I've had a lot of jobs.
They all taught me the same thing.

A bank, a gym floor, a pipeline, a patrol car.

I studied political science and philosophy. It taught me how power works, why institutions behave the way they do, and the question I still ask first about anything: how do you actually know that?

I started in money. Out of college I held a Series 7 and worked as a financial advisor, then wrote mortgages at Countrywide from 2005 to 2007, the years right before the housing crash, and worked as a commercial banker at Wells Fargo. I watched from the inside how money gets sold to ordinary households, right up to the edge of 2008.

Meanwhile I was coaching, which is what I loved. I started in 2006, and from 2008 to 2012 I owned CrossFit Costa Mesa. I learned to coach the Olympic lifts from Mike Burgener, worked closely with Dan John and with Mark Twight at Gym Jones, and built a return-to-performance protocol with a former New England Patriots physical therapist for athletes who were medically cleared but not yet performing. It was the career I'd wanted, and it was going somewhere.

Then 2011 happened. My brother died by suicide, and my daughter was born. I sold my share of the gym to cover a family emergency. Twight had invited me to Bulgaria to help coach the stunt crew on a Superman film, and I turned it down because my brother had just died. Within two years my marriage was over.

I kept coaching part time as a director of training, and went back to what paid: writing mortgages in Fresno. I started a master's in education, aiming to teach high school social studies and coach water polo, and it didn't work out. I came out of that stretch in debt and starting over.

In 2017 I left desks behind, moved to Utah, and learned a trade: TIG welding, a pipefitter apprenticeship with UA Local 140, then welding on oil and gas jobs in Wyoming and Nevada. It's honest, exacting work. A weld either holds or it doesn't, and no amount of talking changes which. It's also where I put myself back together, one shift at a time.

In 2019 I came home to the Sierra foothills to be closer to my daughter and start a career in law enforcement. I started at the bottom, as a part-time courthouse security officer, and worked through animal control and the jail to the academy. I was sworn in as a deputy in December 2021. Since then I've worked patrol as a field training officer, crisis negotiator and financial crimes investigator, and today I run courthouse security, the same building I started in. Working inside a public institution teaches you how one really behaves when nobody is writing about it.

Along the way I became a systematic futures trader, started building with code and AI, and wrote Root Access, which is in large part what I learned about rebuilding a life that has come apart. And I'm a father, which outranks all of it.

It's one thing, not five.

On paper that's a scattered résumé. It never felt scattered from the inside, because every one of those jobs ran on the same few rules, and they're the rules I still run on.

• Write the rule down before you need it. Decisions made under pressure are bad decisions. So the important ones get made early, when I'm calm, and written down: the stop on a trade, the training plan for a bad week, the check on who can move money in a business.
• Follow it when it's hard. A rule you drop the first time it hurts was only ever a preference. Most of the real work is the discipline of not interfering.
• Receipts over credentials. I'd rather show you a record than a title. Something is done when there's evidence beside it, not when someone says so.
• Check outcomes against reality, not against how you feel. Feelings are data, and terrible scorekeepers. Weekly averages, real fills, last month's actual invoices: those are the scoreboard.

The trading account, the training program and the back offices I fix for local businesses are three places I test those rules every day. Underneath them sits a long, slow study of the old traditions that describe everything as coming from one source. That's where the idea of one thing comes from, and it's why I don't split my work into separate brands or separate voices.

What I write about is where all of this meets: how money and power actually move, what that costs a household that earns a wage, and how one person builds a way off the wage side. I'm working through that myself, rules and failures shown.

If you work with me.

• Plain language. I'll explain how something works, not just tell you what to do. If I can't explain it simply, I don't understand it well enough yet.
• The honest version. I'll tell you what I know, what I'm guessing, and what I don't know, and I'll keep those three separate. If I think you shouldn't hire me, I'll say so.
• Written down. Plans, prices and decisions go in writing, so neither of us has to remember what was agreed.
• You own it. Your program, your records, your systems. Nothing is built so that you need me forever.
• No hype. No countdown timers, no "only three spots left," no promises I can't check. If it's good, the record will show it.