My Story
Four acts.
One foundation.
The résumé version fits on one line. Here's what actually happened — and what it cost to learn the order.
Lawyer. Trader. Convict. Advisor. Coach.
— in that order.
My Story
The résumé version fits on one line. Here's what actually happened — and what it cost to learn the order.
Lawyer. Trader. Convict. Advisor. Coach.
— in that order.
Act I
I started where ambitious kids are told to start: hundred-hour weeks at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most demanding law firms in the world, working deals with more zeros than I knew existed. Then I did the thing that looked even more ambitious — I left the safe ladder for the trading floor, and eventually for a hedge fund with my own name on the risk.
The house in the suburbs. A family I loved. And a number in my head — the one that was going to unlock real life. I was certain the next number would do it.
It never did. It never does.
Act II
November 5, 2009. The FBI at my door at dawn, my kids asleep upstairs. The government offered me a deal — probation if I would just say I was guilty. I refused to say words I didn't believe. I went to trial, and I lost. Twenty-one months in a federal prison camp at Lewisburg.
Here's the part that took me a decade to understand. Some of the freest men I ever met, I met inside. One was thirty-five years old with ten years already served — he wasn't getting out until fifty — and he carried a joy I could not explain and could not stop watching. He had something I couldn't name.
I wanted it. I just didn't want where he said it came from.
Act III
I came home to a life that needed rebuilding, and I rebuilt it the way a performance guy would. For ten years I tried every map the modern meaning industry sells. Stoicism. Therapy. Biohacking, cold plunges, breathwork. Plant medicine. The retreats, the protocols, the morning routines — all of it, done seriously, done well.
And every tool worked, a little. I got sharper, calmer, healthier. Optimized — and still awake at 3 a.m. in the middle of everything I'd rebuilt, with the same quiet question.
The tools were never the problem — the throne was.
I had spent a decade upgrading the engine of a car that was pointed at the wrong destination.
Act IV
November 2025. The ocean at St. Kitts. After forty-five years as the most skeptical man in any room — a Jewish kid from Tarzana who tried everything else first — I went under the water one man and came up another. Grace did in an afternoon what a decade of effort could not.
I didn't get a new set of tools. I got a new center. And suddenly every good tool I'd collected over ten years finally worked at full strength, because they were finally in the right order.
Correct throne, real destination, maximum horsepower — in that order.
What I do now — Centerset, the books, the speaking, the advisory work — is one thing wearing four coats: helping capable men get the order right without losing the ten years I lost. I live in New York with my wife, Rosalynn, and our three kids. They are the proof the order works.
If any act of it sounded like your own — the number, the 3 a.m., the tools that sharpen but don't save — that's what Centerset is for.