The Things
I Took Apart

The Kid Behind the TV

I can still picture the kind of kid I was: the one crouched behind a television at someone else’s house, following wires with my eyes like they were roads on a map. Most people looked at the screen. I wanted to know what was happening behind it. Where did the cables go? What connected to what? Why did one wire create sound and another create a picture?

My mom used to warn me that the wires were dangerous and could cause fires. I would repeat it back in my own little way: the wires and the fires are dangerous. Apparently the warning did not fully work, because as a baby I once unplugged a corded phone headset and put the wire in my mouth, electrocuting myself in the process.

That curiosity followed me into everything I could take apart. VCRs, stereos, speakers, household electronics, and random things from the garage all became experiments. But I was not trying to break things. I was trying to understand them. At the time it probably looked like mischief. Looking back, it was the first sign of a lifelong pattern: I was never satisfied with the surface. I wanted to know what was behind the wall.

The Teenager Building Machines

As I got older, the wires turned into computers. In high school I joined TEAL Academy — the Technologically Enhanced Approach to Learning — and the world of troubleshooting, networking, and building computers started to make sense to me. There was something satisfying about finding the hidden point of failure in a system and bringing it back to life.

I became the person who could figure things out. I built computers, fixed problems, and started modifying electronics and gaming consoles for more storage and better features. What mattered was not just the technology itself, but the feeling that came with understanding it. A closed machine feels intimidating. An open machine feels possible.

That was one of the first times I learned that systems do not have to stay the way they are given to you. They can be opened, studied, modified, and improved. I thought I was learning about computers. In reality, I was learning a way of seeing the world. Once you understand a system, you are no longer only a user of it. You can become a builder.

The First Car That Became Identity

Eventually, computers gave way to cars. For a while my father and I had dirt bikes and would ride on weekends, but the open land around us slowly turned into developed neighborhoods. The spaces that once felt wide open started disappearing, and with them went some of that easy access to motion, machine, and freedom.

Cars became the next obsession. I read magazines, played Gran Turismo and Need for Speed, and daydreamed about Japanese tuning cars. I asked my dad endless questions about clutches, shifting gears, and what it felt like to drive a manual.

At fifteen I started working at a drug store within walking distance from my house so I could save money. Eventually my parents helped me find a mint Honda Prelude Type SH. That car was more than transportation. It gave me my first real taste of freedom, independence, and the feeling that something I owned could become an extension of who I wanted to be. That car made the future feel physical.

The Crash

In Raleigh, the car scene gave me another kind of world. On weekend nights the normal city seemed to disappear and another one came alive in parking lots, gas stations, and empty roads. People sat on hoods and talked about engines and suspension — the kind of conversations that happen when everyone is awake past the hour most people have gone home.

One night I was out in the Prelude and decided to grab food before stopping by a girlfriend’s house. There was a road I knew well, with a fun section I had driven many times. I knew the corner. I knew the bump in the middle of it. I knew the way the road loaded the suspension through the off-camber section.

This time I carried too much speed. The car left the road and went through the woods on its roof. When it finally came to rest, it was standing on its side with the engine still running. I crawled out through the sunroof. The windshield and roof were crushed flat, and somehow I walked away with little more than a scratch.

At the time it was a terrifying crash and a lucky escape. Looking back, it was also one of the first moments life taught me that performance without control can destroy the thing you love. Passion, speed, and confidence are powerful, but without integration they can become dangerous. I did not fully understand that lesson yet, but it stayed with me.

The Broken Engine That Changed My Life

After the crash I stepped back from tuning for a while. I bought and sold a few cars while working around dealerships, picking up trade-ins before they went to auction, fixing them, and selling them for profit. It was one of my first practical lessons in value: when you understand something better than the average person, you can see opportunity before others do.

Eventually I found the car that would shape the next decade of my life: a 1995 Nissan 240SX coupe. Part of the allure was a sought-after engine from a Nissan Skyline R34 — but the work had not been done correctly. Shortly after I got home from the eight-hour trip back from Tennessee, the engine destroyed itself.

By then I understood cars and engines pretty well for my age, but this one was different. Information was limited, parts were difficult to source, and I could not find anyone I fully trusted to help me. If the answer was not available where I was, I had to go find it somewhere else. I learned about SAM Racing in Houston — a machine shop, an engine dyno, and a program that seemed to teach exactly what I was stuck on. The broken engine became the doorway to a new life.

Houston and the Dream World

In 2011 I moved to Houston, Texas. I was twenty years old, leaving North Carolina for the fourth-largest city in the country, chasing performance cars, engine building, tuning, and the feeling that my life was finally opening up.

Shortly after arriving I mapped out the best tuning shops and started emailing them. EVS Motors — Exotic Vehicle Specialties — got back to me, and within a short time I was inside a world I had only seen in magazines, forums, and videos. Big brake upgrades, camshafts on Evos, turbos on Supras, wiring harnesses, GTRs, Ferraris, custom wheels, trade shows, and SEMA all became part of my everyday life.

Houston felt like walking into the internet forums I had stared at for years. At SEMA in Las Vegas I met people from Mayday Garage, and that connection led me into one of the most meaningful car communities of my life. Looking back, Houston was the special world of the hero’s journey. It gave me expansion, intensity, friendship, identity, and the feeling of being inside the dream.

Mayday Garage and the Power of Culture

Joining Mayday Garage (maydaygarage.com) meant becoming part of something bigger than a car crew. It was a Houston collective dedicated to keeping the golden era of Japanese cars alive — and it helped pioneer the city's car-meet culture, building a scene around some of the wildest JDM builds anywhere. The difference was that these were not trailer queens. People actually drove them, and drove them hard.

On Wednesday nights — #RicerWednesdays — the block around The Rice Box and 8th Wonder Brewery would start filling with cars. You could hear exhausts echoing between buildings, see people leaning over engine bays, and feel that everyone there understood the same language without needing to explain it. The cars were the obvious part. The culture was the hidden part.

We hosted meets at breweries and convention centers, took long drives across Texas, made trips to Japan for Tokyo Auto Salon and Daikoku Futo, and supported each other through weddings, breakups, and car thefts. Mayday Garage taught me that passion can become culture. A scene is not just a group of people who like the same thing. It is atmosphere, taste, repetition, shared language, and the feeling that your obsession finally has a home. Years later I would see that same pattern in music, events, sound systems, marketing, real estate, and content. People gather around energy. They gather around meaning.

Money, Sales, and the Performance Trap

In 2015 I made an ironic move. I left tuning shops and took a sales job at a forklift battery company. The income jump was massive, and suddenly I had more money to pour into the car. Wheels, turbos, seats, and parts started showing up at a pace that would not have been possible before.

On the surface it was exciting. The car kept evolving — that R34-swapped 240SX would eventually earn a feature in Super Street and coverage from TimeAttackR. But when I look back, I can see another layer. The car was evolving rapidly, but I am not sure I was evolving at the same rate. That is what I think of now as the performance trap. You can improve the object, the image, and the output while ignoring the operating system underneath the person doing the building.

Sales also began teaching me about people in a way the technical world had not. Machines have hidden wiring, but people do too. They have motives, fears, objections, timing, and reasons they say no when they mean something deeper. I did not know it yet, but sales would become another bridge from mechanical systems into human systems.

Coming Home and Losing the Plot

Years later I moved back home to North Carolina with my girlfriend of seven years. She had moved to Texas with me, and we returned together, but the transition was heavier than I expected. My relationship was suffering, my parents were going through a divorce, and the version of myself that made sense in Houston no longer had the same environment around it.

I kept asking myself, what did I just do? I had left behind the intensity of the car scene, the momentum, and the identity I had built. Back home, without all of that structure around me, I felt like I was between lives.

That was when I started growing depressed — not because of one single event, but because I felt disconnected from my direction, my creativity, my future, and the person I thought I was becoming. I had to find work, so I reached out to a longtime friend who owned a BMW shop. I loved filming and proposed making videos for his business. At the time it was just an idea. Looking back, it was the beginning of the next identity.

The Camera Became the New Engine

Filming for the BMW shop gave me something new to care about. In a strange way, the camera became the new engine. I was still interested in performance, but the form had changed. Instead of tuning fuel, air, timing, and suspension, I was learning how to tune perception.

Video gave me a new kind of control. I could decide what people noticed, how a business felt, and how to turn a place, product, or person into something more understandable and valuable. I was no longer only modifying mechanical parts. I was modifying how people saw things.

Then another door opened when my parents’ house was listed for sale. The photographer who came to shoot it saw my camera and asked if I wanted to intern with him. That was how I began learning real estate photography in 2017. Real estate media taught me that people do not just buy houses. They buy the life they imagine inside of them. I had gone from tuning cars to tuning perception.

Seattle and Stellar Media Collective

After months of learning the real estate media world, I grew tired of being back in my hometown. A friend in Portland kept telling me how different life was out west, and something in me wanted to break out again.

I sold my Audi A3 3.2, sold many of my belongings, packed up, and moved to Seattle in January of 2019. That year felt like a new version of life. I bought a motorcycle, started Stellar Media Collective, and built a real estate video marketing company of my own. For the first time, I had built a business around my creative skill.

That same year I took the most meaningful trip of my life to Greece, my dad’s home country, and visited the island where my grandfather was from. Seattle gave me independence, but Greece gave me roots. Eventually the rain wore on me, COVID changed everything, and I moved back home again — but this time I knew it was temporary. Once you have seen more than one version of yourself, it becomes harder to settle for the default one.

The Pause, the Music, and the Next Signal

When I returned home during COVID, the world was paused, but another part of me started listening more closely. A friend, Vlad, invited me over a couple of times, and I started learning how to mix on newer DJ gear. I bought a DDJ-1000 and began collecting drum and bass classics, trance, and progressive house.

Music had been part of my life for years, but DJing changed my relationship to it. I was no longer just listening. I was participating in the architecture of energy. DJing taught me sequencing, tension, release, patience, timing, and the ability to read a room without needing words.

In hindsight it connected to everything else. Cars taught me performance. Video taught me sequence. Sales taught me pressure. Marketing taught me relevance. Sound taught me clarity. DJing taught me how energy moves through people. At the time it may have looked like another interest. But it was another clue.

Florida and the Search for a Better Life

Eventually Florida started calling. I began filming work for a nonprofit after meeting the founder at a VegFest in North Carolina. I was newly vegan for a few years, exploring health, and curious about a part of the country I had not really experienced.

I started taking trips back and forth by car, exploring the east coast down to Miami and the west coast from Naples to Clearwater. Florida felt different. It felt like sun, water, health, outdoor life, music, and possibility. Eventually I fell in love with the Sarasota area and made it my mission to move there.

I was not just looking for a place to live. I was looking for a place that made life feel possible again. In Florida, more pieces started coming together: real estate, video, music, sound, health, events, lifestyle, and business. What once felt scattered started to feel like it might actually be assembling.

Sunsets and Soundwaves

Sunsets and Soundwaves became one of the clearest integrations of my life. Hosting house music parties on the beach with premium sound systems built and tuned locally in Siesta Key brought together many of the things I loved: music, technical sound, beautiful locations, community, atmosphere, and the feeling of creating an experience people could step into.

It was not just about throwing an event. It was about designing an emotional environment. A sound system is physics, but the way it hits a group of people at sunset is something more. A DJ set is timing, but the way it changes the energy of a beach is emotional. A location is geography, but under the right conditions it becomes memory.

That was when I started to understand how many of my interests were connected by atmosphere. Car meets had atmosphere. SEMA had atmosphere. Rice Box nights had atmosphere. Real estate films sold atmosphere. DJing created atmosphere. I had been chasing and studying experience my whole life. Sunsets and Soundwaves made that visible.

Thought Leader Films

Working with thought leaders and creating the Thought Leader Films brand brought another layer into focus. At first glance it was video production, but underneath that it was about something deeper: how ideas become authority, and how authority becomes trust.

I was studying how someone’s experience, knowledge, and worldview could be translated into something another person could understand, feel, and believe in. A person can know a lot and still fail to communicate why it matters. Video, done well, can help make that invisible value visible.

That connected to everything I had done before. Sales taught me how people resist. Marketing taught me how attention turns into action. Real estate videography taught me how people buy into future identity. Thought Leader Films taught me that communication is not just about looking good. It is about transferring belief. I was no longer just filming people. I was helping ideas become believable.

Real Estate, Owner Finance, and the Next Integration

In 2026 real estate became another system to take apart. I started learning wholesaling, owner finance, creative deal structures, seller motivations, and the way opportunities are built through trust, timing, negotiation, and clear communication.

At first glance this might look like another pivot. But I do not think it is. Real estate connects many of the same threads I have been following for years: sales, marketing, video, psychology, value, ownership, leverage, and the ability to see hidden structure beneath a surface-level asset.

A property is not just a property. It can represent shelter, memory, fear, opportunity, debt, identity, family pressure, or future possibility. Most people see the house, the price, and the contract. Underneath that are motivations, constraints, timelines, beliefs, and desires. Every industry has hidden wiring. The people who learn the wiring can create opportunities others miss. Real estate is another machine — just bigger and more human than the ones I started with.