{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwildfire-tales.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2Fthe-prices-were-public-the-whole-time-l203_VzQ","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"The Prices Were Public the Whole Time","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/899bf8be-87f2-43f0-b0b1-610302b1c302/faed4b68-69d6-4ed8-9580-ddc4f67b4c9a/cropped_1791219637852.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"<iframe src=\"https://player.simplecast.com/c43cc411-ceac-49ac-a482-53ac39e8bb3a\" height=\"200\" width=\"100%\" title=\"The Prices Were Public the Whole Time\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>","height":200,"description":"There's data in your industry everybody treats as unknowable. The real prices, the real numbers. It's not actually secret. It's just scattered, and nobody's bothered to pull it together.\n\nIn this episode, Todd talks with Brennan Holloway and Tyler Olson of The Journeyman, who found that wildland fire pricing—the bids that decide whether your phone rings when a fire breaks out—was public the whole time. It just lived across seven thousand Forest Service PDFs, filed by region and resource type, with no way to connect them. Brennan, who isn't an engineer, pulled all of it in about a day with an AI tool and built the board that shows where every competitor sits. Todd gets into why the edge belongs to the domain expert, not the model, and why that advantage has a shelf life.\n\nWhat changed wasn't the data. It was the cost of assembling it."}