I grew up in Oklahoma. I now live in Colorado. The Way began with ideas I've carried through martial arts, art, travel, building things, and trying to understand why information reaches some people and not others.
This is a personal introduction, not an argument that my experiences make me the authority on everyone else's life. My way is not necessarily your way.
The tattoo and the student
I started martial arts when I was six years old and have practiced for more than thirty years. I earned the title Shihan in my early twenties and am now a fifth-degree Shihan.
Years ago, one of my students asked me about my tattoo. It's the Dokkōdō, Miyamoto Musashi's “The Way of Walking Alone,” and its last character, 道, is michi, the Japanese word for “the way.” I explained michi this way:
Everything has its own way, yet The Way is the same for everyone.
It's remained useful as my life has changed. People find their own paths. We still share responsibilities, consequences and a world we can't simply walk away from.
Bruce Lee's water philosophy belongs beside it. Water takes the shape of a cup or a bottle, flows around obstacles, and can strike with force. I don't want to build an institution so rigid that it can't learn.
Growing up with Oklahoma history
Oklahoma taught me that American economic history isn't only a story about presidents and banks. It's also farmers, laborers, families and communities.
Woody Guthrie came from Okemah. The Green Corn Rebellion happened in Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl shaped whole communities and produced some of the most important documentary photography in American history.
I grew up in Tulsa, and by sixteen I was playing polo at about a two-goal rating. Later I started an art gallery there, Corvid Gallery on Archer Street, where I showed local artists.
Tulsa's Greenwood district and Black Wall Street belong in that history too. History lives in actual neighborhoods, family businesses and conversations, not only in textbooks.
Colorado and different kinds of politics
I moved to Colorado in 2004 and have lived in Boulder ever since. Colorado has a long history of unconventional local politics, including Hunter S. Thompson's Freak Power sheriff campaign in Aspen.
I don't have to agree with Thompson on everything to appreciate that people outside the usual political mold can participate and raise questions about their communities.
I want The Way to permit that kind of independence without turning irreverence into an excuse for sloppy evidence.
What travel taught me
I traveled to Uganda during the years of the Lord's Resistance Army. I won't pretend a visit makes me an expert on what people there lived through.
What connects the experience to The Way is the importance of records: what was seen, what was reported, what evidence supports an account, and what we may still not know.
The Farm Security Administration photographers documented Dust Bowl and Depression-era America in ways that made distant suffering visible. I think about that work when considering how modern technology can document public decisions and their consequences.
The goal is not to make every photograph, dataset or testimony speak with one voice. It's to preserve the context that allows other people to investigate.
From engines to evidence
I graduated with three undergraduate degrees in four and a half years. I've worked with mechanical systems, taught, built software and developed large-scale research infrastructure. That work has included timestamped news archives, data processing, local computing, automated systems and experiments that had to be measured rather than guessed at.
That technical background means I can begin prototyping The Way's public research tools without first assembling a large organization.
But being able to build a system does not make my political interpretation automatically correct. The model, data and decisions must be open to review by people with the appropriate expertise.
Why I don't want to own The Way
I'm putting my own philosophy into the first draft because someone has to start. But I don't want a community organized around being loyal to me.
I want people who disagree to test the analysis. I want methods to be revised. I want members to govern the institution that grows out of this project.
If The Way eventually reaches conclusions I dislike, that alone won't make it illegitimate. The record of how those conclusions were reached is what matters.
I want to create something useful enough that it can outgrow me.
The path forward
The first steps are modest: a website, foundational essays, a small testing community, and a research pipeline that exposes its sources and corrections.
The larger goals—public accountability, accessible economic evidence, and wider civic participation—will require more people and more expertise than one founder can supply.
Everything has its own way, yet The Way is the same for everyone.
This was part of my way here. What you make of it is yours.