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One year on from the catastrophic LA wildfires, journalist, author, and MS NOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff examines what the fires reveal about Americas growing age of disaster. Drawing from his new book Firestorm, Soboroff shares hard lessons from the aftermath, exposing systemic failures, unlikely heroics, and what todays recovery efforts tell us about how the U.S. will respond to the next crisis. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You grew up in the Palisades, which were the heart of the fires. For our listeners who haven’t been there, can you describe the Palisades? What it looks like, what type of place it is, and then what happened when the fire swept through and the aftermath? Pacific Palisades is a coastal enclave, I think you could say, in between Santa Monica and Malibu, the iconic Malibu, and it’s nestled along the Pacific Coast. And it’s actually on the absolute opposite side of Los Angeles County from Altadena where the Eaton fire also burned. And the reason it’s the costliest wildfire event in the history of the country is that both of these massive urban conflagrations unfolded at the same time. The Palisades fire due to a holdover fire from an arson fire seven days earlier up at the top of Lachman Lane in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Eaton Fire in Altadena because of, the prevailing theory goes, faulty electrical equipment that energized and led to a spark, that when there were hurricane force Santa Ana wind gusts 80 miles per hour or greater, which by the way, were predicted by the National Weather Service as a particularly dangerous situation, one spark like that led to what they knew was going to be a catastrophic situation. And so the Palisades, the fire raced down from the Santa Monica Mountains and engulfed the community of tens of thousands, and the same exact thing happened in Eaton Canyon on the other side of Los Angeles County, engulfing Altadena. You said that the winds were predicted. There are some folks who talk about how the conditions were unprecedented, these hurricane force winds, and dry landscape, and densely populated homes altogether. Folks weren’t really prepared to handle what unfolded. No, definitely not, and growing up in the Palisades, I evacuated the house that we lived in as a kid, and you always return home and the house is fine. And certainly, there have been homes lost in these fires, but nothing like this. Nothing like thousands of homes, 31 people killed, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. This was something that I don’t think any of us had ever seen, and as you mentioned, the conditions were such that we had received barely any rain at all in the late part of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025, and so Los Angeles was a tinderbox ready to go. And I think what I’ve uncovered, discovered, learned about what it was that I experienced was that this was really the fire of the future. I thought it was a time machine into my past, but really, it was a look into the future that my children and our children will inhabit. And when I say the fire of the future, this was a senior emergency manager working for the federal government that said to me in a clandestine meeting after the fires, who this guy had been to every mass casualty fire in the last five years working for the federal government, there’s not one proximate cause. And certainly, there’s lots of investigative reporting to be done about whether or not there were predeployed firefighters in the right places or the reservoir was full, and it wasn’t full and should have been and who’s to blame for that? Or should Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, have been in town or out of town? Did Gavin Newsom do what he said? Did Donald Trump’s misinformation and disinformation affect this as the president elect? But really, this man, Jonathan White, from the Commissioned Health Service Corps, said to me, he took my notebook and he said, “Let me draw an X on it.” And on the forums of the X were obviously climate change, infrastructure falling apart, changes in the way we live, thousands of electric car batteries, another new technology exploding during the fires. And then the big one is the misinformation and the disinformation in terms of how people got notified, or didn’t, about what was happening in Los Angeles. And all of those things together is what made this not only the Great Los Angeles Fires, but also in some measure, the new age of disaster, America’s new age of disaster where it isn’t just a spark. It’s a spark combined with our politics, it’s a spark combined with the ways we live, it’s a spark combined with hurricane force winds in bone dry Los Angeles in the middle of the winter. It’s all of those things combined. You write in the book about people fighting to save their homes or spraying down their own property with flames all around them. What’s our individual responsibility in a disaster versus what we should be expecting of our government? The tales of people spraying down their own houses, it seems dangerous. I think it certainly was. My own brother spent a long time considering whether or not to leave their house that ultimately burned down that he was living in, his in-laws’ home. And I know many stories like that, that people didn’t leave till the very last second, and I think it’s human nature to want to stand up and defend what is yours. These men and women of the LA County Fire Department, of the LA City Fire Department, of the mutual aid efforts from all over not just Southern California, but the American West and Mexico and Canada, firefighters came from everywhere, thousands and thousands of firefighters. They did everything they could to stop this blaze. There’s a firefighter, Eric Mendoza, who I write about, who laid on his stomach in the middle of El Medio Street in the Palisades with his hose, two and a half diameter hose, biggest hose they could flow open full bore with thousand plus degree temperatures, automobile metal melting around them, and saying to himself, “I’m going to have black shit in my lungs and be coughing up stuff for days and weeks. I can barely see. I need to go into a house to wash my eyes out.” The question is what’s our government’s role? Our government’s role is to provide services to us to mitigate and ideally stop, but the reality is it’s not going to be possible. And as I said, are there questions to ask about could there have been more pre-deployed firefighters in the Palisdes? Of course, those are important questions to ask. But to me, it’s also as much a story, if it’s a story about failures, it’s a story about hope, because I got to meet and spend time around incredible people, not just the firefighters from the Palisades and from Altadena, wildlife biologists who studied the animals that were the first to repopulate these areas, federal government employees like the meteorologists that predicted this stuff. All of them give me hope in the way in which they have approached this. Day laborers, by the way, who are out rebuilding and cleaning up, despite the fact that they’re under the crosshairs of this administration. I always find that in a catastrophe, there are hopeful threads. It’s easy to think about the negative parts of this, but to me, I’m also as uplifted as I’ve ever been after having a really hard year, and I think that that’s what this book was for me as much as anything, which was a cathartic process to work through.
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For years, AI at work felt like a quiet helper in the background. It summarized meetings, suggested text, and answered questions when we asked. That era is ending. The latest AI agents are beginning to move through systems more like teammates. They join projects, update plans, and act across teams. For the first time, organizations are effectively bringing on colleagues that can see more of the workplace than any single person ever could. Ive spent years building tools to give teams clarity and save them time, so I see the upside. But that shift forces a harder question: what does it really mean for an AI to see everything in a workplace? The ethical issue isnt whether agents can technically access information. It is whether their access mirrors what a reasonable employee would encounter in the course of doing their job. When Visibility Turns Into Influence Most workplaces rely on role-based access and permissions to maintain order. People see only the information relevant to their role, and those boundaries shape how teams collaborate and how they resolve disagreements. AI agents complicate that system. If an agent has more access than it should, even by accident, it can surface information that changes how work is interpreted and shifts decisions away from the people meant to make them. These scenarios usually appear in small ways first. An employee might ask an agent a question and receive an answer based on sensitive information they did not realize was in the agents scope. People also produce their best ideas through drafts, notes, and early sketches that are not meant for broad consumption. Even the chance that AI might leverage those early drafts changes how people ideate. They’ll start revising earlier, sharing less freely, and spending more time avoiding misinterpretation. Each incident can seem isolated, but together they alter how authority, context, and trust flow through an organization. What Responsible Use Should Look Like The central question for leaders is not what AI agents are capable of doing; it is what they should be allowed to see. Boundaries must be clear before these systems become part of daily work. An agent working on behalf of an employee should have the same access that employee has, no more and no less. Anything else creates uncertainty. Who can see what? Who can change what? That uncertainty erodes internal trust. Limiting agents to any other standard also creates problems. An agent that lacks access to shared context, public decisions, or common company knowledge will give incomplete or misleading answers. Ethical design is not about minimizing access. It is about giving agents enough accurate, live context to be genuinely useful. Responsibility also has to remain with people. Access defines what an agent can do; accountability defines who owns the outcome. When an agent takes an action, the individual who invoked it should be accountable for the result. Just like a manager owning the work done by their team, delegating tasks to AI can help with efficiency, but decision-making still belongs to the humans who direct the work. Private creative spaces deserve protection as well. Drafts, personal notes, and early explorations help employees test ideas before presenting them. These spaces do not need to be sealed off, but they should be clearly defined and respected. Preserving them supports healthier experimentation and a more open exchange of ideas. Transparency matters throughout this process. Protected spaces only work if the system around them is visible and understandable. When an agent recommends an action or executes one, employees should be able to understand, at a basic level, how it reached that conclusion. As companies adopt AI agents more widely, technical and organizational decisions will converge. The systems will influence how teams collaborate, how information moves, and how people feel about their work. This shapes whether AI becomes a supportive part of the workplace or a source of friction. The issue is no longer whether AI can see everything. It is how leaders define the limits, and how clearly they communicate those choices to the people who rely on them.
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E-Commerce
In todays rapidly changing work environment, developing trust among team members is crucial for success. Yet, many organizations struggle to foster an atmosphere of collaboration and understanding, often resulting in communication breakdowns, conflicts, and a decrease in productivity. The inability to trust can be the result of misunderstanding, conflicting values, or misjudging others because they trigger us and remind us of a negative situation or experience in our past. Building our emotional intelligence can help us increase our awareness and become less prone to building up barriers to trust. Trust isnt built through charisma or authorityits built through emotional presence. Leaders who create environments where people feel emotionally safe, seen, and respected accelerate not just connection, but performance, says Dawn Christian, the CEO of BeLeadership, a leadership coaching community. Emotional intelligence means we become more effective at recognizing and managing our own emotions, as well as understanding and influencing the emotions of others. As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, Ive found that by boosting emotional intelligence, leaders and employees can build a culture that reduces and eliminates many of the barriers that lead to a lack of trust. Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five major areas: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through developing these areas, employees and leaders at all levels can become more adept at navigating through all the areas that build barriers to trust. 1. Self-awareness The first area is being able to reflect on situations. At the end of the day, everyone needs to take an inner journey and consider why they reacted the way they did to a situation. In hindsight, we could ask ourselves how well we managed our reactions in the moment. Would another way of interpreting and reacting have been more effective? Would the outcome have been more positive? Journaling is a known way to aid in the process of self-reflection. It helps us track emotions and reactions and look for patterns that keep coming up that we may want to work on changing. 2. Self-regulation We need to practice self-regulating our emotions. When we notice strong emotions emerging, we need to keep ourselves from reacting. For example, when we have a strong desire to act out from our emotions, count to 10 or remove ourselves from the situation. After taking time to think things through, it is unlikely that we would choose the same response we would if we reacted purely from our emotions. When we continually practice this, we will feel more confident that we have mastered our emotions and wont react in a manner that we may later regret. Busyness doesnt just drain our energyit erodes our emotional capacity . . . Breaking up with busyness isnt about doing lessits about clearing the space where emotional intelligence, trust, and leadership actually take shape, Christian points out. 3. Motivation A good practice is to always view a situation through the lens of how our reactions will serve us. Once we have a firm understanding of our goalsprofessionally and personallyit becomes easier to motivate ourselves. Once we have a clear picture of what we want from life, and where we are going, we are better able to hold ourselves accountable and not deviate from actions that prevent us from moving in the direction of our goals. With this comes a strong realization that we have to be able to collaborate and work as part of a team to succeed. This makes us the kind of person others trust and want to work with. 4. Empathy Practice active listening and empathy. Most of the time when someone is speaking, we are thinking of a response rather than really listening. Everyone has a need to feel that they have been heard. When others are speaking, pay full attention and let them know by your posture and body language that you are engaged. After they have spoken, ask questions to clarify that we have understood them correctly. Even if we do not agree with their perspective, it is crucial that they feel heard and respected. This is a major step towards building trust. 5. Social skills Continually build our social skills through activities that encourage collaboration. Any type of team-building activity is a good way to engage with others in an authentic and supportive manner. Activities in which people share both their successes and their struggles help show that we all have strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Whenever we engage in activities that bring out more of our human side, we build stronger bridges between people and deepen trust.
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E-Commerce
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