About Me

I'm going to write this page without trying to keep it short or create some sort of 60 second about me blurb.

I always hate whenever I’m asked to speak at an event and they say that you have 30 to 60 minutes. Trying to compact a lot of big ideas into short periods of time in the fastest way possible is not fun. I am a verbose person, I have a lot to say, I don’t want to try and condense my brain for people with lukewarm IQ. God blessed me with it, why should I condense it?

Here, I do not need to follow anyone’s rules. So I’m making this about me page as long as I want because I can. Deal with it.

I was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, 1999. My mom and my dad had just immigrated 2 years earlier from the Soviet Union. They were both born in Odessa, Ukraine. It’s odd because at the time that was the USSR, yet they both express themselves with a lot of Ukrainian identity, even though Ukraine only became a country in 1991.

My mom and I have had a lot of intense political decisions about this. She hates Tucker Carlson because he interviewed Putin. Maybe Tucker is CIA controlled opposition, I’m not sure on that one but he is pretty cool so he gets a pass. I thought the Putin interview was interesting with a lot of good history in it. My mom seems to lean pretty hard into the fact that Putin is basically Hitler. I don’t think the world is that simple, but I’m also not a cliche asshole that’s going to say, “Oh it’s a very nuanced situation” while I smell my farts and drink a $24 IPA.

I’ve studied a decent amount of Geopolitics on this topic. From what I can understand it appears to me that Russia is really at war with the EU, and Ukraine is caught in the middle. And of course, Ukrainian citizens are going to hate Russians, and vice versa. But at the top, it appears to be more of a decision from the EU to try and continue to encroach Russia. If you look at maps of Europe Pre-WWI, Post-WWI, Post-WWII, and Post-USSR you’ll see that it’s just Russia’s borders getting pushed further and further east.

Anyways, I don't really remember a whole lot of my childhood. I think a lot of this “Memory Deletion” is probably some form of suppression from trauma. I don’t know about you but to me it feels kind of lame to say “trauma”. Feels like it’s a word that a lot of these limp wrist woosies use to excuse their awful behavior.

But in my case, it does make sense, because my childhood was a literal shit show. My mom and dad got divorced when I was maybe 3 years old. My dad never remarried, never even dated another woman for a long period of time. My mom got remarried at the age of 7. Well, I was 7, not her, we’re not Muslims. Kidding. Not really. I’m now going to move on to the next paragraph.

As a child I was always really into drawing and doing whatever I wanted to do. My mom would always have half a heart attack whenever she took me out in public. We'd go out to a grocery store, or the famous Arizona Choo-Choo Train Park, or the mall to take family photos, and I would just wander off and go explore. I don’t remember what I was thinking but knowing myself it was probably just me being curious and wanting to see the world.

From a young age I was incredibly independent. I even remember my dad (before divorce), telling me that we were gonna do some backyard work together the next morning. I had cooked up this entire imagination in my mind of this Bob the Builder style montage of us doing yard work. When we woke up in the morning, he changed his mind. I told him, “Okay, well, I'm moving out” and I left out the front door with a toy and a pillow. I was maybe 4 years old.

I walked across the street to my friend Eli’s house and his dad (Brett) answered the door and I said, “I'm moving in with you guys now.” Brett slammed the door in my face which was a hilarious response tbh. I cried as I walked back across the street to my parents' house. Good times.

Throughout elementary and middle school, I was getting in trouble and getting suspended constantly. I was incredibly disinterested in anything I did not care about, yet I was incredibly fascinated in things I enjoyed. The two subjects I really excelled in were English and History.

English was because I was incredibly creative and good at stealing. I would plagarize constantly and never got caught for it. Not once. Picasso says, “A good artist copies, a great artist steals.” I loved reading which is what put me in front of so many good ideas to steal. They had these programs in school where if you read enough books, they gave you points and you could get these prizes. I loved free stuff because I wanted more stuff. I guess I didn't have enough stuff. You know, my parents definitely struggled from time to time with money. But, you know, I was able to get stuff like a Nintendo or whatever. Yet, the idea of getting free stuff, yeah, it really excited me. So they definitely got the incentive program correct there.

History is also just a lot of reading. I had a really cool teacher in the fifth grade. His name was Mr. Brist. It's like you took someone who was former Special Forces and who knows way too much about the way the world works and put him in a classroom filled with fifth graders and just let him kind of talk about his view of History the entire time. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I know he probably wasn’t drunk but it’s fun to think about if he was just wine drunk while talking about Ancient Greece with a bunch of 10 year olds. I found him on Facebook and met up with him a few years ago for coffee. Still a cool ass dude. He told me he only eats tuna which was odd.

I hated physics. I hated math. I hated biology more than anything else. Biology felt like bullshit to me. I did not believe in evolution and still do not believe in evolution. There’s a lot of great debates debunking Darwin’s crap. The idea that a fish somehow morphed into an ape and then turned into a human felt retarded even to a 6th grader.

I went to a very difficult school from the fifth grade through the eighth grade. They were teaching us college level clases in the fifth grade. It's called Basis Scottsdale, a famous charter school in Arizona. I know that even though it sucked at the time, it helped a lot in forming early intelligence and I'm grateful that I went. Yet at the same time, it definitely was very difficult and created a lot of that trauma with my mother. The reactions she would have towards me not being able to succeed in school were horiffic.

You know, my mom says, “That's just how we parent when we’re from the Soviet Union” And I think that’s a load of crap. I love my mom, yet I’m not going to defend her ther. The idea of yelling and screaming at your child and instilling everything with a steel whip…yes, you have to be strict with your children, but at the same time, where is too far? Where does the line get drawn? To quote Charlie Murphy, she was, “A habitual line stepper.”

Freshman year, I transferred over to Desert Mountain High School. I did everything possible to beg my mom to get me out of Basis. I told her that it was because I wanted to play Football but in all honesty, I just hated that school. At Basis all of my classmates were Asian and Indian, they were all way smarter than me. At least that’s what I thought at the time. The truth is their brains were wired differently than mine and no one had really made an effort to tell me I was brilliant in any way.

That changed at DMHS. I had three separate English teachers who all poured into me. Ms. North, Mrs. Vogt, and Dr. Peterson. They all admired my work and I remember Ms. North said my writing was pure talent. That made me feel special, I had never felt that way before in school and it meant a lot to me. Dr. Peterson always left very few comments on my essays, whereas my classmates all had red mark ups all over their work. It felt good to be better at something than other people for once.

In High School, I really wanted to be the cool kid who got all the girls. I felt like that girl, if you've ever seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where all she wanted to do was eat white bread sandwiches. But I never really fit in wherever I went, I was a black sheep.

I was friends with the football kids, with the cool kids, with the A/V kids, with the nerds, the skaters, and with theater kids. I even had my own show on the announcements called “On The Verge” which people loved. I was cool with most people, but at the same time I didn't fit in with anyone.

My closest friend at the time was a guy who looked like Johny Bravo, his name was Collin Taylor. His nickname was Douchebag Collin Taylor, or DCT for short. I still have his phone number memorized and we still talk maybe one or two times a year.

At the time, I was very jealous of Collin even though he was my friend. I think I was attached to him because I wanted to emulate him. He always had a girlfriend, people liked him and invited him to parties, he got into fights, and everyone thought he was a tough guy.

But one thing Collin and I were both good at was making money. We both had hustles. Collin sold weed when he hit high school and vape pens in middle school. I would buy fake designer clothing and accessories from China and sell it to kids like it was real. We were two peas in a pod, truly. We smoked a lot of pot together. That was really a big part of what our friendship was based on. We would just smoke and talk about how we want to be successful when we grow up later in life. We both loved Gary Vee and Grant Cardone, they were huge inspirations to the both of us. Him and I connected deeply over that and even made a clothing brand together called, Jonny Blaze Clothing.

The clothing brand was how we made money to buy weed and it’s how I made my way into his friend circle, and suddenly, at a school I didn’t even go to, I was kind of a cool kid. All of his friends were cool with me and loved me and would say things like, “Verge! Ah! Verge is here!”

But you know, no one was really ever going out of their way to invite me to stuff. No one really had a real friendship with me but Collin. Even then I think he felt like he was always having to drag his autistic friend along. At the time, I wasn't comfortable embracing the fact that I was weird. To me weird felt like different and I didn’t want to be different, I wanted to fit in.

I can now see that this desire to “fit in” was based on a lot of brainwashing that Western media had pushed for decades. Through television and movies, they pushed this idea that the cool guy was just an idiot consumerist degenerate. Make money. Buy stuff. Get famous. Be dumb. Have sex with a lot of women. Be cool. You can see this with characters like The Fonz from Happy Days.

I wish I could go back in time and pull younger me away from one of those parties where he felt alone, even though he was surrounded by everyone. I would take him on a walk down the neighborhood the house party was at. I would tell him, “Nick, look at every single person worthy of power and respect in this world. Napoleon of France, Alexander the Great, Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire, Nikola Tesla, Plato, all of these men were abnormal. They were not like everyone else, but that’s why they are remembered. Do not focus on fitting in, focus on being an exceptional individual and lean into the fact that you are much more intelligent than most people. It’s okay to say that, there is no shame in it. People will call you cocky and arrogant for it. Yet, nobody who is smart, intelligent, or even brilliant will say that, because they understand what you’re experiencing.”

Unfortunately, I didn’t have someone to say that. So I was just dumbass-maxxing during high school and by the time I graduated, all of my priorities were completely jacked up. I was addicted to marijuana. I was addicted to pornography. I was addicted to sex. I was addicted to validation from others. My only goal in life was that I wanted to be famous. Essentially the Western mind virus had chewed me up and spit me out of the other side.

When you're going through The System, you don't realize what's happening. It's just normal to you. But now I can reflect on it and see that it's entirely just a form of lying through omission. That's what the devil loves to do. The devil likes to distort the truth and leave things out. For instance, “sex feels good.” Of course sex feels good, right? But then the devil distorts it. “Well, sex with anyone feels good” leaving out the fact that having sex with people outside of marriage is literally what destroys society. One of many reasons, but still, it’s not helping our situation.

In my senior year of high school and when I graduated I started to do a lot of psychedelics. I tried large doses of LSD because the rappers I was listening to at the time talked about it. That was quite the experience, taking LSD while watching Adult Swim Off The Air. I can't say I really got anything from the “trip” other than a strange feeling like a demon had walked into my life. I remember that demon very vividly. A face popped out of the TV screen and turned everything in the room that I was into a silhouette. And I can't remember at all what it said other than it just felt demonic and looked demonic. I threw up in the middle of that trip because I had eaten too many enchiladas. However, I did a lot more acid from 16 to 18 years old and I also was experimenting with mushrooms eventually as well.

One time I took such a big dose of mushrooms that I felt nauseous, went to the bathroom to throw up and started seizing up in front of the toilet. It felt like I was being strangled by a demon. I saw the icon of Christ the Pantocrator and then was broken free from the seizure and vomitted everything into the toilet. At the time I thought nothing of it, but this is actually a massive prelude to what was going to happen later in my life.

At this point in my story, Collin went off to college and I was by myself back in Scottsdale. He got addicted to Xanax and we got into a big fight about something I can’t even remember. I went home and changed all of our logins and rebranded Jonny Blaze to Burnout University. I thought that was a great name at the time. I had some intricate explanation that I can’t remember but it definitely sounded like a pot head wrote it.

People liked my designs and the color schemes I created. I was selling these shirts at Phoenix art fairs and on Instagram to my friend groups. It was pretty good money, but I wanted to improve my margins so I begged my dad to buy me a screen printing set up. He was always trying to help me do stuff and funding it which I am very grateful for. He's a good guy. Maybe a bit dysfunctional and a slight alcoholic, but again, he’s just doing the best with what he’s got and I accept him regardless.

So I’m screenprinting all these shirts and one day my mom gets a cold call from a brand-new print shop asking if her security company needed shirts. She told them her son was already screenprinting and asked whether they were hiring. They were.

I walked into the shop in Phoenix and met Gordon Rose, a short, stubby guy with a big nose. He told me they had not actually bought the screenprinting equipment yet, but they needed someone to help with sales. My only experience was cold calling companies with Collin for his dad’s drone footage business. I had made like 30 cold calls, left a voicemail for a country club, and they bought a $20,000 package, and I made about $2,000. That was enough experience for me to say yes.

Gordon put me on the phones selling T-shirt packages. I had no idea what I was doing, but he taught me and paid me on commission with a small draw. At first, I set appointments for two lesbians he had hired to close the deals. They were in a relationship together which I thought was odd because the “butch” dressed like a guy. So you hate men and are trying to be a man? Lord have mercy. They were terrible at sales and kept screwing up the appointments I had worked hard to set, so I stopped handing the deals off and started closing them myself. Gordon loved not having to pay multiple people and eventually fired them.

The night after he fired them, I was driving an order down to Tucson to deliver an order. At the time, I was practically living at the office. While nobody was there, the two women broke in and stole a bunch of stuff. Gordon watched the security footage the next morning and had an actual heart attack.

I walked into his hospital room, to first ask if he was okay, and then asked the other obvious question: “Do I still have a job?” Gordon asked me one of the most important questions anyone had asked me at that point in my life: “Can you run the shop while I’m gone?”

I said yes, even though I had no idea whether I could.

At 18 years old, I ran the entire business. I kept enough cash moving to pay the rent, buy food, fulfill orders, and keep doing cold calls. Gordon eventually came back after recovering from the heart attack and helped us start doing voicemail drops, which I’m pretty sure were illegal. But who cares? A little TCPA violation never hurt nobody. We did the voicemail drops and grew the business rapidly to somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a month.

Then, I took a vacation to Italy with my dad and my entire world came crumbling down. Gordon told me he was going to handle a bunch of things while I was gone. We had just hired 2 new employees and he said he would manage them. He did not. He spent a bunch of the company’s money and I came back to cash flow problems caused by the new hires not doing their jobs properly. Something in my gut told me to quit, so I quit.

I wasn’t a good steward of the cash I had made so I needed to figure out how to pay my rent while I was figuring out a new business. So I got a job at Chick-fil-A during the day and another restaurant at night. My plan was to make cash from hourly wages in the morning, cash from tips at night, and

Chick-fil-A was an awful experience. It taught me some work ethic, but it was still awful. My coworker was a gay black guy named Brandon who I’m 100% sure stole cash from my register and I had to pay the restaurant back for it. I’m not saying that it’s because he’s black, nor am I saying it’s relevant that he was gay, these are just the facts.

I remember one manager, Nate, telling me that if I covered someone’s shift, I could have a free meal and a cookie, instead of one or the other like we normally did. I agreed, those cookies were amazing. When I clocked out, another manager, Brad, told me I could have the cookie or the meal, but not both. I tried to explain the previous agreement and he said, “Nick, you can choose the cookie or the meal. I’m not going to argue with you about this.”

I remember walking home after that shift in my slacks and red polo, feeling like SpongeBob walking home from the Krusty Krab. I had just argued with a grown man over a cookie. The next day, I quit in the middle of the lunch rush, just to be a little petty. I walked home, and decided I was going to spend all of my time figuring out how to make money online and lean on the tips from my restaurant job to pay my rent.

I was still selling clothes, which helped, but I also started pirating courses about making money online. Some Indian guy DM’d me “Hello ser, I have every course in google drive, $50 I give you access.” I sent the money on paypal and went through everything I could find and quickly saw that a service business was probably the best way to make money without much capital.

I considered building websites as a service, but I found out that if you didn’t know how to code, it was going to be difficult because AI didn’t exist at the time. But what I did know how to do was write my ass off. I had made a few demo websites for portfolio projects and people kept telling me that they liked the copywriting more than anything

So I looked up “copywriter” in my pirated Google Drive folder and found a course from a guy named Ray Edwards. He had a program with a unit in it called something like “How to Make $100,000 a Year as a Copywriter.” I thought, “Hey, I could figure out how to do that.” So I did what he said, read a bunch of books on copywriting, and spent all of my time trying to get clients.

I started reaching out to people and offering to write their copy. Slowly but surely, I stacked clients. People paid me to write newsletters, websites, sales letters, video sales letters, ads and so on. I got really good at writing copy and people started to hear more about me. Over the next 7 years I went on to produce $100,000,000 with my copy for clients, but that’s something I’ll cover in depth at a different time, this isn’t really about business or what I do for clients.

I lived with my friend Kyree during this part of the story in Gilbert Arizona. He was a mentor to me and is still my friend today. I love him to death. He’s black and he gives me the N-pass and no, you can’t have one. Outside of him taking me to poker nights or cigar bars, I really did not have many friends. I was struggling to just make it out of the $5,000 a month range with my little freelancing business. Kyree said he could help me if I hired him as a coach, so I agreed, reluctantly.

It was money well spent because Kyree taught me how to prioritize networking over cold outreach, something I wasn’t used to. Within 3 years or so of following his approach, I had built a solid career as a copywriter and was making anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 a month. I had also learned how to turn my writing into produced videos by managing the video production as well, instead of just handing someone a Google Doc. That skyrockered my rates and I went from barely making $1,000 per project to making $10,000 to $15,000 per project.

At 23, I moved into a big house in Gilbert, Arizona. I had two dogs and a lot of money, so I decided to live out my dreams and become the cool guy finally. I wanted to be a playboy, just like Andrew Tate, the guy I was modeling my life off of. Oops. So I bought a Porsche 911, started buying designer clothes, and got really into day game and learning how to talk to women. That became my entire focus. I went so far into that world that I completely lost myself in it.

One night, my 3rd date of the week, a girl was asleep at my place and I was smoking weed. I felt incredibly empty inside. I walked into the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and thought, “I don’t know who God is. I don’t even know who I am.” That moment brought me back to the question I had been trying to answer for years: Who is God?

I had listened to a lot of “Psychedelic Rap” when I was younger which led to me studying Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Freemasonry, at a fairly young age. I had read a lot of esoteric woo-woo books, dozens and dozens of them. The conclusion I had reached was that spirituality meant being calm, visualizing what you wanted, thinking about it constantly, and manifesting it into reality.

Basically, I was trying to make myself God.

Standing in that bathroom, in the middle of this cesspool of degeneracy I created, I realized that I did not want to live this way anymore. Something felt deeply wrong and I needed to get my life together. Around that time, Instagram started targeting me with content about Christian Orthodoxy and all sorts of traditional values. I googled “Orthodox Church” near me and saw Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in Phoenix.

The second I walked inside, I felt like I was home. My grandmother, who I never got to meet before she died, gave me an icon of Saint Nicholas that I always hung over my bed. Even since I was 1 or 2 years old. I didn’t know who Saint Nicholas was, but all of these Saints looking at me in this massive church looked just like my icon.

I asked the priest, Father Tuba, if I could have his number to schedule a time to sit down with him and ask questions. He gave me his cell and told me to come back on Monday. My pride ruled me so much at the time. The idea of being the rich guy who knew more about “the metaphysical nature” of the world sat well with me. Lord have mercy on me I didn’t know any better.

Father Tuba, was a very soft-spoken, pious, and holy man. I do not remember most of our conversations, but I can probably guess that I brashly and pompously dominated the dialogue while trying to get what I wanted. He answered all of my questions and gave me an Orthodox Study Bible, which I still have to this day.

One day, we sat in the church library and somehow the topic of sex before marriage came up. I told him I did not agree with the concept and that it felt outdated. He responded that I could not be Orthodox and hold that belief. I said it felt interpretive, and he told me, “Truth is one, and perception is many. Perception is the devil’s playground.”

I was so filled with pride and arrogance about doing things my way and being right that I never came back to meet with him. I went back to my sinful life. I even ended up being Muslim for about six months because I was such an Andrew Tate fan boy that I would do whatever he did. I left Islam and thank God I did before getting wrapped up in a marriage.

After Islam I ended up in some quasi-spiritual, mystic worldview I brewed up from reading more woo-woo books. I would oscillate between wanting to be a holy man and wanting whatever my flesh desired. My life was built on cope and justification. Lust and addiction ruled over me like a puppet by its strings. The pendulum swing usually happened after getting out of a relationship,where I would go from one worldview to another.

One day, I randomly woke up at 3:00 in the morning. Something felt off. I checked my phone and people were tagging me on Facebook with death threats. I thought I was dreaming, but I knew I was awake. It did not make sense, so I went back to bed. The next morning, the situation was ten times worse. My inbox was filled with people insulting me and saying they wanted me dead.

Here’s what happened: A girl I had gone on a date with and taken back to my place 6-8 months back had written an anonymous post in some group, framing me like a sociopath. The true story was that I did not feel right continuing to have sex with women. I could not get Father Tuba out of my head, so I told her I wanted to take her home because I did not think we were compatible. Her post made it sound like I had tried to murder her and was some sociopathic rapist. I can only now understand that it was my sin of pride that caused me to suffer from someone else’s. She probably could not stand the fact that I “rejected her” and so she made up a story to get even with me.

My friends were texting me. Business colleagues were messaging me. Mentors were calling me to ask what was going on. These psychos went through my friends list and harassed everyone I knew, telling them I was scum, and many of them believed it. After three days of this, I sat on my kitchen floor completely deflated. I was so stressed because I could not do anything. The girl was posting anonymously and I did not even remember her name. Something in me told me to get my Study Bible and read the prayers on the first few pages.

I sat on the couch on my balcony and felt so much resistance to opening the Bible. I knew that if I did this, I would have to let go of my sinful ways. I cried. I protested. I hesitated.

Then I heard it as clear as day: “Choose.”

I chose to open the Bible and read the prayers out loud. I got to the fourth prayer and started crying harder than I ever had at that point in my life. My tears splattered onto the page as I read the words:

“You give the command: I will open the gates which You alone created, that You may enter with love, as is Your nature, that You may enter and enlighten my darkened reasoning. I believe that You will do this, for You did not banish the harlot who approached You with tears, nor did You reject the publican who repented, nor did You drive away the thief who acknowledged Your kingdom, nor did You abandon the repentant persecutor Paul as he was; but You established all who have been brought to You by repentance in the company of Your friends, for You alone are forever blessed, now and for all eternity. Amen.”

I felt so compelled that I made a blood oath at that moment to not have sex outside of marriage. I pricked my finger and stamped it on the page. I was definitely still thinking in a very woo woo ritualistic-like manner, but hey, I was doing the best with what I got. But that apparently wasn’t much. Within three or six months, I broke my oath to God. I hadn’t even read a single line out of The Gospels, nor did I know what the difference was between the Old Testament and the New Testament other than I thought it was Angry God versus Forgiving God.

Let’s fast forward a bit. I got into a super chaotic relationship. It included but was not limited to gaslighting, therapy talk, and all types of explosive episodes. We were two broken people trying to find ourselves through each other, so that’s never great. I was living in Scottsdale at the time, living in a nice apartment, making good money, and was still “successful,” but everywhere I went reminded me of her. I had hit an all time low with my addictions and felt trapped. So I sold most of my stuff, packed my crap into my car, and moved to Austin, Texas in November of 2024.

I had visited Austin several times and had two mentor-like figures there who I wanted to spend more time with. I do not really talk to either of them anymore, but they were part of why I moved. Austin is a cool part of Texas, Downtown is a god-forsaken traffic-packed hell hole but the outside regions are sick. I rented a big house in the woods in Lakeway. It was beautiful and serene with a creek right below my balcony. The rent was expensive and I barely had any furniture, but I was making good money so I didn’t really care.

When I got to Austin, I promised myself I was going to straighten myself out, get sober, stop watching porn, don’t have sex with women. Every morning, I woke up and read the Study Bible because I was trying to understand God. I thought moving to Texas would solve the problem because weed was illegal and porn websites were banned. I was completely wrong. An addict will always find a way. Every smoke shop had some legal form of weed. I do not even know what the hell it was called, but I smoked it and ended up relapsing hard.

Regardless of falling back into my sins, I kept reading the Bible. I kept telling myself, “Read the Bible. Even if you fall, get back up. ” I read the Gospels every morning, listening to this track in the background, while I cried reading Christ’s words.

I underlined everything Christ said because I was trying to see if Christ said I could not have sex with women outside of marriage. That is how deep in cope mode I was. I read through the Gospels and concluded, “See? It’sotally okay to have sex outside of marriage. Christ never said anything specific about it.” Not my best moment, Lord have mercy on me.

Had I read a little further into the Epistles, Paul would have made it perfectly clear in 1 Corinthians 6:18 “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.” At the time, I probably would have said, “But those were men, not God!” Of course, men also compiled the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and all of Scripture is divinely inspired. At what point do you draw the line between what you will follow and what you will ignore?

I had no philosophical foundation for anything I believed, so I used my stupid conclusion as an excuse to return to sex, weed, and all of my other addictions. I ended up back in my weird mystical Christian worldview. I was halfway Gnostic and my belief system made absolutely no sense. Random women came in and out of my life until I ended up in the same pit again, feeling like crap and knowing this was not the right way to live.

One night, a friend mentioned that he had a DMT pen. I had never seen one in person before but had always been interested in it because of Joe Rogan. I asked if I could borrow the pen and after pausing for a minute or so, he said yes.

I went home without realizing that this was about to change the trajectory of my life forever.

I took a shower, got into bed, and took a huge hit. Then another huge hit. Then another. I leaned back and was immediately transported into what felt like another universe. All of the colors blended together and I started seeing Hindu figures like Krishna, Shiva, and Vishnu. I felt in my gut that it was extremely demonic. I wanted to cry, my insides felt like they had twisted and spiraled. These demons were mocking me, laughing at me, and trying to grab my skin while spinning around me. I thought I had destroyed my brain in one shot. I did not know what else to do.

So I shouted, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.”

All of the Hindu entities vanished, scurrying away like rats. I heard a voice as clear as day say, “Begone. His body is sworn to Me.” I felt a force push through me and drive all of them away. Then I felt the presence of God. I knew it was God because I felt love.

I said outloud, “I love You, Jesus.”

I heard, “I love you too, my son.”

I said, “No, Jesus. I love You. I really love You so much.”

I heard, “I love you so much, My son.”

Something touched my shoulder and it’s crude, but I don’t know how else to explain it, it felt like I orgasmed a thousand times in one second. This feeling of bodily pleasure moved through my entire body. The amount of love pouring through my body brought me to tears. I did not know what to say, but what came out of my mouth was, “How do I become successful?”

It’s not every day you get to ask the creator of the universe something. My brain defaulted to that, and I heard, “You do not need to become anything. You simply need to be. Be successful. Do not try to become anything.”

I asked, “How do I be successful?”

I heard, “I gave you a gift in that you are more sensitive than most. I gave you this gift so you could feel My love deeply. Fill your cup with My love and pour it out into the world. Then you will be successful.”

Then I woke up from the trip, and was so exhausted that I went to bed. The next day, I called my friend and told him what happened. He suggested I try it again and go back for a second experience. So I did. I took a couple of big hits and ended up in an experience with a giant ball of energy in the center. There was some weird Hindu crap at the beginning again, but I ignored it and it disappeared.

I asked the ball, “What is my purpose in this life?”

It morphed into an embryo inside a pregnant woman’s belly. I asked out loud, “I’m supposed to have kids?” Then a band of energy came out, tapped me on the mouth, and the experience ended. I did not want to go back again, that felt like enough.

Over the next few days, I felt empty. It was like I had been filled with all of this love and then it disappeared. I needed to understand what had happened, so I wrote about it. I posted it on Twitter and the post went viral and got tens of thousands of likes. A bunch of people told me the experience was demonic and that it was not Christ or God.

Was that God? Was that a demon? What even happened there?

A few weeks earlier, I had met a guy named John (John the Baptist was the forerunner for Christ. Another coincidence.) who attended an Orthodox church in Austin. His spiritual father was a priest I followed online named Father Moses. I decided I should share the experience with him. I went to church with my friend that week and met Father Moses. I did not think it was wise to dump the entire DMT story on him the moment I met him, so after the service and lunch, I asked if we could go for a walk.

During the walk, I asked him, “Father, what is the purpose of our life?”

He said, “Oh, it’s simple. To have kids.”

I got goosebumps throughout my entire body and still get emotional when I write this down. That was exactly what the second DMT experience had shown me. That was some spooky stuff, yet I immediately felt drawn to Father Moses. He was like a big bear. He was funny too. I started spending more time with him, going to his house, and talking about spiritual life with him.

Once I had become a catechumen, I told him everything about the DMT experience.

He asked me a few simple questions.

“Did you say His name?”

“Yes. I said, ‘Lord Jesus Christ.’”

“Did it bring love and peace?”

“Yes.”

“That was Christ.”

I told him everyone online was saying it was demonic because I had taken drugs. He said, “How you get somewhere is not necessarily the most important part. Saints have been made in prison, but that does not mean we recommend going to jail.” Father Moses has a lot of really funny one-liners, some of the highlights I have saved in my notes are…

Anyways, he made it clear that he did not recommend doing DMT again. He had his own experiences with psychedelics when he was younger and explained that they were demonic and should be avoided. So I listened to him, and with nothing other than faith in the experience I just had, I dedicated myself to Christ and the Orthodox Church. It was the greatest decision I have ever made.

After a year and a half as a catechumen, I was baptized at 27 years old.

Glory to God, He removed every one of my addictions from my life. It had nothing to do with me. God pulled all of the horrible vices that the Western world had normalized for me. It was not an easy journey. I struggled, I stumbled, I made 1001 mistakes. Yet, God’s Grace is so bountiful, even someone completely “cooked” was able to get out of the cesspit.

That is where I am today. The person writing this is a devout Orthodox Christian whose life was put back together by Christ.

During my catechism, I put my business on the back burner while I worked through my crap. It was worth it. Totally worth it, because I no longer define myself by my business. I do not define myself by the way women feel about me. I do not define myself by anything other than the fact that I am God’s child and God loves me. That is where my identity comes from.

I have put myself out there with a personal brand during several phases of my career, but it was always grounded in pride, ego, and vanity. I felt that once I was baptized, I would be in a better position to put myself out there to the world. That is what this website is.

There is a lot more to me. There are a lot more stories. There is endless stuff I could share, as you can probably tell. But if I had to give someone a summary of my life up until now, this is pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

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