April 28th, 2025
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After my season with the Sawtooth Hotshots I was physically exhausted, mentally drained, and slipped into a deep depression. Mental health is a huge problem amongst wildland firefighters. Wildland firefighters attempt suicide at ten times the rate of the general public. Just two years after I left Sawtooth one of our own passed in a lonely hotel room. He was only 37. We’d bonded over a shared love for bodybuilding. He lifted three times a week religiously, no matter how tough the workload was on the job. We shared MREs and listened to Country Roads in the buggy, and now he’s gone from this Earth. Be happy. Be at peace. Be free from suffering.
Wildland firefighters are at elevated risk for depression, alcohol use disorder, sleep deprivation, post-traumatic stress and suicide. Peer-reviewed data focused on this specialized group is limited, but there is ample research on first responder mental health, some of which shows they contemplate and attempt suicide at a rate more than 10 times greater than the general public. Firefighters, specifically, report higher rates of suicidal ideation, planning and attempts than even military personnel, and it’s more common for firefighters to die by suicide than in the line of duty. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/17/mental-health-crisis-spreading-wildfire-fighters
Most of the crew, including myself, were laid off at the end of the season after we reached our 1,039 non-overtime hours. This is a neat little trick that the federal government uses to not pay a big chunk of their work-force retirement, healthcare, and other benefits afforded to full-time federal employees.
If an employee works more than 1,039 regular hours they qualify for health insurance, retirement, and worker protections under federal law. So us seasonals were worked up to that 1,039 hour limit and then laid off. We actually worked 2,200 hours total in our season as on fires we regularly work 16 days(including travel time), get two days off, and then go right back to work. On our second to last fire the more senior crewmembers brought out cigars and we smoked in celebration of the fact that we’d just passed 1,000 overtime hours. This is the goal that wildland firefighters strive for. A thousand oats. It means a successful season and enough overtime money to buy a nice Tacoma.
According to Google the GS4(which is what I was hired on as) hourly pay was only $12.90 in 2020. That seems low. I think I made around $14/hour that year. The big bucks came with overtime and hazard pay. This brought your hourly rate up to somewhere in the $23/hour range.
The overtime pay was a big motivating factor in me joining the shot crew. I had another offer for a perm position in Big Sur, California on an engine crew that summer. That position came with housing at a fire base literally on the ocean, in Big Sur, surrounded by state park land. If that property were private no doubt it would be a hundred million dollar property. That job would have come with health benefits and a federal pension, but I turned it down for the adventure of being a hotshot and the overtime money. An engine crew can expect only 300-400 overtime hours per season.
I could’ve spent a summer surfing in the ocean and chasing California girls. Instead I chose to work in Twin Falls, Idaho with a buncha Mormons and Christian fundamentalists. I guess it’s lucky that I’m tough cause I’m clearly not that smart.
All told that summer I made about $50,000, pre-tax. Not a lot of money to risk your life, destroy your relationships, and irrevocably damage your physical and mental health. But this was the most money I’d ever made in such a short period of time and I planned to spend two years traveling SE Asia with it. For some reason the idea that “you can rent a beachfront house in Thailand for $300/month” had been stuck in my head since I was in my 20s and I wanted to finally live out my Thai expat fantasy.
That summer we had three close calls where the fire overran our position and if we had run away any slower we would have died. Everyone developed a hacking cough as if they smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I suppose in some sense we did. When people see my pictures they always ask “didn’t you guys wear masks or respirators?” We didn’t. Wildland firefighters use very little protection compared to our structure counterparts. This is mostly due to practical concerns. You simply cannot carry a heavy respirator up into the mountains and you would run out of O2 long before a shift was over. Also, you can’t work effectively with a mask on. Working on a fireline is like running a marathon. It’s intense physical labor. Try running a marathon wearing a N95 mask and you’ll quickly see why we didn’t wear masks. So, we just expose ourselves to smoke all day everyday and damage our lungs in the process.
Nothing I did in the Army was as dangerous or intense as my season with the hotshots. You can watch my documentary I made about the season on YouTube, it’s called “Unskilled Labor, a Season With the Hotshots.” The title refers to a dig a senator made in 2021 that said wildland firefighters didn’t deserve higher pay because they’re “unskilled labor.”
At the end of the season I made the firm decision to never risk my life again for such shitty pay and for a government that clearly doesn’t care about its citizens or its workers. I set the firm intention that I was going to gain financial freedom no matter what.
And that’s when I manifested my million dollar business. I won’t get into all the nitty gritty details but I found an opportunity out of the blue a few months after my season ended. I’d just finally started to come out of my depression and was intently focused on the goal of gaining financial freedom. Covid had created some really wonky issues in the supply chain and I found an opportunity to meet demand that just wasn’t being fulfilled due to supply chain disruptions.
Once I identified my market and tested my hypothesis I went all in. I maxed out all my credit cards buying inventory and signed up for new cards. At the peak I was charging 40-50k on my cards each week. I worked in a fever pitch. I'd wake up at 6am and start packing orders. I’d do this until 4pm where I’d drive to UPS and drop off packages. Some days I’d ship 150 packages. Throughout the day orders I’d placed with suppliers would arrive and then at night, after dinner, I’d unbox everything that had arrived and then list my new inventory.
This schedule went on for six months. The weekends I’d catch up on my order fulfillment. It’s not exaggerating to say I worked 80 to 100 hours a week for six straight months. I was actually glad when I saw the market cooling off because I was so burnt out and needed a break.
Interestingly, the skills I’d learned playing the Auction House in World of Warcraft and in the markets of Everquest actually helped me a lot in my endeavor. In both of these games I’d become rich in the game by playing the markets. I’d buy items when I saw a good deal and then resell them for a hefty profit. I made so much gold in WoW and platinum in Everquest that when I eventually quit I was able to sell my in-game items and currency for real-world money($1,200 in WoW and $600 in Everquest). I was able to recognize the same trends and patterns and used the same strategies to identify the most in-demand items and sold as many of them as I could acquire.
Taking in large volumes of data, parsing it, and predicting future trends seems to be a weird skill I have. I don’t know where it comes from but I’ve always been good at it. This skill helped me read the markets in MMORPGS and it helped me make a bunch of money in my business. Recognizing these macro trends led me to move to a majority cash position in my investment accounts weeks before the Trump tariffs tanked the market. I am staying in a mostly cash position now because my instincts tell me we haven’t even begun to see the impact of this administration on the markets.
This weird skill has been telling me since 2015 that our country is headed to a civil war. Every year my instinct grows louder and more insistent. And here we are.
I think the only way we escape a civil war is if we can remove the cancer of MAGA, whose base of white supremacists have been allowed to metastasis in this country for far too long. We need to hold billionaires to account for the division and damage they’ve done. I don’t think there’s the political will to make this happen. So unfortunately I think a civil war is inevitable.
But maybe we can manifest the changes that we need to see a prosperous and peaceful future.
By the time my business wound down I had made over a million dollars in revenue. Mind, this is revenue, not profit. Still though, for one person to make that amount of revenue in six months by themselves. I’m proud of my hard work and my willingness to go all in once I saw the opportunity in the market. I’d gained the financial freedom that I wanted and now I could travel stress free while I built an online stream of income.
As woo-woo as it sounds I really do believe that I was able to find this opportunity and succeed at it because I first visualized it and intended it in my mind.
Manifesting Reality in a Sensory Deprivation Tank
This isn’t the first time I’ve seemingly manifested my thoughts into reality. When I opened my gym I saw with crystal clarity the gym that I wanted and my gym looked exactly like that. The part where I messed up is I only manifested the fact that I owned a gym, omitting the important detail of me being happy and fulfilled and successful. The fable of the monkey’s paw is relevant here. You really do need to be careful what you wish for and it seems like the universe has a nasty habit of giving you what you want along with things you never thought about or intended.
Toward the tail end of my Appalachian Trail hike in 2016 the weather was turning cold and I needed to add an extra mid-layer to my clothes. I was going to order a sweater in town. I’d looked it up, found the exact model I was going to order, but for some reason just sat my phone down and didn’t place the order. As I hiked out the next day I was mentally berating myself for being lazy and now I’d be cold for the next week. I was looking down at my feet as I climbed and lost in thought when something hit me in the face.
I looked up and hanging from a branch in the middle of the trail was a black sweater. “Oh strange, that looks like the one I was going to order.” I took it down from the tree and inspected the sweater more closely. “What the hell!” This not only looked like the sweater I was going to order. It was the exact brand, the exact size, and exact color of the sweater that I was going to order. It was literally what I had put in my shopping cart but failed to hit the “complete order” button on.
In 2017 my friend Connor opened a sensory deprivation float center in Columbia, MO and I pitched him an idea: “You should let me float for 30 days in a row and I’ll make a documentary about it. We’ll call it SuperFloat me.” I had just watched Morgan Spurlock’s documentary where he ate McDonald’s everyday for 30 straight days. Mostly I wanted to get some free floats.
Connor agreed and I started floating. The following is an excerpt from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Ralph Leighton, Pages 128-130.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that comes down. It's completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick, there's no sound. There's a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out you don't need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large, and you're only in there for two or three hours, and you don't really consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it's just psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at body temperature, or 94, or something-- he had it all figured out. There wasn't supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly, or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn't get any hallucinations, but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was used as an anesthetic. I've always been interested in questions related to what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out, so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I've never been able to figure out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn't see clearly. But when I'd look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you didn't care to look at things; you're sloppily doing this and that, feeling kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn't do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn't get any hallucinations, and the second time I didn't get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn't afraid because I knew what it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting--I met many interesting people there--who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an "out-of-body experience" (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board): Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you breathe.
I figured I'd try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that --it's hard to explain--I'm an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a little bit, by about an inch.
“Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” is one of my all-time favorite books where nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman recounts his various encounters with metaphysical and mystical states of consciousness. I suppose his chapters about his work in physics and the Manhattan project are also interesting. You should read it, it might just change your perspective on reality.
I floated for 90 minutes everyday for thirty days in a row. It took me four sessions before I could relax fully inside the tank. My first sessions I fought the very natural desire that humans have in water to not let my head sink under and drown. Once I was able to fully relax I started to experience some really interesting states of consciousness.
For one I found that my ability to visualize in my imagination became extraordinarily sharp inside the tank. I could visualize events, memories, and imagination in such vivid detail that it was almost as if I were there in reality. Almost, but not quite. I think it would be fair to call it an immersive virtual reality of the mind. Or, almost but not quite as vivid as a lucid dream.
I found that I could hold vast amounts of information. In one session I composed an entire multi-page blog post and was able to hold the whole thing in my mind. Just like a word processor I was able to go back and revise certain parts, cut out others, and all the while I could hold the entire blog in my memory without forgetting any details.
After two weeks I decided to conduct an experiment. I’d always been interested in the idea of manifesting reality with my mind and saw the tank as a perfect place to visualize something and see if I could bring it into waking reality. I found the perfect test case.
YouTube was offering a program called “YouTube Next Up.” It was open to anyone who had a YouTube channel(pretty low barrier to entry)! It was a program where a handful of YouTube creators would be invited to the YouTube headquarters in New York City and be given a week of training. I put in my application and then went into my float session.
Lying in the dark tank in the warm epsom salt water I let my consciousness drift down into myself. I floated there in complete silence until my mind calmed and then I visualized myself getting accepted to the program. I felt the emotion of joy at being accepted and I saw myself in New York City attending the training. I really put myself there. Most importantly I felt the sensation of having already attended YouTube Next Up. I felt all the strong emotions of being selected and attending. I didn’t leave any room for doubt in my mind. This had already happened and what I was seeing was a moment of time in the future and all I needed to do was move forward in time to that moment. There wasn’t a shred of wanting this to happen, or wishing for it to happen. It’s already happened. I know it’s already happened. I feel that it’s already happened. And now I’m just moving to that point in time.
I finished that float and put the whole experiment out of my mind. One month later I was washing my car when my phone buzzed with a new e-mail. It was from YouTube.
Hello!
Sit down, you might not be ready for this...
Congratulations, you have reached the final round of YouTube NextUp US/Canada! You have been selected from a large field of entries after several rounds of judging so you should be feeling pretty good right now!
Before we can confirm you as a winner, we just need to know a few more things that require immediate attention -- deadline to respond is May 3rd. Read on to complete the following steps and find out more details, but please don’t share with family and friends (and your subscribers!).
I’d been selected! Out of the thousands of people who had applied I had been selected! Here’s the YouTube page. You can see my channel toward the bottom “The Healthy Gamer” https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/05/
I really had no right being there. YouTube was just a hobby at the time. Most of the other folks were very serious about growing their YouTube channels and I was honestly turned off by most of them. All they wanted to talk about was how to get views and grow their channels and monetize. I’d just come off the Appalachian Trail the year before and was debating whether I wanted to drop out of society entirely. Their concerns about views and click throughs and branding seemed so inconsequential and trite.
And if you click through those links and look at their channels you can see how much effort and work these people have put in. Many have 500k+ subscribers. I’m still under 100k all these years later because I was more interested in having adventures and living in the woods than putting up fancy videos and optimizing thumbnails and all that.
I’m not condemning the people for their focus and passion in growing their channel. I’m just pointing out that I didn’t belong in that group and really shouldn’t have been chosen to be part of YouTube next up. I truly believe that I was chosen due to my visualization inside the float tank.
I found the week to be mostly tedious. I really didn’t care about what they taught us. Half of it was basic photography lessons about lighting, aperture, and such which I already knew, and the other half was focused around best practices for getting views which again, I just couldn’t care about. Go outside people! See the sunset! Feel the wind on your face! Live in the woods! Who cares about views and click through percentage!!!
It just all felt so fake. It reminded me of when I was younger and had been involved in the local entrepreneurship scene at Mizzou. Oh my god you could not find a group of more pretentious assholes who enjoyed the smell of their own farts than an entrepreneurship meet-up. But I did learn valuable lessons from my time attending those events and meeting start-up folks. I learned that most start-ups and businesses are just smoke and mirrors. From the outside they’re professional but are a complete mess internally. Their website will say they’re “a professional team of dedicated entrepreneurs who harness the power of AI to solve the world’s problems!” But their team is made up of 3 kids who haven’t finished college and no one knows what their product actually is or how they’ll create it. But throw enough buzzwords around, get funding, and then you can figure out all that pesky stuff like what you’re actually going to sell later.
What a load of horseshit. No wonder why so many start-ups fail. If you don’t know what you’re doing you still won’t know what you’re doing even if you sell a bunch of bullshit to dumb people.
I got so fed up with the fake people. Everyone wants to have coffee. “Hey I love what you’re about, let’s get coffee.” “I love your story, we should get coffee.” “It was so nice to meet you, we should get coffee.” Inevitably in these coffee meetings I’d learn that it wasn’t actually so nice to meet me. They didn’t care about my story. They wanted to sell something to me, or they wanted to access my clients. That was it. Oh my god the number of multi-level-marketing idiots(think Herbalife) who wanted coffee meetings with me after I opened my gym.
I vividly remember one coffee meeting with a husband and wife duo. They were in their 40s and their skin looked like leather from too much time spent in tanning beds. They were trying to sell me some BS MLM miracle supplement. I just kept asking them “okay, but how does it work?” “Well you see this new herb that was discovered in Africa can reduce inflammation and increase energy.” “Okay, but how does it work?” “Well we’ve been selling it to our clients and I’m sure your gym members would see great results with it.” “Okay, but how does it work?” “If you get in on the ground floor like us your earning potential is unlimited.” “Okay, but how does it work?”
It went on like this for about 20 minutes until they got visibly frustrated and made up an excuse to leave.
I hate fake people. I hate fraudsters. I hate injustice. So it’s no wonder I hate the trump regime. They are the embodiment of phoney fraudsters. They are the embodiment of injustice.
Let’s use our powers of manifestation and see them tried and sentenced for the treasonous traitors that they are.
You make such interesting contrasts between worlds. I really relate to it as I currently live in two worlds that I work to reconcile.
My wife was a Chicago cop who died by suicide. First responders already have higher rates of suicide and CPD is 60% higher than that. I theorize it’s because of similar reasons to firefighters- under supported, under paid, under appreciated and massively overworked. I hope I’m not the only one to say to you that I’m grateful for your service - military, firefighting and now, writing.