I grew up next door to a dictator.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Our backyard in Suriname shared a wall with Desi Bouterse — the military strongman who seized power in a coup, executed political opponents in a colonial fortress on the river, and somehow ended up at the center of one of the most overlooked intelligence operations of the Cold War era.

I was seven. I had a pocket telescope. He had teenagers with Uzis that looked exactly like Miami Vice.

My parents were missionaries. Or so I believed.

Thirty years later, I'm still pulling that thread — through declassified CIA documents, FOIA requests, Reagan Library archives, and oral histories from people who were in the room when decisions were made that nobody was supposed to know about. What started as a kid trying to understand why his mother sobbed in the study one afternoon in Kansas became a full-scale investigation into the intersection of Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity, Iran-Contra era politics, and covert operations on a global stage.

That investigation lives on Substack. It will become a book. It will become a documentary. It's the work I was born to do.

But investigations take time. And in between chapters, I've had to live.

So I sold insurance. I flipped historic homes in Des Moines and enjoyed my time hunting hidden treasures in dead people's attics than doing the actual restoration work. I ran a Belgian fry truck called Powered by Fries. I organized tuk-tuk races. I spent three years in a tech incubator building software. I spent ten years helping build Rocket Referrals into an Inc 500 fastest-growing company.

Through all of it, I was trying to answer the same question I started asking in that Kansas study: What's actually going on here? What does this mean? And what do we do about it?

Turns out, those questions don't just apply to Cold War intelligence operations. They apply to struggling startups, broken systems, overlooked markets, and companies that are one good story away from breaking through.

I'm not an proper entrepreneur. I've made peace with that. What I am is a pattern recognizer, a first follower, a systems thinker who can also tell the story. I'm the booster rockets, not the rocket. And once we land on Mars, I'm the one who wants to explore.

My degree is in religious studies. My office has been everywhere from a food truck window to a documentary research bunker. I've learned from Michelangelo that the “David” is always already in the stone — and that most of the work is just removing what's covering it.

That's what I do. In stories. In systems. In organizations worth believing in.