July 2, 2026 • 52 mins
John Mills is the CEO and co-founder of a nonprofit called Watch Duty. His problem is this: How do you build an app to warn people when they are in immediate danger from a natural disaster? Watch Duty has millions of users and played a key role in the Los Angeles fires of 2025. In the show, John talks about how he built his app with the help of an army of volunteers, and why the government hadn’t already built something like Watch Duty.
In this episode, John explains:
- Why one-quarter of Los Angeles residents downloaded Watch Duty during the 2025 fires
- Why the all-clear message matters almost as much as the initial warning
- How they are expanding into flood warnings
- How to decode firefighter’s radio chatter, and his favorite bit of jargon
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem? And
my guest today is John Mills. John is the CEO
(00:36):
and co founder of a nonprofit called watch Duty. John's
problem is this, 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
(00:56):
seen in recent disasters fires in LA and floods in Texas,
those government systems can and do fail, and in twenty
twenty one, John and his colleagues launched watch Duty to
fill the gap. At watch Duty, paid employees and volunteers
track public information like firefires, radio chatter, and they provide
(01:17):
near real time updates on the watch Duty app. So far,
Watch Duty has focused mainly on fires, but they just
rolled out coverage for floods as well. Watch Duty was
a key source of information for the LA fires in
early twenty twenty five, and today millions of people use
the app, and those users include, interestingly, a lot of
(01:38):
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 watch Duty succeed where the government
had failed? John started Watch Duty after he moved to
Sonoma County in northern California. At that point, he had
(01:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
A month after I bought this place in twenty nineteen,
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.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Around and I'm like, I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
And then I go outside look at it, and another
one shows up with a water bucket on the bottom.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
That's when I realized I was in danger and something
was happening.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
It's a great question.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
And look, there are alerts everywhere, but as you have
probably seen from the news and the Palisades and Eaten.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Fires, the alerts are leave a lot to be desired.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And so those men and women are doing the best
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
(03:30):
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
(03:50):
a twenty acre fire, that can still change your life
or take.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
It twenty acre fire meaning small. If it's the acre
you live on, it's a big deal.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
To you, that's correct.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
And so who do you think I'm going to make
an app? Like how do you get from there to
the app?
Speaker 3 (04:15):
That fire was in November of twenty nineteen. I did nothing. Well,
it's not true. I didn't do nothing.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I started building sprinkler systems, I started parting my home,
and I started preparing so, like 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 as understanding it. And then a fifty thousand
acre fire showed up from the dry lightning storm that
passed over northern California in twenty twenty. People remember this
(04:42):
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 of friends in Fountain Grove
by the Way, who almost lost her house.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
In twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I already the whole thing, and I was watching from
across the hill, and I spent day and night listening
to fire surface radio chatter, on the internet, researching, learning,
watching fire cameras, and just trying to figure out what
is going on around here?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
How do I get my bearing stretch. So that's what
really triggered me.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
House was spared, thankfully, land was spared and ended a
quarter mile for 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 firewives and fire safe community groups.
I went on ride along with fire chiefs man. After
talking to chiefs, you realize that like every Silicon Valley
(05:34):
techie who shows up is like hate chief if you
thought about drones, and they just rolled their eyes like,
oh my god, yeah I have a drone. I got
it right, And so yes, I'm in there chatting with
them and they were talking about their new nine one
one 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.
(05:56):
I'm like, what do you mean you don't get a
photo literally just text a photo? Yeah, oh my goodness,
Like how did you even buy this? They're like, look,
we're actually kind of bomb, but like we spent a
lot of money. It took five 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.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And that's when it hit me.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
And that's how it all came to fruition.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
So when you say radio operators, like who are these people?
Who are the people you're banding together with?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
So when I went through my second fire, you listen
to the radios yourself, the fire service radio.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
So I have a radio here at.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
My desk, but you can also hear them online on
like broadcastify dot 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 norical 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
(07:14):
were their answer for their community. And so they started
staying up twenty four hours a day during those fires
that were happening, and they started to broadcast what they
were hearing to their.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Users on Facebook.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Some of them had groups with seventy one hundred thousand
users on Twitter.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
This is where everybody went.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So I just want to 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
(07:55):
is that bottom up emergency management system.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
That's what's happening. It is that analog in that symbol.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, that is wild. Okay, So these are your people?
So you now, you you what are you going to do?
You got your people, you got your what is your idea?
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Well, the idea is that these 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're sometimes
you see something that you can't not see again or unsee.
And that's when I was like, oh my god, if
(08:33):
I can convince those people that joined me and we
build our own emurgency, youre learning product and app, we
can change the world.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
We know.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
No, it did work. It is working. I mean was
there what 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?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
I mean we're still figuring things out. But the implementation
was not very hard. My background is an engineering and
software that.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Was easy to build. I built the app in eighty days.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I wrote most of the code myself with a bunch
of other volunteers because I was Lloyd at the time,
in between companies, just selling my last one, and so
I said, this is my time in life.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
To provide value and have impact here.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
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 uh, what do
fire departments think? What do you know government? You know,
fire departments, government organizations have jobs called public information officer, right,
(09:47):
They have people whose job is getting information to the
public in 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, And so I'll use the analogy
all the time. I thought I was so clever. I
just came to the I mean this business, and so
(10:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
So what I was told by the people who were
talking to me who are don't do this. We'll figure
it out, et cetera, et cetera. We got this covered
and it was just a bunch of hoopla.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
They didn't want my help obviously told.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
By fire departments essentially, but by the fire departments.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
The fire departments that I was working with loved what
I was doing, like this makes a lot telling you
not to do it. The emergency management people that I
was I was interacting with, Yeah, so they told me
not to do this. I did it in eighty days.
So anyway, the app launches August eleventh, twenty twenty one.
Seven days later, there was a pretty big fire in
(10:56):
Lower Lake County through a mobile home park and it
moved very fast.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
It was wind driven.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
It burned this mobile home park down, unfortunately. And Watch
Duty was there and we were very popular a ready
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 refrained from using that term. That's
(11:23):
that 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.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Everyone's using wash Judy.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
We're putting out intelligence no one had seen, and it
was everywhere overnight.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Well, that upsets.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Emergency managers and certain fire officials who were much higher up.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
In the ranks.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
We got on a phone call where I had a
now retired battalion chief have his face right next to
the camera on zoom just screaming at me.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
I mean, it was wild.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
What was he saying? What was he screaming?
Speaker 2 (11:58):
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
(12:20):
and is foiable because it came across the radio that
the people up above them a caloes already had watched
duty and they didn't hear the radio traffic, but they
saw it and watch duty and they blocked the grant.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
To correct, which is it's a bummer for many reasons.
The first thing is that forward progress stopped 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 is 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
(13:01):
reality is, though, like we told the truth. 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
(13:24):
so man, it's really twisted and torn internally. But we
knew was the right thing to do, we kept doing it.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
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?
(13:53):
Why didn't the government do it.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Yeah, it's a great question, one that I ask myself
all the time.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
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 warning industry, but
(14:20):
it comes from tornadoes. So the tornado warning system is
a role model for watch duty.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
And let me explain why.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And this is public just to be clear, this is
a government system. Yep. Okay, yep.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
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 that
are like, what are we going to do with these
damn things we put up everywhere? Well, NWS is like,
I know what we can National.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Web use these for correct Yes, I know what we
can do with these.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
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, their 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
(15:12):
up anyway.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Besides the point, that's a history lesson.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Someone will call the NWS office who's a spotter, and say,
tornado touchdown in my backfield.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
It's about this Latin long well.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
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 what's happening, and
I can see it.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Sirens go off all around where that tornado is, and
everybody knows go to the basement.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Actually, it's funny what they do. You know what they do?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Take a guess, get in their car and go chase
after it.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Okay, some people do that, but the average human, good
point average human goes on their front porch.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
And looks out. We all want to know where to
is right.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I love the social science aer I'm doing this stuff.
It's so fascinating.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
I would do the same thing.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
And apparently they say the sky turns like a greenish
color where they know it's close.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So why don't we have that for fire? So we
did it for that. Like what's the problem?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
You tell me? I do not know, but anyway, I'll
potificate with you.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
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 fifties or something, where they like
(16:32):
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's it is so profoundly
bottom up rather than top down. And it seems like
a government is not set up to build bottom up systems.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
So what I mean.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
By this it's very simply plug because I now have
be who are competing with me.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
They think they're a competitor.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
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.
Is a game a telephone the process has broken. It's
not a weather spot or who makes a phone call
(17:34):
then the unilatter repress 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.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Still to come on the show, John and I talk
about the LA Fires of twenty twenty five. We talk
about floods, were watch duty is today and more. Okay,
let's talk about the LA Fires of twenty twenty five.
Tell me about what it meant for watch do.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
I mean?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Look, here's 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, because 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, Sisku and Delnore counties, we
(18:33):
have more subscribers than there are citizens in those counties.
That is how deeply penetrated we are in these areas.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
What does that mean? People subscribe on two phones. They
subscribe for the county over. I know, what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (18:44):
The county over? That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So everybody has it. Everybody has it the way everybody
has correct.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Yeah, it's insane, right, it's wild.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
And so we've already been like the lifeline for these
these communities, including my own.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Now let's bring La back into the situation.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
We never thought this would happen, never wanted this to happen,
right like we were there to meet the moment.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
But oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
You know, sixteen thousand structures destroyed, thirty two 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.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
When you say hurricane because it was so because the
winds were so high and that was so bad.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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 it particularly a dangerous situation.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
It's a level of red flag above red flag.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
It means high winds, dry fuels, low well to humidity,
everything is ripe for something real bad to happen. So
we staffed up, we got everyone ready, and then sure enough,
ten thirty in the morning on the seventh, all hell
broke loose in including our systems, which didn't crash, but
I mean we were sleeping in shifts. I mean we
(20:14):
were doing hundreds of thousands of new downloads an hour.
We had one quarter of La download watch duty in
the first week. I mean it exploded overnight, right, We
more than doubled.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Our user count.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And this is this time four engineers who kept this
thing up doing one hundred thousand requests a second, which
is like Wikipedia scale, with four duds 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
(20:47):
GIS systems that they used crashed, cal fire systems crashed.
Everybody turned to us, and it was I didn't sleep right.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
For a month, I think after that.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
So there's this photo that I saw you mentioned somewhere,
so I looked it up, 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
(21:19):
wall in this big room of this government organization is
watch Duty. Is your app during the LA fires? What
do you make of that?
Speaker 2 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
This is a story of failure.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
How the hell did a couple misfit hackers had radio
operators built 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.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
I'm upset. We can do better.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
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, yeah, the case.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
And it's not because the emergency managers don't care. It's
it's not that like, no, it's nothing that.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Don't 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?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
This is an interesting question.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
So I have a couple of theorists 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
pure bred capitalist. My point is is like people who
are trying to go build great things in Silicon Valley
(22:49):
are oftentimes money oriented. So they're much more likely to
go work at Androl, which can sell to the DoD
now the DOW, than they are selling to firefighters who
can barely afford a fire engine. Right, So like it's
just basic capitalism. I don't like what I believe, but
like this is what I've seen.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Maybe, but like there are lots of witch software products.
I mean, I 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,
(23:27):
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
(23:48):
you built works.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Absolutely, that is part of it. But there's a misnomer
on there. The data comes from the government, right, it.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Comes from it comes from individual people who are employed
by the government. Right, it comes from firefighters who are
talking to each asty. But it doesn't it doesn't have
to get aggregated up to some public information official who
then has to ask his boss if he can, you know,
send the press release or whatever it is, right.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Right, 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. Yeah, 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
(24:37):
buying this stuff.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Let's talk about let's talk about how watch Duty 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
do you have you must have the app hand, you know.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, let's see what's actively happening right now. You're picking
a day that we never know what's happening. Yeah, luckily,
knock on wood.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Right now it's a.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Little bit quiet, so we're going to pick. There's a
fire that is burning up here in Solano County called
the Putah Fire. It's very strange name.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Has an eight la to our listeners who speak Spanish,
it has an aged so it's not what you yes, okay, goodness,
I clicked on it and it tells me, so tell
me what I'm looking at says, it says, what is
this is the address or something twenty five five hundred
block of CAA one eighth one. It's a highway. It's
just telling me the address of where it started California, Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And you can see the pin drop that little flam
icon is where the fire started. That's not where it's
got and.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
There's like a red boundary around it. Is that where
the fire is burning? What is that? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (25:46):
That is where the fire is burned. Fires are only mapped.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Once or twice a day, depending In California, we have
an overflight called the Fire's Program that flies with people
inside with an infrared camera, so that gets more real time,
but oftentimes you're not going to get a fire perimeter
for a day or days, depending on how remote your
area is.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Frankly, so tell me what else this tells me about
the fire?
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, So what's what?
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Really?
Speaker 3 (26:13):
The magic is in the reporting.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
So if you look on the bottom of that page,
you see what would we referred to as a news
feed 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.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Coming, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
So it notifies you, right, And so the story is
where the magic is.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
There's a message it looks like so there's oh, it
started as a prescription I burn YEP, and then that
part was an automated message five days ago, and then
one day ago there's a message from Evan Jacob's regional captain.
Does that mean they are on your staff or they're
a volunteer? What is regional captain mean?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
He's paid staff. He's actually training to be a tanker
pilot right now in Montana.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
I love that it says evacuation warnings have been requested
for Golden Bear estates and Bobcat Ranch. The fire is
five to six acres burning in the grass and currently
hung up on a ridge. Highway twenty eight 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
(27:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
So these are all the tactics.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
These are all the tactics that they're 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, oh, okay,
it's not near me.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Engines are coming, And the next thing you.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Know, they're like forward progress has been stopped and they
could just turn their mind off again.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
They're like, you know what, it's okay.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Huh, you gotta close.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
So there adrenaline is up. They're still paranoid.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Is it's over. Is a message that says it's over.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Correct, You're gonna be okay, turn your brain off, go
back to lunch.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Is there a real of call it false positives? I mean,
if I see somebody, right, evacuation warnings have been requested, Like,
it'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
seems complicated.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
It is complicated, but it's the truth. Yeah, And so
that's a fun one. The truth is hard, right.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
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?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Absolutely we have we have a code of conducts 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.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I don't know that. What's an incident with an incident?
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Firefighter death I see right, or engine roll over our life.
There are there are scanners out there who do not
have this journalistic integrity and they'll say engine number three
forty seven rolled. Someone's wife or husband is going to
hear that and think they're dead. Right, That is not useful.
So we don't publish block numbers, we don't publish names.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
You can see.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Even the fire that we're talking about right now, we
don't have an address, an exact address. We don't say one, two, three,
four 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
(30:41):
on the ridge, it's not moving, the tankers are coming.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
That story is important. So there are lines, and we
do have practices for this to your point.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yes, 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 send in DoorDash to each other anymore? Right,
Like what is it like? What is this thing you
have built?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
At this point? It's become a big thing.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
It's almost sixty paid staff, about three hundred 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 and
they can't help it. You know, just because you hang
up your yellows doesn't mean to stop fighting fire, and
(31:28):
so hits wild. We have dispatchers and firefighters and law
enforcement officers, sons and daughters of firefighters who've been hearing
the radio chatter and the background their entire life, and
so hits their way to be of service. And so
a lot of them who are passionate about their hobbies
and somehow they got lucky enough we found each other
and now we can pay them more money than they
(31:49):
were doing at a job. But 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.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
And so the volunteers are listening to radios and sharing
the information through the app. That's basically what they're.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Doing twenty four And the important thing to note here
is that in the background, we use slack for everything, right, so.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Chat for you, No, it's Chat or Microsoft Teams or whatever.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
We divided up the country and slack in 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 Puza 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.
(32:42):
Some come over the radio. So what happens is it
drops a notification and slack everybody in that region sees, oh, shoot,
there's a fire. They start 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
(33:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
It's interestingly low tech at a certain level. Right. That's
actually the people listening to the radio and checking each
other is sort of.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Wild, But that's how firefighters fight fire.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah right, Yeah, we just plug into the same infrastructure
they're plugging into.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I know.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
It like blows people's minds.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
We think we have like satellites and we can track
every hotspot, like there's some amazing future.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
But literally people talking to each other being like, hey,
there's a fire over here, somebody come help me put
it out.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
You got it?
Speaker 1 (33:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
That is that is correct, that is happening right now. Actually,
we use tons of AI to help US sift and
soar 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
(34:24):
fifteen acres not fifty acres.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
So hard one. It's a hard one in the English language.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Well, and especially when it's radio chatter over one hundred
and fifty five megahertz frequencies deep out in the woods.
Their static and so it's a little challenging. So our
goal is to again enable the humans. It's a copilot model,
not a replace the human model.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
So you were talking about how some government officials were
antagonistic when you were starting out. I understand that you're
now you now have a product that that governments are
actually buying from you. Not only you're working with governments,
but they're a client. Tell me about that. So watch
(35:08):
Study is a free anyone can download it.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
There's no sign up, no email, no tracking, no phone number,
no nothing. It's like Craigslist. It's it's just there and
it works. So that's that's the point right now. If
you let you become a member of our nonprofit organization.
You can pay twenty five dollars 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
(35:31):
the helicopters, and I can see where they're working. And
then if you spend ninety nine dollars 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 and tones? Where are the repeaters because radios have
to hit repeaters to.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Bounce out to the next canyon.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
So these are things that firefighters would want to know,
like jurisdictional boundaries and power lines. Yes, I'm worried about
a fire coming to my house. These are not things
that I'm preoccupied with. That's correct, and that's how that's
why it's valuable. Know 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?
(36:16):
Who's buying that.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, I think there's probably about thirty forty thousand professionals
currently using I'd have to look.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
It changes a lot. We've been selling like crazy recently.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
But that's that's a lot. I mean, that's I mean,
there's that many. It's a lot of firefighters, right, presumably
that's mostly firefighters or what.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Who is now?
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, okay, now it's actually it's actually mostly utilities, powerwater, 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.
(36:54):
And if you sign up with like your Yahoo account
that you signed up with fifteen years ago, like, I
don't know who this person is.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
So right, But if it's whatever PG and E dot
com or something, then you know that it's correct.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
They're one of our largest customers, right, and they help
support us. But we found though, as we go through
fire departments and we have a lot more relationship 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 seventeen or seventy different people all paying for this.
I'm like, you guys, realize there's a discount a lot
(37:27):
if you all buy in bulk. And they're like, oh
my god, this is great. 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.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
What does that mean when you say overlay their data.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
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 correctly,
or water lines or railroads right, it could be any
of these things.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
It's men, women and equipment in the way.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
So it's like it's like gis geographical information is just
like adding layers the map.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Correct 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.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
It turns out it's not.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
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 of people in a
room somewhere and only they can see it.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Well, you're back in that the top down world. Right,
that's right. This is my hammer and a nail. Like
to me, every problem in this story looks like top
down versus bottom up.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
It is it is.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yes, you're absolutely right, and so we've been able to
provide an immense amount of impact to troubleman, 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 has all their six hundred and fifty buildings in there,
(39:06):
and so it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
But when they use it, are they using the app
like I'm using but they can lay there? 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.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
You got it, yeap.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
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 CF I was
missing anything, and it was floods.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Floods are new just yesterday.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Congratulations, tell me about floods.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Thank you. Well.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
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.
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.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
I didn't know that. I didn't know that more people
died from flood This is in the United States.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah, fires don't kill that many people, believe it or not.
It definitely kills people, and we just saw in the
Palace dates and even fires it does. But like the
Kerville flood as you just saw last year in July
fourth killed one hundred and twenty five people. Twenty five
of them were little girls Texas summer in Texas, that's right. Yeah,
And so floods have been a much bigger problem for
(40:30):
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 Judy today, you'll see all the
NWS polygons and alerts. So you can see the Doppler radar,
you can see where the flood warnings are.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
And then my favorite.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Feature, because I live near a river here is the
river gauges. To the river gauges are actually operated by
the US 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.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Beautiful.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
Analog love analog, man, I do.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
So what's really cool for me living here is that
if you live by a river, everybody knows their number.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
So I live near the Russian River. Here's what I
mean by their number.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
The number is when I have to GTFO when things
are going to get real south, real fast, right, we
got to get western. So some people live at twenty feet,
some people live at twenty eight feet. Some people are
above the hill and don't care at all, right, but
they have to know their number.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
And so that number is the depth of the river
near your house. Is that what that number is?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
You got it right, And that's really when you start
to know what to do.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
And is actually what you care about the depth of
the river upriver? Presumably you want to know before it gets.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
To you that is that's right, deep, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
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
pushed notified now I know.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
That is 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 watched Guda 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
(42:53):
we'll actually ping you and start doing the same thing
we did in the Garden Grove has Matt incident that
almost exploded in Orange County. Is we just listened to
the pios, We listened to incident commanders, and we relay
human consumable information for you to follow along with.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
So it's a yes.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And there is more digital signal in flood than there
is in fire.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
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?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Oh? I think we've talked about a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
But like, what does it look like to have like
a disaster a learning platform that just works across the
board like that.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
This should have been a solved problem.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
Right, NWS and FEMA and everyone should have gotten together
just 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 it's 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, and you'll see all these other events that
you care about, even if you're not a weather nerd, right,
(43:55):
because 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
(44:16):
when this happens, when fire comes lava, when 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.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay,
let's do the lightning round. I love jargon, and I
feel like the radio traffic that you and your colleagues
(44:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Well, there's a couple, and we don't always abbreviate them, actually,
and the fire surface 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.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Know, all resources requested.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Sounds bad.
Speaker 3 (45:27):
That's a signal to us where like, holy shit, this
is going to be a really bad one.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
And then you hear things like reporter 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 of the vegetation is real, and so the
report on conditions is like, that's what that's what we're
waiting for.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
That's all we want to know. So that's a really
big one.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Give me a little like do they do the tens?
I mean, I know ten four is a classic, but
aren't there a bunch of tens? Ten? Ten, ten, twenty.
Is that not a thing?
Speaker 3 (45:59):
No, not not really, not really.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
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, Like fire service is really a mutual
aid thing. And so there's lots of other people involved
in listening. So it's every color of every engine and
every patch has to speak English on the same radio
traffic radio channels, right, and then add in power, water
(46:24):
light tailco railroads. There's firefighting railroad engines. There are huge
engines with massive cannons and they drive the ravines, wetting
everything wild. It's pretty it's the photos are intense. It's
absolutely bonkers. And then you have dot DPW. They're trying
to open up roads and keep things moving. Like mutual
(46:45):
aid is mutual.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
That's correct.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
What's another domain besides emergencies natural disasters that might benefit
from this kind of community sourced bottom up information.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
I mean that's an easy one to answer, right, I mean,
like look at the the os int community or open
source intelligence community, that happens on Twitter and other places.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Now we call it x but.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
There's tons of people who do incredible amount of war
reporting and monitoring and intelligence gathering and OS and Defender
is a really good one on on on Twitter, and
these these guys and gals are really good at gathering
intelligence and spreading the info to the world. And so
there's a lot of other role models of this.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
What's an example of what they figure out? Those those
kinds of people.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
They track airplane flights and monitors for example, they're like, hey,
there's all these KC one thirty is all flying over
the ocean right now. KC one thirty is a refueling plane.
And when you see like ten refueling planes crossing the pond,
you're like.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Oh, oh, something's up.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Right, And so like there's all these little ways that
you can look at this intelligence and glean something from it.
So it's everywhere, and like Wikipedia is open source and
tell right, like, yes, it's not too dissimilar, and so
this exists other places.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a really interesting, uh kind of analogous
organization to watch duty in a weird way, right, it's
it's bottom up information. If you weren't working on watch duty.
What would you be working on I'd probably be woodworking. Frankly,
I have a big ranch to manage. What was the
last thing you built out of wood?
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Just last week or two weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
I just finished four very large, twelve foot long redwood
tables on rolling wheels, so I can entertain and have
have big parties. And I just had a bunch of
fire chiefs over spent the night a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Which was awesome.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
You had a slumber party with fire chiefs.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
It's more of a you know, living boys dream you get,
except that I can drink bourbon and play with fire.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
It's the twelve year old boys dream. It's it's great.
What's what's the DIY project? You got in over your
head on.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Watch Didy?
Speaker 2 (49:18):
You know, like this thing is a monster, like what
we knew we were gonna you know, catch you know,
ride the dragon. But it's this thing's bigger than we
then we could.
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Have hoped or expected. So that's a pretty big one.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
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 freaking pipes.
I am chasing water problems. I have a mile and
(49:49):
a half a pipe, my wells 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.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
I fight my way out of everything, including the one
I got myself into the watch duty. But like I
just I don't give up, and I know I can
solve these problems.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
What's your water problem? Right now?
Speaker 2 (50:21):
I'm losing about two hundred 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
thirty five gallons thirty five thousand gallons in tanks.
Speaker 3 (50:34):
When I open the.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Valve, the water comes out, so it's gravity fed, mostly
for fire reasons. 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.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
So I have to address it. At some point.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
I might have two years, I might have two days.
It's eventually going to break. What's your next big project?
Probably some tree houses that might be next. I have
a couple of cabins, I have a couple of yurts.
Speaker 3 (51:03):
I have more to build.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
I've always wanted to build treehouses. I've got to do
a couple of bridges as well. Have a real housing
crisis here on my property.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
We have too many friends and guests and I want
places them to stay.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
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 taxis and insurance I paid this land, man, I
don't own it, you know.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
I'll give it to the nonprofit when I'm dead.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
And I want to keep this thing going and keep
innovating here and bringing people together to build weird things
that change the future.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
Great ending. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
Here, Very welcome. It's a lot of fun. I love
talking about it. I do it every day.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
John Mills is the co founder and CEO of Watch Duty.
Please let us know what you think of the show,
which you want to hear more of, which you want
to hear less of particular guest ideas. You can email
us at problem at pushkin dot fm. I read all
the emails. You can also find me on x grum LinkedIn.
(52:11):
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 Hansdale She and edited by Lydia
Jean Kott. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next
week with another episode of What's Your Problem
Pushkin. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem? And
my guest today is John Mills. John is the CEO
(00:36):
and co founder of a nonprofit called watch Duty. John's
problem is this, 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
(00:56):
seen in recent disasters fires in LA and floods in Texas,
those government systems can and do fail, and in twenty
twenty one, John and his colleagues launched watch Duty to
fill the gap. At watch Duty, paid employees and volunteers
track public information like firefires, radio chatter, and they provide
(01:17):
near real time updates on the watch Duty app. So far,
Watch Duty has focused mainly on fires, but they just
rolled out coverage for floods as well. Watch Duty was
a key source of information for the LA fires in
early twenty twenty five, and today millions of people use
the app, and those users include, interestingly, a lot of
(01:38):
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 watch Duty succeed where the government
had failed? John started Watch Duty after he moved to
Sonoma County in northern California. At that point, he had
(01:59):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
A month after I bought this place in twenty nineteen,
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.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Around and I'm like, I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
And then I go outside look at it, and another
one shows up with a water bucket on the bottom.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
That's when I realized I was in danger and something
was happening.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
It's a great question.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
And look, there are alerts everywhere, but as you have
probably seen from the news and the Palisades and Eaten.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Fires, the alerts are leave a lot to be desired.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And so those men and women are doing the best
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
(03:30):
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
(03:50):
a twenty acre fire, that can still change your life
or take.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
It twenty acre fire meaning small. If it's the acre
you live on, it's a big deal.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
To you, that's correct.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
And so who do you think I'm going to make
an app? Like how do you get from there to
the app?
Speaker 3 (04:15):
That fire was in November of twenty nineteen. I did nothing. Well,
it's not true. I didn't do nothing.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
I started building sprinkler systems, I started parting my home,
and I started preparing so, like 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 as understanding it. And then a fifty thousand
acre fire showed up from the dry lightning storm that
passed over northern California in twenty twenty. People remember this
(04:42):
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 of friends in Fountain Grove
by the Way, who almost lost her house.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
In twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
I already the whole thing, and I was watching from
across the hill, and I spent day and night listening
to fire surface radio chatter, on the internet, researching, learning,
watching fire cameras, and just trying to figure out what
is going on around here?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
How do I get my bearing stretch. So that's what
really triggered me.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
House was spared, thankfully, land was spared and ended a
quarter mile for 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 firewives and fire safe community groups.
I went on ride along with fire chiefs man. After
talking to chiefs, you realize that like every Silicon Valley
(05:34):
techie who shows up is like hate chief if you
thought about drones, and they just rolled their eyes like,
oh my god, yeah I have a drone. I got
it right, And so yes, I'm in there chatting with
them and they were talking about their new nine one
one 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.
(05:56):
I'm like, what do you mean you don't get a
photo literally just text a photo? Yeah, oh my goodness,
Like how did you even buy this? They're like, look,
we're actually kind of bomb, but like we spent a
lot of money. It took five 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.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
And that's when it hit me.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
And that's how it all came to fruition.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
So when you say radio operators, like who are these people?
Who are the people you're banding together with?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
So when I went through my second fire, you listen
to the radios yourself, the fire service radio.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
So I have a radio here at.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
My desk, but you can also hear them online on
like broadcastify dot 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 norical 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
(07:14):
were their answer for their community. And so they started
staying up twenty four hours a day during those fires
that were happening, and they started to broadcast what they
were hearing to their.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Users on Facebook.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Some of them had groups with seventy one hundred thousand
users on Twitter.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
This is where everybody went.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
So I just want to 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
(07:55):
is that bottom up emergency management system.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
That's what's happening. It is that analog in that symbol.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, that is wild. Okay, So these are your people?
So you now, you you what are you going to do?
You got your people, you got your what is your idea?
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Well, the idea is that these 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're sometimes
you see something that you can't not see again or unsee.
And that's when I was like, oh my god, if
(08:33):
I can convince those people that joined me and we
build our own emurgency, youre learning product and app, we
can change the world.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
We know.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
No, it did work. It is working. I mean was
there what 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?
Speaker 2 (08:56):
I mean we're still figuring things out. But the implementation
was not very hard. My background is an engineering and
software that.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Was easy to build. I built the app in eighty days.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I wrote most of the code myself with a bunch
of other volunteers because I was Lloyd at the time,
in between companies, just selling my last one, and so
I said, this is my time in life.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
To provide value and have impact here.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
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 uh, what do
fire departments think? What do you know government? You know,
fire departments, government organizations have jobs called public information officer, right,
(09:47):
They have people whose job is getting information to the
public in 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, And so I'll use the analogy
all the time. I thought I was so clever. I
just came to the I mean this business, and so
(10:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
So what I was told by the people who were
talking to me who are don't do this. We'll figure
it out, et cetera, et cetera. We got this covered
and it was just a bunch of hoopla.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
They didn't want my help obviously told.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
By fire departments essentially, but by the fire departments.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
The fire departments that I was working with loved what
I was doing, like this makes a lot telling you
not to do it. The emergency management people that I
was I was interacting with, Yeah, so they told me
not to do this. I did it in eighty days.
So anyway, the app launches August eleventh, twenty twenty one.
Seven days later, there was a pretty big fire in
(10:56):
Lower Lake County through a mobile home park and it
moved very fast.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
It was wind driven.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
It burned this mobile home park down, unfortunately. And Watch
Duty was there and we were very popular a ready
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 refrained from using that term. That's
(11:23):
that 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.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Everyone's using wash Judy.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
We're putting out intelligence no one had seen, and it
was everywhere overnight.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Well, that upsets.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Emergency managers and certain fire officials who were much higher up.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
In the ranks.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
We got on a phone call where I had a
now retired battalion chief have his face right next to
the camera on zoom just screaming at me.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
I mean, it was wild.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
What was he saying? What was he screaming?
Speaker 2 (11:58):
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
(12:20):
and is foiable because it came across the radio that
the people up above them a caloes already had watched
duty and they didn't hear the radio traffic, but they
saw it and watch duty and they blocked the grant.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
To correct, which is it's a bummer for many reasons.
The first thing is that forward progress stopped 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 is 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
(13:01):
reality is, though, like we told the truth. 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
(13:24):
so man, it's really twisted and torn internally. But we
knew was the right thing to do, we kept doing it.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
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?
(13:53):
Why didn't the government do it.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Yeah, it's a great question, one that I ask myself
all the time.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
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 warning industry, but
(14:20):
it comes from tornadoes. So the tornado warning system is
a role model for watch duty.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
And let me explain why.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
And this is public just to be clear, this is
a government system. Yep. Okay, yep.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
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 that
are like, what are we going to do with these
damn things we put up everywhere? Well, NWS is like,
I know what we can National.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Web use these for correct Yes, I know what we
can do with these.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
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, their 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
(15:12):
up anyway.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Besides the point, that's a history lesson.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Someone will call the NWS office who's a spotter, and say,
tornado touchdown in my backfield.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
It's about this Latin long well.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
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 what's happening, and
I can see it.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Sirens go off all around where that tornado is, and
everybody knows go to the basement.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Actually, it's funny what they do. You know what they do?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Take a guess, get in their car and go chase
after it.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Okay, some people do that, but the average human, good
point average human goes on their front porch.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
And looks out. We all want to know where to
is right.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I love the social science aer I'm doing this stuff.
It's so fascinating.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
I would do the same thing.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
And apparently they say the sky turns like a greenish
color where they know it's close.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
So why don't we have that for fire? So we
did it for that. Like what's the problem?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
You tell me? I do not know, but anyway, I'll
potificate with you.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
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 fifties or something, where they like
(16:32):
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's it is so profoundly
bottom up rather than top down. And it seems like
a government is not set up to build bottom up systems.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
So what I mean.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
By this it's very simply plug because I now have
be who are competing with me.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
They think they're a competitor.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
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.
Is a game a telephone the process has broken. It's
not a weather spot or who makes a phone call
(17:34):
then the unilatter repress 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.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Still to come on the show, John and I talk
about the LA Fires of twenty twenty five. We talk
about floods, were watch duty is today and more. Okay,
let's talk about the LA Fires of twenty twenty five.
Tell me about what it meant for watch do.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
I mean?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Look, here's 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, because 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, Sisku and Delnore counties, we
(18:33):
have more subscribers than there are citizens in those counties.
That is how deeply penetrated we are in these areas.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
What does that mean? People subscribe on two phones. They
subscribe for the county over. I know, what does that mean?
Speaker 3 (18:44):
The county over? That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So everybody has it. Everybody has it the way everybody
has correct.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Yeah, it's insane, right, it's wild.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
And so we've already been like the lifeline for these
these communities, including my own.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Now let's bring La back into the situation.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
We never thought this would happen, never wanted this to happen,
right like we were there to meet the moment.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
But oh my goodness.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
You know, sixteen thousand structures destroyed, thirty two 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.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
When you say hurricane because it was so because the
winds were so high and that was so bad.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
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 it particularly a dangerous situation.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
It's a level of red flag above red flag.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
It means high winds, dry fuels, low well to humidity,
everything is ripe for something real bad to happen. So
we staffed up, we got everyone ready, and then sure enough,
ten thirty in the morning on the seventh, all hell
broke loose in including our systems, which didn't crash, but
I mean we were sleeping in shifts. I mean we
(20:14):
were doing hundreds of thousands of new downloads an hour.
We had one quarter of La download watch duty in
the first week. I mean it exploded overnight, right, We
more than doubled.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Our user count.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And this is this time four engineers who kept this
thing up doing one hundred thousand requests a second, which
is like Wikipedia scale, with four duds 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
(20:47):
GIS systems that they used crashed, cal fire systems crashed.
Everybody turned to us, and it was I didn't sleep right.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
For a month, I think after that.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
So there's this photo that I saw you mentioned somewhere,
so I looked it up, 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
(21:19):
wall in this big room of this government organization is
watch Duty. Is your app during the LA fires? What
do you make of that?
Speaker 2 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
This is a story of failure.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
How the hell did a couple misfit hackers had radio
operators built 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.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
I'm upset. We can do better.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
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, yeah, the case.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
And it's not because the emergency managers don't care. It's
it's not that like, no, it's nothing that.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Don't 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?
Speaker 3 (22:27):
This is an interesting question.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
So I have a couple of theorists 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
pure bred capitalist. My point is is like people who
are trying to go build great things in Silicon Valley
(22:49):
are oftentimes money oriented. So they're much more likely to
go work at Androl, which can sell to the DoD
now the DOW, than they are selling to firefighters who
can barely afford a fire engine. Right, So like it's
just basic capitalism. I don't like what I believe, but
like this is what I've seen.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Maybe, but like there are lots of witch software products.
I mean, I 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,
(23:27):
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
(23:48):
you built works.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Absolutely, that is part of it. But there's a misnomer
on there. The data comes from the government, right, it.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Comes from it comes from individual people who are employed
by the government. Right, it comes from firefighters who are
talking to each asty. But it doesn't it doesn't have
to get aggregated up to some public information official who
then has to ask his boss if he can, you know,
send the press release or whatever it is, right.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Right, 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. Yeah, 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
(24:37):
buying this stuff.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
Let's talk about let's talk about how watch Duty 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
do you have you must have the app hand, you know.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, let's see what's actively happening right now. You're picking
a day that we never know what's happening. Yeah, luckily,
knock on wood.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Right now it's a.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Little bit quiet, so we're going to pick. There's a
fire that is burning up here in Solano County called
the Putah Fire. It's very strange name.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Has an eight la to our listeners who speak Spanish,
it has an aged so it's not what you yes, okay, goodness,
I clicked on it and it tells me, so tell
me what I'm looking at says, it says, what is
this is the address or something twenty five five hundred
block of CAA one eighth one. It's a highway. It's
just telling me the address of where it started California, Okay.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
And you can see the pin drop that little flam
icon is where the fire started. That's not where it's
got and.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
There's like a red boundary around it. Is that where
the fire is burning? What is that? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (25:46):
That is where the fire is burned. Fires are only mapped.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Once or twice a day, depending In California, we have
an overflight called the Fire's Program that flies with people
inside with an infrared camera, so that gets more real time,
but oftentimes you're not going to get a fire perimeter
for a day or days, depending on how remote your
area is.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Frankly, so tell me what else this tells me about
the fire?
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah, So what's what?
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Really?
Speaker 3 (26:13):
The magic is in the reporting.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
So if you look on the bottom of that page,
you see what would we referred to as a news
feed 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.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Coming, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
So it notifies you, right, And so the story is
where the magic is.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
There's a message it looks like so there's oh, it
started as a prescription I burn YEP, and then that
part was an automated message five days ago, and then
one day ago there's a message from Evan Jacob's regional captain.
Does that mean they are on your staff or they're
a volunteer? What is regional captain mean?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
He's paid staff. He's actually training to be a tanker
pilot right now in Montana.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
I love that it says evacuation warnings have been requested
for Golden Bear estates and Bobcat Ranch. The fire is
five to six acres burning in the grass and currently
hung up on a ridge. Highway twenty eight 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
(27:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
So these are all the tactics.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
These are all the tactics that they're 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, oh, okay,
it's not near me.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Engines are coming, And the next thing you.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Know, they're like forward progress has been stopped and they
could just turn their mind off again.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
They're like, you know what, it's okay.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Huh, you gotta close.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
So there adrenaline is up. They're still paranoid.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Is it's over. Is a message that says it's over.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Correct, You're gonna be okay, turn your brain off, go
back to lunch.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Is there a real of call it false positives? I mean,
if I see somebody, right, evacuation warnings have been requested, Like,
it'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
seems complicated.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
It is complicated, but it's the truth. Yeah, And so
that's a fun one. The truth is hard, right.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
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?
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Absolutely we have we have a code of conducts 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.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I don't know that. What's an incident with an incident?
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Firefighter death I see right, or engine roll over our life.
There are there are scanners out there who do not
have this journalistic integrity and they'll say engine number three
forty seven rolled. Someone's wife or husband is going to
hear that and think they're dead. Right, That is not useful.
So we don't publish block numbers, we don't publish names.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
You can see.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Even the fire that we're talking about right now, we
don't have an address, an exact address. We don't say one, two, three,
four 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
(30:41):
on the ridge, it's not moving, the tankers are coming.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
That story is important. So there are lines, and we
do have practices for this to your point.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yes, 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 send in DoorDash to each other anymore? Right,
Like what is it like? What is this thing you
have built?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
At this point? It's become a big thing.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
It's almost sixty paid staff, about three hundred 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 and
they can't help it. You know, just because you hang
up your yellows doesn't mean to stop fighting fire, and
(31:28):
so hits wild. We have dispatchers and firefighters and law
enforcement officers, sons and daughters of firefighters who've been hearing
the radio chatter and the background their entire life, and
so hits their way to be of service. And so
a lot of them who are passionate about their hobbies
and somehow they got lucky enough we found each other
and now we can pay them more money than they
(31:49):
were doing at a job. But 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.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
And so the volunteers are listening to radios and sharing
the information through the app. That's basically what they're.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Doing twenty four And the important thing to note here
is that in the background, we use slack for everything, right, so.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Chat for you, No, it's Chat or Microsoft Teams or whatever.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
We divided up the country and slack in 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 Puza 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.
(32:42):
Some come over the radio. So what happens is it
drops a notification and slack everybody in that region sees, oh, shoot,
there's a fire. They start 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
(33:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
It's interestingly low tech at a certain level. Right. That's
actually the people listening to the radio and checking each
other is sort of.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
Wild, But that's how firefighters fight fire.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Yeah right, Yeah, we just plug into the same infrastructure
they're plugging into.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I know.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
It like blows people's minds.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
We think we have like satellites and we can track
every hotspot, like there's some amazing future.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
But literally people talking to each other being like, hey,
there's a fire over here, somebody come help me put
it out.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
You got it?
Speaker 1 (33:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
That is that is correct, that is happening right now. Actually,
we use tons of AI to help US sift and
soar 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
(34:24):
fifteen acres not fifty acres.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
So hard one. It's a hard one in the English language.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Well, and especially when it's radio chatter over one hundred
and fifty five megahertz frequencies deep out in the woods.
Their static and so it's a little challenging. So our
goal is to again enable the humans. It's a copilot model,
not a replace the human model.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
So you were talking about how some government officials were
antagonistic when you were starting out. I understand that you're
now you now have a product that that governments are
actually buying from you. Not only you're working with governments,
but they're a client. Tell me about that. So watch
(35:08):
Study is a free anyone can download it.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
There's no sign up, no email, no tracking, no phone number,
no nothing. It's like Craigslist. It's it's just there and
it works. So that's that's the point right now. If
you let you become a member of our nonprofit organization.
You can pay twenty five dollars 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
(35:31):
the helicopters, and I can see where they're working. And
then if you spend ninety nine dollars 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 and tones? Where are the repeaters because radios have
to hit repeaters to.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
Bounce out to the next canyon.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
So these are things that firefighters would want to know,
like jurisdictional boundaries and power lines. Yes, I'm worried about
a fire coming to my house. These are not things
that I'm preoccupied with. That's correct, and that's how that's
why it's valuable. Know 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?
(36:16):
Who's buying that.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, I think there's probably about thirty forty thousand professionals
currently using I'd have to look.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
It changes a lot. We've been selling like crazy recently.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
But that's that's a lot. I mean, that's I mean,
there's that many. It's a lot of firefighters, right, presumably
that's mostly firefighters or what.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Who is now?
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, okay, now it's actually it's actually mostly utilities, powerwater, 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.
(36:54):
And if you sign up with like your Yahoo account
that you signed up with fifteen years ago, like, I
don't know who this person is.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
So right, But if it's whatever PG and E dot
com or something, then you know that it's correct.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
They're one of our largest customers, right, and they help
support us. But we found though, as we go through
fire departments and we have a lot more relationship 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 seventeen or seventy different people all paying for this.
I'm like, you guys, realize there's a discount a lot
(37:27):
if you all buy in bulk. And they're like, oh
my god, this is great. 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.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
What does that mean when you say overlay their data.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
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 correctly,
or water lines or railroads right, it could be any
of these things.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
It's men, women and equipment in the way.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
So it's like it's like gis geographical information is just
like adding layers the map.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Correct 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.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
It turns out it's not.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
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 of people in a
room somewhere and only they can see it.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Well, you're back in that the top down world. Right,
that's right. This is my hammer and a nail. Like
to me, every problem in this story looks like top
down versus bottom up.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
It is it is.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yes, you're absolutely right, and so we've been able to
provide an immense amount of impact to troubleman, 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 has all their six hundred and fifty buildings in there,
(39:06):
and so it makes sense.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
But when they use it, are they using the app
like I'm using but they can lay there? 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.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
You got it, yeap.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
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 CF I was
missing anything, and it was floods.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Floods are new just yesterday.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Congratulations, tell me about floods.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Thank you. Well.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
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.
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.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
I didn't know that. I didn't know that more people
died from flood This is in the United States.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Yeah, fires don't kill that many people, believe it or not.
It definitely kills people, and we just saw in the
Palace dates and even fires it does. But like the
Kerville flood as you just saw last year in July
fourth killed one hundred and twenty five people. Twenty five
of them were little girls Texas summer in Texas, that's right. Yeah,
And so floods have been a much bigger problem for
(40:30):
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 Judy today, you'll see all the
NWS polygons and alerts. So you can see the Doppler radar,
you can see where the flood warnings are.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
And then my favorite.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Feature, because I live near a river here is the
river gauges. To the river gauges are actually operated by
the US 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.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Beautiful.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
Analog love analog, man, I do.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
So what's really cool for me living here is that
if you live by a river, everybody knows their number.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
So I live near the Russian River. Here's what I
mean by their number.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
The number is when I have to GTFO when things
are going to get real south, real fast, right, we
got to get western. So some people live at twenty feet,
some people live at twenty eight feet. Some people are
above the hill and don't care at all, right, but
they have to know their number.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
And so that number is the depth of the river
near your house. Is that what that number is?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
You got it right, And that's really when you start
to know what to do.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
And is actually what you care about the depth of
the river upriver? Presumably you want to know before it gets.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
To you that is that's right, deep, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
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
pushed notified now I know.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
That is 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 watched Guda 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
(42:53):
we'll actually ping you and start doing the same thing
we did in the Garden Grove has Matt incident that
almost exploded in Orange County. Is we just listened to
the pios, We listened to incident commanders, and we relay
human consumable information for you to follow along with.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
So it's a yes.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And there is more digital signal in flood than there
is in fire.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
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?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Oh? I think we've talked about a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
But like, what does it look like to have like
a disaster a learning platform that just works across the
board like that.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
This should have been a solved problem.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
Right, NWS and FEMA and everyone should have gotten together
just 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 it's 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, and you'll see all these other events that
you care about, even if you're not a weather nerd, right,
(43:55):
because 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
(44:16):
when this happens, when fire comes lava, when 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.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay,
let's do the lightning round. I love jargon, and I
feel like the radio traffic that you and your colleagues
(44:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Well, there's a couple, and we don't always abbreviate them, actually,
and the fire surface 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.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
Know, all resources requested.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Sounds bad.
Speaker 3 (45:27):
That's a signal to us where like, holy shit, this
is going to be a really bad one.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
And then you hear things like reporter 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 of the vegetation is real, and so the
report on conditions is like, that's what that's what we're
waiting for.
Speaker 3 (45:49):
That's all we want to know. So that's a really
big one.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Give me a little like do they do the tens?
I mean, I know ten four is a classic, but
aren't there a bunch of tens? Ten? Ten, ten, twenty.
Is that not a thing?
Speaker 3 (45:59):
No, not not really, not really.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
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, Like fire service is really a mutual
aid thing. And so there's lots of other people involved
in listening. So it's every color of every engine and
every patch has to speak English on the same radio
traffic radio channels, right, and then add in power, water
(46:24):
light tailco railroads. There's firefighting railroad engines. There are huge
engines with massive cannons and they drive the ravines, wetting
everything wild. It's pretty it's the photos are intense. It's
absolutely bonkers. And then you have dot DPW. They're trying
to open up roads and keep things moving. Like mutual
(46:45):
aid is mutual.
Speaker 1 (46:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
That's correct.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
What's another domain besides emergencies natural disasters that might benefit
from this kind of community sourced bottom up information.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
I mean that's an easy one to answer, right, I mean,
like look at the the os int community or open
source intelligence community, that happens on Twitter and other places.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
Now we call it x but.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
There's tons of people who do incredible amount of war
reporting and monitoring and intelligence gathering and OS and Defender
is a really good one on on on Twitter, and
these these guys and gals are really good at gathering
intelligence and spreading the info to the world. And so
there's a lot of other role models of this.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
What's an example of what they figure out? Those those
kinds of people.
Speaker 2 (47:43):
They track airplane flights and monitors for example, they're like, hey,
there's all these KC one thirty is all flying over
the ocean right now. KC one thirty is a refueling plane.
And when you see like ten refueling planes crossing the pond,
you're like.
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Oh, oh, something's up.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Right, And so like there's all these little ways that
you can look at this intelligence and glean something from it.
So it's everywhere, and like Wikipedia is open source and
tell right, like, yes, it's not too dissimilar, and so
this exists other places.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a really interesting, uh kind of analogous
organization to watch duty in a weird way, right, it's
it's bottom up information. If you weren't working on watch duty.
What would you be working on I'd probably be woodworking. Frankly,
I have a big ranch to manage. What was the
last thing you built out of wood?
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Just last week or two weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
I just finished four very large, twelve foot long redwood
tables on rolling wheels, so I can entertain and have
have big parties. And I just had a bunch of
fire chiefs over spent the night a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Which was awesome.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
You had a slumber party with fire chiefs.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
It's more of a you know, living boys dream you get,
except that I can drink bourbon and play with fire.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
It's the twelve year old boys dream. It's it's great.
What's what's the DIY project? You got in over your
head on.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Watch Didy?
Speaker 2 (49:18):
You know, like this thing is a monster, like what
we knew we were gonna you know, catch you know,
ride the dragon. But it's this thing's bigger than we
then we could.
Speaker 3 (49:26):
Have hoped or expected. So that's a pretty big one.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
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 freaking pipes.
I am chasing water problems. I have a mile and
(49:49):
a half a pipe, my wells 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.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
I fight my way out of everything, including the one
I got myself into the watch duty. But like I
just I don't give up, and I know I can
solve these problems.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
What's your water problem? Right now?
Speaker 2 (50:21):
I'm losing about two hundred 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
thirty five gallons thirty five thousand gallons in tanks.
Speaker 3 (50:34):
When I open the.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
Valve, the water comes out, so it's gravity fed, mostly
for fire reasons. 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.
Speaker 3 (50:47):
So I have to address it. At some point.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
I might have two years, I might have two days.
It's eventually going to break. What's your next big project?
Probably some tree houses that might be next. I have
a couple of cabins, I have a couple of yurts.
Speaker 3 (51:03):
I have more to build.
Speaker 2 (51:04):
I've always wanted to build treehouses. I've got to do
a couple of bridges as well. Have a real housing
crisis here on my property.
Speaker 3 (51:12):
We have too many friends and guests and I want
places them to stay.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
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 taxis and insurance I paid this land, man, I
don't own it, you know.
Speaker 3 (51:26):
I'll give it to the nonprofit when I'm dead.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
And I want to keep this thing going and keep
innovating here and bringing people together to build weird things
that change the future.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
Great ending. Thanks for your time.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
Here, Very welcome. It's a lot of fun. I love
talking about it. I do it every day.
Speaker 1 (51:49):
John Mills is the co founder and CEO of Watch Duty.
Please let us know what you think of the show,
which you want to hear more of, which you want
to hear less of particular guest ideas. You can email
us at problem at pushkin dot fm. I read all
the emails. You can also find me on x grum LinkedIn.
(52:11):
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 Hansdale She and edited by Lydia
Jean Kott. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next
week with another episode of What's Your Problem
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