Nobody Trained Me to Do What I Actually Do. I Had to Leave the System to Figure It Out.

This is not the story of a company. It's the story of a person — one who got fired from a pizza job in Ohio, had a cardiologist tell him to accept a pacemaker or probably die, refused both, and spent 25 years navigating into and then deliberately out of a healthcare system that was never designed to actually fix anyone. Here's how it actually happened.

I want to tell you who I actually am. Not the credentials — though I have those. Not the platform numbers or the press mentions. The actual texture of how I think, why I do what I do, what has driven every decision I've made for 25 years, and what it has cost me along the way.

Because I think the story matters. Not as a highlight reel. As a map. The kind of map that might be useful to someone who is currently lost in the same territory I was lost in.

It starts, improbably, with a large pepperoni pizza and a chiropractor in Cortland, Ohio with a very nice truck.

This is not the story of a company. It is the story of a person. The company came later. The obsession came first.

Cortland, Ohio. A Pizza. A Chiropractor With a Very Nice Truck.

The year is 2000. I am 18 years old, freshly graduated from high school in Cortland, Ohio, and I am delivering pizzas part-time. If you have ever delivered pizzas you know that it is an exceptional motivator for reconsidering your life trajectory. The tips are bad, the hours are strange, and the job has a way of clarifying what you don't want.

Every Friday night I'd pull up to the same house. A chiropractor would answer the door. Nice house. Nicer truck. Always seemed like a man who had figured something out. Very good taste in company, which I noticed because I was 18 and noticed things like that.

I thought: whatever this guy does, I want to do that.

So I got fired from the pizza place — the precise circumstances of which I will take to my grave — walked directly across the street to his clinic, and asked for a job. He hired me on the spot. Whether this was a sign of insight or desperation on his part, I'll never know. What I know is that he became one of the most important mentors of my life, and that ridiculous sequence of events cracked open everything that followed.

Because once I was inside that clinic, I encountered an idea I had never encountered before: the human body is a machine. A three-dimensional structure with patterns. Patterns that are readable, predictable, and reversible. That idea walked into my brain in the year 2000 and has never left. It is still the organizing principle of everything I do.

I was 18 years old and I had found my obsession. I just didn't know yet what it was going to cost me to follow it.

The body is a machine. A 3D structure with readable,
predictable, reversible patterns. That idea walked into
my brain at 18 and has never left.

The Education Years: Ohio to Iowa, and the Thinkers Who Actually Made Sense

From there: psychology degree from Kent State University — useful for understanding why people stay stuck in patterns they know are hurting them, and also, as it turned out, for understanding what goes wrong when you build a team without the right psychological architecture. More on that later.

Then chiropractic school at Palmer University in Davenport, Iowa. The birthplace of the whole profession. I enrolled in 2006 and graduated in 2009. I was captain of the golf team, which is directly relevant to my Titleist Performance Institute obsession and also evidence that I cannot exist without competition and a specific target to aim at.

Palmer is a remarkable institution, deeply committed to the chiropractic adjustment as the primary answer to what ails people. I respected the tradition and I understood the philosophy. But my real education kept coming from a different set of thinkers: Stuart McGill on spine biomechanics. Gary Gray on chain reaction mechanics. Gray Cook and the Functional Movement Screen. The Titleist Performance Institute on athletic bodies. Active Release Technique. Graston. These were people who talked about the body as mechanics — as a system of forces and patterns and load paths — and that language made sense to me at a level that almost nothing else did.

There is something else you should know about me here, because it explains the next 25 years better than almost any credential: I have ADHD. My brain does not operate on a smooth, consistent gradient. It cycles. There are periods of scattered, restless, unfocused energy — and then the switch flips. Hyperfocus arrives. And when it does, I disappear completely into whatever has my attention.

Late nights. Yerba mate. Pink Floyd on repeat. Sixteen-hour days. I'll spend weeks simplifying how the scapula connects to the pelvis. Then how that connects to the hip. Then what order those movements should be delivered to a body with a specific disc pathology at a specific level. I don't stop until the piece is done — not good enough. Right. Completely understood, completely simplified, completely communicable to a human being who has never thought about their scapula before. And then I move to the next problem.

Einstein has a line that has lived rent-free in my head for fifteen years: if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. That sentence became my operating standard for everything. It is why I work until the explanation is clean. It is why I am genuinely uncomfortable with complexity I can't resolve into clarity. And it is, fundamentally, why everything I have built exists.

In chiropractic school, hyperfocus had fully locked onto mechanics. Patterns. The question of why bodies break down in predictable ways, and what it actually takes — specifically, mechanically, repeatably — to reverse that. I have never really stopped asking that question.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. That sentence has been running in the background of my brain for fifteen years. It drives everything.

Iowa, 2006: The Heart That Almost Ended Everything

I need to tell you about my heart. It's one of the most important parts of this story, and it almost didn't make it in, which would have been dishonest.

I'd been noticing something off about my heart since around 2002 — a funny flutter during racquetball, an irregularity that came and went. I ignored it the way young men ignore things that frighten them. Then in 2006, during chiropractic school in Iowa, I was pushing my broken-down Isuzu Rodeo on the side of the road and my heart completely spun out of control. Racing. Dizzy. Out of breath. I went home and called 911.

At the University of Iowa I met Dr. Brian Olshansky — one of the country's leading electrophysiologists. He reviewed my scans and was direct: life-threatening arrhythmia. You could die. We need to address this immediately. He scheduled a cardiac ablation procedure.

I went under. And during the procedure, my heart lost its rhythm entirely. Coming out of the sedation — groggy, barely conscious, wires running into my chest — I heard someone say: it's a mess in here. We need to put a pacemaker in right now.

Half-conscious on that table, I said: get all of these wires out of me. I want nothing.

They listened. They pulled everything. The ablation was never completed.

The next day Olshansky sat across from me and laid out the situation plainly. The options were: burn the nerves around the heart, accept a pacemaker, or face the possibility of dying within the year. He was not being dramatic. He was being a good doctor delivering a serious prognosis.

I said: I would rather die than have all those wires in me.

I meant every word. And I want to be honest about what happened next, because this is where the story gets important.

What followed was not passive resignation. It was the most aggressive, methodical self-directed recovery I had ever mounted. I eliminated everything — went fully natural, cleaned up my diet completely, went what we'd now call paleo, eliminated toxins and fluoride, rebuilt from the ground up one variable at a time. I treated my own body as the most important diagnostic puzzle I'd ever been handed.

For three years after that procedure I couldn't golf a full round without my heart going into arrhythmia. I'd wake up in the morning genuinely grateful just to be alive — not performatively, not as a mindfulness practice, but because I had made it through the night without my heart going sideways in my sleep. I was afraid to fly because elevation would trigger an episode. I couldn't run, couldn't train the way I wanted to, was afraid to travel freely, afraid to push. I was in my late twenties and terrified of my own body.

By 2011, the natural approach was working. My heart was improving. I got strong again. Started training again. Spearfishing. Living again.

Then in 2013 — after a long wedding weekend, too much alcohol, a hard workout the next morning — I heard a pop in my chest. The arrhythmia came flooding back. I was slurring my speech. A doctor named Gregory Feld identified atrial flutter and performed an ablation — my first and only successful ablation. Five or six solid years followed. I climbed Mount Whitney. Trained MMA and jiu-jitsu. Spearfished in conditions that would make most people reconsider. I was fully alive again.

Then 2018. Same pattern: a social weekend, alcohol, hard workout. Pop. Slurring again. And at that moment, the pattern became undeniable: the alcohol was doing this. Not that I was an alcoholic — I'd drink socially, beers with friends, whiskey on a good night out. But for my particular cardiac wiring, alcohol was a trigger, and the data had finally accumulated to a point I couldn't argue with.

I quit in 2018. In the seven years since I've had the equivalent of maybe five drinks total — sips here and there of something genuinely exceptional. My heart has gotten stronger every year since.

What I know now: seven to nine hours of sleep, no alcohol, and a specific magnesium-potassium-CoQ10 protocol I developed over years of self-experimentation. Three things. That's what gave me my life back.

I tell you all of this because it is the foundation of everything I believe professionally. When someone tells me their back pain is ruining their life and that they've been told it's permanent — I know what that feels like from the inside. When they've been handed a treatment plan that involves permanent hardware in their body and told to accept it — I know what it is to refuse that, and to find another way. The conviction that people can fix things themselves, that there are usually answers outside the standard-of-care playbook, that you do not have to accept the first thing a specialist tells you — that conviction came from my own body. From a hospital table in Iowa where I woke up half-conscious and told a cardiologist to pull his wires out of my chest.

A cardiologist told me: burn the nerves, accept a pacemaker, or you might die. I said no. I fixed it myself. That's not a dramatic story. It's the reason I believe what I believe.

California: Athletes, 10,000 Bodies, and an Invention Someone Else Got Rich From

I graduated in 2009 and moved to California to be near the Titleist Performance Institute. A board member I'd connected with was going to show me everything I needed to know. What actually happened is he handed me the keys to a practice that was, to put it charitably, not thriving. My first real-world lesson in the gap between having great connections and having a functional business.

I sorted it out. Then landed a position as an independent contractor at Ezia — a sports performance center in San Diego that was genuinely extraordinary. USA Rugby trained there. X Games athletes. Action sports pros at the highest level. I'd travel to events, work on some of the best athletes in the world, stand next to excellent physical therapists and elite-level personal trainers. The kind of environment that either makes you very good very fast or exposes you completely. I got very good.

Over my clinical career I worked with more than 10,000 patients in person. NFL players. Olympians. NFL teams. People who had been in chronic pain for two decades. You learn things from 10,000 bodies that you cannot learn from textbooks. Patterns become obvious. The body's error codes become legible. And the gap between what the healthcare system was doing for these people and what actually needed to happen became increasingly, unavoidably clear.

During this period I also started my own practice. CaliSpine — which I opened, built, and eventually sold in 2017. CaliSpine is still operating today under new ownership. I built it around the quadratus lumborum — the QL — a muscle I was convinced was the most chronically overlooked structure in the human back. Deep, square, sitting between your lower ribs and your pelvis, quietly responsible for an enormous percentage of chronic low back pain while everyone else argued about the discs. I called it the most overlooked muscle in the back. I still stand by that.

To treat it properly, I needed better tools than what existed. So I built one. I called it the AccuPulse — a percussive therapy device, one of the first of its kind, with custom tips I developed and refined with the help of robotics engineers. I pitched it to DonJoy Global. They declined.

Then I connected with Jason Wersland, founder of what would become Therabody — maker of the Theragun. We reached an agreement. His company wanted my tips. If they performed well in the market, he would pay me and put my name on the patent. A handshake deal. Shared vision. Good faith all around.

Eight years later. Eight million Theraguns sold with my tips on the product. Zero dollars paid to me. Zero credit on the patent.

In June 2025 I filed suit in the Central District of California — patent fraud, unjust enrichment, failure to credit. That case is ongoing. I share the story not out of bitterness — genuinely — but because the lesson is one I want other people to have for free, since it cost me considerably: get every agreement in writing. Every detail. Every promise. Every handshake that matters. No exceptions.

Eight million units sold. My tips on the product. Zero dollars. Zero name on the patent. Get everything in writing. Every single time. No exceptions.

Teaching, a Viral Video, and Something I Can't Fully Explain

While running CaliSpine I was also teaching at California State University — a kinesiology course I created from scratch called Introduction to Manual Therapy Techniques, for pre-physical therapy students. And something happened that genuinely surprised me.

I fell in love with it. Not 'this is a useful thing to do' love. The other kind — 'I would do this for free and it would be enough' love. Standing in front of a room, taking something genuinely complex and making it land simply, watching understanding arrive on someone's face in real time — that lit something in me that clinical work alone had never fully ignited. I realized somewhere in those classrooms that I am, at my core, a teacher. Not a practitioner who occasionally teaches. A teacher who also practices.

Around the same time I started making social media clips with Andrew — a Cal State intern with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, exceptional mobility, and genuinely great on-camera presence. We had chemistry. We made a lot of content. One video in particular — The Greatest QL Stretch in the World — got shared by a page called MMA Leech on Facebook.

Four million views.

I sat with that number. And something clicked — loud, clear, total. I knew enough. I was good enough. I was done being small while people suffered through a system that was never going to teach them what I could teach them from a phone screen in their living room. I set a twelve-month deadline: convert this into a real digital education operation.

I want to tell you about something else that happened around this time, because I think it is part of the story and I am going to tell it honestly and let people make of it what they will.

It was 2016. I was not particularly religious — raised Catholic, but hadn't thought deeply about God or faith in years. And then two things happened that I cannot fully explain and have never been able to explain away.

I had what I can only describe as downloads. Twice, on separate occasions, moments where it felt like I received lifetimes of knowledge all at once — information arriving from somewhere outside myself, fully formed, complete. And once, alone in my living room, I saw what I can only describe as a vortex open up in the room. It terrified me. I genuinely thought I was losing my mind.

The next day my friend, Dr. Michelle Wolford, texted me out of nowhere asking if I was okay. I called her. She said she had a sudden, overwhelming thought about me the previous night and felt compelled to reach out. She knew nothing of what had happened. I hadn't told a single person.

I've had other experiences like this — sensations I can only describe as feeling like a gunshot going off in my head, followed by a sense of ripples moving outward, like I was briefly in contact with something much larger than myself. I know how that sounds. I am also a scientist and a clinician with 25 years of evidence-based practice. Both things are true simultaneously. Those experiences are the source of a confidence I have carried ever since — a deep, unshakeable sense that the work matters, that the mission is real, and that I am supposed to be doing it. You can call that whatever you want. It is mine.

I saw a vortex open in my living room and felt like I received lifetimes of knowledge at once. I know how that sounds. I also know what I know.

The Price Is Right and What It Taught Me About Myself

I want to tell you about a moment from 2014 or 2015 that sounds absurd but was one of the most clarifying experiences of my adult life.

I was invited by a group to attend a taping of The Price Is Right. Before we went in, someone mentioned that producers interview the audience and hand-select who goes onstage. The instant he said that, something settled in me with complete certainty: I'm going. They will pick me. Not hope. Certainty.

They put the audience in groups of thirty and interview everyone simultaneously. I watched what the producers were looking for, engaged directly, made myself impossible to overlook. Sure enough — I was the first person called onstage.

I won a set of genuinely terrible purses. Then I was one digit off from winning a car. Then I spun the wheel first, landed on sixty-five cents, stayed — and lost the showcase.

I was sad for days afterwards. Legitimately, embarrassingly sad. The purses did not help.

But here is what I took from that experience that has stayed with me ever since: I light up under pressure. When the cameras are on, when the stakes are real, when there is an audience and something to perform for — my brain sharpens. I am better, not worse. I have always been this way. Extreme downhill mountain biking at speed. Free diving to depths over 110 feet on a single breath, harvesting fish in conditions that would make most people reconsider being in the water at all. Speaking in front of rooms full of people in Dubai and New York and Houston. The pressure does not intimidate me. It clarifies me. It is the environment my brain is optimized for.

I took a strengths assessment some years back and it came back that I am a Responder. Not a planner. Not a ten-year-roadmap architect. A Responder — someone who is at their absolute best when reacting in real time to what is directly in front of them. That result made more sense to me than almost anything I had ever read about myself. I don't have a ten-year plan. I have never had a ten-year plan. But put something real and difficult in front of me, put some stakes on the table, put an audience in the room — and I will show up better than anyone expects.

The challenge has been building a life and a business that keeps feeding that. Not fighting the Responder. Building around it. I am figuring that out, incrementally, with each iteration of what I do.

I'm a Responder. At my best when something real and difficult is directly in front of me. I've stopped trying to change that. I'm building around it instead.

Walking Out of Healthcare on Purpose

By 2015 I was running CaliSpine six days a week, teaching at Cal State, and growing increasingly, bone-tiredly done with the healthcare system I was operating inside.

The insurance billing games. The reimbursement structures that reward volume over outcomes and process patients rather than fix them. The quiet reality that if you bill honestly for the work you actually do, you get paid almost nothing — so everyone overbills and nobody talks about it in polite company. The patients who capped their own recovery at eight visits because that's what the insurance company approved, as if a claims processor in an office somewhere had received divine knowledge about the specific number of sessions their particular lumbar spine required.

I was also suffocating in the physical model itself. I am not, constitutionally, a person who should be in one building six days a week. I spearfish. I freedive. I hunt birds. I mountain bike aggressively and fast. I train jiu-jitsu. I travel when I can. I need movement and novelty and challenge the way other people need routine. The clinic was successful and it was a cage. A very nice cage. Still a cage.

After the four million view video I set a twelve-month deadline. Then an eviction notice arrived — it turned out CaliSpine had been operating out of a location that was not properly zoned for a medical clinic, a situation I had been quietly managing with what I would generously describe as optimistic compliance for approximately four years. The notice gave me thirty days.

The solution was to convert from a medical clinic to an online education company. Which I had already decided to do. I renamed it MoveU — short for Move University — sold CaliSpine, and left the healthcare system in 2017. I have not looked back for a single day since.

I left healthcare in 2017. Not because I failed at it. Because I understood it too well — and I wanted to actually fix people, not process them.

The Growth, the Implosion, and What I Learned the Hard Way

MoveU launched properly at the end of 2016. From 2017 through 2019 the growth was unlike anything I had experienced. I went from a three-person practice to a company of twenty employees. And here I need to be completely honest, because this is a story about who I am and dishonesty would defeat the entire point.

I am not a manager. I am a visionary, an educator, a person who is obsessive about the work itself. Managing people — setting accountability structures, holding a team to goals over time, navigating the interpersonal reality of a fast-growing organization — is not my skillset and never has been. I kept believing people when they told me what they could do. I'd hear someone say they could be my operator, my COO, the person who could execute on the vision — and I'd believe them. Completely. Because I believe in people. The same way I believe every patient who walks through the door can fix their own pain, I believe people when they tell me who they are and what they're capable of.

That's a strength and a weakness living in exactly the same place in my personality. It's one of the things I've had to learn to navigate, because it has cost me — in business and in trust — more than once.

The team grew fast and the culture deteriorated. There was drama I won't detail publicly — ethical violations, personal chaos that had no business entering a professional environment. I had to let people go, including Andrew, one of the original faces of MoveU. Most of the team left in the fallout. For the first time in my career I felt genuinely foggy. Unsure what came next. Unsure how to rebuild. For a person whose brain runs on stimulation and momentum, that fog was one of the most disorienting experiences I've had.

Here is how I processed it. I do not believe things happen to me. I believe they happen for me. I have people close to me who are perpetual victims of their circumstances — who carry their setbacks as evidence that the universe is against them. I understand the pull of that position. I have never been able to live there. When something goes wrong, my first question is: what is the lesson? And what do I do differently next time? Not as a performance of resilience — as a genuine, immediate reflex. The implosion of what I'd call MoveU 1.0 was painful and clarifying in equal measure.

I went back to basics. Started making genuinely great education content again. Stopped worrying about scale and focused on substance. And MoveU came back to life — because the thing that makes it work was never the size of the operation. It was always the content. It was always me, simplifying the complex, which is the one thing I have never been able to stop doing.

Nine years in, I still find it somewhat remarkable that I've been at this for nine years. I get bored. I'm stimulated by new problems, new territory, new things to build. I've studied people like Steve Jobs who committed to singular things for decades and I've always known, honestly, that's not the model my brain runs on. The fact that this particular problem — why do bodies break down, and what does it actually take to reverse that — has held my full attention for nearly a decade tells me something about how deep the question actually goes. How much work there is still to do.

I'm raising investment capital for the first time, which I'm genuinely excited about. Because the honest self-assessment is this: I am the visionary, the head of education, the head of new product. I am not the operator. I have never found the right high-level executor to pair with — the person who can take the ideas and actually build the systems around them — and that gap has slowed things down more than almost anything else. I'm clear-eyed about it now in a way I wasn't five years ago. I'm still looking. I'll find the right person.

Things don't happen to me. They happen for me. The implosion of MoveU 1.0 was painful and clarifying in equal measure. I'd take both again.

Katie, Marriage, and the Person Who Is Usually Right

I was married once before — at 26, in chiropractic school. We divorced three years later. She is wonderful. I simply was not ready. I'm grateful I didn't do more damage than I did, and I'm glad she's doing well.

I've been with my wife Katie for seven or eight years now. She is, I'll say it plainly, usually right. This is something I've made peace with. It took a while but I got there.

Katie is one of the most structurally capable people I have ever met. She currently runs her own company — ISH Active — and serves as CMO of BOSU Fitness, while being deeply involved in MoveU. The systems. The business structure. The discipline that holds the whole operation together. She has her fingerprints on all of it. Where I have ideas, she has execution. Where I have vision, she has process. A lot of what actually works about MoveU is her, and I want to be explicit about that because it's true and because I think people who build things in public have a responsibility to be honest about who actually helps build them.

She is also, for the record, significantly more patient with me than I probably deserve. I mention this without further elaboration.

My wife is usually right. I've made peace with it. A lot of what works about MoveU has her fingerprints on it. That's not a footnote — it's the story.

How I Actually Work: The Builder Who Does Not Maintain

Here is something important to understand about me, because it explains more decisions — professional and personal — than almost anything else.

I do not maintain things. I build them and I fix them. There is a real and meaningful difference between those two modes, and I live almost entirely in the second one.

I love the complexity of a broken or unsolved problem. A scoliotic spine that has been compensating for thirty years. A movement pattern so ingrained the person can no longer feel it. A mechanical puzzle that has defeated everyone who has tried before. The harder the problem, the more alive I feel working on it. And when I solve it — when the pattern is understood, reversed, and the person has genuine ownership of their own body again — I want to move to the next one. Not maintain the solution. Not check in on progress indefinitely. Move to the next problem.

My garden does not get maintained. My landscaping does not get maintained. My wife has extensive documentation on this.

I also have a compulsion to trace everything back to its mechanical origins. When I encounter a problem — in bodies, in business, in anything — I want to know not just what is happening but why, at the most fundamental structural level. What is the actual load pattern here? Where is the force going and why? What is the origin of the failure? That is the question I apply to backs and it is the question I apply to most things in my life.

The ADHD hyperfocus cycles feed all of this. When I am locked onto something — really locked on — I am relentless. I custom-built my Nicolai G1 mountain bike from scratch over eleven months, obsessing over the geometry that was specific to my body type and riding style. I freedive seriously — over 110 feet on a single breath, harvesting fish in conditions that require genuine technical skill and comfort with deep discomfort. I hunt birds with real methodical intensity. I build guns from components. I weld. I cerakote. I have a workshop that is one of my favorite places on earth, and I will disappear into it for days at a time, because building things with your hands — solving physical problems in three dimensions with tangible materials — is one of the purest satisfactions I know.

Each of these became a consuming, temporary obsession. Learned deeply, then set down and redirected. I've stopped fighting that pattern. It is the engine. The goal now is to build a life and a career that keeps the engine fueled — that keeps the problems interesting and the territory new — while creating enough structure around me that the things which need to be maintained actually get maintained by someone suited to maintaining them.

What moves me is not money. I want to say that clearly. I am stimulated by success stories — the person who has been in pain for a decade, who has been told it is permanent and will not improve, who finds a way through and comes back to tell me about it. That hits differently than any revenue number I've ever seen. I am also moved by a sense of duty — a genuine conviction that I have something to offer and a responsibility to offer it at the widest possible scale. That duty has sometimes come at a real cost: less time with family, less time with Katie, fewer evenings with friends, because I'm consumed by the work. Whether that is always the right trade is a question I am still sitting with honestly.

I don't maintain things. I build them, fix them, and move to the next problem. My garden has strong feelings about this. So does my wife.

The Crash, the Flow State, and the Lesson That Came Later

The night before I wrote this, I was on my Nicolai G1 doing a night ride on my favorite downhill section in Poway — a trail called Gardens. I was absolutely shredding. In full flow state — that rare condition where everything is fluid and fast and you are not thinking, you are just riding, and the trail and the bike and your body are one connected system operating above the level of conscious thought. I had just cleared a double jump cleanly and I was on fire. Setting a personal record on the descent.

Here is the situation: I had borrowed a friend's helmet because mine wasn't available. The borrowed helmet had no headlight. My bike light is strong and pointed forward. But the helmet-mounted light is what illuminates the trail at eye level — what lets you see into the shadows between rocks and into the depth of turns. Without it, you're working with a single cone of light that doesn't show you everything.

I came around a section and there was a rut in the shadow that I couldn't see. I hit it at over 20 miles an hour and went over the bars.

Banged myself up. Real crash. Not a small one.

Here's the thing: in the moment I was still buzzing from the flow state. Being in that state — fully alive, completely present, performing at the edge of what you're capable of — that doesn't evaporate just because you hit the ground. I was still energized from the ride itself. The lesson didn't come in the moment. It came later that night, quietly, when the adrenaline settled and I sat with what had happened.

Mike. When you ride at that level, at night, you need to be able to see through the shadows. The helmet light matters. And the one you had before this — your regular helmet light — was weak to begin with. Upgrade it.

The next morning I ordered a significantly brighter helmet-mounted light. Done. Lesson applied. Forward.

This is how I live. And it is exactly how I coach. Something goes wrong — you sit with it honestly, you extract the lesson without drama or self-pity, and you apply it immediately. You don't make yourself a victim of the rut in the shadow. You get a better light and you go back out.

I should also say this: underneath all of the lesson-extracting and the relentless forward motion, there is a quieter belief that runs through everything. I believe things work out. Not naively — I've had enough go wrong to know that things do not always work out the way you expected or wanted. But there is a current to life, a way that things are meant to unfold, and I have found that if you stay in motion and stay honest and keep asking the right questions, you end up where you're supposed to be. Every wrong turn in this story — the pizza job, the hospital table in Iowa, the Therabody handshake, the MoveU implosion — was also a step toward something. I believe that. Fully.

The lesson didn't come in the moment. It came later that night. I upgraded the light. Get a better light and go back out. That's the whole philosophy.

Where 25 Years Lands

I am in my mid-forties. I have been obsessing over the same fundamental question for 25 years: why do bodies break down in predictable ways, and what does it actually take — specifically, mechanically, repeatably — to reverse that? That question has held my full attention through two marriages, two cardiac events, one lawsuit, one company implosion, one eviction notice, 10,000 patients, four million views on a QL stretch, and one genuinely terrible set of purses from The Price Is Right.

I have made a lot of mistakes. Believed people I shouldn't have trusted without more evidence. Stayed in situations too long — I can look back and see times I should have pivoted faster, ended things sooner, moved on before the cost compounded. Scaled too fast without the right infrastructure. Built great things and watched them fall apart and built them again. Refused a pacemaker and figured out how to fix my own heart. Invented something that became part of an eight-million-unit product line without seeing a cent of it. Got fired from a pizza job that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

What I believe, underneath all of it, is pretty simple.

The body is a machine with readable patterns. Those patterns are reversible. Most people have never been taught how to read them because the system that's supposed to help them has no financial incentive to fix them — only to process them indefinitely, comfortably, expensively. I have a responsibility to change that, one clean explanation at a time, until the mechanics are so clear and so simple that anyone can understand their own body.

That has been the mission since 2000. It took 25 years of building and crashing and rebuilding to get the language right. The language is right now. And there's a lot of work still to do.

Now go fix your shit.

About Dr. Mike Wasilisin, DC

Chiropractor, movement specialist, educator, and builder of things. Over 10,000 patients in person. Founder of CaliSpine (sold 2017) and MoveU. Former kinesiology instructor at California State University. International speaker — Dubai, New York, Miami, Houston, San Diego, and beyond. Lectured at University of St. Augustine, Life Chiropractic College West, California Chiropractic Association, and others. Featured in Men's Health, Fortune, Muscle & Fitness, and Entrepreneur. Appeared on Kelly and Mark and CNN. Currently somewhere between a 3am hyperfocus session on scapular mechanics and a night ride in Poway with a much brighter helmet light.