Let me start somewhere I didn't plan to start.

This series gave me PTSD symptoms.

I've been shot. Bombed. Stabbed. As an adult. I was sexually assaulted as a child. I've done enough work, in enough rooms, with enough professionals who charge enough money, to know what it feels like when something trips a wire you thought you'd finally handled.

Writing this series trips wires.

And I'm the one writing it. Which means I've been sitting here thinking about all of you. The ones reading this at 11pm with the door closed. The ones who got two paragraphs in and closed the tab and just... sat there.

How many of you cried? How many retreated? How many quietly decided the industry isn't worth what it keeps asking you to pay?

Nobody tracks that number. Of course they don't. Why would they.

Women at a conference last week started calling it that. Organically. Spontaneously. Not as a campaign, not as an attack on the conference itself, because I want to be very clear: this is not about the conference.

It's about the aura of the people there.

The specific atmospheric condition created when certain men enter a room. The smell, honestly. You know the smell. The women at the conference knew the smell.

The conference didn't create those men. Conferences never do. But they do create the conditions where those men feel freest, because everyone is watching and everyone has silently agreed to see nothing.

So I asked Possible some simple questions.

What is your policy on sex offenders attending? No response.

What happens if someone is sexually assaulted at your event? Can that person come back? No policy. No response.

I asked again. Still nothing.

Here is what that silence is. It is not an oversight. It is not a communications lag. It is a choice.

In 2026, after everything that has been documented and published and cried over and quietly settled out of court, having no policy is itself a policy.

It is the policy of not caring. It is the policy of the asset being more important than the person.

It is a policy that says: we will cash the badge registration check and whatever happens after that is not our department.

And by the way, this is a conference that credited my show for helping them get acquired. Thanked me publicly. So they know how to respond when something benefits them.

Funny how that works.

In the United States, over a thousand people experience sexual violence every day. That's the conservative estimate. Most of them are women. Many of them are in your industry. Some of them are at your events.

Between 30 and 45 percent of women report sexual harassment or unwanted sexual contact at professional conferences specifically. Not in dark alleys. At conferences. With lanyards and sponsored cocktail hours and LinkedIn recap posts.

This means that SOMEONE(S) at the confernces last week was sexually assaulted at the conference last week, and nothing was done about it. Nothing will likely be done about it. That’s the statistics, hard, real, a fact.

How many conferneces made this part of their sessions? How many conferences have a policy? How many conferences gave a damn to create safety staff last week?

Your guess of NONE, is correct. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

I want to be very clear about that. Zero performance. Zero false modesty.

I have kids. I have a wife who is a saint, and she has the texts to prove it,

I became a chaplain. I help bury people. I wanted to write a newsletter about adtech the way a guy at a diner yells about his fantasy football picks. Loud. Dumb. Gone by Thursday.

Something my therapist calls "healthy professional engagement" instead of whatever this has become, which my therapist calls "Pesach, we should talk about this."

And yet.

Two conferences since my last piece. One in New York. Daytime event, most attendees local, no hotel rooms to vanish into, no fifteen hundred miles between a man and the conscience he left in the hotel minibar in Scottsdale. Relatively tame by the structural logic of conference predation.

And still people tagged me. Photo after photo after photo. And look, I have an enormous ego. I love being tagged. Ask anyone. But not for this.

You know the photo. You have always known the photo,

Genuinely. Not fishing. I wish someone with more standing, cleaner hands, a longer list of relationships worth protecting, had done this years ago. When it could have protected the women who are now writing to me from secret email accounts at 2am, editing their own words with the care of someone disarming a bomb in a building they still have to go back to on Monday.

Those people didn't do it. They still haven't. The podcast has not been recorded. The trade publication has not run the piece. The industry voice with the Spotify deal has not said the words.

So here I am. Retired guy. Newsletter. Two adopted kids. A sixteen-year-old who is already more sorted than most of the executives I'm writing about. Chaplain's license. Absolutely nothing left to lose professionally that I haven't already decided I don't need.

The attacks are coming. Some have already started in the anonymous Slack channels where this industry processes everything it's too afraid to say with its name attached. I know what the attacks look like. I know what they mean. So does every woman who has watched an industry turn on someone who got too loud about the wrong thing.

It means: shut up or you're next.

I want those women to watch me not shut up.

That is the whole reason. Start to finish.

I'm putting this in every single piece until it stops being true, or until this industry decides to make it stop being true, whichever one of those things actually happens first.

A woman in this industry was raped by her supervisor. He is still working. Still attending events. Still collecting lanyards and speaking on panels and shaking hands and expensing steak dinners and walking into rooms she has to calculate, every single time, whether she can safely enter.

She contacted me from an account she created to send this one message and no other. She told me what happened. She told me she doesn't want anyone to know.

She told me she is scared of him.

Not the memory. Not the trauma. Him. The actual living, breathing, currently employed human being. Still here. Still in this industry. The industry that has decided, through years of collective, deliberate, well-documented inaction, that this is fine. That this is just how it is. That she should learn to work around it.

Two conferences since my last piece.

Nothing changed.

Every event without a harassment policy told her she was right to be scared. Every buried complaint confirmed exactly what she already knew. Every podcast that shared this newsletter in a private Slack and then recorded three episodes about programmatic without saying a single word about any of this told her exactly where she sits in the hierarchy of things this industry is willing to protect.

He is still here.

She is still scared.

What the hell are we going to do about that.

The Rabbi of ROAS. Troublemaker. Chaplain. Father. Formerly one of the guys these parties were built for, which I have said publicly and will keep saying because the admission matters more than the comfort of pretending otherwise. Still here. Still angry. Still married to a woman of extraordinary patience who has not asked me to stop, God willing never will. Still not invited to the conferences that need this conversation the most, which stopped feeling like an oversight two pieces ago and now feels like the most honest thing they've ever communicated.

[email protected]. Nearly 35,000 people. Every week. Watching.

Experian.

You are on notice.

I have evidence from multiple women that points to a labor investigation into a pattern of covering up sexual misdeeds by executives. I have not yet decided how to write it all. But I have been speaking to the authorities.

They are curious.

More soon.

The quiet is getting very loud.

Come find me.