In 2012 I hit rock bottom. I had spent four years and eight hundred hours of footage following the gay rodeo circuit for my first feature documentary, the one that would eventually land on Netflix, and I had no story. Worse, I had no idea how to find one. Fresh out of USC film school, twenty four years old, convinced I was a hot shit filmmaker, sitting in front of all that footage completely stuck.
Figuring my way out took years, a lot of failing, and more mentors and guides than I deserved. It rebuilt how I think. Honestly, it’s a miracle Queens & Cowboys got finished at all, much less landed on Netflix and a pile of festival awards. The bigger miracle is that I learned how to tell stories by making every mistake in the book. Then I told stories for a living in every format there is. Documentaries and ten second ads. Brand films for NFL Network, Warner Music, Wondery, Honda, and Coors. Interviews, campaigns, pitch decks, product launches, keynotes, static ads, emails, and all-hands speeches. Then running creative teams of my own, and teaching them frameworks for finding and telling better stories. Different audience every time, different objective every time.
Adapting story to whatever was in front of me turned into a muscle. Now I train others how to build that muscle.
In 2017 I started teaching business students at Pepperdine how to use story to get what they wanted. A year later I put a storytelling course on Udemy that became a top 3% bestseller. The feedback from more than twenty thousand students is what actually changed my thinking. A pastor using it in his sermons. A teacher whose lectures finally landed. A dentist who wanted his patients to relax in the chair.
Especially now, in the era of AI, I see people communicating in lazy ways constantly. Nobody ever showed them a better one. So I got obsessed with finding uses for story everywhere, and now I see it in three dimensions, in places most people would never call storytelling. Sales calls. Product moments. All hands. Performance reviews. The same four ingredients, everywhere. Most people never learn to find them, and that is what I teach: sales teams, executives, marketers, and university classrooms. It works on people who would never call themselves storytellers. The highest-rated workshop in Ford’s L&D history. Close rates and lifetime value up at Clipboard Health, in writing, from the CFO. Every executive in the room at Envista left better at it. I have yet to find a business that story could not give an edge to.
I’m a proud fifth-generation Angeleno, unabashed Dodgers fan, and a happy jungle gym to two feral children (see photo).
Book a Call →