There was a moment after I took my big corporate job at Microsoft that I realized there was something beyond money. It was one early morning when I was carting a stack of large three-ring binders to a conference room. On the other side of that door was Bill and the Office of the President (BOOP). My manager met me outside to accept the binders I had spent the previous night assembling in the campus copy center. My manager then said, “Do you want to come in and listen?” I said, “Sure.” What transpired from that point, I’ll never forget.

I was a fly on the wall. I looked around the room and I saw all the other flies. This was a meeting of who's who in the company and a gathering that set the future direction for the next year and beyond. In the center of this room was a big conference table. There were Bill Gates, Mike Maples, Steve Ballmer, and Frank Gaudette, and all the other lieutenants of that day. I was nervous, fascinated, and curious.

Two levels away was the man who ran the Enterprise Customer Unit, or ECU. He was at the table. Let’s call him John. John was the coolest cat that I’d ever seen. So many of us were in our thirties, but this guy may have been in his late fifties, early sixties. I’d seen him at conferences, sales meetings, and customer pitches. This guy was smooth.

As I was holding up the wall, I looked over and it was John’s turn to duel with Bill. Standing there, I felt really good, considering all the work that I had done compiling the data for our customer unit, preparing it, and getting it there on time. Doing an all-nighter was a badge of honor in those days. I helped hand out the binders and then the questioning began. To my dismay, the binders weren’t even opened. Here was Bill with one question after another about deep nuances of the ECU. Everyone at that table was extremely bright and it wasn’t about how much you knew. It was about seeing through the data to have actionable insights and almost predict the future. Bill was playing chess. I glanced at John, and there was a bead of sweat on his forehead. This guy was the smoothest I knew and somehow, he was nervous.

I had to think about that for a while. I’m looking at a table that has a combined net worth of billions of dollars. And this was in the mid-90s. I thought to myself, “What’s going on here?” It was like a beam of light that came in. In that moment, I realized this had nothing to do with money. You couldn’t buy a seat at this table. And it was the only seat to have at this time in the industry.

Something that was more than money — a concept I hadn’t yet considered. What does life look like beyond money? And what if it’s not about money?

For the group at that table, it was a little bit about money, but way more about power and control. I had mixed emotions about this. You mean it’s just not about working hard, doing your best, and being recognized for what you’ve done? I’ve got to consider things like power, influence, and control to get ahead in my vocation. Something was not adding up. I didn’t have language for it yet, but what I was watching was the system working exactly as designed — for the people already at the table.

I also thought a lot about safety and security. If any one of those people at the table left the company, they’d have a pretty big nest egg to be able to take and have a cushion to do something else with. Not so much for me. I had my fair share, but there were vesting schedules. Each time a grant occurred, it added another four years. I can’t tell you how many people had spreadsheets and looked at their vesting schedules quarter after quarter trying to figure out what their exit strategy would be once they got to their self-prescribed milestone. Everyone knew we couldn’t continue at the pace we were keeping. And who wanted to be someone that wasn’t on the fast track, who took some normal job inside the company and sat quietly vesting? Well, I certainly didn’t want to be that person, and it was the biggest monetary mistake of my life as I left in a fit of anger, six months after taking this job. I made it almost eight years and I was relieved to be out of there.

For years after, I looked at my vesting spreadsheet and what could have been. The millions, then tens of millions of dollars, staring me right in the face. In today’s terms, more than a hundred million. It ate at me, and the anger grew. A year later after quiting, I tried to get a field job back, along with my prior stock option grants, but at that point it was too late. I realized I was chasing the past.

As I was climbing the corporate ladder at Microsoft, the makeup of the people who were hired changed. They were a bit older and had solid experiences in the industry. When I looked in their eyes, they knew the kind of opportunity ahead of them and they were very grateful for it. I told my friends all sorts of stories about the company’s coming demise. I didn’t realize it was just a reflection of what was going on inside me. I was scared, confused, and angry. I didn’t have the business maturity to understand what I had in my hand. And my actions showed it.

I look back now and I’m grateful for the experience because at that time I wasn’t ready for that type of money. I think it would have fed my self-centered, egotistical, and materialistic tendencies and turned me deeper against myself. Something I wouldn’t start to address until many years later.

We’re all asking the same questions, and most of us are carrying around the same issues. For a long time, I beat my head against the same wall and expected something to change. It didn’t, until I got curious. The more I studied macroeconomics, really studied it, the more the pieces started coming together. That curiosity is the foundation of this work. What follows are five truths I’ve arrived at through my own life — through the work, the losses, and the years of study. Take what’s yours. And if any of it resonates, stay close. There’s a lot more coming.

TRUTH ONE — THE SYSTEM WAS BUILT THIS WAY

Do you ever notice that you’re working harder than you used to, and somehow it feels like you’re falling further behind? That’s not your imagination or bad luck. That’s the system working exactly as it was designed to.

For years I was angry. Angry at the government, angry at the political process, angry at a set of rules that seemed to apply to me but not to the institutions around me. What took me a long time to see is that the system wasn’t broken. It was doing exactly what it was built to do. It just wasn’t built for me. Or for you.

When you hear the word inflation, you probably think about prices going up. But inflation isn’t a weather pattern or an accident. It’s what happens when the government creates more money and each dollar you already hold buys a little less. That’s a direct consequence of how the monetary system was designed.

Inflation is a hidden tax, one you never voted for and never agreed to, and it’s been happening your entire life.

You’ve probably heard that two percent inflation is normal. Healthy, even. Did you ever wonder where that number came from? It was made up. The government carries debt, and inflation makes that debt cheaper to pay back over time. The two percent target exists to serve the system.

When money gets printed, it goes to the banks first. They make their investments and buy their assets before prices rise. By the time it filters down to you and me, we see very little of it directly. Remember COVID? You got a check, and so did I. But the banks got their own checks too, much larger ones, and they got them first.

The people closest to the money benefit the most. The people furthest away feel the inflation without seeing the benefit.

The system wasn’t broken. It was built this way. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

TRUTH TWO — PRIVACY IS DISAPPEARING

I’ve been in software long enough to remember when terms and conditions first appeared, and I dismissed them completely. Legal muckety muck, I told myself. Doesn’t really mean anything.

It meant everything.

The old saying is: if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product. I watched it happen in real time as people uploaded their photos, their locations, their relationships, and their opinions and handed all of it over without reading a single line of what they’d agreed to. I wasn’t immune. None of us were. The trade was convenience for privacy, and it was made so gradually, so reasonably, that most people didn’t feel it happening.

Then 9/11 hit. Legislation passed quickly, in a moment of fear, with provisions that were never repealed. We moved on. The legislation didn’t.

Each step came with a justification. Cameras at intersections because people run red lights. Blue lights in parking lots for your safety. KYC and AML requirements at every financial institution to prevent money laundering. And for every one of these, I am the law-abiding citizen. I did nothing wrong. And yet I find myself explaining to my own bank why I want to withdraw my own money.

Think about that for a moment. Your money, your account, your decision — and you need to justify it?

Here’s what financial privacy actually looks like: if I hand you $20 in cash, nobody needs to know why. That’s the whole thing. And that’s exactly what’s disappearing.

The next step is already visible. Programmable money. Stablecoins that represent the dollar but live inside a system where the rules can be written and rewritten by whoever controls the platform. Today it’s private institutions, but those institutions are regulated, and we already know what happens when regulations tighten. Chokepoint 2.0 wasn’t a hypothetical. It was the second attempt by the government to cut off banking access to businesses they didn’t like. It happened.

So when the people in charge of the money decide they don’t like a particular behavior, and they have the technical ability to control it, what do you think they’ll do?

TRUTH THREE — THE FRACTURES

I grew up on the lower side of what economists now call the K-shaped economy. I didn’t know that term then. I just knew that certain people seemed different, with different concerns, options, and access to things I couldn’t quite name.

For a long time I assumed it was hard work since that’s what my dad etched into my beliefs. That the people ahead of me had just put in more time, made better decisions, and earned what they had. But the more I studied money, really studied it rather than just read the headlines, the more I understood that hard work was only part of the story. There was a different system available to people with resources, not illegal, not exactly hidden, just different. And most people don’t know it exists.

The K-shape economy works like this. Asset holders go up. Everyone else goes sideways or down. When the government prints money, as we talked about in Truth One, it flows to the banks and financial institutions first. Those institutions buy assets. Asset prices rise. If you already own assets, your net worth climbs. If you don’t, the prices of the things you’re trying to buy — a house, an investment, or a business — just got further out of reach. The monetary system creates this inequality by design.

I don’t have a problem with people being billionaires. I want to be clear about that. If someone generates tremendous resources through their work and their ideas, that’s theirs. What I have a problem with is a system designed to benefit only those who already have. I have a much bigger problem with a system that can be purchased.

Look at the lobbying laws. Look at campaign contribution rules. Look at the Supreme Court rulings that opened the door to dark money, unlimited political spending funneled through nonprofits that aren’t required to disclose who funds them. What that adds up to is simple: if you put enough money into the right places, you can buy the legislation and regulation your company or industry needs. Tax incentives get written by the industries they benefit. Trade policy gets shaped by the companies most affected by it. That’s not a free market. A free market follows opportunity. What we have follows whoever can afford to write the rules.

Now add the polarization on top of all of this.

Both parties print money, both parties spend beyond their means, and both parties preside over a financial system that benefits people closest to the money. The inflation was the same. The spending was the same. The K-shape kept widening under every administration.

But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about each other.

I’ve taken the bait myself. I know what it feels like to be certain that the other side is the problem. What I’ve come to see is the social issues that divide us, and they are real, I’m not dismissing them, are also extraordinarily useful to the people who benefit from us not looking at the monetary system. Angry people fighting each other aren’t following the money. And the money is where the answers actually are.

Here’s a thought I keep coming back to. If this country were required to balance its budget by law, we’d probably go to war a lot less, because then we’d have to make an actual decision about whether something is worth spending more than we take in. That would have to go through a real legislative process, and it would change everything. But neither party talks about that anymore, because the current system works for the people who designed it.

That’s not a country by and for the people.

TRUTH FOUR — LINEAGE

My father gave me his name, though it took me years to understand what that actually meant. I knew there was a significance to it my entire life, and I knew my family was guiding me towards something. Heritage matters, culture matters, and where you come from matters. And someone has to carry it forward.

My father didn’t leave me financial assets when he died. He had his own business, and to me he was the most successful person I’d ever known because he built something from nothing and used it to support his family. What he left me was a work ethic and a principle he repeated so often it became part of me: your word is your name. Do what you say you’re going to do. Be honest. Show up.

That’s lineage. Not a dollar amount. A way of being in the world.

A few years ago, I started putting a will together. I wanted to think seriously about what I was leaving behind, personal property, digital assets, and things that hold and grow value over time. What I found was that there’s almost no roadmap for this. Very little precedent for digital assets in estate planning, a lot of guesswork, and professionals charging a very large hourly fee to navigate uncertainty alongside of you. If you’re on the upper side of the K-shaped economy, you probably have attorneys who handle this without you having to think about it. For everyone else, figuring out how to pass something real to the people you love is largely a mystery.

And yet most of us want the same thing. We want our families to have a better life than we did. How many times have you heard someone say this is the first generation in our family to: go to college, start a business, or have enough to actually raise a family without counting every dollar. That’s lineage in practice, one generation handing the next a slightly better starting point.

What I want to leave is access to opportunity. Not dependency. I’ve seen what happens when people are handed everything and never have to build anything themselves. What I want is to give someone a leg up, to ease the financial burden enough that they can step into whatever dream or vision they have for their own life. That’s different from a handout.

I also want to leave behind who I was. A record of what I believed, how I got here, and what I learned along the way, so that the people who come after me, especially my family, can know me beyond the stories that get told at family get togethers. This project and writing it down is part of that.

Wealth is more than money. Money is a component, an important one, but wealth is the full integration of the sovereign individual, the internal and the external working together. Someone doesn’t need a lot of money to live well in this world. What they need is the clarity to know what they actually want, and enough of a foundation to go after it.

That’s what I’m trying to build and leave behind.

It’s not a handout. It’s a help out.

TRUTH FIVE — SOVEREIGNTY

For most of my life, I believed the world was organized against me, not in some vague abstract way, but personally, specifically. There was a system, a group, or a force that had decided Robert Jordan Jr wasn’t going to make it, wasn’t going to get ahead, and wasn’t going to have the relationship, the life, and the freedom he wanted. I couldn’t have told you who they were. But I felt them everywhere.

And my response was to fight, every time, scorched earth. There was going to be blood on that battlefield, and it wasn’t going to be mine. When I was done, I cleared the surface to make sure nothing could come back at me. That was the strategy. It worked, in the way that survival strategies work, until it didn’t.

What I eventually came to understand is that nobody was coming for me. There was no conspiracy, no group consciously pulling levers against Robert Jordan Jr. The war I was fighting wasn’t with the world. It was with myself. And I had been losing it for decades.

The anger was never the real thing and was only the top layer. Underneath it was something much older and much simpler: I didn’t feel safe. I hadn’t felt safe since I was young, when I was longing for a love and a security from my parents that I didn’t experience the way I needed to. I carried that longing into every relationship, every room, and every confrontation. And when you don’t feel safe, your nervous system does what nervous systems do. It picks a response. Mine picked fight, every time.

Drinking starting at fifteen wasn’t a choice. It was a solution, the only tool available to a kid whose emotions felt too big to survive. I genuinely believed that if I actually felt what was underneath the anger, it would kill me. So I didn’t feel it. I left. Dissociation is what happens when the feeling is too much and there’s no safe place to take it. Your body is present but you are somewhere else entirely. For most of my life, I was somewhere else entirely.

The work of changing my internal life happened in two stages, and you need both.

The first stage is the mind. Talk therapy, one on one with someone trained to help you open up and say what you’re actually feeling. The most important thing that happened in that room wasn’t insight. It was realizing I wasn’t alone. I had spent years convinced that I was the only person experiencing what I was experiencing, broken in some specific way that separated me from everyone else. Finding out that wasn’t true took an enormous amount of pressure off. I understood for the first time what was happening inside me, what was causing it, and what I could do differently.

But the mind only goes so far. Because the reaction, the fight response, the scorched earth, that wasn’t happening in my head. It was happening in my body, in my chest and my jaw and my hands. You can understand something completely in your mind and still have your body run the old program the moment something triggers it. The second stage is somatic work. Breathing and movement, being in nature, sleeping well, eating in ways that support your system rather than tax it, and learning, slowly and with a lot of practice, to be present inside your own body instead of leaving it every time something difficult arrives.

What I found on the other side of that work is hard to put into words. There’s a difference between doing and being that most people never experience, because we spend our entire lives doing. Moving through the day, working the job, running the errands, and showing up for the communities we’re part of. Doing is necessary. But being is something else entirely, a felt sense, a groundedness, and the deepest centering I know how to describe. In those moments, nothing matters and everything is okay. Not performed okay. Actually okay.

I used to wear masks. A professional one, a personal one, a version of myself for every room I walked into. I told myself that was just how it worked, that you showed different faces in different contexts. What I understand now is that I was managing and presenting the version least likely to get hurt. The inner work dismantled the masks one by one until there was just one person, the same in every room. Emotions still come up and they always will. But now I know that whatever is happening outside of me is a reflection of what’s happening inside. When I’m triggered, that’s mine. I don’t need to make it someone else’s problem or project it onto them.

That’s sovereignty. Not a financial strategy. A way of being.

You cannot build a sovereign life on an unexamined foundation. Someone who hasn’t done the inner work will recreate the same broken patterns inside a better financial system. The money changes but the person doesn’t. And it shows.

This work is not for the faint of heart. You will get your ass kicked. You will go to places inside yourself that hurt in ways you couldn’t have predicted. The strongest people I know have gone there, not Navy SEALs, though every bit as strong and possibly even more courageous. What they found, and what I found, was a peace and a presence inside their own body. A love and a compassion for themselves that allowed them to look at a situation and decide how to respond rather than react. And the funny thing is that the relationships that were the hardest, the ones I was convinced were the problem, those challenges started to disappear the moment I changed.

Choosing a better system is an act of integrity. There are two systems at play, and both are yours to build. The external one is the financial tools, the assets, and the infrastructure designed to serve your interests and your family’s future. The internal one is the long, uncomfortable, and necessary work of becoming someone who knows who they are.

The financial system you choose and the person you’re becoming are not two different projects. They have always been one. And that project starts with you.