad to happen. So we staffed up, we got everyone ready, and then, sure enough, 10:30 in the morning on the 7th, all hell broke loose. And including our systems, which didn't crash. But I mean, we were sleeping in shifts. I mean, we were doing hundreds of thousands of new downloads an hour. We had 1/4 of LA download watch duty in the first week. I mean, it exploded overnight, right? We more than doubled our user count. And this is this time, four engineers who kept this thing up, doing 100,000 requests a second, which is like Wikipedia scale, with four dudes in their basements trying to door dash food to each other and doing whatever we can do to keep this thing up. Because as you may have seen, the alert and warning systems crashed. They sent false alerts three different times. Parts of the GIS systems that they use crashed. Cal fire systems crashed. Everybody turned to us and it was, I didn't sleep right, for a month, I think, after that.
- [24:51]
Jacob Goldstein
So there is this photo that I, I, I saw you mentioned somewhere. So I looked it up and, and it is a compelling photo. There's a photo not of a fire, but of the LA Emergency Operations center, right, which is like, you know, Command Central. And they have like all these different screens. And in the giant screen in the middle of the wall in this big room, this government organization Is watch duty is your app during the LA fires. What do you make of that?
- [25:26]
John Mills
Well, I was just speaking to Congress about this a couple months ago and I told them that like, this is not a story of success, this is a story of failure. How the hell did a couple misfit hackers and radio operators build something so big and so critical that it was used by the people who are fighting and risking their lives for us, that they rely on our infrastructure? I'm upset. We can do better.
- [25:51]
Jacob Goldstein
I mean, I would imagine they had spent a tremendous amount of money on some other system that worked less. Well, like, I don't know that. But is that the case? Of course.
- [26:01]
John Mills
Yeah, of course that's the case. And it's not because the emergency managers don't care. It's not that, like. No, it's not that they don't.
- [26:08]
Jacob Goldstein
No, I don't really believe in villains in that way, but I like, systemic failures are more interesting to me, frankly, than individual villains anyway. So, like, what is the systemic failure here?
- [26:20]
John Mills
This is an interesting question. So I have a couple theories on this. One being it's a very simple one and it's about money. There is not much money in this industry. So if there was more money, it would drive more innovation. And again, I am running a nonprofit here. I'm not a purebred capitalist. My point is, is like people who are trying to go build great things in Silicon Valley are oftentimes money oriented. So they're much more likely to go work at Anduril, which can sell to the DoD now, the DoW, than they are selling to firefighters who can barely afford a fire engine engine, right? So like, it's just basic capitalism. I don't like what I believe, but like, this is what I've seen maybe,
- [27:01]
Jacob Goldstein
but like, there are lots of niche software products. I mean, I go back to this idea of bottom up versus top down, right? Like the thing you have built is you didn't start with the idea that we have to get the information from the fire department or from the government, right? You started with the idea of like, there are people out there right now sitting in random rooms in random places, listening, gathering that information already. And what we need to do is reliably aggregate it. We need to take this dispersed information and aggregate it from the bottom up. And that, that to me seems like the big exciting idea you have and why the thing you built works.
- [27:44]
John Mills
Absolutely, that is part of it. But there's a misnomer in there. The data comes from the government, right?
- [27:52]
Jacob Goldstein
It comes from Individual people who are employed by the government.
- [27:55]
John Mills
Right.
- [27:55]
Jacob Goldstein
It comes from firefighters who are talking to each other.
- [27:57]
John Mills
That's right.
- [27:58]
Jacob Goldstein
But it doesn't have to get aggregated up to some public information official who then has to ask his boss if he can send the press release or whatever it is. Right, right.
- [28:09]
John Mills
So we should definitely clarify here for our conversation and for the readers what the government means. Right. Because there's Little G and Big G. Little G are the men and women on the ground fighting for their freaking lives and fighting for hours. Big G is very faceless, and Big G is usually getting software sold to them, top down to your point. And they're the ones often buying this stuff.
- [28:32]
Jacob Goldstein
Let's talk about. Let's talk about how WatchDuty works now. I downloaded the app, so can you sort of just talk me through it? Like, let's pick a fire and tell me. Tell me how it works. You choose. Like, you must have the app handy. No. Yeah.
- [28:49]
John Mills
Let's see what's actively happening. Right now you're picking a day that we never know what's happening. Luckily, knock on wood, right now it's a little bit quiet, so we're going to pick. There's a fire that is burning up here in Solano county called the Puta Fire. It's a very strange name.
- [29:05]
Jacob Goldstein
It has an H. I will say to our listeners who speak Spanish. It has an H. So it's not what you think. Okay.
- [29:12]
John Mills
Thank goodness.
- [29:12]
Jacob Goldstein
I. I clicked on it and it tells me. So tell me what I'm looking at. It says, says what is this? Is the address or something? 25500 block of CA128. Oh, CA128 is a highway. It's just telling me the address of where it started. California migration. Okay.
- [29:29]
John Mills
And you can see the pin drop. That little flame icon is where the fire started. That's not where it's Scott.
- [29:34]
Jacob Goldstein
And there's like a red boundary around it. Is that where the fire is? Is burning? What is that?
- [29:40]
John Mills
Yeah, that is where the fire is burned. Fires are only mapped once or twice a day, depending. In California, we have an overflight called the virus program that flies with people inside with an infrared camera, so that gets more real time.
- [29:53]
Jacob Goldstein
Okay.
- [29:54]
John Mills
But oftentimes you're not going to get a fire perimeter for a day or days, depending on how remote your area is, frankly.
- [30:01]
Jacob Goldstein
So tell me what else this tells me about the fire.
- [30:05]
John Mills
Yeah. So what's. What, really, the magic is in the reporting. So if you look on the bottom of that page, you see what would be referred to as a newsfeed if we were a social media site, which we're not. But you can see a timeline of events. So if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you'll see the first ignition fire reported here. Engines dispatched, resources are coming, et cetera, et cetera. So in your mind's eye, what happens if you're a user who lives here? You hear the tactics, more engines are coming, all call is happening, tankers are coming. You're like, oh, no, this is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so you start to, like, hear the storyline.
- [30:44]
Jacob Goldstein
And presumably with the app, I've set up to have an alert if there is a fire near my house is the first thing that happens. Yeah.
- [30:52]
John Mills
So it notifies you. Right. And so the story is where the magic is.
- [30:58]
Jacob Goldstein
There's a message, it looks like. So there's. Oh, it started as a prescribed burn. Yep. And then that part was. There's an automated message five days ago. And then one day ago, there's a message from Evan Jacobs, regional captain. Does that mean they are on your staff or they're a volunteer? What does regional captain mean?
- [31:18]
John Mills
He's paid staff. He's actually training to be a tanker pilot right now in Montana.
- [31:22]
Jacob Goldstein
Oh, I love that. It says, evacuation warnings have been requested for Golden Bear Estates on Bobcat Ranch. The fire is five to six acres, burning in the grass and currently hung up on a Ridge. Highway 28 has been requested to be closed between Pleasant Valley Road and Canyon Creek Road per incident command. So he's telling you that not that there's an evacuation warning, but that people are talking about an evacuation warning. So you're getting the news, you're learning about this ahead of time. This is. You got it? Yeah. So go on.
- [31:51]
John Mills
These are all the tactics. These are all the tactics that they're going through at the time. And so this story is what helps you paint a mental model. Right. Of what's going on. So let's use the other example really quickly for a good one. So my favorite is when a fire pops off, people see it, they look on their phone, they're like, okay, it's not near me. Engines are coming. And the next thing you know, they're like, forward progress has been stopped. And they could just turn their mind off again. They're like, you know what? It's okay. And so the de escalation story is also really important that the government doesn't do very well. So sometimes, like, if you don't close the loop, people are still panicking. You got to close. So if they did get an alert, which they often don't, then they don't get one telling them it's okay until much, much later. So their adrenaline is up. They're still paranoid. Giving people the storyline allows them to prepare and think about what's going on. And that is one of the biggest, like trauma reducing things in our app that everyone tells me they love more than anything else is it's over is
- [32:54]
Jacob Goldstein
a message that says, it's over.
- [32:56]
John Mills
Correct.
- [32:57]
Jacob Goldstein
You're going to be okay.
- [32:59]
John Mills
Turn your brain off, go back to lunch.
- [33:01]
Jacob Goldstein
Is there a risk of. Call it false positives. I mean, if I see somebody write, evacuation warnings have been requested. Like that's kind of complicated. Right. What I hear in that is evacuation warnings. But maybe it was requested for a bad reason. Maybe I don't need to evacuate. Like, that's seems complicated.
- [33:21]
John Mills
It is complicated. But it's the truth.
- [33:23]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [33:24]
John Mills
And so that's a fun one. The truth is hard, right?
- [33:26]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. And like, are there. I guess it's. I mean, you know, I'm a journalist by training. I guess it's always good for people to know more. Are there any instances where you think it's not?
- [33:38]
John Mills
Absolutely. We have. We have a code of conduct that we. There are certain things we never ever do. We don't talk about what's called an iwi, an incident within an incident. We don't name.
- [33:49]
Jacob Goldstein
I don't know what's an incident within an incident.
- [33:52]
John Mills
Firefighter death.
- [33:53]
Jacob Goldstein
I see.
- [33:54]
John Mills
Right. Or engine rollover. Like there are. There are scanners out there who do not have this journalistic integrity. And they'll say, engine number 347 rolled. Someone's wife or husband is going to hear that and think they're dead.
- [34:09]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [34:09]
John Mills
Right. That is not useful. So we don't publish block numbers. We don't publish names. You can see even the fire that we're talking about right now, we don't have an address, an exact address. We don't say, 1, 2, 3, 4 Main street just lit a fire. Right. So when you think about it from a large scale back again, like, what is useful to know? Right. Not a firefighter died fighting for your life. Right. It's actually that the fire is burning over this ridge, or it's hung up on the ridge, it's not moving. The tankers are coming. That story is important. So there are lines. And we do have practices for this. To your point. Yes.
- [34:44]
Jacob Goldstein
So let's talk about the sort of state of the app now. How does it work? Like, you're big now. It's not four guys sending DoorDash to each other anymore, right? Like, what is it? Like, what is this thing you have built at this point?
- [34:58]
John Mills
It's become a big thing. It's almost 60 paid staff and about 300 volunteers at this point. And so it's gotten very large. We have a career ladder for volunteers who want to become paid staff, and many of them do. A lot of them are actually ex fire who want to be of service. They can't help it. Just because you hang up your yellows doesn't mean you stop fighting fire. And so it's wild. We have dispatchers and firefighters and law enforcement officers, sons and daughters of firefighters who've been hearing the radio chatter in the background their entire life. And so it's their way to be of service. And so a lot of them were passionate about their hobbies, and somehow they got lucky enough we found each other, and now we can pay them more money than they were doing at a job that a lot of them didn't like, you know, so it's really an honor to give them, like, a life and trajectory to do something bigger than themselves out of a hobby.
- [35:53]
Jacob Goldstein
And so the volunteers are, are listening to. To radios and sharing the information through the app.
- [35:59]
John Mills
That's basically what they're doing 24 7. And the, the important thing to note here is that in the background, we use Slack for everything, right? So chat for, you know, it's chat or Microsoft Teams or whatever. We divided up the country and Slack into different regions. So we get signals from government sources and they show up in Slack. So all of a sudden, let's use this example that we're looking at with the puta fire here. What happens is that a signal comes in. We know that firefighters are being dispatched somewhere. We don't always know yet where. Some signals are digital and it has an address. Some come over the radio. So what happens is it drops a notification in Slack. Everybody in that region sees, oh, shoot, there's a fire. They start.
- [36:45]
Jacob Goldstein
They.
- [36:45]
John Mills
They put their ears on is what they call it. They start listening. So now what's happening is they're collaborating in real time. So they're all listening and they're all typing what they're hearing. Sometimes they'll be copying each other, saying the same thing. Sometimes they'll be saying, yes, I heard that. Confirm, confirm, post it. Who's got the con? Who's got control? Who's running the incident? And so we are collaborating all the time. It's not one Lone wolf sitting in the Radio Shack somewhere.
- [37:13]
Jacob Goldstein
It's interestingly low tech at a certain level. Right. That actually people listening to the radio and checking each other is sort of wild.
- [37:24]
John Mills
But that's how firefighters fight fire. Yeah, right? Yeah, we just plug into the same infrastructure they're plugging into. I know it like blows people's minds. We think we have like satellites and we can track every hotspot like there's some amazing future.
- [37:38]
Jacob Goldstein
But it's literally people talking to each other being like, hey, there's a fire over here. Somebody come help me put it out.
- [37:44]
John Mills
You got it.
- [37:46]
Jacob Goldstein
Did I read that you got a grant or are working with Google to try and use AI to transcribe the radio traffic that people listen to the radio?
- [37:57]
John Mills
That is. That is correct. That is happening right now. Actually. We use tons of AI to help us sift and sort information coming from public information officers reading PDFs looking at images for smoke and fire. Right. Like we've been using tons of AI, but we have a human as the final backstop saying, thank you, machine. That was actually wrong. Or that's in the wrong place. Or that was actually 15 acres, not 50 acres.
- [38:21]
Jacob Goldstein
The hard one. It's a hard one in the English language.
- [38:24]
John Mills
Well, and especially when it's radio chatter over 155Mhz frequencies deep out in the woods, they're static. And so it's a little challenging. So our goal is to again enable the humans. It's a co pilot model, not a replace the human model.
- [38:40]
Jacob Goldstein
So you were talking about how some government officials were antagonistic when you were starting out. I understand that you now have a product that governments are actually buying from you. Not only are you working with governments, but they're a client. Tell me about that.
- [39:01]
John Mills
So Watch Duty is a free app. Anyone can download it. There's no signup, no email, no tracking, no phone number, no nothing. It's like Craigslist. It's just there and it works. So that's the point. Right now, if you like to become a member of our nonprofit organization, you can pay $25 a year. And then you get a couple extra features in the app. The one that we have to pay a bunch of money for is flight tracking. So now I can see the tankers, I can see the types of tankers, I can see the helicopters, and I can see where they're working. And then if you spend $99 a year, you can get all the professional features. There's more in there that we constantly are adding, but it's Jurisdictional boundaries. It's where the power lines are. It's. What are the radio frequencies, frequencies and tones? Where are the repeaters? Because radios have to hit repeaters to bounce out to the next canyon.
- [39:47]
Jacob Goldstein
So these are things that firefighters would want to know, like, jurisdictional boundaries, like, and. And power lines. Like, if I'm worried about a fire coming to my house, these are not things I'm preoccupied with.
- [39:59]
John Mills
That's correct. And that's how. That's why it's valuable.
- [40:02]
Jacob Goldstein
And so how many. Like, how big is that business? I know you're a nonprofit, but whatever. How many people, you know? Like, are there big fire departments? Who's buying that? That?
- [40:11]
John Mills
Yeah, I think there's probably about 30, 40,000 professionals currently using. I'd have to look.
- [40:17]
Jacob Goldstein
It's.
- [40:17]
John Mills
It changes a lot. We've been selling like crazy recently.
- [40:19]
Jacob Goldstein
But that's a. That's a lot. I mean, that's. I mean, there aren't that many. It's a lot of firefighters. Right. Presumably that's mostly firefighters or what? Who is that?
- [40:28]
John Mills
No.
- [40:28]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. Okay.
- [40:28]
John Mills
No, it's actually. It's actually mostly utilities. Power, water, light railroad, all those folks have it. And firefighters also have it, too, and emergency managers also have it. And so here's the fun part about this. We don't track anybody. So unless you sign up, I actually don't know who you are. And if you sign up with, like, your Yahoo account that you signed up with 15 years ago, like, I don't know who this person is, so.
- [40:54]
Jacob Goldstein
Right. But if it's whatever, PG and Ecom or something, then you know that it's correct.
- [40:58]
John Mills
They're one of our largest customers. Right. And they help support us. Yeah. But what we found, though, as we go through fire departments and we have a lot more relationship with. With the fire service, we find out, oh, wait, I pay for it myself. Or, oh, I swiped it on my purchase card. And, like, you find out, they're like, oh, shoot, there's like 17 or 70 different people all paying for this. I'm like, you guys realize there's a discount a lot if you all buy in bulk. And they're like, oh, my God, this is great.
- [41:23]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [41:23]
John Mills
And then they find out. Here's the fun part. And then they find out we can overlay their data on watch duty, and that is what's blown their mind.
- [41:31]
Jacob Goldstein
What does that mean when you say overlay their data?
- [41:35]
John Mills
So let's use a power company, for example. A power company or a water company has assets that are under threat. They want to know where the fire is, where it's going in relation to their assets, to their power line. Correct?
- [41:49]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [41:49]
John Mills
Or water lines or railroads. Right. It could be any of these things. It's men, women and equipment in the way.
- [41:55]
Jacob Goldstein
So it's like, it's like gis geographical information. It's just like adding layers.
- [42:00]
John Mills
Correct?
- [42:01]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [42:01]
John Mills
And so it's interesting because we thought that us selling them the data in a nice format that they could put in their gas would actually be really valuable to them. It turns out it's not. And here's why. We've democratized this information so everybody has it on their phone. So when you sell it to the operations department, there's a couple people in a room somewhere and only they can see it.
- [42:25]
Jacob Goldstein
Well, you're back in that top down world, right? It's.
- [42:28]
John Mills
That's right.
- [42:29]
Jacob Goldstein
This is my, this is my hammer and a nail. Like to me, every problem in this story looks like top down versus bottom up. It is, it is. Yes.
- [42:37]
John Mills
You're absolutely right. And so we've been able to provide an immense amount of impact to troublemen, firefighters, people on the ground. And now they're getting more out of it. So now they're ingesting everything from like, show me all my fire hydrants, show me my jurisdiction, show me my firehouses, show me my LA Unified School District is a customer who, who has all their 650 buildings in there.
- [42:59]
Jacob Goldstein
And so it makes sense. But when they use it, are they using the app like I'm using? But they can lay their, they, they sort of, rather than starting with their software, they start with your app and then they customize it for themselves to lay their schoolhouses over it. Is that the way it works?
- [43:16]
John Mills
You got it. Yep.
- [43:17]
Jacob Goldstein
That is extremely interesting. And just in the last few days you added floods. This is the news. I did a news search before we talked to see if I was missing anything and it was floods. Floods are new.
- [43:32]
John Mills
Just yesterday.
- [43:33]
Jacob Goldstein
Congratulations. Tell me about floods.
- [43:37]
John Mills
Thank you. Well, fires are the hardest to report on and it's a lot of radio traffic work. If we look at the other disasters, flooding being next, there's two reasons we picked it up. The first and obvious one is it kills more people than fire. It is a catastrophic problem. It also needs help, so that's why we picked it.
- [43:56]
Jacob Goldstein
I didn't know that. I didn't know that more people died from flood. This is in the United States.
- [44:02]
John Mills
Yeah. Fires don't kill that many people. Believe it or not, it definitely kills people. And we just saw in The Palestinians. It eat fires. It does. But like the Kerrville flood, as you just saw last year on July 4, killed 125 people. 25 of them were little girls in Texas. Summer camp in Texas. That's right. Yeah. And so floods have been a much bigger problem for much longer, and they don't involve as much radio traffic. So let's get into this. There's a lot of really good signals. Again, back to my favorite weather service. The NWS provides a great service to the world. And if you look at watch duty today, you'll see all the NWS polygons and alerts you can see. See the Doppler radar. You can see where the flood warnings are. And then my favorite feature, because I live near a river here, is the river gauges. So the river gauges are actually operated by the U.S. geological Service. Turns out. It's fascinating. And so these are gauges that are on bridges with a float that moves up and down and it radios in when it's moving.
- [45:03]
Jacob Goldstein
Beautiful. Analog.
- [45:06]
John Mills
I love analog, man. I do. So what's really cool for me living here is that if you live by a river, everybody knows their number. So I live near the Russian River. Here's what I mean by their number. The number is when I have to GTFO when things are gonna get real south real fast. Right. We gotta get western. So some people live at 20ft, some people live at 28ft. Some people are above the hill and don't care at all. Right. But they have to know their number.
- [45:32]
Jacob Goldstein
And so that number is the depth of the river near your house. Is that what that number is?
- [45:38]
John Mills
You got it. Right. And that's really when you start to know what to do and is actually
- [45:43]
Jacob Goldstein
what you care about the depth of the river upriver, presumably you want to know before it gets to you that it's too deep, right?
- [45:49]
John Mills
That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so what's a little different about. About this feature is that you can now set your tolerance for pain on your own and you can put the phone in your pocket and live your life and know that it's going to ping you when the river gauge hits five feet below. And you have to care and you get push notified. Now. I know.
- [46:07]
Jacob Goldstein
So this is much more automated than the fire thing you're saying. Basically, there is a. There is a device floating in the river that you're worried about, and it is already sending out a radio signal. And now you can get a ping whenever you want. When that device gets to whatever when the river gets to whatever level is of concern to you, that is.
- [46:26]
John Mills
Yes, that is the first part. And then we add reporting on top of that. And so now we do the same thing we always do for only catastrophic flooding. If it's raining a lot, we're not going to start pinging your phone, right? But when it's life and death, and that's what watch duty is about, it's life, death and property and livelihoods, not, you know, get your surfboard, go surfing. And so that's when we'll chime in and we'll actually ping you and start doing the same thing we did in the Garden Grove hazmat incident that almost exploded in Orange county is we just, just Listen to the PIOs, we listen to incident commanders, and we relay human consumable information for you to follow along with. So it's a yes. And there is more digital signal in flood than there is in fire.
- [47:08]
Jacob Goldstein
We've talked about some interesting kind of big ideas. And so I'm curious, you know, what you've learned, what you're trying to figure out. What do you make of things?
- [47:17]
John Mills
I think we've talked about a lot of them, but, like, what does it look like to have like a disaster alerting platform that just works across the board? Like, this should have been a solved problem, right? NWS and FEMA and everyone should have gotten together to figure out this problem. And there are great examples. Like I said, with tornadoes, we know what to do and it's not getting done. And so we're taking it on our shoulders to do it. And so at some point, you'll see tornadoes in there, you'll see tsunamis in there, you'll see all these other events that you care about, even if you're not a weather nerd, right? There's plenty of weather apps and that's not really where we play. We play in a world that we want to be there for. It's the app we want you to have and you never want to have to use. So if you download it and put it in your pocket and never hear from us, we're doing our job. You're safer. We all know what's happening. And so our goal is to really give people a fighting chance, right? When this happens, when fire comes, lava, wind, tornadoes, I want a fighting chance. And the tornado warning system is our role model. And I hope America can get out of its own way and start to build better infrastructure again like we used to.
- [48:27]
Jacob Goldstein
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- [49:47]
John Mills
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- [50:18]
Jacob Goldstein
Okay, let's do the lightning round. I love jargon and I feel like the radio traffic that you and your your colleagues are listening to must be full of jargon. And I want you to teach me some. Give me like, give me a few of your favorites.
- [50:36]
John Mills
Well, there's a couple and we, we don't always abbreviate them actually. And the fire service doesn't either often. But ROC report on conditions. That is a really important one for us. When an engine first gets there, they will give out report on conditions. And it sounds like this fire burning uphill, heavy timber, critical rate of spread. You know. All resources requested.
- [50:59]
Jacob Goldstein
Sounds bad.
- [51:00]
John Mills
That's a signal to us. We're like holy shit, this is going to be a really bad one.
- [51:04]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah.
- [51:05]
John Mills
And then you hear things like reported conditions, like small roadside spot extinguished by locals. That's my favorite. Like someone pulls over with a fire with a fire extinguisher in their car and puts it out the Amount of vehicle fires that spread to the vegetation is real. And so the report on conditions is like that's, that's what we're waiting for. That's all we want to know. So that's a really big one.
- [51:25]
Jacob Goldstein
Give me a little like do they do the tens? I mean, I know 104 is a classic, but aren't there a bunch of tens? 10, 10, 10, 20. Is that not a thing?
- [51:32]
John Mills
No, not, not really. Yeah, not really. I mean it's interesting because fire service is really. And like, don't get me wrong, like I love what the police do as well. But like fire service is really a mutual aid thing and so there's lots of other people involved in less. So it's every color of every engine in every patch has to speak English on the same radio traffic. Oh, that's radio channels, right. And then add in power, water, light, tailco railroads. There's firefighting railroad engines. There are huge engines with massive cannons and they drive the ravines wetting everything down. Wild. It's pretty, it, the photos are intense, man. It's absolutely bonkers. And then you have DOT dpw they're trying to open up roads and keep things moving. Like mutual aid is mutual.
- [52:19]
Jacob Goldstein
Uh huh. So the firefighters who are talking into the radios know that they're talking to everybody. They know that they're speaking publicly, not to just some other firefighter.
- [52:29]
John Mills
That that's correct.
- [52:31]
Jacob Goldstein
What's another domain besides emergencies, natural disasters that might benefit from this kind of community sourced bottom up information?
- [52:42]
John Mills
I mean that's an easy one to answer, right? I mean like look at the, the, the OS Int community or open source intelligence community that happens on Twitter and other places. So now we call it X. But there's tons of people who do incredible amount of war reporting and monitoring and intelligence gathering. And OSINT Defender is a really good one on, on, on, on Twitter. And these, these guys and gals are really good at getting, gathering intelligence and spreading that info to the world. And so there's a lot of other role models of this.
- [53:12]
Jacob Goldstein
What's an example of what they figure out? Those, those kinds of people, they, they
- [53:16]
John Mills
track airplane flights and monitors for example. They're like, hey, there's all these KC130s all flying over the ocean right now. KC130 is a refueling plane. And when you see like 10 refueling planes crossing the pond, you're like oh, something's up, right? And so like there's all these little ways that you can look at this intelligence and glean something from it. It so it's everywhere. And like Wikipedia is open source intelligence, right? Like yes. It's not too dissimilar. And so this exists other places.
- [53:47]
Jacob Goldstein
No, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a really interesting kind of analogous organization to watch duty in a weird way, right? It's bottom up information. If you weren't working on watch duty, what would you be working on?
- [54:03]
John Mills
I'd probably be woodworking, frankly. I have a big ranch to manage.
- [54:07]
Jacob Goldstein
What was the last thing you built out of wood?
- [54:11]
John Mills
Just last week or two weeks ago, I just finished four very large 12 foot long redwood tables on rolling wheels so I can entertain and have big parties. And I just had a bunch of fire chiefs over spend the night a couple weeks ago, which was awesome.
- [54:27]
Jacob Goldstein
You had a slumber party with fire chiefs?
- [54:30]
John Mills
It's more of a, you know, live
- [54:31]
Jacob Goldstein
in the 12 year old boy's dream you get.
- [54:35]
John Mills
Except I can drink bourbon and play with fire. It's a lot of fun.
- [54:37]
Jacob Goldstein
Truly the 12 year old boy's dream.
- [54:39]
John Mills
It's, it's great.
- [54:41]
Jacob Goldstein
What's a, what's a DIY project? You got in over your head on
- [54:48]
John Mills
watch duty. You know, like this thing's a monster. Like we knew we were gonna, you know, catch, you know, ride the dragon, but it's. This thing's bigger than we, than we could have hoped or expected. So that's a pretty big one. Living off the grid is an interesting challenge and most people think living off the grid means power problems. That's not true. Power is very easy to manage. It's very digital now. It's super easy to. My systems never go down. You know what's hard? Keeping water in the fricking pipes. I am chasing water problems. I have a mile and a half of pipe. My well's a half a mile from me. I have tank arrays all over the place as we speak. I have a water problem that I fixed one and found two more at the same time. And so I built water monitoring systems so I know when the waters are going down. I know when I'm losing water. I can open and close valves and watch the data and so over my head, like I don't. That's a big one. I fight my way out of everything, including the one I got myself into at the watch duty. But like I just, I don't give up and I know I can solve these problems.
- [55:50]
Jacob Goldstein
What's your water problem?
- [55:51]
John Mills
Right now I have, I'm losing about 200 gallons a day on one side of my lines, which isn't that much given I produce two or three thousand a day. And I have 35 gallons, 35,000 gallons in tanks. When I open the valve, the water comes out. So it's. It's gravity fed, mostly for fire reasons. So. But what that means is that small leak will become a big leak and then vines will grow their way inside the pipe and start to slowly break the thing open. So I have to address it at some point. I might have two years, I might have two days. It's eventually going to break.
- [56:27]
Jacob Goldstein
What's your next big project?
- [56:31]
John Mills
Probably some tree houses that might be next. I have a couple cabins. I have a couple of years. I have more to build. I've always wanted to build tree houses. Got to do a couple of bridges as well. I have a real housing crisis here on my property. We have too many friends and guests and I want places for them to stay. And so that's something that I really think about is my guest, you know, experience and having more people here to share this place with me. Because with the amount of taxes and insurance I pay at this land, man, I don't own it. You know, I'll give it to the nonprofit when I'm dead. And I want to. I want to keep this thing going and keep innovating here and bringing people together to build weird things that change the future.
- [57:09]
Jacob Goldstein
Great ending. Thanks for your time.
- [57:12]
John Mills
You're very welcome. It's a lot of fun. I love talking about it. I do it every day.
- [57:22]
Jacob Goldstein
John Mills is the co founder and CEO of WatchDuty. Please let us know what you think of the show, what you want to hear more of, what you want to hear less of. Particular guest ideas. You can email us at problemushkin fm. I read all the emails. You can also find me on x or on LinkedIn. Really do appreciate all the messages that we get. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and Trina Menino. It was engineered by Hans Dale she and edited by Lydia Jean Cott. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of what's yous Problem?
- [58:04]
John Mills
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.