Mission

I’ve been sticking forks in things my whole life — sometimes literally, much to my mother’s horror — just to see what happens.

I grew up a punk kid in Calgary. The restless energy was always there — the artistry came later, and in ways I never expected. After college, I worked the oil fields of northern Alberta as a field operator. I saw a blowout that devastated the local environment — land and forest poisoned overnight. That stuck with me, though I didn’t know what to do with it yet.

I had a dream of becoming a sound engineer. So I left — packed up and moved to Vancouver to chase the music industry. Life, as it does, had other ideas. I landed in film. Feature films, television, documentaries, and eventually commercials — mixing sound on sets for 25 years as a freelancer. It was a career that took me to the far reaches of British Columbia and beyond. Creative problem-solving on a deadline, every single day.

Then, in the late ’90s, I read about a garbage patch the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean. I couldn’t unread it. Film sets were catering 75 to 100 meals a day, sending thousands of plastic forks, cups, and plates straight to landfill. So I did something about it — started importing corn-based compostable cutlery from Vietnam and brought it to the industry. I was the first in British Columbia to do it. The business eventually fizzled — warehousing and supply chain will humble anyone — but today, compostable products are the norm on every film set in the province. Sometimes you plant the tree and someone else sits in the shade. That’s fine.

My mother took me to New Orleans for my 21st birthday in 1989, and I fell in love with the city. So when Katrina hit in 2005, I went back — not to report, but to help. While I was there, I photographed and recorded the stories of survivors — musicians, artists, academics, cultural historians, still standing in the wreckage. It was in New Orleans that I fell in love with an artist who lived in the Mojave desert. That same year, she lost her studio in New Orleans to the flood and her house in the desert to wildfire. I photographed and recorded all of it. It was the combination — falling in love and watching her world turned upside down by natural disasters — that changed something in me. Floods and fires. I wasn’t reporting. I was bearing witness. I didn’t know it then, but I was documenting the exact disasters I’d one day try to predict.

After COVID turned the world inside out, I sold my home in Britannia Beach — a former schoolhouse I’d spent ten years rebuilding with my own two hands, turning a rat-infested relic into something beautiful. That project taught me I was an artist — I just hadn’t known what medium yet. I took a position with Canada Post, first in Squamish, now in Cranbrook. Four years in, and I genuinely love the work.

Two years ago, a little device called the Rabbit r1 caught my eye — designed by Teenage Engineering, one of my favourite music hardware companies. It came bundled with Perplexity, and that was my first real encounter with artificial intelligence. For a punk kid who grew up making noise, it felt like discovering a new instrument — one with infinite strings.

I haven’t looked back. Moving to Cranbrook meant leaving my network of friends behind, so I filled the silence by teaching myself everything I could about large language models and machine learning. My first serious project came from grief. The year before, I’d buried my father, and watched my family drown in the paperwork, finances, and decisions that nobody prepares you for after a death. So I built a platform to make sure my family would never have to go through that. I called it Elysium.

That project lit something I didn’t expect. It brought me full circle — back to the same instinct that’s driven every turn in my life: see a problem, build something to fix it. Elysium was built to protect my family. Now I’m building something to protect everyone else’s. An environmental intelligence platform — a warning system for the disasters that threaten the people and places we care about. The blowout I saw in Alberta. The floodwater in New Orleans. The scorched earth in California. I’ve stood in front of all of it. Now I’m building the warning system I wished had existed.

People find it strange that a punk kid and sound mixer ended up building AI systems. I don’t. This is the most creative work I’ve ever done. The medium changed — from sound boards to neural networks — but the impulse is exactly the same: take something chaotic, find the pattern, make it sing.

The goal is simple. Leave the earth a little better than I found it 57 years ago. I believe the tools to do that finally exist. I intend to use them.