Knowing Your Value with Van Lathan

Yeah, so you're from Baton Rouge.

Yeah.

And, you know, we had a good conversation about that.

It just seems so worlds apart from L.A., right? How did you end up going from Baton Rouge to L.A.?

I love Baton Rouge.

I love Louisiana.

Certainly a down-home boy.

But I knew that if I was going to achieve the things that I wanted to achieve in life, that they would probably happen here in Los Angeles.

I didn't really think about New York or Atlanta or any of those other places.

I knew that in order to have access to the types of opportunities that I needed to make the best use of my talent, I needed to be out here.

So Hurricane Katrina was in 2005.

April, August in 2005, I left to come to L.A. in, I think,

February 2006.

And you would say that Hurricane Katrina was the main reason that you left?

Yeah, not from the standpoint of I had to relocate because of the hurricane, like so many other people had to do to Atlanta, Houston, other places like that.

But...

the decimation of a society that quickly.

Me seeing just how fragile all of the structures of civilization are, it...

Changed me in a way.

I was like, if I am going to, I was 25 at that time.

So I'm like, if I'm going to leave and try to attack my future and like literally attack my future in a very deliberate way that I needed to get busy on it because you never know when things are going to be around or gone.

Many of the people watching this show are similarly minded in the sense that they knew they wanted more and they continue to want more, but they need guidance on how to go about it or just to hear different perspectives on how to go about it and to build that relationship.

that life that they're looking for.

When you were young in Baton Rouge, what kind of vision did you have for yourself? And did it include working in the media and entrepreneurship, or was that something that you stumbled into? You know,