Spite Is The Greatest Motivator with Watch Duty Founder John Mills | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

What can we do for you? What does watch duty need?

Computers are cheap to operate, but rebuilding 12,000 homes and restoring lives that are lost is just not possible.

I think the best thing to do is give money to direct relief efforts like directrelief.org and others who are on the ground helping.

This is why I love you. I ask you, how do we help you? And you're. And you ask us to give to other people.

I mean, that's what I do, right?

When the wildfires erupted in Los Angeles on January 7, 2025, people were frantic. We didn't know where to get information. We didn't know if or when we had to evacuate. At the beginning, we got information through sort of an informal whisper network. Did you hear? We'd say to each other. Then we found WatchDuty. This one magical, elegant app told us everything we needed to know. And it was up to date and it was accurate, and we all had it. We checked it constantly. It was a lifeline, literally. Evacuation orders, fire perimeters, and wind directions, all of it faster and clearer than any government site or news outlet. And we owe it all to tech entrepreneur John mills. John coded WatchDuty himself to help his community after a series of deadly fires came close to destroying his own home in Northern California. Today, the app serves millions of people. It operates in multiple states and relies on scores of trained volunteers who gather data from radio scanners and other sources to get the information out. The app has skyrocketed in popularity, and John has no intention of selling it because the value, as he explains it, is bigger than any paycheck. We live in a world where too many put themselves before others. So how can we be more like John Mills? How can we inspire more people to serve those who serve others? I think John may have the answer. This is a bit of optimism.

John, thank you so, so much for doing this. I know that your life has been extremely busy. How did you find yourself in this position where all of us in Los Angeles were glued to your app more than anything else? Why you and how do you find yourself here now?

Why me? Well, they said that luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparedness. And I have the unique opportunity to be able to do this with my life and dedicate my life to this work.

And.

And I've been through a couple of pretty close calls here on my ranch. Fires come very close to me. One is a 50,000 acre fire that ended about a quarter mile from my property. Another one was a quarter mile away in the other direction. That was Another fire that I wasn't alerted about the helicopters or how I knew there was a fire, not because anybody told me. And so.

So the world is burning outside of your home and you find out about it because you see a fire helicopter fly over you.

Yeah. That's how you get alerted.

Yeah, that is. Yeah. That's a good motivation to try and want to do something.

Sure, why not?

Okay, but hold on, hold on. That's a motivation for a lot of people to complain. That's a motivation for a lot of people to get angry. That's a motivation for a lot of people to yell at their mayor or congressman or whoever. You then went and built an app to give yourself the information you needed.

I don't know, I felt like it was more fun, you know.

You'Re an engineer, right?

I'm an engineer and a product person. Yes.

I'm trying to understand how you found yourself in the situation. Isn't this what the. The authorities, what the governments, what the local government's supposed to provide? Aren't they supposed to buy. Provide us the information we need to stay safe and know what's going on?

You would.

You would think so. That's what I mean by why you. Like, like it shouldn't have to be you.

That. That is correct. My friends are joking. I just had an article about me. Like the la. The Hollywood Reporter said I'm building this out of spite. And they sent me the episode of Larry David who makes the spite store despite his. The coffee guy next door. You know, I mean, spite's a powerful motivator. I mean, really, I do it out of love, but also just out of disdain for like, this lack of good technology in the government. Right. They still call it it. Right. It's kind of like a. It's kind of like a derogatory term, like the guy who fixes your printer, you know what I mean? Rather than actual, like serious infrastructure that. That has held up the Internet or held up cell. Like, this is critical infrastructure that must exist. And so I just knew they weren't going to do it. And I could just complain on the Internet, but that would have been boring.

And I think people have to understand that the LA fires were not. This is not your first rodeo. Like, watch duty is already, dare I say, an essential app in a lot of other places. Is that. Is that fair?

Yeah, we started in just Lake Sonoma. Napa county is where I live in Sonoma. About 2021 is when I first launched it. And since then, I mean, I'm in one in every two or three phones in most counties in Northern California already. Who? We have mass adoption throughout these areas and there's been some pretty fast moving wind driven fires and everybody knows and unfortunately we didn't have enough adoption in LA until now.

Why does yours work? I mean putting the tech aside that the tech works, why does it work? Because you're basically consolidating information that comes from a lot of other places that is fairly accurate and fairly up to date.

That's actually the easy part. Right. So as a technologist, the challenge isn't to go and just scrape all these government websites and to make a beautiful product and package, et cetera. Like people know how to do that, right? Like Silicon Valley is very good at getting your attention and keeping it, making sure you doom scroll endlessly and then buy a bunch of random stuff that you don't need. Right? Like it's very good at that. But the magic is actually in the people. And what I mean by the people are these radio operators and reporters who are listening to fire scanners constantly. So those folks in real time are hearing everything, had disseminated that information across the application via push notifications. So that newsfeed is coming from human beings who are spending their days and nights hearing the fire ground. And that's what the magic actually is. There's nothing else to it. Anyone could have done what I did. The hard part was to find these people who were, who are just bound by their own like sheer will and the, and the desire to help people. And so that was the really key insight here. That's the data that's missing.

So it begs two questions. A tech is obsessed with AI and AI seems to be the answer to absolutely everything. And yet you chose to go human. Why human and not automation?

Well, in my opinion, AI is unable to do this job right now, it's just not there yet. That might be a reality in the future. But we, we do use some AI and we use that to help do signals and noise processing, right? So we do have a lot of AI that are scraping and scanning government websites that are trying to interpret random things and they feed that information into Slack where the human beings are able to see it and interpret it. So to answer your question shortly, I don't think it's ready yet. And then finally, like even if it was ready, I would be concerned about mistakes being made. And I just don't like that idea right now. It's life and safety. You know, this isn't like a silly chat bot helping you write a Paper or something, right. This is like, do I run east or west when I leave my house or not? It's a little bit too dangerous, in my opinion.

Yeah, it's a little bit like autopilot. Right? Which is. I think every single one of us is fine with computers helping pilots fly the plane, but at the end of the day, we like the idea that there's two pilots sitting there evaluating the automation. I think we trust people sometimes more than we trust computers, which I think is a good thing. And so. And then how. You know, again, playing off the Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley very much is about a business model, an ipo, giving everybody equity, you know, to get people to work hard, to get to that quote, unquote liquidity event that everybody's obsessed with. And yet you are a not for profit who. The people who work with you so hard are volunteers. What was it about starting a not for profit and versus the traditional Silicon Valley route? And then how did you get the people to sign up?

So we do have some paid staff, obviously, like any nonprofit does. We had zero for the first 18 months. It was just a bunch of volunteers. So let's start there. Right? So these radio operators were already doing this job on Facebook and Twitter, right. The first really big mega fire was the Valley fire, I think 2015 or so. And then we had the tubs in 2017, and paradise was either 18 or 19, I believe. And so we've had these series of events that have driven these radio reporters to start putting this information out on Facebook and Twitter. And they were doing this for free anyway. Right. Some had, you know, just.

Just concerned citizens.

Correct. And again, some are ex. Inactive retired firefighters and all different types of people. It's kind of all over. All over the board. So they were already doing a nonprofit, right. Like, some of them had cofi links to buy them, you know, $5 cup of coffee. But they were doing this because I don't. It's a hobby, right. Like, why do Wikipedia do this for free? Right? Like, why are there, like, Redditors who are, like, just avid geeks about keeping their subreddit community organized and clean? It's like, it's in their hearts to do this. And so taking that idea, like, of course they want to do a nonprofit. It's in their heart to do it that way. And so for me, like, on a very personal level, I understand why they do that. I feel their pain. This. This shouldn't be for sale. This can't stop, right? Maybe one day the government will do it and we'll stop. A nonprofit's job should be to finish its job and delete itself. That would be ideal, right? The program finishes running, and then it gets deleted. But unfortunately, we're in a growing industry, as my friends like to remind me.

What can we do for you? What do you. What does watchduty need? What do you need from us? What do you like? How can we help? How do we support you?

Well, the community is supporting us. I mean, it's amazing to get, you know, such amounts of funding in such a short period of time. And obviously, donations are super important to keep our operation running. It's hard to ask, because.

Right now the relief efforts are going to take, you know, almost a decade. I mean, we still have towns around me that have not been rebuilt. And so part of it is challenging for me to ask for anything else rather than give money to direct relief. Because watch duty is a capital efficient business. We will continue to operate and not stop. We are in the business of bits, not atoms, right? Computers are cheap to operate, but rebuilding 12,000 homes and restoring lives that are lost is just not possible.

I think the best thing to do is give money to direct relief efforts like directrelief.org and others who are on the ground helping.

This is why I love you. I ask you, how do we help you? And you ask us to give to other people.

I mean, that's what I do, right?

John, seriously, man, you bring me to tears. You bring me to tears.

You're gonna make me cry. I've had a fucking hard week, man.

You okay?

Exhausted.

Yeah.

I'll be all right. I've had a couple hard ones, but, you know, it's.

It'll be all right eventually, you know?

What. What happened?

I mean, you just have some days you're just so proud of what you're doing, and then you're just in the shower crying because, you know. You know, people's running for their lives, you know, like, it's just. It's. It's tough because I'm looking out my window and behind me is my forest, and it's going to be overrun with fire again. And so it's not my turn right now, but it's going to be my turn again. And so it's just the cycle of life. I just, you know, I just. I'm just come to grips with it, you know?

You know, one of the weirdest experiences I had in this, all of this is 2. 2. 2 incredibly weird things that happened to me. One was as the evacuation zones got closer to us, and we got very lucky. The wind changed direction and. But they came. They. They were creeping towards us, you know, and I. Even though they didn't reach us, we didn't get to yellow. We were one zone away from yellow. I sort of. You start preparing. And I walked around my house and I started saying thank you to my stuff. You know, Like, I. I went through this crazy gratitude, like one of my favorite paintings in the world that I've owned for years hanging on my wall. It's too big for me to put in a car. And I look at it and I said, thank you. Thank you so much for. For the joy. I'm gonna cry.

I just. I went through this crazy gratitude practice.

You know, and it was just the. Whether the stuff survived or didn't.

I didn't have fear that I was going to lose it.

I got to say thank you. You know, you hear this from people who lose loved ones, and they say, I'm glad I was by their side to say goodbye. You know, they had cancer. We knew it was going to happen. I'm glad I was by their side. There was some shit I didn't give a shit about. You know, I walked around, I'm like, I don't care about that. I don't care how much it cost. I care nothing about that. And there was some stuff that I was like, you know, so that was one crazy experience. And I realized I don't need a lot of stuff, you know, which is a beautiful thing to come to. Come to come to terms with. And the second thing, which I. Is just a strange experience.

Which is watching your app, watching the winds. And I remember the winds changed direction, and I thought, God, thank you. I'm so grateful. And in the same moment, fully aware that somebody's watching the app, going somewhere else. Oh, no. And to have to reconcile that my good fortune is somebody else's ill fortune. And by the way, nobody wants their house to burn down to save somebody else's house. That, like, that doesn't exist. And just the paradox that there's no winners in this. That my happiness and relief and sigh is somebody else's increased blood pressure and fear. The world is unfair.

It is unfair. And that's what fire teaches you, man. It takes from everybody equally. And it's not fair. I remember the first time I evacuated.

I was gone for eight days, I think. And after six days, I was just like, just verna ready. I'm done. I'm just so stressed out. I'm up all night night. There was no watch Duty. I'm listening to radios, I'm just like, you know what, man? Just get it fucking over with. I was just done. I just really resigned. I resigned myself to the outcome. It was a strange, strange feeling.

I hope the lessons are learned. And this is the shitty thing about people, right? Which is we forget. And I remember September 11th. I lived in New York during September 11th, and for weeks, dare I say months, but definitely weeks after September 11th. Yeah, I'll say months. New York was the most incredible city in the world. Crime disappeared. There was nothing. There was no crime. Somebody who might have mugged me a week before was holding a door open for me and there was this shared hardship and we were there for each other. And you see it now in la, the insane outpouring of love. There's also idiots and looters and people who are raising the rents on their houses because they're assholes, you know, talking about ethics over, over money, you know, like, nobody's saying you can't make money, but my goodness, like raising rents, you know, Anyway, but we'll forget. And New York went back to being New York. And I remember, I remember being in the middle of it going, this is Utopia and it's going to go away because we forget. We forget. And this is my fear, which is the people who are now struck by this well of emotion. I'm going to live, devote my life to service. For how long? I hope forever. I hope forever, but for how long?

You know, this is why I like the disaster business, because I see the best in people.

Yeah.

I have a couple friends in the industry before I got here, and I always wondered, I was like, how do you guys do this? How do you. My friend is Jose Andreas, his right hand man. Sure. He's the one who lost his, his friend, his, his employees in, in Gaza, twice. I mean, like, he's just. His nickname is actually Doomsday. I gave him that name. I mean, that guy has no pilot's license, has landed multiple planes. He's in fucking tornadoes, hurricanes. He's just, he, he lives it. And he feels more alive at the edge of death than anyone else I've ever met in my entire life. And he embodies this, this spirit, you know, and he sees the best in it. And now that I'm here, I understand why he does what he does. And I'm hooked.

I'm an addict and I, I see it. I, I've spent time, you know, I spent a lot of time with the military, with people who live these lives of service. Who, who. As somebody said when, you know, he described a life in. In service as my get rich slow plan. You know.

Like, everybody knows they're not doing it for the money. You know, like, you know that when you sign up and, and you don't have to. You don't have to be like your friend, the Doomsday to have that, that intensity. It's a shame that they call it disaster, right? Because the. The flip side of disaster is an inspiration and a joy and a fulfillment like you cannot experience anywhere else. There's no. There's no company, there's no. There's no liquidity event. There's no client you can win. There's no game that you can top that will recreate the feeling of service for those who need it more than.

You very much agree. And that's what the firefighters do, man. But my heroes, I mean, these people, you know, are just. They're like, no one else will do whatever is right at all costs. And I've seen them risk their careers and their lives to. For the betterment of the world, and they get paid jack shit. And they are just above and beyond anyone else I've ever worked for. So it is not a boring group of people to be around. And that's just my favorite.

I'm so enamored by who you are and what you stand for. I mean, you've had success as a technologist, you've had success in Silicon Valley. You've lived the movie life, the trope, you know, that a lot of technologists and startups go through. You've done it. I've met a lot of people who, as a result of selling their business or going public or whatever it is, they've made generational wealth. And if you ask them, what do you do now? They say, I'm an investor. And I don't understand why people who've made generational wealth, their goal is to now make more money. And what I so appreciate about you is you've. You've done that, you've made the money. And somebody says, what do you do? And you're a philanthropist, and you may invest, but you're a philanthropist that invests, not an investor that is a philanthropist. And I think that's really important. When I look at who you are and what you stand for, what goes through my mind is, first of all, thank you. I mean, I used your app and I checked it like a teenager looking at TikTok, you know, and I'm grateful, but it's more the example of who you Are and what you stand for. That, I think is even more important than the app, because there's a lot of other problems that need to be solved that good people who can afford to do it and do know how to do these things and. Or have already built a business and understand infrastructure and people and all of the things, even if they build it out of spite. Like, we need more of you.

I mean, I'll take the compliment. Thank you. And I agree. Part of it is, like, you know, I'm an operator, right? Through and through, so, like, I can't just sit there and invest. It doesn't make sense to me. Like, I need to build things I want my hands on. Equipment, machinery. I had a choice. I could, like, go get a yacht and travel the world and hang out with billionaires, or I could go, like, fight the man and change the world. Right. Something more thrilling than this.

Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting conversation because all of those folks who made that money, they had the attitude to get there, you know, and something happens, and I don't know what it is. I mean, I have some ideas where stops. And I guess what I'm trying to get at is, what is it in your DNA that I. That how do we replicate you? I mean, we both agree on two things. We both agree that you shouldn't have to do this. Government should be doing a better job of doing it and not you, number one. And we both agree there needs to be more of you. Like, how do we raise a generation of people who. Whether they. Whether they achieve generational wealth or not, that service is built into how they want to live a life and grow old.

Yeah. I mean, something that really. Like, I tell people that I run a nonprofit because I hate them. And what I really don't understand is, like, if you're a really good operator, why would you give your money to philanthropists who don't know how to run a business? Right. Like, some of these nonprofits that I've seen, like, the homeless industrial complex in San Francisco is, like, one thing that really upsetted me about 10 years ago when I was getting involved is like, those. Those executive directors didn't actually know each other. Right. Like, the largest ones or the largest buildings don't ever meet. And it occurred to me one night walking home after this big event that I had thrown, and I put these executive directors together, and I realized they knew each other's names and didn't know each other, and I finally realized they're actually in competition with one. They do not want to solve the problem and that right then and there I was like I'm first of all I'm done I'm not working in the homeless industrial complex anymore until I can come back and make a difference and then I realized that like I'm not giving money to these people they do not know they are not good stewards of capital. So as an operator or an investor why am I going to invest in a failing business? Show me the outcome right where is it? I don't know where it is so again more spite you know.

But this is an important insight which is and I hate the term not for profit right that is a tax delineation that is an IRS delineation on your on a, on a on a form of course they should be profitable they just measure profit differently so if you're if your charity exists to rescue kittens out of trees then I want to see that you are rescuing a lot of kittens out the of.