Founded a college film festival
Ran it for five years. Lost it in the dot-com bust. Learned early that building and rebuilding are related skills.
The story
Turns out knowing the rules and feeling safe enough to follow them are not the same thing.
I knew all the rules. I just couldn't always follow them.
I was 19 when I founded a college film festival. It ran for five years, then disappeared in the dot-com bust. So I did what I've done more than once in my life: rebuilt.
I earned an MBA, worked in mortgage marketing and my family's financial business, spent a decade teaching Financial Literacy as an adjunct professor, and started speaking and leading workshops because I couldn't stop noticing that traditional money education was leaving out the most interesting part: the human being making the decision.
In 2015, a student suggested I start a podcast. That show eventually became Everyone's Talkin' Money. I created and hosted it for ten years, watched it grow to more than 28 million downloads and a New York Times top-four personal-finance podcast ranking, and sold it in 2025.
Meanwhile, I was folding my own ATM receipts into tiny paper cranes.
I knew plenty about money. I also didn't want to look at the number. I called it busy. It was fear.
That disconnect cracked the work open for me. The financial facts were real — and so were safety, identity, shame, control, belonging, achievement, pleasure, relationships and all the old stories we'd attached to the numbers.
That eventually led me deeper into the behavioral side of money, trauma-of-money training and becoming a Certified Financial Therapist™. It's the lens I now bring to private financial therapy, writing, speaking, media and the programs I build.
Money is never just about money.
