#8: Personal Loss and Tragedy: Rebuilding Life After Losing Everything In Palisades Fire
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why does this life sometimes bad stuff happen? The question is, is how do we respond and what does it turn us into? And, and, and, and hopefully it,

kind of refines us in a way. It refines our character, it refines our traits, it brings good things out of us that make us more patient, more caring, you know, more eager to help those that are in need because you can now sympathize because you've been in a place where you were in need. Welcome to Divot, a community for people sharing stories about the mark they're making on the world.

Our guest today is my friend Rich Radden, the co-founder and co-CEO of Zephyr, a platform empowering brands and agencies to navigate the complex landscape of online video content. Zephyr's technology ensures brand safety and sustainability across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Meta. Before establishing Zephyr, Rich co-founded Movie Clips, the largest collection of licensed movie content on the web.

which was acquired by Fandango in 2014. Before that, he was the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Rich and his family live in Pacific Palisades, California, which was devastated by the recent fires that swept across Los Angeles. Rich and his family lost their home and virtually all of their possessions in the fire. He's one of the most grounded and thoughtful people I know, and I asked him to share his and his family's experience. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Welcome to my backyard.

Tell me about this space, Rich. Where are we? Well, this is my home or what used to be. I was one of the... We were caught up in the wildfires on January 7th. We live in the Pacific Palisades. It's pretty well known right now that a lot of the homes in the Palisades burned. Most of the homes in Altadena burned as well. And so, yeah, we had a beautiful home.

6,300 square feet and it's just kind of a pile of toxic mess at this point. For those that haven't been to the Palisades, what makes it a unique place? The Pacific Palisades is an incredible community. Part of it has to do with how it's situated in Los Angeles. So it's on the water.

But it's set up kind of close to the mountains, which was part of the problem with the wildfires. And it's not right on the ocean. So it's a unique community and it's a little bit sheltered by just a lot of the tourists that come through Los Angeles, which tourists are great and whatnot. But it is a community that is made up mostly of locals.

A lot of working class, a lot of families. Definitely there is celebrities and stuff, but it's very understated. There was a great tagline. I'm going to get this wrong and somebody from the Palisades is going to remind me, but there was a great tagline they used to put on t-shirts and it went something like,

If you're famous, you live in Malibu. If you're rich, you live in Santa Monica. And if you're lucky, you live in the Pacific Palisades. And it kind of embodied, the community embodied that spirit. It's cool. When did you move here? How long have you lived here for? So about 15 years. We've been in this home, which was really the home we bought after...

We sold one of our companies that me and my, the other co-founder, Zach James, were working on. We sold it to Comcast and I was able to buy this home. It was kind of, my wife and I were like, where do we want to end up? Like, where would we like to retire? And it would be this place. And so we stretched a little bit and got into this home and it's just been a beautiful community. We've been here for 10 years.

Tell us what happened the day of the fire. How quickly did it happen and when did you find out you needed to move? It was dramatic. It was intense. A lot of people, I think, who lived through that day will never forget it. I, unfortunately, had left before the fire started. So on Tuesday, January 7th, was the day that I was slated to fly out to Las Vegas for the CES, Consumer Electronics Show.

So my plane was at 10 a.m. I got on a plane at 10 a.m. The fire hadn't started. It started approximately at around 10.30. So I got on a plane. By the time I landed in Vegas, it's only a 45-minute flight. It's probably an hour and 15. So I got off the plane at 11.15 to a host of texts and messages, and it was on every television screen in the airport.

that a fire had started just about half a mile east of here in the mountains, because I'm up in the highlands, and it was moving incredibly fast, and there was no way to stop it. And so I called my wife, and she had been told already to evacuate our home. So I immediately turned around and got a plane ticket for the earliest flight coming home, which was, that was about 11.15. I think it was at around...

1:30 or 2:00, I got a flight and I flew back and by the time I landed back here in Los Angeles, it had pretty much, it had traveled over, burned the bottom part of the area that I'm in now. In fact, it trapped a lot of cars on the roadway, which they needed a bulldozer to come free up the street so that people could get out. My wife and my daughter eventually got out through that road.

And it had also gone over into Temescal Canyon and was headed towards Palisades Village at that point. That was about three or four o'clock. And I just, at that time, I didn't even think about coming back to my house. I mean, in hindsight, I'd like to think that I would have come back and tried to save my house, which, you know, they say don't do, but there's a lot of folks, a lot of stories of folks that were able to fight off the fires with their garden hoses and whatnot.

Just because there were so many fires that it was overwhelming the firemen and women. And they were just setting up sort of zones to protect the fire not going any further. But if you were within that zone and your house caught on fire, it was just going to burn to the ground. And so... And you're right, almost right at the hills, right? The fire is just right...

Like you said, a half mile from here. A half mile, sort of the front lines of where everything was happening. Yeah, and in this community in the highlands, on the other side of sort of the valley right here, the west side, nothing burned. So only 20% of the homes burned in this area. And it was the homes that were right mostly on the east edge, which I'm on the east edge of.

A couple years ago, as you remember, because I think your brother was involved, there was a Malibu fire and it was coming over from the west edge. And so it just sort of depends on where the fire starts. And obviously there's been a lot written about and lots talked about, about how much needs to be, more needs to be done in Los Angeles to mitigate fires. Because it's complete, I believe it's very manageable to do through just making sure that we're clear cutting areas and making sure

that were doing safe burns when there's not 100 mile an hour winds. And that was the biggest issue is that the winds were hurricane force winds that could carry an ember up to a half a mile, a mile away. So a fire could be a mile away and your house could start on fire. I don't think people can fully appreciate how crazy the winds were. I happened to be

of maybe 20 miles from here that morning. And I woke up and opened the blinds and it was like, everything in the yard is blowing all over the place. Like, you know, leaving the yard, it was, it was like a hurricane. Yeah. And then the fire catches and then you have like

a fire hurricane type of situation just going all over the place. Right. And compounded by the fact that we hadn't had in Los Angeles eight months of rain. Interestingly enough, this winter we've had about half the amount of rain that we normally get. We get about 14 inches. And by the way, I've always studied the rain patterns because I just know of...

just in general fire danger in Southern California. At that point, we hadn't had any rain, so everything was incredibly dry. They hadn't done any clear cutting, and ultimately, what was the downfall is there wasn't actually any water. So we have a reservoir up here that's specifically a man-made reservoir that's specifically for fire prevention, and it had been emptied because they were doing repairs on it. And so

There's a lot of discussion, you know, amongst the city and politicians about clearly more needs to be done to mitigate fires in Southern California, building materials and all that. But it was intense. When your wife, Katie, got noticed that she needed to evacuate...

How much time does she have and what at that point, what was she able to grab? Did she take anything or? Ultimately, what happened is the fire doubled back the second day. So our home didn't burn until the second day of the fires. And like I said, we were just in that zone that had been sanctioned off and the zone was large. I mean, there's probably 15,000 homes in the zone and 6,000 burned, of which

police and fire were like, firemen were like, let's just stop it from traveling. Because the concern is, I talked to one of the firefighters and they said the concern was if it had kept moving east, it could have gone into Bel Air, then jumped down to Santa Monica. And then they were afraid it was going to burn from like 26th Street in Santa Monica all the way to the ocean. So if you can imagine the density of

apartment buildings and everything. Can you imagine a fire that literally burned most of Santa Monica from 26th Street to the ocean? It would have been even more of a massive tragedy. And also, I think the blessing in all this is the loss of life was relatively small compared to the size of the tragedy, both here and in Altadena. How are you doing? We're hanging in there.

I'm not going to say it's not difficult, right? Most of the stuff in your house can be replaced, but there are things that you accumulate or things that you're given, family heirlooms, things that are like personal and sacred to you that, or that you curate over a lifetime. Just, you know, I don't actually like to shop for clothes so much. And so I buy an item, I keep it for years and years. And so waking up,

one day to the next realizing that everything that you've had accumulated or curated or been given, you know, that it was all gone. That's a really, that's a really challenging thing to just deal with. And I will say, you know,

I'm so grateful that my family and my friends that were all involved in this are all safe because that is the most important thing. But it does in many ways feel like a death of a close one because you don't, I never realized how much personality you give to a property or your home or what it symbolizes in your life. And when it is taken away, there's a sense of loss, right?

And, um, and accompanied with that is now you have a bunch of work. Like, where am I going to live? What am I going to do? I got to go buy underwear for tomorrow. I mean, like literally like every day you wake up and you feel like, okay, I'm

These are the things I must get done to make it to the next day. And so that's the sort of the sense of loss and the mourning accompanied with the immense amount of work. It's a really unique and tough situation. You mentioned as we were walking around that just some of your journals or some of those things that not really sort of priceless things,

Kinds of things that it feels like if you could, if you, if you could go back and grab anything, it wouldn't be some painting or something on the wall. It would be, as you said, family heirlooms or. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, the things that are important are me. I think a lot about my ancestors. I think about my posterity.

the things that to me are important are the things where I can pass them on to my posterity. And I'm not talking about money or stuff like that, material things. I'm talking about things that are very personal. Like I had a journal that I wrote on in my mission. I served the mission for our church and, and, uh,

like very personal sacred experiences to me were written down that I planned to give to my posterity and then you know that's gone and so that makes that stuff is not replaceable and that's the thing and by the way

I think as I talk to other victims that have lost their homes, everybody has something like that. Some of my Jewish friends have some things from their grandparents that were passed down to them through incredible hardships and them wanting to pass that to their future generations. I just think it makes for a... It's tough. It's heartbreaking in a way. Some people who watch this know you and maybe some don't.

You gave me my first job in tech when I quit my... We were a lot younger today. And I was desperate and I wasn't making any money. And you gave me an opportunity to work. And so I've known you for a long time and I know what a good person you are and what a good family you have. And it's difficult to kind of make sense as we drive up here

of you see a lot of homes burned down, thousands of homes burned down and you see homes still standing. - Yeah, yep. - And I wonder as somebody as a person of faith and as somebody that's a really good person, just how do you make sense of sort of really hard, horrific things happening to good people? - Well, I think that's a great question.

And it's the question I think a lot of people ask themselves. And my belief is, and my belief system is, is that we're here in life, not the material things in life. Sure, they're nice. But really, we're here to develop and to grow as individuals. I believe just fundamentally, we're spiritual beings having a mortal experience, not the other way around. And so because of that,

things are going to happen. Mortality is, is, can be random. Right. And, uh, you know, if, if, and I believe in a higher power, I believe in God and, and do I think, you know, that, you know, if it was his will, he could have saved my house. Sure. But the reality of it is, is I don't really believe that when bad things happen to, it's a, to us, it's a punishment necessarily. But for me, it's,

I'd like to look at it as an opportunity to grow and to change. Obviously, certain things happen when tragedies strike. First of all, I think you become, you know, there's the phrase being tenderhearted. And I experienced that here in Los Angeles. I was telling you, the day after, that week after I went to church and there was a lady who didn't have two nickels to rub together. Really, you know,

just not well off. She came up and she tried to hand me a wad of cash, you know? And I just thought this beautiful lady that like has nothing is willing to give me all that she has to help me. And I think there's, and by the way, I didn't need it. So I, you know, kindly refused, but

That sentiment like bringing out the best in people around these things is as I think what we can take from these tragedies and what we can learn from and hopefully become just better people, right?

Like when I die, I don't take anything in this house with me, right? It's just who I am and who I've become as a person. And so that's where I like to focus. I'll say you, I'll tell you it's, it's a challenge, right? Cause we're very connected to everything in this life and you know, success and all, all the kutraman that come along with it. And so

I have to remind myself just to take a step back and be grateful for the things I do have in my life. I have my health, my family's all right. And just be grateful. And then look to learn from these things and grow. But nobody gets out of this life without some trials. I don't care who you are. Just everybody is going to go through stuff. Bad stuff, hard stuff, divorces, divorce.

infidelity, whatever in marriages or everybody goes loss of children, like terrible tragedies. Nobody is, I've never met a person who just skips through life. And so I think it's important just to just take it as it comes and be mindful and thoughtful. And if it's going to let it change you to become sort of a better person or the person you want to more resemble, then let it change you.

What have you been most proud of your kids and your family sort of through this whole thing? What's I know they're I know I know they're great people, but what surprised you about some of the way they've reacted and how they've handled this situation? Yeah, well, first of all, I think it I I definitely think and we've been talking as neighbors. WhatsApp groups have been great during this time and people have kind of self-organized.

And I'm definitely a big advocate of just therapy, either individual therapy or family therapy to talk through this. Because I do think there's just, you can't have something this dramatic happen in your life with some sort of residue that you need to kind of work through. And so, but I'm super proud of my family for like,

Every day there's something that's difficult that we have to do. I mean, take case in point, you know, we want to go do an activity with my son, but, you know, we want to go skiing. He doesn't want to go skiing because all our stuff burned up. But getting out and just getting back on that horse and going buying the things and,

Thankfully, we're in a position where we had an insurance policy. I know many didn't and my heart goes out to them. And it's really been amazing to see how the community has surrounded those people that didn't have adequate insurance to try to help them out in one way or another. But yeah, I'm super proud of

of just how they continue to fight. It's not that everybody's standing strong, because the reality is you have a lot of times where you just break down and cry, but I think that's okay. And I think it's okay to be in tune with how sad you are, right? And I do believe that, you know, good therapy is needed and you got to be just aware of it. Like it's a dramatic thing that's happened. And so...

How does therapy, I mean, how is it beneficial in this instance to have somebody to talk through it with? Mostly, it's just a venue to express a lot of the things you're going through. And in doing that, I think there's kind of a healing that goes on. For instance, a bunch of guys in the area were

who had all lost their homes or had had them severely damaged, we all got on a WhatsApp just to talk, to share stories. And I opened up about the fact that right after the fires, I had a really hard time walking into stores and buying anything. And I don't know. I honestly don't know. I don't know whether it was because I just didn't want to accumulate something that then I would lose or...

because it reminded me too much of the things I had lost, but I found it. I was in tune enough to say, okay, this is really a challenging moment. I'm having a tough time, you know, and most people don't have a tough time spending money. And I typically, I don't either, but like just the idea of going and purchasing these things. And when I said that,

More than half the group said, "Oh my gosh, I'm going through the exact same thing. I'm so glad you mentioned it 'cause I thought it was me. I thought it was just some weird affectation." And to hear that you are having that problem, I'm definitely having it. And people just started sharing in that way. And I think that's kind of healing, right? Just because it allows you to sort of expunge that. And I think that's, to me, that's what therapy has always been about. Just an opportunity to talk about things, hear yourself say them,

and then receive some sort of confirmation that you're not losing your mind, you've just gone through something that's really

tough and you're finding ways to cope with it and you're developing coping mechanisms and then to be just aware of that. Has there been anything that's brought your family strangely closer together through this or is that just sort of a cliche? No, I think the whole thing has brought my family together. I mean, you know, when all your stuff burns and you have your family, you start to look at each other and depend on each other a lot more and

And I think it makes you very grateful for your family, for those that are, you know, that there wasn't a loss of life. And my heart goes out to people that did lose family members or acquaintances or friends in the fires. But it does bring you closer. At least I feel closer to my wife and to my children.

And I think that's one of the things that hardship does. You asked before, you're like, why does more... I'll reframe your question. You're like, why does bad stuff happen? And I'd reframe it as, why is this mortal life? Like, why does this life sometimes bad stuff happen? The question is, how do we respond and what does it turn us into? And hopefully it turns...

kind of refines us in a way. It refines our character, it refines our traits, it brings good things out of us that make us more patient, more caring, you know, more eager to help those that are in need because you can now sympathize because you've been in a place where you were in need. And so,

That's why it's a very intense experience that way. I remember reading in the Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson book that he said, as he dealt with cancer and came close to death, the thing that he said is he said, I just hope, I don't know what's going to happen, but I hope that I can at least take my intelligence with me. Yeah. The things that I've learned. And I mean, like you said, like we're,

someone ultimately is going to be living in the homes that we built and someone's going to be driving the cars that we pay for and it's just going to be the experiences we had and

Hopefully the relationships that we built and the things that we did for other people, the way that we made the world a better place. Yeah, I believe that. I mean, and by the way, you know, some might say, well, I don't believe that. It's like, that's okay. You know, everybody has different belief systems. But I ultimately believe that we do take these things with us and we do live on after this life. And like I said, I don't ever...

put my belief system on anybody else if, you know, whatever you believe, it's okay. But I do think

It's important how we treat each other in this life. And I was talking earlier to one of your crew members about, he just said something. He said, look, when I'm here, I just feel like I want to help. I want to help. I feel like that was prevalent along people internationally, nationally, people that reached out to me. Like in many ways, these tragic moments bring us closer together, despite political differences or socioeconomic differences or all the differences that can divide us.

Ultimately, coming together and helping one another, I think that is an important trait. And I think it is something that we should look to do. So yeah, it can change us. Have you learned anything about yourself that you didn't know before this happened? I think it was Elon Musk that said being an entrepreneur is like chewing glass and looking to the eye of the abyss, into the abyss. And in many ways-

Being an entrepreneur, being right there trying to build something and the risks that are involved in that and the challenges that are involved in that. If anything, I think that that prepared me for moments like this, right? Because it's like, okay, I know how to deal with very challenging situations, right?

because I've trained myself to stay calm, to try to think clearly, to try to figure out a game plan, to try to maneuver. And in many ways, if anything, I feel like being an entrepreneur, as you develop those skills, it can really help you just in your personal life, right? Have your priorities changed? Have you

made any, I mean, there's tons of physical changes that you've made, but the way you think about life or, uh,

Has any of that materially changed before and after a tragedy like this? I think it was, if anything, it was just a reminder to me. From a very young age, my parents taught me to not just focus on the here and now, but focus on a greater thing, a greater purpose. And I feel like, you know,

the minutiae of our day-to-day lives, especially when you experience this, you know, I've had a small, some success, a small amount of success, you know, you can get caught up in the minutiae of the day-to-day. Oh, I didn't get that tea time I wanted. Oh, you know, that new restaurant, I couldn't get a reservation at a restaurant, like things that are candidly quite silly in retrospect, when you think of like all the pain and suffering that goes around in the world. And so if anything, it was just a reminder of,

of things that I had been taught from a very young age about what is important and what I should learn to focus on. Where are you living now? So I moved my family to South Orange County to a beautiful little community called San Clemente. It's 70 miles south. So I also got an apartment right next to our office. Our offices are in Marina del Rey. So I drive up

and spend a few nights a week up here and work in the office during the week where we, I believe in being in the office and working as teams in the office together in person. And so I wasn't going to allow this, even though

My wife and I, as we discussed it, we really felt like it'd be a better place for my son, who's 13, just to be in a different environment down there. Great surfing, he's learning how to surf and starting to meet kids and stuff. That's pretty jarring when you're 13 years old to be ripped from your school, your friends and everything, but we felt that it'd be kind of a soft landing for him. And it's working out, I'm coming up here every day.

every week midweek and working out of the office and by the way i don't know if my team likes it because now like when people bug out at 5 30 or 6 or whatever i'm like oh no i'm gonna i mean there's nowhere to go i don't even have an internet i'm in an apartment right next to the my office and i i got a couch in my office i got a television so i just stay in my office till nine or ten o'clock at night and i walk over and i have a toothbrush i brush my teeth and i

you know, whatever, go to sleep there. And then I get up in the morning and wow, I'm almost the first one to work this morning. I think I got in at 8 a.m., you know, by the way, it's a five, it's not a five minutes, a two minute walk over to being in the office. So in many ways, it's pretty productive actually. I kind of, it sort of reminds me of the old days. Like when you first start companies, sometimes you're like sleeping in the office. I mean, I remember when we,

Zach James and myself, my co-founder, we started Movie Clips. We were literally in that office, that small little office. We had like little rollaway cots. We'd sleep there. We were always there. So it's a little bit of a throwback to that period, which I don't mind. I like to work. You've been the CEO of the company you started for over a decade. Yep. That's pretty rare. And you've built this amazing company. What

What have you learned about leadership over that time? The reality is when Zach and I started the company, it was called Movie Clips. It was a publisher. We ended up selling that to Comcast. We had started at the same time around when we started that business. We started a rights management business. We renamed the company Zephyr after that rights management business.

So we sold that to Comcast and that was in 2014. In 2019, we sold the rights management business to a Chinese company, Volvo, that's traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. That was a good event. We sold that asset as well because we'd already started moving into doing brand safety and brand suitability on the walled gardens. So that's...

Today, we work on Meta, we work on TikTok, we work on Google, we work on Snap, and we help brands to make sure that they're around posts or around content that they feel like is suitable for their brand. And so the iteration has been kind of different iterations. So I've been doing different things. It has allowed me, though, to, in many ways,

really study great entrepreneurs and refine my sort of management style, which is I've always felt like you have to lead from in front. And so you have to lead by example. You have to work as hard or harder than anybody at your company. You have to understand the macro, what's happening in macro, but you can't be afraid to jump into the details. You have to be

unbelievably curious about everything in your vertical what's happening. I think you have to be constantly have an appetite for growth, for growth of the company, for growth of individuals. You have to be just built for just building and growing and, and, and your employees have to feel that, right? They have to feel that you are all in on this every single day, every hour. And, um,

And I just heard a quote about Jensen Wong, who I look, I have a tremendous amount of respect for because he grinded it out when it wasn't that great, you know, for years and years and years. And then

you know, wonderful things happen with the, it turns out his little chip was very good at processing these larger language models and away you go. Right. And, but there was a lot of strategic steps he made along the way, but I, I don't think it was all like, you know, it wasn't up into the right, up into the right every single day. And there were,

popping champagne bottle. I don't think it was that for many, many years. So I got a lot of respect for people who grind through the tough times. But one of the quotes I heard about him is that he just loves to work. And I've always felt like that's something I love as well. I love to achieve success. I love to see growth. I love to see

you know, how things, how you can have an idea, build it, add team members, it grows, it starts to scale. There's nothing more kind of satisfying than that. And there's, there's nothing that's equally as depressing when you put your heart and soul into something and it doesn't take off that way. And like, do you have the,

Do you have what it takes to actually make a change or alter what you're doing? And in many ways, the course of this company, Movie Clips, the rights management businesses, because we saw a ceiling with each of those businesses. And eventually when we got into this space, I talked to myself, we had a couple of main thesis is why we thought it'd be a big business and why I continue to think it would be. I always assumed that the public squares were going to be places where people can converse freely.

I assumed that they weren't in the early days of most of these platforms. A lot of the, a lot of the founders pitched them as like highly curated environments, but that just wasn't the case. If you saw anybody could upload anything to YouTube, you could say anything you wanted on, on, on meta. Now for a while, the, it got very sort of curated and restricted, but I knew at some point it would rebound. And it has where that aperture to, for freedom of expression has opened.

And while that might be a good thing for overall for democracy and whatnot, you can, that can, that's debatable, right? Because some things can be very toxic in a public environment. What I didn't know is that

if there were certain things that were deemed really toxic, there wouldn't be want to be brands around it. And as, as they kind of, as the platforms did their job by opening up that aperture, there would need to be third parties involved. And so we're really proud to partner with all these global platforms. We're one of very few partners that do this kind of thing. And people that work at Zephyr really feel not only just like a, a general pride that we help make, uh,

these public forums sort of better and more appropriate because we help the brands determine what gets monetized with their advertising dollars. And so if somebody wants to be really toxic and spew

kind of hateful things in these platforms. That's their prerogative. But I think we need to remove the component of them getting paid for that because it creates some sort of very perverse incentive, especially when you look at the studies and you see that a lot of that edgy content

has an easier time going viral just because of the shocking nature of it. So by removing that monetization aspect, we feel like we do a really good thing for humanity, candidly. Probably a lot of people are unaware of Zephyr but have

almost certainly interacted with your work because whether it be on YouTube and monetizing content there from, from all for movie clips, which was one of the first places on YouTube to watch any sort of licensed movie content. And then you worked with all the studios there and then to working with other brands on YouTube and in all these other spaces, Meta and the other social platforms to, to now what Zephyr has become.

how many impressions or how many people do you touch?

I mean, you're talking in the billions of people that are touching one of those platforms on a monthly basis. So if we are working with one of the brands that is spending money on those platforms and we work with a large percentage of the Fortune 500 brands, then yeah, they are coming in touch with Zephyr, but they just don't know. We're behind the scenes ensuring that those brands are in the most

I would say in the most suitable place. And they define, the brand defines suitability. If the brand wants to be around certain kind of content, we say, okay, our job is to recognize what that content is at scale, label it accurately, which is very challenging to do, and then pass that signal to the brand. And they've already made a decision about what is appropriate and what isn't appropriate. And then that content can receive an ad, it can be monetized. And then the platform decides as that

money flows to the actual creator of the person and post is it that's all

that's all regulated by the by the platforms themselves what's been the reaction of your team and employees with you and your family going through this tragedy thankfully we're a company of a little over 200 people and we have about 100 people here in los angeles and only my home burned and our head of sales her home burned as well and in a weird sort of way i

it would have been hard if just her home burned just because we live in the same kind of area. And I just, my wife would kill me, but I liked that we're kind of going through the experience together that, that, that it happened that I could kind of share that with her. And cause it, it's challenging. We talk almost every single day. Did you hear about this? And we're sharing notes. And by the way, everybody in the community is doing the same thing. But yeah,

There was a moment where people said, well, maybe we should cancel. Everybody internationally was coming in. Everybody was coming in. And we made the decision, no, we have to go forward with this. Because I get that a community was impacted. I get that two people at the company were impacted. But there's...

hundreds of other people at the company that were not directly impacted, indirectly impacted. Sure, they know friends and neighbors and know people or family members maybe even, but life has to go on. And just that grit, that determination, and that's the message when we started the All Hands. I said, I know that he feels bad for us. The way you can help

myself and our head of sales is you can work. Work hard. Pour your heart and soul into it. Don't say that's not my problem when something comes across your head. Take it on. Take initiative. Be active. Be proactive.

And we've had, even though the economy is really wild right now and advertising usually follows sort of the macro economies, we have had an unbelievably successful Q1 and the year is looking to be great. In fact, today is April 1st. I sit on the phone, um,

We had an executive call and I was like, this was an amazing Q1. This was an incredible Q1. And I unfortunately said that to my wife yesterday and she almost slapped me. So on a professional front, it was an amazing Q1. On a personal front for two of us, it was a horrible Q1.

But the great part about it is, is, you know, building companies, seeing success. There's a lot of, and I'm lucky I get to take that in, right? That kind of, you know, you ask about like things that kind of feed your soul after you've experienced tragedy. For me, one of it is seeing all the investment and time and energy we put in with all these great people at the company to see it really kicking in. That's what's exciting.

If there's one thing that you would want people to learn from what you've been going through the last few months, what would it be? I am an optimist. And I know, I believe the human spirit is strong. It is strong. We rebuild. We go forward. That's the nature of how we're built as humans. And especially, by the way, in this country. It's part of what the fabric of what makes it. This country was blazed out of nothing. L.A.,

was blazed out of nothing. LA was a wasteland. It was built out of nothing. It shouldn't really technically exist. And, um, cause it's kind of a desert and it's weird. It's hard to get to for a lot of the early settlers and stuff. And they built this incredible jewel. So I want them to know that, that, that the Palisades will come back. Altadena will come back. Los Angeles. I believe I'm an optimist. I believe Los Angeles has had some tough days as has, uh,

San Francisco. Let's be candid. A lot of the state of California has had some coming out of COVID. I believe that things can change. Things can improve. I believe that there's so many talented people in this state in California that we

we will unlock incredible value. I'm super excited about all the things that are happening with these generative models, with all the just energy around the future of technology and how technology, you know, I heard Sam Altman talk about at the age of abundance. I believe that. I believe that we will enter an age. Now, the question is, as humans, what will we do with that abundance? Will it make us better people, you know, more caring, helpful to others, or will it make us

You know, the other thing, greedy, selfish, like these are traits that I don't want to view, nor do I want them for my kids and my posterity. But I'm excited and I'm an optimist. I think things are going to be not only all right, I think they're going to be great. I've learned so much from you over the years. And like many of the things that you've taught me and as I've watched you and learned from you, you know, this whole experience with you is unbelievably amazing.

your you and your family's reaction to it you and how you and your family are coping and how you are thriving in as best a way you possibly can is incredibly inspiring to me and i think it'll be incredibly inspiring to anybody that that sees you and sees this and um and just just want to thank you and say i love you and yeah appreciate you man thanks brother thank you i love you good man all right

That was good, right? It was okay? Okay. You're a good man. You're a good man. All right, I love that you do this. This is good. Yes. When the production team hugs you. Give it. On next week's episode. I have seen leaders across the spectrum of skills and ages make profound change. But it's only when they really, really want to change.