[00:06:17] Host: Before this technology, we would find out about fires through smelling smoke or seeing the change in the color of the sky or hearing multiple sirens or aircraft, like very rudimentary sensory experiences. This seems like, you know, we should be at a better place for how destructive these fires are, for how frequent these fires are, that it seems obvious that something like WatchDuty should have existed.

[00:06:54] Mills: Yeah, you're absolutely correct. And, you know, I think that what's interesting about WatchDuty is we built the obvious, right? It wasn't boil the ocean. It wasn't invent new things. It wasn't wait until the satellite showed up and did the whatever. And we have to do something now. And fires fought with radios and shovels, right? Water when you have it. But oftentimes it's cutting breaks, man, in the middle of nowhere. You have no water. And so you realize how primitive of an operation firefighting is and honestly how primitive WatchDuty is by design. It is very easy to use. It is simple. It is clean. It is boring, like Craigslist. I just wanted to be reliable and dependable and easy to understand and not so overly complicated that, frankly, people can't use it. I think there's something interesting about the disaster environment that I really appreciate, because when you look at when you look at all natural disasters, not just fires, you're going to find a pattern. Right?

So if you... I love history and I think it's important if you're a product person and entrepreneur to understand what came before you, because if you know what came before you, you can understand what's coming next. And many people are trying to build the future and don't know the past. And that gets people into trouble. They want things that won't exist yet. And you have to meet the moment, not meet the moment five years from now, because if you're like me, I live in the wildlands. I'm even in the WUI. I'm talking to you now on a ranch off the grid where I make my own power, water and infrastructure. I don't have connectivity to the outside world other than my Starlink. And so you really end up fending for yourself with what you have.

But back to my point. So if you look at tornadoes, it's really interesting because tornado sirens have been around for a hundred years. They work extraordinarily well. They're on poles. They have sirens. They hit the button all the damn time and everybody is used to it. The architecture in the area also is indicative of disaster. They've been building tornado shelters for a hundred years. Right? They've been dealing with this for a very, very long time. What I find to be frustrating about fire is people treat it differently. It's not different. Right? They're an unfightable force. Oftentimes you cannot win. You are not stopping a wind driven wildland fire. You are not stopping a hurricane. You're not stopping a tornado. So why do we treat them any differently? Why don't we study what has been done in other environments and say, hey, they've really figured this out. Let's build a system that mimics what we know works. And that is sharing more information than less. Right. Right now with fires, you get less information until WatchDuty showed up. So I think it's important to look at all perils similarly and realize that if people can't see or smell or know where it's coming or going, it's the same type of problem. How do we inform people with information so they can either evacuate slowly, get into their shelter? How do I do this? Not tell people when it's too late, which we're seeing over and over and over again. And we just saw in in in Kerr County, Texas, unfortunately.

[00:09:55] Host: Yeah. I connected to that here in in L.A. On January 6th, I received the red flag warning about the winds, potential hazardous winds. National Weather Service sent us that notification. So I knew that that was coming. I didn't even know that the fires were happening until they exploded. So that's the disconnect that the fires already existed in this wind experience, in this wind occurrence. But it wasn't until it was too far gone that those notifications started coming out, that those warnings started coming out. I live in Pasadena currently, and I didn't hear about your app until I was in evacuation warning. And someone said, “oh, you need to get on to WatchDuty. And I know a lot of other Los Angeles residents learned about the app within a couple of days. How prepared were you for two point five million new users in such a short amount of time?

[00:11:05] Mills: Well, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, obviously we stayed up 100 percent uptime and didn't crash. We were preparing and we've been doing this for four years. But I mean, we had a man, I think we had maybe three or four million users at the end of December of 2024. And we nearly doubled our input. And then we were doing about one hundred thousand requests a second, about a couple of million users every hour. And it was an incredible amount of load. And luckily we were able to take it. But it was harrowing. It was harrowing for the engineers. It's harrowing for our radio operators who listen to first responders all day long. I mean, it definitely took us by surprise at the scale and magnitude of it. And frankly, it's the most heavily populated area that experiences fires. Right. Like the areas that we cover. Like if you go to Sonoma where I live or Siskiyou County up north and other places like that, I mean, everybody has WatchDuty everyone's phone goes off. Like we've been living with this for a long time. The Angelenos had not. I think when the fires first started, we had like maybe a hundred thousand users in L.A. and that ended up with literally one in every four people in L.A. had WatchDuty within like two or three days. So we were obviously prepared for scale, but that I think, you know, an order of magnitude bigger than we imagined it blowing up. And somehow we're able to meet the moment.

[00:12:34] Host: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I was addicted to it for weeks and not in a good way. But just in...

[00:12:46] Mills: I know, it's dramatic. Sorry about that.

[00:12:47] Host: I want to go over how the information is spread and disseminated through your reporters and to your users. A few weeks ago... I mean, this this happened so quickly, I was I was driving through Coldwater Canyon here in L.A. and I heard a helicopter hovering. I got the notification on my WatchDuty. And then moments later, all of the trucks came to respond. So WatchDuty notified me before the full response arrived on the scene. It's so fast. Could you kind of take us through once something is acknowledged, once the fire is noticed, how that information is spread through your reporters, the radio chatter and then sent to all of the users in the area?

[00:13:35] Mills: Yeah, I mean, it's really quite simple, which is the beauty of it is, you know, the reason that happens is that when a firehouse gets toned out, which is the term for page essentially in modern, well, I guess kids don't know what a pager is anymore. But when a notification goes to the firehouse, we hear those signals. So the minute some fire department, Coldwater Canyon, I'm trying to think what department that's near. That's not 69. That's farther away. The minute they get toned out, we get toned out. So what will happen is that we hear that signal, that analog to digital conversion happens where we hear those signals. We have computers that can monitor this stuff as well. We've built bots and all sorts of things that help us find these events that gets dropped into Slack. Slack is how we talk behind the scenes. And so we've divided the country. We're in 22 states now, but we divide the country into different regions. In California, we use the Cal Fire regioning system. So in the in the L.A. County region, so-and-so got toned out for this fire requesting engines, whatever it may be. And then anyone who is listening or available, volunteers and paid staff, about a little over 10 of them are paid staff. They volunteer. Then that becomes their fulltime job. They all turn their radios on and they start talking. Right. Fire in Coldwater Canyon, quarter acre rate of spread. Quarter acre rate of spread, RP, which is the reporting party, says, you know, half acre behind their house, moving up the hill or whatever.

Then we will look at the wildfire cameras. Hopefully something's looking at it. Luckily, they're pretty damn good at what they do. And so we can oftentimes get visual on it as well. Pretty quickly, we know tankers are taking off. And if we can see the column and know this is pretty bad, you can often see by the density and scale of the column how quickly it's growing. We'll oftentimes post before an engine gets on scene. Not usually. We don't usually do that. But when it's catastrophic, we're like, oh, my God, this is really bad. We've got to do this now. And so we'll make judgment calls that the government often doesn't make. It's not in their DNA. It's not that they're trying to hide things from us. They worry about fatiguing users, which is actually what happened in Kerrville with the flood. Right. Like, it's really sad to like.

Anyway, we'll come back to that in a second, how we go into other perils and what happens and how we don't fatigue our users and give them real information. It's challenging, right? But in situations like this, we know it's bad. And so someone will make the call watching multiple people make the call and they'll say, hey, this is bad. I'll take the con, which is the control. You guys help feed me information. And then so that them as a group will work together to feed what they're hearing from the radio, whether it's air attack, ground dispatch. And so we hear it all in real time. And that's how we do it. Right? Like, we go where they go. We hear what they hear. And that's how we do what we do.

[00:16:35] Host: And then you're really quick to notify when forward progression has been stopped as well. So there's always this kind of like relief element to it as well. It's not just about here's a fire you let you give the all clear almost signal as well.

[00:16:56] Mills: Yeah. I mean, that's something that I wish the emergency alerting services would start to learn is that the de-escalation is also really important. And that's what we call it. Like, we don't just send the alert and let you panic. We're listening there with you, right, trying to understand what's going on, let people know it's getting under control. And that that makes people feel better. Right. It's a whole arc of like, your heart rate goes up. This is near my house. That's my grandma's house. That's where I grew up. That's my school. And you start freaking out. We don't want you to do is turn to the turn to the news is not going to give you what you need or social media who's going to spread misinformation and randos are going to be telling you thoughts and prayers. My kid goes to school there and it's like, look, man, I feel for you. But like, that's not what I need in this moment. I actually need some clarity. And that's what we end up doing is giving clarity and peace of mind.

[00:17:48] Host: What has the response been from fire departments and forestry officials and other first responders? And I know you have multiple active and retired fire service members on your board and as reporters like Chief Fennessey of OC Fire Authority is a huge proponent and the reason why we're having this conversation right now.

[00:18:09] Mills: Yeah, I mean, those folks, I mean, they've come to our rescue, right, just like we come to theirs. That it's been it's been hard to get adoption through a lot of the government agencies and they're starting to to change their tune, which is wonderful because we're not there to fight fire. We're there to spread intelligence. Right. And so it took a while because a lot of them, it's their job to be a public information officer. Right. And so it's it's been it's been an interesting journey of, you know, fighting the man and letting them know that, like, we're not a fly by night organization. We train constantly. We've all done our FEMA PIO trainings. We have internal trainings. We have recertifications. These are not yahoos saying things on the Internet and freaking people out. This is not crowdsourced. Right? It's expert sourced. We only have about 50 people with permissions to post on WatchDuty and no one's posting alone unless there's no one there at night and they're freaked out, but they can actually page for help. And that will wake up our other staff reporters who help them come to their rescue. And so we're extraordinarily diligent.

Four years of doing it now. There's been a lot of trust gained. They're extraordinarily helpful. And frankly, we have a professional version of our product that fire departments, governments and power utilities are all buying our professional version, which means that we can support a free version for everybody. And so the tides are turning. The world is looking better and we're proud to be able to support these people who are fighting for us and risking their lives.

[00:19:37] Host: Your app also tracks for members aircraft carrying retardant and water drops. You can watch the aerial battle of these fires in real time. It marks where there are prescribed burns, which I think is wonderful. It shows the actual burn radius. It shows evacuation zones. Here in California, it shows where power outages are, and I'm sure that that's going to expand as well. It's a very intuitive app, but how can this information get to some of the more vulnerable population who also sometimes tend to be the less tech savvy? I'm talking about the parents and grandparents who can't post a photo to their Facebook page.

[00:20:34] Mills: It's a great question and one that we get all the time. So let's talk about vulnerable for a second. We have been serving a vulnerable population for a very long time. You guys didn't hear about us, frankly, because you didn't need to, unfortunately. I wish that that was not the case because I think it would have helped save some lives. If you go up to, again, the places I live, I will meet little old ladies who were in their 70s who meet me in tears at the post office and they tell me it's the only app they have on their phone, literally the only app. It is incredible to watch the adoption and how we have reached an audience that has never been reached before. They don't have Uber. They don't use Tinder. They're like 70-year-olds who are living in vulnerable communities like where I live. Part of this is very much on purpose why it is such a simple app to use because, frankly, a lot of firefighters I know are also similar. They're like, I don't want that crap. Everything is confusing and frustrating.

This was built for the vulnerable from the beginning. This was not built for LA. Yes, it works for LA, but it was actually built for people who get overlooked constantly like my neighbors who were seeing tankers overhead drop retardant down the road and they're like, what is going on here? That's who it was actually built for. If you look at our audience, we do surveys every year. Generally, the older people like filling out surveys, but man, 55 plus is a huge part of our population. It is crazy to get these love letters. We get handwritten letters and scripts that you can see they learned how to write in the 1950s. No one writes that way anymore. They just send us a $5 check and they're like, John, this is the only app I have on my phone. We love it so much. It's the weirdest thing. That was very much by design and it is much more deeply embedded in the community than people actually think or realize because when LA burns or New York floods, everyone thinks it's about them. I'm from New York, so I get it. We're like the pinnacle of the world. We don't even care about LA. It's bullshit.

People need technology to help them. I think that technologists are often overlooking everybody else. We're trying to build the next ride-sharing app, the next food delivery service, the next AI, whatever. You come out here and my neighbors and friends are like, man, I just want less fire and more water and my insurance not getting dropped and the power staying on. They're just like, no one speaks to me. The longer I'm here, the more I understand the cognitive dissonance between the rural people, I prefer the wild land people, and everybody else because they don't get help very often. That was really our goal when we started this thing is to help everybody else because as Thoreau says, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. We did a very good job distributing a product that looks high-tech, I guess, or feels high-tech but is actually usable by everybody.

[00:23:38] Host: In four years, we're coming up on the four-year anniversary of your launch. What have you learned about the nature of fires, about fire seasons, about the necessity of this information being accessible?

[00:24:00] Mills: I learned a lot of things. I didn't learn that. I built it because of those problems. I knew this wasn't going to get solved. I violently understood how challenging it was to work with these government organizations. I was trying to work with my local county and others, and they struggled to work with me because I'm a private citizen from Silicon Valley who doesn't know anything about their community and whatever other reasons were. I knew I'd meet great opposition. That's not what I learned. What I learned is just how dangerous and fragmented these systems actually are. That's what I really didn't understand. I didn't realize that in a mutual aid scenario, which is what fires are and a lot of perils are, there are going to be thousands of men and women in these base camps. It's called Incident Command Post, or ICP for short. There are going to be thousands of people in those camps. Let's talk about California. I've met people from New Jersey and Idaho on my road posting up an engine trying to figure out how they can be of service. They come from all over the world. There's Cal OES, there's Cal Fire, there's U.S. Forest Service. They don't really collaborate as well as you would think. It really operates more like a paramilitary operation. It's a little bit more cowboy than you'd imagine. Our military, for example, is very good at collaborating, lack of friendly fire, what we've learned through technology and how they plan top down. This is like a bunch of chiefs all working together in a very ragtag way. It's really quite dangerous. What they do is nothing short of incredible with what they have. That's what I've learned. They really need more help. They need more funding. They need more money. Frankly, they need centralized intelligence to help them understand their surroundings much better than they're given currently.

[00:25:58] Host: Looking at your maps, though, are you surprised at how many – I mean, I was just looking at it before we got on the call and we're barely entering – I mean, I guess fire season is nonstop, but just how many fires are active at one time? Does that ever surprise you?

[00:26:18] Mills: It used to, but I've been doing this for four years. I can put myself in my user's shoes. I call them my community members and my neighbors. They're users in Silicon Valley to me. They're human lives who live near me. They're incredibly surprised. They're like, “John, I didn't know how many fires there were.” They kind of knew because I've had many other fires where tankers are flying around and there's no alerts at all. It's like a half acre or an acre or two, but if it's near you, it's your natural disaster. This is a big deal for you. Your neighbor's ranch catches on fire and starts spreading. I don't care if it's 50,000 acres or five. If you're near it, it might be the end of your house or your life. It surprises them how often this is happening, but what I can also say that I think is really quite beautiful is they'll be like, “man, I didn't realize how busy the first responders are.” I'm like, “you're damn right. These people are squashing fires out all the goddamn time.” If you live like I do, I'm in the wildlands off the grid, but I'm only like six miles from the air attack base. Those S2 tankers are flying minimum once a week, if not more. Those things are up in the air all the damn time. They are hitting it hard and working overtime. I think it's important that the citizens see that and know that. I think it's actually quite important that they know not about their tax dollars. This is not what it's about. It's about their life and safety, that these people are heroes doing incredible work against all odds. I think that's the beautiful part about it.

[00:27:54] Host: I want to kind of take it to now and moving into the future. We're thinking about the cuts to the National Weather Service. This app becomes abundantly more vital. Like I said, I received the red flag warnings hours before the fires started here in LA. Is this something that, this technology? Is it something that could be translated to other natural disasters, weather-related incidents? You've talked about the flood in Texas, earthquakes. Is this something where you're looking at how can watch duty grow to these other natural disasters where information is hard to come by?

[00:28:44] Mills: Absolutely. There were two questions in there. One's about the Weather Service. Let's put that one separate. Let's answer the last one first. I like to tell people we didn't name it Fire Duty or Fire Watch on purpose. It's not about fire. It's actually about humans on WatchDuty. It's about citizens and your neighbors helping neighbors. These perils are similar. They seem different, but if you look at it from 80,000 feet down, you're like, man, around that ridge, there's an unseen disaster, that I might have to move, that might change my day or my life. I don't care if it's lava, tornado, or whatever. I got to move. I think that's where we really shine and how we think about this. We are starting to launch our flood program here later this year. We're looking at what this looks like now, talking to data providers, figuring out how to provide a similar level of intelligence for these types of situations in other disasters, floods being next. Earthquakes are almost easier in some regards because, unfortunately, there's no warning and then it happens. Where we would shine is we have the evacuation zones, we'd have power outages, we'd have reporting and intelligence, we have the places to get food, the places to take your animals, and all that information. This is all building to something bigger. Again, I think they're all similar. They're all large-scale geospatial problems that you may have to physically move your body to do something about the incident as it unfolds.

[00:30:16] Host: You wanted to talk about the National Weather Service as well?

[00:30:22] Mills: Yeah, it affects us. Predictive services are important. Flooding is a great example of predictive services being really important. Obviously, the same thing happened in LA with understanding the fire weather watch. Sadly, that's kind of hard to stop. If there were better warning systems that happened in Texas, those girls might not have died at Camp Mystic. It's really sad to see that get defunded because it's not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. They're not the droids you're looking for. There's other ways to cut spending and do things. I think there's a lot of government waste, sure. My roads, my schools, my infrastructure, weather alerting, and disasters, that's not where you cut. There are other places we can cut. That's not where you do it. This is going to affect all of us. We are the beneficiaries like everybody. We're beneficiaries of Doppler radar, of these pieces of infrastructure that are running to help us foresee what's to come. Without that, we're going to have more tornado deaths, which, by the way, are happening more, as you probably noticed. We're getting more weather events that are acting stranger than usual. This is not the time for this. We can't replace those systems. Not only are we not meteorologists, we don't have Doppler infrastructure. We don't have the ability to do that. I hope that we don't have to go figure that out because there's a lot of expertise that is now getting laid off and pushed aside that is important for life and safety.

[00:32:05] Host: Is this the time we're entering into August? Almost we're right in the middle of July as we're recording. Is this the time where the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and it's preparing? Do you see it that we're just in a fire season in general all year round?

[00:32:26] Mills: Yeah. The fire season is getting longer, obviously. Some years are different than others. LA particularly hadn't had rain since April in 2024. That's what made that such a reality. Even if you had a couple inches in November or December, it would have helped. The other challenge is an inch or two doesn't really make that much of a difference, as people are maybe starting to learn. The shoulder seasons are getting shorter, meaning the fire season itself is getting longer. We are noticing that across the West. Frankly, we're seeing some more in the East as well. It's our business to do this. We are getting into the heart of dry season, so we definitely are more prepared. We have more staff and we're constantly growing, but a lot of this is business as usual. We're in this business. It's not like a surprise to us when it happens, unfortunately. That's not what you want. You don't want us to be surprised. You don't want the firefighters to be surprised either. You want them to be ready, willing, and able at all times. Sure, we staff up more so, but the same thing would happen at the air attack base nearby. They're not fully staffed. It's been raining all winter. We got 12 inches of rain in one day in Sonoma. There's not going to be a mega fire here. It's just not going to happen. Now those two pilots are stationed there. It's happening. Yes, we prepare, but we are prepared, if that makes sense. We just do what anyone else would do and just continue our training and do what we do and stay the course. There's no reason to change now. We're just trying to get better at what we do and train more, but frankly, our team has been doing this for so long, they're becoming experts at what they do.

[00:34:19] Host: We had those horrible fires in the Carolinas, fires in Georgia this year. Is there a plan to make it all the way over to the East Coast and have all 50 states? Absolutely.

[00:34:34] Mills: It is our goal next year to be covering fires and floods throughout the US. We're in Hawaii. We're not in Alaska yet. We're just trying to figure that one out. Alaska's tricky. It's hard when it's not heavily populated. It's a different challenge. I'm happy to get into, but it is very much in our plan to get across the East. We know there's going to be more fires. There was a 600-acre fire in Long Island. I grew up not far from there. My mind is blown. I'm like, how is this happening? It doesn't make any sense to me. We will be there. It is in our purview to do it, and we're coming. John, is there anything else you'd like to share? I think the important thing here is people have to understand that WatchDuty is not a replacement for the government and the National Weather Service. We're beneficiaries of their systems. We get the wireless emergency alerts as well. I have them on my phone. I don't turn them off. It's not a great idea. I want belt and suspenders. I've been through this before. The government needs to, which they're starting to get, we repackage and resend out their alerts. We're not just trying to make up our own whatever. We're like, hey, this fire department said this. This thing happened here. We're trying to get all the information and do what you and I did before WatchDuty. We're scrambling on the internet to try and piece together some semblance of reality. I think it's important to really do everything you can to prepare from a digital perspective, but also prepare for the inevitability of fire coming, having your go bags ready, having a plan with your family of where you go, where you're going to meet, what happens if the radios and systems fail. It's important to have your plans together. I think there's nothing that I can do for you when the fire is there and you know it's coming. I'm like, all right, man, now you're on your own. What are you going to do? And if the fire department's overrun by too many fires, they're not going to answer your 911 call. Not because they don't want to. It breaks their goddamn heart. But when you're fighting a thousand structure fires at once, we are on our own.

[00:36:32] Host: We'd like to thank John Mills and the entire team at WatchDuty. The Fire Problem is produced by Past Forward and Chapman University. To learn more about these issues, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.