I grew up a punk kid in Calgary, and after college I worked the oil fields of northern Alberta as a field operator. I witnessed a blowout that poisoned land and forest in an instant. It stuck with me, though I didn't know what to do with it yet.
I left to chase a career in sound and landed in film — feature films, television, and commercials, mixing sound on sets across British Columbia for more than twenty-five years. Creative problem-solving on a deadline, every single day.
The environmental thread kept pulling. After reading Charles Moore's account of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, I couldn't keep watching film crews send hundreds of plastic forks into the trash each day — so I began importing compostable cutlery, among the first to bring it to the industry in British Columbia. The business fizzled; the practice didn't. Sometimes you plant the tree and someone else sits in the shade.
Hurricane Katrina, and later the California wildfires, were the flash points. I traveled to both — with cameras and a recorder — bearing witness to people who had lost almost everything to environmental disaster. I wasn't reporting; I was paying attention. I didn't know it then, but I was documenting the exact disasters I'd one day try to predict.
When I later taught myself machine learning, the first thing I built grew out of a family loss — a platform to spare the people I love the paperwork and decisions no one is ever ready for. I called it Elysium.
That brought me full circle, to the instinct behind every turn I've taken: see a problem, build something to fix it. Elysium was built to protect my family; now I'm building to protect everyone else's — a warning system for the disasters that threaten the people and places we care about. The blowout 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 wish had existed.
Leave the earth a little better than I found it. I believe the tools to do that finally exist, and I intend to use them.