0:07

Alright. Welcome to Digital Creator. It's me, your host, Dylan Schmidt. And this will be a different episode than normal because there's a lot going on over here. If you listen to last week's episode at the beginning, you might have caught that. I said, that I had to record that episode because we had high wind warnings, and little did I know what that would transpire to. Yeah. So I'm in a high wind boarding area still. Just letting you know right off the bat, my family is safe. Our house is safe. Where I live right now is safe. And unless you somehow didn't know, which I'm sure you did know, there have been wildfires going all across Los Angeles. As of right now, when I'm recording this for you, over 40,000 acres have burned, more than 12,000 structures, have been destroyed. There have been at least 24 fatalities. The fires have led to an evacuation of over a 150,000 residents, and it's really hard to put into words the impact that this has had on Los Angeles. And Los Angeles is a huge place. When we say Los Angeles, we don't just mean like the city of Los Angeles. Usually, we're talking more like Los Angeles County, which is absolutely massive. I don't live in the city of Los Angeles. I live outside of it, right near Pasadena. And there have been 2 of the biggest fires. Well, the biggest being the Palisades fire, which if you're unfamiliar with the territory that is, like, right on the coast. And then inwards a bit is the Eaton fire, which is the 2nd biggest. And that one has been closer to me, which is, which did a lot of destruction to Altadena. So while it has been an incredibly difficult week for our community as a whole, I just wanna share my experiences and reflections while they're still raw as someone who had to evacuate. Last Tuesday, I had record an episode that I published, and then I had a client call. Like I've mentioned on here before, I do consulting coaching calls. And in the middle of a client call, my power went out. And I thought, you know, that's basically to be expected because Edison had given me a warning that they were gonna be doing these public safety power shutoffs. And as far as I understand it, that means, like, we shut off your power so that it doesn't spark a wildfire. And they had said that the minimum that it could be for the power to come back on is around 8 hours. So, you know, I kinda thought that, like, maybe, after the power had gone out that it would be, like, 8 hours when it goes back on. And I had all my stuff charged up ready to go. So I even hop back on the client call, and I'm using a hotspot, and I'm thinking nothing too much of it.

This is around like 2: 2:40

30 PM. Fast forward

to 5: 2:43

30 PM and the power comes back on. And also that's right when it's starting to get a little bit dark too. I pop on the news just because you can hear the winds picking up and I had my trash cans out on the street for trash pickup. And it was so windy out. They just kept blowing over and the trash trucks normally had already been by to pick them up at that time, but they hadn't come, which was unnormal. But I'm, like, maybe because these high winds, they won't pick up the trash. And I've experienced, you know, all sorts of weather. I lived in Denver, drove a snowplow for one part of my life, but I've mainly lived in Southern California. Just lived in Denver when I was around 18 to 20. So I'm pretty familiar with, like, the Santa Ana winds, the cold out here, and I've never felt winds this strong. So anyways, my trash cans are blowing over. Trash is going in the street. I'm picking up neighbor's trash cans. I call the trash service. She's like, oh, you know, I'll send them over your way. Right away, the trash truck comes, picks it up. I'm like, cool. I'm watching the news, just keeping an eye on things because I'm like, this is wild. I think I had seen some posting about a fire. I believe the Palisades fire started before the Eden. I could be wrong, but I I saw something about a fire, and I was like, woah. That's something to keep an

eye on. And then now around, like, 6: 3:50

15 or so, power goes out again. And I'm thinking, okay. That's kinda to be expected. Maybe we just got lucky that the power had come back on, but I'm still checking my phone just, you know, like the Nextdoor app, the Citizen app, Facebook groups, just kinda like hearing what's going on because the winds are so powerful and with no noise in the house because the power's out, you could really hear the strength of the wind. And I always have this feeling like when it's really windy, that's I don't know. I mean, besides wildfires, like stuff just seems to act strange. There's just a different energy in the air when it's really windy out. So I'm kind of on a different level of alert. I'm not just chilling reading a book in the dark or something, but we get our daughter to sleep. And then I see that this must have been around not long after it started, which I believe

was right around 6: 4:42

30. I see that there was a fire near Altadena, which is there's basically 2 it's like 2 towns over, but the town in between is pretty small. A lot of these, like, mountain towns over here that basically rests right on the, Angeles National Forest, which is where I am. And so the power's out. I go to pick up food. And while I'm out, I'm like, this is the dumbest idea. I'm going to eat Chick Fil A for my wife and I, and it is so windy out. Power is out everywhere. Stoplights don't even have power. They're not even blinking red. There's no street lights. The wind is blowing full blast. Flags are being torn down off the light poles on streets. Trees are already knocked over. And I'm like, here I am risking my life for a Chick Fil A Cobb salad. Not that we needed to, but I'd already set out and I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna go for it anyways. But I just like, again, knew that this was just like not your everyday power outage either. So I

get back, I eat, and that must have been around, like, the 6: 5:36

30,

6: 5:41

45 mark when the Eaton fire started. And I look out my window in my living room, and I can see flames. I opened the door and I'm like, well, I'm not going to go out there because it feels like we're in a tornado right now. It took all of my strength to close the front door. That's how hard the wind was blowing. But I could see the fire on the hill and I'm like, this wind and that fire I can see that's already sparked up. And then I know that there's another fire by the Palisades area. Something is not good going on right now. This could turn bad quick. Right away, I see people already talking about evacuating again on the different apps that I'm checking in on. And I'm thinking, okay, we just put my daughter to sleep. We have places to go. Like, I have a backup plan of, like, where we would go to and all that, communicating it to my wife, and we're already like, okay, let's get the bags packed now. But I also realized I'm not going to sleep anytime soon. So let me just keep an eye on this. And when I say it's time to go, we know where we'll go. Like, we've got the agreed upon spot and we'll go. So I'm keeping an eye on my phone and just checking in on all the latest community apps, and then I'm also looking out my window and seeing, like, with my own eyes, like, I see that fire over there. I'm consulting Chat GPT. You know, I kinda talked to Chat GPT. And it did say, like, at night especially, fires are closer than they appear. I'm like, that feels far on the map, but it looks closer in person. And I'm not, like, trying to risk this or anything. But if it's not going out anytime soon, like, I don't wanna hang around here, you know? And I'm not, like, deeply attached to anything inside the house, really, other than the people and animal that lives in it. So I'm like, hey, we gotta go. We gotta go. No problem. I'm not trying to put up a fight. I'm just trying to make it the most comfortable for my family and, of course, keep them safe. So every couple hours throughout the night, I'm keeping an eye on things, making sure that, like, the fire is not just creeping up on us. And from everything I see, it's not. The wind is blowing in a direction that's away from us, thankfully. But around 5 AM, I look at my phone. I see, alright, we gotta go. Like, there's we're we're at that point where it's just go time. Like, there's no reason to stay. Thinking of, like, a risk assessment, I'm like, the baby has slept long enough. The fire may not be like creeping on our house right now or anything like that, but if an ember or something blows because those can blow for a couple of miles and light up a new fire and the smoke, like there's just no sense in staying, right? So we take off to my mother in law's house, which is just a few miles south. It's basically like a pit stop before we go to our next location, and we're watching on the news. At this point, I've got a good rotation down, which I've shared on, Instagram, but I'm checking these different apps, which WatchDuty is like the number one wildfire app, and it's showing me maps of the fire. I'm able to see, like, live wildfire cameras, which is just wild. Like, the access we have right now to be able to click a camera and then see in a real time, like, what the fire looks like. It's basically like a live stream of the wildfire. And I'm just keeping an eye on it, and then I'm like, you know what? Smoke easily can shift in our direction. We're not in danger of the fire really, but we are in danger of the smoke blowing in our direction and there being ash in the air, which the air quality is naturally gonna be bad. Asbestos were, you know, in this houses, the houses are like way older in that area. So we continue our trek about an hour and a half South, and it's a completely different vibe down there. Air quality is normal. It's not super windy, very safe. And naturally, we're glued to everything that's happening on the news, which is in our neck of the woods is Altadena just going up in flames. And it's really sad because, my wife has a good friend that had a house just get destroyed, burned to the ground. And the lady who married my wife and I, a good friend of ours, she officiated our wedding, had a beautiful, like, intimate ceremony. She's amazing. Her house burned to the ground. She has 4 kids, an amazing family. They're all safe, but, like, they lost everything. And the town of Altadena that got hit the hardest by me, like, this is a town that we were considering moving to. If you've been listening to this for a while, you know that I moved about a year and a half ago. Well, Altadena is right in the middle of where I lived and where I moved to. I didn't move that far from where we previously lived. So it's a beautiful, beautiful town. We were just there a couple of weeks ago as we're running through the park with, my daughter, and we've gone hiking right where the fire started. I just bought some steaks from the grocery store that was there that just burned down. So, Althena, you know, as a community, holds a special place in our hearts. And on one hand, it was, like, emotionally exhausting to see all the updates on you know, at that point, we're watching YouTube because they have live streams on the news. We're checking the WatchDuty app. We're hearing from, you know, personal friends and family. I'm having a lot of people reach out, which is fantastic. But I did find it just like at a certain point, you're just like, this is crazy because you don't really wanna watch anything else. It's not like you wanna put on a movie and just kick your feet up because there's just this destruction going on. So what do you do? You just watch live streams of the news, and you focus on what's around you and making sure everyone is doing good around you. And for my daughter who's too young to really know what's going on, I'm doing my job as her dad, of course, to keep her safe, but just to keep a sense of normalcy, because I think that is part of keeping her safe at her age is not making it feel like we're in an immediate threat. You know what I mean? And if you're wondering, like, in that kind of evacuation moment, what we took with us, just the essentials. I've shared before, I'll share it again. My wife and I are a bit minimalist. You know, we have a good amount of stuff, but we're not, like, packed to the gills with stuff. Like, we don't just collect things to collect stuff. So we took the essentials, clothes, hygiene items, toys for my daughter. I took my computer. I didn't even take my cameras, honestly. I was like, if they were to go, I got my iPhone. I'll be good. Didn't take my beloved, Shure SM7 B custom microphone, just my computer. And while we're at a hotel, you know, a couple hours away from home, can't help but think, like, what if we did lose everything? And while our situation is, I would say, more so unique than to others, and it's different for everybody, it just got me thinking, you know, I'm showing my experience here, but that's just one of thousands of others experiences. How my wife and I, you know, relate to our physical items in our house are way different than how other people relate to their physical items in their house. And especially, you know, a lot of these people, whether it's the Palisades or Altadena, you know, a lot of these people lived in these houses. I know for sure in Altadena, like 40 plus years, I kept seeing stories about that. And, you know, it's so different. I've lived in this house for a year and a half, but I can't even imagine what that's like to live in a house longer than I've been alive. And we just kept seeing stories of just like the tragedy on the news of what these people were experiencing and hearing stories from friends and then new fires popping up and then, like, hoping, you know, that other friends feel safe and are safe and taken care of because it just seemed like fires just kept popping up because the wind kept pushing the fire around. And as a couple days pass, come back home, our house thankfully is fine. Evacuation orders in our area start to get lifted. There starts to feel some normalcy even though, as I say that today, there is an email that I received from Edison, I think, last night that the power could get shut off again because of the wind, and they do these public safety shutoff warnings or whatever. And as, I guess, like, this whole last, like, 7 days or so has kind of been going on, I'm thinking about, like, what's the lessons in this? Like, what are the lessons in this that I could share? What are the tidbits that, you know, I could pass along that someone else might find useful? And I think that there's, like, a few things that I think are worth sharing. Number 1, the importance of community in a time of crisis. For people that are grieving, which, I mean, my whole life, I've had to experience grief, gone through a lot of loss in my life, parents, sibling, other family members. It's easy during those times to, like, isolate, I would say, at least for me, but it's also important to remember to lean into community, not just for yourself because you get a lot out of accepting help from the community, but it helps switch your perspective of focusing on the anxiety and devastation of everything when you reach out to help when you reach out to participate in community. So you get a lot out of it, but it's not so much just about getting from it. It's about giving because that's where you get even more giving without that expectation of receiving anything in return. And another thing I've been thinking about is just like preparedness. I had become kind of obsessed with air quality in my house because I get allergies and I'm like, maybe I could just, like, figure out how to tackle allergies through the air quality kind of angle. And so I was I've been prepared to, you know, I got air filters in every single room. That kick on automatically. I've got meters checking in on the air quality. And so that just came in handy. But the preparedness part of communicating with my wife, communicating where we're gonna go, communicating what we need to bring, and being ready so that when the time comes to actually go, we feel confident because we've communicated exactly what will happen. And that's another thing, communication. All I could think about, especially in the first few days, was how important information was. Information about where the fire was at. Information about where the wind is blowing to know if I'm in this huge cloud of smoke or if the fire is coming towards me. There's just like way more information coming in, and it's easy to get fed false information or information that changes me from a state of, like, preparedness, confidence, and focused to one of, like, arousal, desperation, and vulnerable and powerless. And what I mean by that time kinda to give you an example is, you know, if I am checking the watch duty app or checking, you know, a website that shows me what planes are flying overhead, I'm getting the exact information I need communicated to me so that I can be informed about what's going on around me versus opening up YouTube, looking at a live stream of the news. And as helpful as the news is, there's some times where they just kind of have this, like, angle that gets you aroused of this devastation, despair. This is awful. And, yes, it is awful. But at that moment, the timing of the information being communicated is not helpful. What you need is that confidence in that you're being prepared, you're being safe, you're being focused on the best outcome. And this even comes to just communicating to family members, to friends. When they ask if you're okay, you don't just give them the long answer. You just go, yes. I'm okay. We're safe. Our house is fine. And then you can go into anything else. And I think I've learned a lot of that from all of the work that I share in this podcast that I do with clients, it's like being a good communicator translates over into other areas of life, not just making podcasts and content. Front loading the information so that you can calm the other person, which is the effect I wanna have. I'm not trying to, like, oh my gosh. Yes. The house is on fire. Oh my god. We gotta go. You know? Like, that's not effective. That just creates more confusion. And what I want to convey is confidence, clarity, and to let people know that I'm okay despite all of the devastation and destruction that's happening in Southern California while I'm communicating that to them. Right? So last thing I'll add for now is it is kinda strange to, like, okay. They create content, a huge tragedy going on right now. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about like, wow, how could this person be posting during such a tragedy in Southern California? They live in Los Angeles. And just a lot of judgment towards creators like that. I can see it from both angles. And I think that there's more to it than just 2 angles. But number 1, like, if information being shared is not, like, critical information to the livelihood of someone else, then it's just like entertainment or something. Right? A lot of these content creators jobs that are, like, living in Los Angeles making content that's not about the fire, their livelihood could very well depend on the content that they're creating. And entertainment content, even during destruction and devastation, doesn't negate the experience that people are going through or the sheer size of things. It's like there's one channel, say that social media, for example, entertainment content, if you will. Again, granted it's not done in, like, poor taste or anything. It's like timing is just awkward. Because if they make their money doing that, like, makeup unboxing is when I saw people like, how could she do this? Or I saw another person talking about topics that had nothing to do with fire. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not mad at it. I get it. Like, they gotta do it. There is a larger audience outside of Los Angeles Despite all of the stuff going on, like, there is still a need for normalcy. It kind of reminds me a little bit of when I had my mom die. When people would want to talk to me, they're like, does he want to talk about anything else other than his mom? And it's like, yeah, I do. Because maybe you're not even the person I wanna talk to about my mom. You know? It's not like I just wanna talk about her 247. I'd like to have some sense of normalcy. You know? And it's just uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for a lot of people, and I think it's not gonna get easier anytime soon because there's been so many people that have been affected just trying to share, like, different perspectives here because it's easy to think, like, especially people going through this mass event here that you wanna focus on it. And it's like, yeah, you do, but then another part of you is, like, if it's all you consume, it starts to, like, eat away at you, and then you start to feel like more depressed. And it's not like you're forgetting about the people whose lives were lost or the people that lost their homes. Nothing like that. People that have lost their home, at a certain point, they're like, oh, I lost my home. You know what? Anyone wanna get a drink? We don't have to talk about the fire or anything. Like, let's just get a drink kind of thing. Like people are more than just this thing that happened to them. And they seek community and community isn't only talking about the things that you're going through. That's a part of it. But I do read and hear this desire for more than just to talk about the destruction, not to forget about it, but to talk more than just about it. So it's been a challenging week. Can't lie, but I am reminded about how resilient people can be. And I'm grateful to even have this platform to share, reflect on this past week, and connect with you all. So in the meantime, wherever you are, stay safe, and I'll get back to our usual topics next week.