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

1. SSSimon Sinek0:00

   What can we do for you? What do you, what does Watch Duty need?

2. JMJohn Mills0:03

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

3. SSSimon Sinek0:19

   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...

4. JMJohn Mills0:26

   That's what I do, right?

5. SSSimon Sinek0:28

   When the wildfires erupted in Los Angeles on January 7th, 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 Watch Duty. 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 Watch Duty 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. [upbeat music] 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?

6. JMJohn Mills2:36

   Why me? Well, they say 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 I've been through a couple pretty close calls here on my ranch. Fire has come very close to me. One was, was 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 are how I knew there was a fire, not because anybody told me, and so-

7. SSSimon Sinek3:07

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

8. JMJohn Mills3:12

   Yeah. That, that's how you get alerted, yeah.

9. SSSimon Sinek3:15

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

10. JMJohn Mills3:18

    Sure, why not? Also a motivation.

11. SSSimon Sinek3:18

    Or at least... 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, to yell at their mayor or congressman or whoever. You then went and built an app to give yourself the information you needed.

12. JMJohn Mills3:36

    I don't know. It felt like it would be more fun, you know? [laughs]

13. SSSimon Sinek3:39

    [laughs] You're an engineer, right?

14. JMJohn Mills3:44

    I'm an engineer. I'm a product person, yes.

15. SSSimon Sinek3:47

    I'm trying to understand how you found yourself in this 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?

16. JMJohn Mills4:00

    You would, you would think so.

17. SSSimon Sinek4:01

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

18. JMJohn Mills4:05

    That, that is correct. My friends are joking. I just had an article about me in, like, the h- the LA, uh, the Hollywood Reporter, and, uh, I said I'm building this out of spite, and they sent me the episode of Larry David, who makes the Spite Store [laughs] to spite his, the, the, the coffee guy next door. Uh, 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 the actual, like, serious infrastructure that, that has held up the internet or held up cell towers, like, this is critical infrastructure that must exist. And so I just knew they weren't gonna do it, and I could just complain on the internet, but that would've been boring.

19. SSSimon Sinek4:52

    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?

20. JMJohn Mills5:02

    Yeah. I mean, we started in just Lake Sonoma, Napa Counties, where I live in Sonoma. About, uh, 2021 is when I first launched it, and since then, I mean, w- I'm in one in every two or three phones in most counties in Northern California already who experience fire, right? 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, um, enough adoption in LA until now.

21. SSSimon Sinek5:28

    Why does yours work? I mean, p-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.

22. JMJohn Mills5:42

    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 doomscroll 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 and disseminating 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 get- who were just bound by their own, like, sheer will a- and, and the w- and the desire to help people, and so that was the really key insight here. That's the data that's missing.

23. SSSimon Sinek6:44

    So this, uh, uh, 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?

24. JMJohn Mills6:56

    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 chatbot 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.

25. SSSimon Sinek7:46

    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, we like the idea that there's two pilots sitting there evaluating the, the, the automation. I think y- we trust people sometimes more than we trust computers, which I think is a good thing. A- 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 l- 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, 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, to sign up?

26. JMJohn Mills8:37

    So we do have some paid staff, obviously-

27. SSSimon Sinek8:39

    Right

28. JMJohn Mills8:39

    ... like any nonprofit does. We had zero for the first 18 months. It was just a bunch of volunteers. So, 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 Tubbs 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-

29. SSSimon Sinek9:08

    J- just-

30. JMJohn Mills9:08

    ... Co-

Episode duration: 41:48