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Travis
00:00:00
So 2025, not starting out as planned. I was gonna do, like, a dramatic thing where I set the camera up and sit down in front of a chair to start this video.
But then I realized that the tripod I was gonna use is in there. Was in there. So it is January 30th today. It's been 23 days since wildfires ripped through Los Angeles.
And I think it's time to finally share my story a little bit and kind of update everybody here on the channel about what's been going on. So I live in Altadena, California, which has been mostly wiped off the map. My YouTube studio and my mixing space was in my garage, which is no more.
It burnt to the ground with all of my equipment, all of my gear, cameras, lights, hard drives. I have no musical equipment to my name. After 20 years, I can say that miraculously, my home survived.
So my family and I can return to our home one day. I don't know when that's going to be.
I don't know how long it's going to take to properly clean, when it's going to be safe for children, or when I could even remotely start rebuilding my business in that place.
But before I go any further, I just want to say, if you want to support the music community of Los Angeles, look at organizations like the Red Cross, Music Cares. We are moving the needle. There are a lot of people that are giving a lot to this community. And the.
The community of Altadena and Pacific Palisades is really. It's really a lot of people in arts and entertainment. I mean, it's like the lifeblood of what kind of keeps a lot of this city pumping.
At most everybody I know in Altadena is in the arts, in music, in film, editing, photography.
There are just so many creatives that have worked so hard to build a life in a beautiful place that have just had everything just taken away from them. So before I share my story, I have to talk about Altadena, right?
I've been in LA for almost 20 years at this point, and I have never once felt community outside of maybe the bar down the street from Capitol Studios until I came to Altadena and started a family here. And Altadena is just. It's unlike the rest of Los Angeles. It's mostly residential. It's unique homes there, there's apartments, but mostly it's.
It's families. It's people that have been here for generations. The businesses have been here forever. On almost all of them are local. It's just.
It Just everything that I don't like about la. And I hate to say that there's things that I don't like about la, but there's a lot of them. None of those things are here.
This is the only place that I could imagine living in Los Angeles or California. And, you know, the people here, they want to talk to you. It's not like in Hollywood, where everybody's caught up in whatever they're doing.
I was in Hollywood for, I don't know, like 15 years, 10 years or something like that. It's, you know, whatever. When you're in your 20s, it's, it's fun, or maybe it's not. But the people in Altadena care about the other people.
In Altadena. You have kids, you start talking to people, you see the same people everywhere.
You see people at coffee shops, you see them at the library, you see them at the park. It is just such a small town that's a stone throw away from the second or third largest city in, in the U.S. so it's really special in that sense.
And, and I think that the communities even come more together, come together more through this, this just horrible situation. And we're, we're all going to rebuild.
Everybody that I've talked to, they want to be there, they want to rebuild their house, they want to rebuild their business. And so that's what, that's what Altadeena is about. It's about that community, and we're going to bring that back.
So I want to share my story, but before I do that, I.
I want to say that I'm putting this out there for those of you who don't know me, for those of you that watch the channel also a little bit for some closure. And also some of my closest friends don't even know how this happened for my family. So I just want to put that out there for people.
And then I also want to say that, you know, I do feel so lucky that my house is standing. I know so many people that have nothing. But everyone in Altadena is suffering through their own personal hell right now.
Whether they have smoke damage or they have a barren lot. This is probably one of the hardest things that every person, regardless of their level of loss, has ever experienced.
So I don't want anyone to believe that. I feel like I'm a special victim here. My life has been thrashed in, in as many ways as everyone else's.
Everybody, if you know anybody in Altadena, no matter what they have or don't have anymore, they're having a very hard time. So the story, I'll try not to ramble and keep this Fairly concise.
Around 6:30pm on January 7, we're putting our daughter to bed and got a text message that there was a fire nearby. And you know, it happens not regularly, but every year or two there's a fire in the hills here. What was unique to this time is the wind.
People talking about hurricane strength winds. I mean, we get a lot of wind in Altadena, but my fence blew over at like 10am that day and that's never happened before.
And so this fire started at 6:30 ish. There's been a lot of news that's come out about it, so I'm not going to try to give you the specifics because you can go find it.
And we were kind of thinking, let's put our daughter to bed and then talk about whether we want to stay here. Our house is also very old and the wind is crazy. And so we'd been up all night the night before just from the wind.
And so we were thinking maybe let's just go to a hotel, right? It's just going to be 3, 400 bucks and we don't have to worry about being evacuated.
If this fire was bad, we can also sleep because the wind won't keep us up. And so then one of our friends texted me or my wife, somebody closer to the fire and they said a helicopter flew over and told them to leave.
And this is, I mean, really
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minutes after the fire has started. And so at that point I went outside, I looked, I could see orange glow, crazy windy.
And we just decided, you know what, it's never, it's never going to get here. We're so far from the mountains. We, we live basically next to a fire station just a couple blocks.
Like, let's just leave just so we can sleep in peace at night. We'll just go get a hotel, we'll take our daughter and we'll feel good about it and then we'll come back tomorrow.
So we threw a couple stuffed animals in a bag, threw some clothes in a bag, threw a pack and fillet in the car and I started loading the car. When I went outside, there's a lot more orange than there was a second before when I looked out the window.
And so I started to get a little concerned that maybe this was going to be a serious thing. But still, we're so far from the mountain that there could never be the threat of fire to our home.
So I went back inside And I said, okay, let's leave faster. And I grabbed a few extra things and we cruised down the hill at like 7:30, checked into a hotel, saw people I knew and recognized.
Like I said, Altadena is so small.
And then all of a sudden everybody's piling into, like, these hotels and you're in the elevator with somebody that you've seen at the coffee shop and you're like, I know your face, I don't know your name, but you definitely live in Altadena. I know why you're in this hotel right now. And so we watched the news a bit.
Anybody that has a kid knows, trying to get him to go to sleep in a hotel room is a bit of a challenge. So we were up fairly well, late for us because, you know, we're old parent people.
So, like, it was like 10, 10:30, and the fire seemed like it was moving east. And it, you know, things, it was in. It was in from what we could tell from the news, it was in houses or structures, but it was to the east of us.
Uh, technically not in what would be Altadena. Maybe, maybe it would be Altadena, might be Pasadena over there. And so we went to bed, like, with a little bit of peace.
And we woke up in the morning, you know, six, seven o'clock, something like that toddler wakes you up. And I mean, I grab my phone first, just like, I have to see the news.
And it was pretty clear in those first few seconds that there were structures burning in Altadena. And so I told my wife, I was like, we, I. Let me go, let me go back and get stuff we took nothing.
Like, let me go get the Social Security cards, let me go get the, the whatever, like the things that you should have taken in the first place. I just wanted to get back and get those.
And she was kind of 50, 50 on that until we turned the news on and our street was on the news with houses further south than ours burning. I mean, like, just apocalyptic burning with no fire department presence, just a news reporter talking about the destruction.
And it was our street three blocks south of us. And so at that point, I knew that I couldn't go back. That, like, what we had was what
we had.
And we started to come to terms with the fact that our house could be gone and what are we going to do? And so that was like, I don't know. I can't really put that into words. You just, you kind of black out. You don't, you don't know what to do. So we.
We stayed at that hotel for a little bit longer, and then we decided, let's go south to my. My wife's family because they have a guest house and they're outside San Diego. Let's get out of this smoke. My wife is pregnant as well.
We're going to have a baby in a few weeks. Us staying in the quality of air that was going to exist in Pasadena was just not an option. We left with the stuff we had.
We loaded the car up and we drove south to where we could breathe outside because it was horrible, horrible toxic air from all of the structures burning. We spin spent that day, Wednesday the 8th, just watching the news.
And we live near kind of a business district in Altadena, like one of two areas where there's businesses. And that area was just being devastated and heavily covered by the news, national news.
We watched the church next to us burn down on tv, and the reporter said that embers had lit up a structure next, next to us, next to the church, a few. A few houses down, which would have been our house. And the camera panned and it stopped just shy of where you could actually see our property.
But all you could see was smoke, smoke everywhere, just black. Just black smoke. And there was some fire presence there, maybe one or two people.
And I don't, in this story, want anyone to think that I'm faulting the fire department for what happened. This is absolutely catastrophic. And they were spread thin and they did the best they can. And I think those guys are heroes.
But, yeah, they were usually nowhere to be found. And that, that story rings true with most. Most people I talked to. And it's. It's not because they didn't want to be there.
It's because there was too many houses, too many fires, and they were just. Wasn't enough of them. So we felt like we were watching our house burn. And, yeah, we didn't know what to do. So that continued all day.
We watched various news, local and national news all day, and just.
We watched a helicopter drop water on what could have been my garage, could have been the preschool next to us that burned to the ground, could have been my neighbor's house burned to the ground, could have been the apartment next to us that burned to the ground. And so we went to. We went to bed that night not knowing whether we had a house.
And so the next morning, when it was clear the fires were kind of not active in a dangerous sense, we decided that I wanted. I wanted to go. I had to get back there. I had to See our property. And luckily my brother in law drove up early in the morning from down in San Diego.
He had to go to LA for work.
So 4:00 in the morning he saw our house and then we texted him when we got up and he called us and he told us that the house was standing, the garage was not.
And so at that point we, I loaded the car and well, I guess I unloaded the car because we had to get stuff out because things were still burning at this point. And like I said, there was not enough fire presence to deal with this situation.
And so I decided that I was going to go back to our house, I was going to get everything that we needed. I mean we took no clothes, you know, so it was kind of a trip to save what we can because it's possible that our house could still burn down.
There was, it was still windy and there were still active fires. So I drove up immediately and got to, got to Altadena and the roads were closed. The highway patrol and, and police were closing it.
Depending on what officer you went to, you might get in.
And so I, I was able to get in my, myself and my father in law, we had to park I don't know, maybe a half mile from our house and walk uphill carrying like, you know, a cooler for stuff in the freezer bags to put things in gallons of water.
My brother in law told us that when he was there at 4 o'clock in the morning, there was a small fire in the garage that he went and got some water and dumped on it because there was no water pressure, there was no water flowing out of any of the hoses anymore. And so he had put this little fire out in the garage.
And so we decided that we would take water with us in case we needed, in case there was a fire that we would pour it on there. I just, I wanted, I did not want the studio to start up again and then go to the house.
Like if this house existed, I wanted it to still exist, you know, by the end of the day. So we got to the house. It was emotional. Obviously.
The devastating, the devastation was just like, it's just so crazy to see in my area, we're just a few blocks south of the, the absolute blank lot devastation that is just north of us. Our area is like lot by lot and street by street. So you know, I walked towards my house up the first street.
It's perfect, green trees, fine, maybe something a tree fell over because it was windy. And then you turn right, there's nothing for two blocks on the right, everything is gone. But the school across the street is there.
Then you get to my street and the first half of the block up to our house is gone. And then above our house, there's a few structures left. And then beyond that there's nothing. Then there's a street that's untouched, perfect.
And it's just so weird to see green grass, landscaping, perfect house. And then right next to it, gray, barren pile of ash and a chimney. And then next to that, green grass, perfect house. It's. You just.
I don't, I don't understand it. It's absolutely horrible to see and it's horrible. So when we were there, we did what we needed to do. We got the things we needed to get.
And we had left a car there, which was, I mean, the smoke damage, the smoke damage to the house and this in the car is, is unbelievable. But we decided let's fill this car up and drive it out, right? Because
it was in our driveway. So we walked half mile uphill.
So I would have had to do multiple trips downhill with everything that we were trying to take out. But people were driving around in the closed area.
And so we decided, let's load this car and let's drive this car out because they'll let us drive out, but they won't let us drive in. So we drove out. We got to the car that we brought and we loaded it up. And my father in law wanted to get back.
I didn't feel like I was ready to leave yet. So he took everything in, in the car, the. The not smoked car. And he drove back to, to take the things that we needed back.
And I grabbed some more water and walked back up to the house because I just felt like I wanted to a. I wanted to walk around a little bit. I wanted to see the area. I told my neighbor that I would check on his house and take a video.
I wanted to make sure I did that for him. I. I just wanted to do a due diligence of trying to move leaves away from the house. Branches, like anything that could light up.
I wanted those things to go away. And so I spent an hour or two, no rake, right? Because my shed with all my tools was gone.
Just like moving leaves by hand, filling my trash cans, just trying to get everything that could go up in flames away from the house. And so I did that for a bit and poured some water on some smoking spots in the garage. And then I. I felt like it was time to go.
And so I decided that I Would leave. And I was walking around the back of my house, and I heard that. That campfire crackle that like you. Like you humans know is, could only be fire.
And I could hear it and it didn't know where it was. And so I was looking around and then I could see it. It was. So my garage butts up basically to the end of my property, and then there's like a fence.
And then my. My neighbor's property's there, and they used to have two houses which they, they. They lost. And there was like a pile of ash that must have been hot.
I guess that's a thing. I don't know how these things work, but there was flames coming out of the ground and starting to creep up this tree.
And so I had one gallon of water left that I hadn't poured on leaves or like on the studio or whatever. And I ran back and I grabbed that gallon of water, hoping like, God, I hope this is enough. Like, it's just this one.
I only have this bottle and like kind of jumped over this fence. It's like half broken. Stepped in something that was super hot, which is probably where the fire came from. And then just started tossing the water.
And I didn't want to get too close to it because now I now have realized that all this ash is hot because I just stepped in it. And luckily I. It. It went out. And then I. I went back to see if there was any water in my drinking water bottle or if there was something in the house.
And when I came back out and walked towards the front of my house, there was a very slow moving fire truck. And so I ran out to the front and I fly, I flagged it.
And these guys, they had just gotten into town from Northern California, and their job was to look for hot spots and check burnt structures to make sure that fires don't start. And I said, hey, guys, I don't, like, I don't know if this. If you can do something, but I just put a small fire out back here.
There's also like an open flame over here. There's also an open flame over there.
And they were like, those sound like gas, but we're gonna mark them, we're gonna check them, show us this hotspot. And so those guys pulled back around. I showed them the area. They raked it all out. They hosed, hosed it down.
They were like, yeah, we got a hot spot or whatever their terminology is. And they spent like 20 minutes addressing the back corner of that property, which was right next to where My garage was.
And I mean, I feel like I was supposed to be there for that. I feel like maybe I saved a fire from starting again because that fire was small.
When those guys, that truck would have driven by, they wouldn't have seen a fire. And this property is like, it's behind my property with just a driveway that goes back to it.
So it's not even really clear that there's a property back there to look at. And so I'm just glad I. I'm glad I stayed for, for that. And so then I. I trekked it out of there, walked back down the hill to the car and drove to.
Drove back to my, my in law's house. And so at that point, I mean, I don't really think it's worth, you know, summarizing any more or really going into detail anymore.
And we'll just summarize it with, you know, now we're, we're in temporary housing.
We've rented a house close enough to Pasadena to be able to go to the hospital we want for our baby, my wife to be able to go to her doctors, for our daughter to go back to preschool, which finally just reopened because it had to be cleaned. And so now we're just in the process of insurance and, you know, recollecting everything for the baby. The.
The outpour of love and from people has been like crazy.
I mean, we've had things come from strangers in other cities that just know somebody that knows somebody and they wanted to send us a crib or wanted to send us this.
And so we're very fortunate that people have shown up and given us a lot so that we can be prepared to have a child, since everything that we had saved for our second child was, was in the garage and the shed that burned. So that is, that's the story. It's. It feels good to like, put it all down like this with no edits.
So I'm sorry if it was a bit rambling, but it was just important for me to tell it. I feel actually, I feel better having finished. So I think the only thing to do before we go is to talk about where I'm gonna go from here.
Obviously there's gonna be. There's gonna be rebuilding of the studio and the garage and, and a lot of that I'm going to be bouncing around town. So many people have used.
Offered me their studios. I'm going to take those people up on their offer. I'll probably be shooting some videos in other locations that are nicer than this.
And Then I think the only thing I could do with the podcast is to make this part of the story. Because the podcast has always been about what's going on in my life, what I'm learning, what I'm trying to be better at, what I'm doing.
And, you know, there's no avoiding or hiding what has happened and how my situation has changed. And so that is just going to become a feature of this channel. I'm still going to be doing interviews.
They're going to be a little bit more challenging for scheduling having a newborn and not having a dedicated space. Those interviews will be hopefully continuing down the line of having some, some really impactful big guests.
But there's also going to be interviews around what's going on with me.
Like maybe we'll get some studio designers on here, maybe we'll talk to, I don't know, equipment people, equipment manufacturers or wiring or things that are about rebuilding. And then the non interview episodes.
There's an opportunity to do things that I would never have done normally because this podcast has been more about career and mindset.
Given the situation, I can talk about rebuilding studio or picking the equipment that I want to replace my equipment with and why I would make a change or why I would stick with what I had. So there might be a little bit more technical stuff on here, which I know a lot of people love on YouTube.
You know, obviously there's always a hot video topic of like, what would I do if I started over today? Well, well, that is literally what I'm doing. I am starting over. And so this channel is going to be about building now.
It was, it was about building a career before and, and now it's really gonna be about building a career from the ground up. So what would I do with 20 years experience if it all was taken away?
And I imagine that the answer to that question is gonna change over the next year. So it'll be interesting to see what we talk about. But I appreciate the support from everybody. Keep watching the channel.
I'm gonna try to keep uploads as regular as I can. It's just, it's going to be challenging. I'm going to start replacing equipment and maybe try to up the production value around here a little bit.
But yeah, I just, my priority will be my family and reorganize my life and then getting back to mixing records and then doing this podcast. Hopefully I can do all those things pretty quick.
And so, yeah, I appreciate all of you for watching the channel and please stick around through this odd period. I think there's actually going to be some really interesting conversations that come from this.