The Question That Started Everything

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK,
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The Question That Started Everything

An Autobiographical Account of the Origins, Pressure, Collapse, and Reset of Betweenplays

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The Question

“How are you making money when I’m losing everything?”

That was the question.

It didn’t come once.
It came again and again.

From friends.
From friends of friends.
From people who were watching their savings evaporate while markets felt chaotic, irrational, and hostile.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. I answered honestly, the same way I always had.

I told them I was putting in the work.

I wasn’t following noise.
I wasn’t chasing people screaming “to the moon.”
I wasn’t reacting emotionally.

I was researching.
Reading financial statements.
Studying.
Taking lessons.
Refining a process.
Building discipline.

I was buying low when value was present—and selling into strength.

That calm, structured, accountable approach is what people trusted—long before they trusted anything called Betweenplays.

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Why This Was for My Children

Betweenplays began for my children.

That statement is often made, but the reason matters.

When 2020 hit, I was already older. My view of life had long been shaped by the police force. I had seen too many moments where someone was alive one second and gone the next.

People talking casually — “we were watching the game” — and when I turned to respond, they were already dead.

Every breath felt earned.

I wanted my children to know me.

Not through stories.
Not through secondhand memory.

But through recorded presence.

I wanted something they could look back on 30 years in the future, from anywhere in the world, and say:

“This was my father. This is how he thought. This is how he viewed life, work, discipline, and responsibility.”

Betweenplays began as that record.

Then the question came.

“How do you make money when I lose everything?”
“How do you not sell on emotion?”
“How do you avoid clickbait, panic, and noise?”

That question transformed something personal into something larger.

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Before Betweenplays Had a Name

It also began for close friends who were losing badly in the markets while I was consistently doing well.

There was no brand.
No platform.
No intention to build something public.

There were only conversations.

Friends asked questions.
Then friends of friends asked questions.

The same questions.
Over and over.

The stock market does not wait for anyone.

I found myself answering the same explanations repeatedly—sometimes twenty times a day—by phone and message, while still trying to be present as a father and still have a moment for my family.

It wasn’t sustainable.

So I built a WhatsApp group.

Not to grow anything.
Not to build an audience.

I built it so I could answer one question in one place, so everyone could see the same explanation, learn from it, and I wouldn’t have to answer the same phone call twenty times a day.

One question.
One answer.
One place.

That WhatsApp group was the first real structure.

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When Messages Became Ideas

As the WhatsApp group grew, something became obvious.

Some of my answers were not short.

They weren’t soundbites.
They weren’t hype.

They were long explanations.
Structured breakdowns.

Why I liked something.
What the risks were.
How I thought about entries and exits.

I realized many of those WhatsApp messages weren’t just replies.

They were articles.

So then came the website.

Not first.
Second.

I built it so I could put my ideas in one place.

I realized that some of my WhatsApp texts were so long in explanation that they could become proper blog content. Friends could read instead of asking me to rewrite the same thesis again. I could add images, charts, and GIFs, making the information clearer and more engaging.

That website became a repository of thought—not marketing.

That may sound trivial to some, but it wasn’t.

I hadn’t meaningfully touched a computer since 1998.

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The Unseen Cost of Learning

I had to teach myself how to build a site.
How to manage content.
How to publish consistently.

All while continuing to invest, research, and keep information flowing in real time.

There was no team.
No automation.
No monetization.

Just responsibility—to my kids and to the people asking honest questions.

I sat in a chair, alone, in 2020—for weeks and months—without seeing my family, trying to learn how to build that website.

I will never forget that period.

It was overwhelming to the point that I had to reduce everything to a single rule just to keep going:

Do one thing every day. Build on that.

That didn’t mean adding something to the site every day.
Sometimes it meant only learning how to do something.

The next day, I did it again.

Then my website was stolen.

I had to call GoDaddy. They told me they could not retrieve it. They explained it was being passed from one VPN to another around the world and that it would have to come from my PC.

I knew nothing about computers.

Now I was trying to retrieve my website from hackers, on the phone with GoDaddy, being guided step by step through something I barely understood.

This took many, many hours.

Eventually, GoDaddy used me—navigating through my own system—to track it down. We recovered it. They put security protections on the website so it couldn’t happen again.

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Expanding Format, Not Intention

Only after all of that did I expand formats.

I created:
• a YouTube channel
• a Spotify podcast
• an Apple Podcasts presence

The goal was never influence.

The goal was permanence.

This could now exist for my children, for my friends, for my family, from anywhere in the world.

The work remained the same.

I wasn’t a finance influencer.
I wasn’t selling courses.

I was a father and a police officer applying discipline, research, and accountability to investing.

Even my articles followed one internal rule:

If my children read this in 30 years, what would they think of me?

That question forced belief.
It forced alignment.

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The First Pull — When It Went Public

Then came the retail investors on Facebook.

They saw my coverage of companies.
They saw the consistency.
They saw that I didn’t disappear when things went wrong.

They began pulling me into their Facebook groups—repeatedly.

They wanted the dad.
They wanted the cop.

Someone who didn’t exaggerate.
Didn’t panic.
Didn’t posture.

That was the first pull.

Once knowledge becomes public, expectations multiply.
Once trust is established, responsibility increases.

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The Second Pull — Monetization Pressure

At a certain point, Betweenplays became larger than me.

That’s when the second pull happened.

This one did not come from retail investors.

It came from someone who saw how Betweenplays could be monetized.

There was constant pressure:

“Do not do interviews if they do not pay.”
“This is how we get paid.”

I had a “little bird” always showing me how Betweenplays could be monetized.

At the same time, my nephew had just passed away in February 2021.

I was already weak emotionally.

And everything was happening at once:
• monetization pressure
• incorporation
• PDAC
• becoming recognized media
• writing articles
• producing videos
• handling family

I needed help moving forward.

But not at the cost of principle.

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Why Incorporation Became Unavoidable

We had to incorporate if we were to take revenues.

We had to get tax numbers.

I had to learn how to invest as a corporation, not an individual.

Structure was no longer front-end.

It became foundational.

All of this was learned in real time, largely alone, while balancing family life.

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From Individual to Institution

Betweenplays became an incorporation.
A media company.

It was acknowledged by PDAC, EXPLOR, Deciding Tech, and others shaping capital and technology.

We sat in private, invitation-only institutional events—Fasken, Canaccord, and others.

I saw how institutions think.
How incentives are structured.
How far removed retail investors are from those rooms.

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WhatsApp to Telegram — When Scale Changed Responsibility

As growth accelerated, WhatsApp could no longer hold.

After the website, YouTube, and the first pull, during the second pull, we moved to Telegram because it had a more efficient system.

Telegram allowed scale.

But Telegram was built on WhatsApp.

It still contained family and friends.

I felt an obligation to protect them.

By nature, I am overly protective.

What I did not yet understand was that Betweenplays had grown far beyond myself.

In trying to protect, I stifled growth.

That was a learning experience.

This will no longer happen.

There will be no policing.
The more conversation, the better.

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Pressure, Loss, and Resilience

My nephew passed away in February 2021 how much I still miss him.

Then life intervened again.

In August 2024, I was at my campsite during what appeared to be heavy rain.

When I returned home, I discovered it was a serious disaster.

Over 3.5 feet of sewage water had destroyed my studio and all my equipment.

Everything was lost.

The rebuild exceeded $100,000.

In June 2025, I underwent hernia surgery—with complications.

And all the years in between, I was learning, on my own in the backend, expanding, not just for me, for Betweenplays and despite all of this:

I am still here.

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Accountability, Reset, and Openness — 2026 and Beyond

For clarity,

I am still here and will be as long as God permits me and even then, Betweenplays will out last every one of us as I plan on building it to a level that it loves by its own right.

and for the record:

There are no contracts for interviews.
There is no pay-to-play.
There is no compensation tied to access.

Never will we see the day where I refuse to do an interview with a CEO because he is not paying.

Those days are done.

They hurt Betweenplays.
They hurt you, the investor.
They hurt the principles this platform was built on.

Betweenplays was not built for speed.
Not for comfort.
Not for approval.

It was built for longevity, integrity, and contribution.

Betweenplays is not my channel.
Not my Telegram.
Not my community.

We are Betweenplays.

2026 is the year it all comes together—outwardly, for the world.

We are launching our own app, built intentionally, including:
• notifications
• value-based token incentives
• real community communication
• paper trading and transparent learning
• Graphenomics
• Telegraph infrastructure

No hype.
No shortcuts.

Execution first.

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Peace, Clarity, Identity

There was a time I feared losing what I had—because I didn’t even know what I had.

Fear rips at one’s soul.

I no longer have that fear.

I have found peace.
I have found clarity.
I have found myself.

This is your voice.

We are Betweenplays.

I may have lost my way at times.
You may have as well.

But together, we will succeed—as we always said we would.

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