I've been having these conversations my whole life. Before I had any framework for it, I was the person people told things to. The one who saw the gap between what their life looked like and what they actually wanted. The one who stayed present when it got hard.
I spent a decade in software engineering. I was good at it — graduated first in LSU's College of Engineering, built products, led teams, became VP of Engineering.
Along the way I developed methods and structures that helped people grow unusually fast. I had 100% voluntary retention of everyone I had hired until the very last day of the company — even when it was insolvent, and I had trained them how to pass interviews myself. I helped engineers find the right role for how their mind actually worked, not the role they'd been slotted into. Eventually I found that engineering was too restrictive a container. I started by finding bugs in code. Then I moved on to debugging processes and methods. When I focused on the gap between who someone was and how they were living, the results multiplied.
I served a two-year mission, learned Spanish on the streets of Los Angeles, then spent years in South America — Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay — living out of a carry-on, picking up Portuguese, some Italian along the way.
I met people in the worst situations a person can face. I tried to help. I learned what helping actually costs, and what it can't buy.
I practice daily. I've traced my own wounds to their roots, processed them through my body, documented what I found. I'm still doing it.
I've also read voraciously my whole life and racked up nearly a year of watch hours on YouTube since 2011 — lectures, rabbit holes, other people's ideas. That hunger was its own signal. What you consume reveals what you're missing. I learned to read the gap in myself long before I had language for what I was doing.
Doing your own work is the only way to learn to see it in others. That's the credential — not a license.
The mask doesn't go away because you've seen it. Mine still runs. My task is to notice when it's managing me. Those are the days I watch 0-5, maybe 6 lectures, podcasts, random history moments, or weird cat videos on YouTube. When I don't notice, it becomes 30 — and the content worsens over time.
I am not a therapist. I'm not a licensed counselor. I'm a person who has done his own work — and is still doing it — who sees what people carry without knowing it, in their choices, their patterns, and what they reach for when no one's watching.
I am quirky. My questions might be the opposite of comfortable. I make contact. I see. I name. I stay.
And somehow, people change.
Every conversation where someone sees the pattern of their own life. Every "huh" that lands when it suddenly makes sense. Every person who finally says out loud what they actually wanted all along. At that moment — I'm living mine.
15+ business ideas failed before this one. Every single one was me trying to justify being seen. This is the one where I stopped justifying — because I found what I actually wanted. I live to show others the face underneath.
Your bugs are not the problem — they show the mask you forgot you were wearing.
60 minutes • Recorded • Published to YouTube