How I Came to My Approach to Bring Free Energy to Humanity, Part 3: Years of Idealism and Disillusionment

College and my early career, before I heard from that voice again

When that voice in my head suggested that I study business, the next semester I took an introduction to business class and Bookkeeping 101. I knew virtually nothing about the business world, but my mathematical mind quickly digested the bookkeeping. It seemed like something that I would like doing, and it paid. I spent a year transitioning from science to business studies. The next year, I got serious. I took Accounting 101 from Mr. Professor, who was the best teacher that I ever had. It was not just because he was competent, but his deep caring for his students was evident. That in-law with the memory better than mine was also like that with his students, and those two inspired hundreds of careers, including people that I encountered independently over the years. With a teacher like that, I was sold on becoming an accountant. During my last year at the junior college, I was a janitor for office buildings that rented to accountants, attorneys, stock brokers, and investment advisors. I read the Wall Street Journal while cleaning the offices. My zest for learning was focused on accounting and capitalism, while I studied spiritual teachings at night. I was trying to square my capitalist studies with my spiritual studies, which was likely an impossible task.

I got involved with my first girlfriend in college, I followed her to the university, and she broke off the relationship a week after we got there. On one hand, I was devastated, but on the other, I had time to focus on school and I was also on the track team, and that was my peak academic and athletic year. I also became lifelong friends with my roommates. When I got to the university, I quickly became the star student of the program, and in my last year, I got the highest score in the university’s history on the national accounting exam. But by then, I was burned out on academia and just wanted to graduate. I did not even study for the CPA exam. A few months before graduation, the department chair told the class a joke about how accountants could make the numbers say whatever they want. I didn’t “get” the joke, and it was my first hint that the idealism that I had directed toward accounting might have been misplaced.

While the big Los Angeles firms rolled out the red carpet for me, I wanted to move back to my natal city of Seattle. But December 1981 was the midst of the worst recession in the USA since the 1940s. I ended up “wasting” another year with my first postgraduate Seattle misadventure and began my career in LA at a big international accounting firm, in January 1983. A few months into my career, in an auditing class, I asked a question that everybody laughed at. The answer was what students are told in their first day of auditing class, but after a few months of auditing, I was having trouble seeing it, and the question was what benefit audits provided to society. It was the existential question of my new profession, and I received the standard answer: it kept companies honest in reporting their profits and kept the capitalist playing field level. But several years later, I realized that it was a Big Lie. My profession was so interest-conflicted (the companies that were being audited hired their auditors) that it was worthless. I saw the Savings and Loan Scandal from the inside before it became a scandal, and my profession played a key part, as we were financial cops on the take. That conflict of interest still exists.

The myths about my profession were the same kinds of myths, lies, and legends of my nationalist indoctrination, of Founding Father mythology, fairy tales about Columbus and Serra, the 49-ers, etc.

My LA days were my life’s unhappiest years. I worked in LA’s Skid Row for about six months, and it was like working in hell. Walking past a dead body on the sidewalk on the way to lunch epitomized those days. The air pollution was awesome, and if there was any saving grace to my days in LA, it helped inspire my free-energy quest, as I wanted to end the world that I saw.

During my first Seattle misadventure, I had a headache for every waking hour for months at the small CPA firm that I worked at. I initially thought that it was from the climate change of moving from California to Seattle, but I eventually realized that it was my first stress bout of my career, and the first of six stress burnouts. The lifestyle of auditors at the big firms was life-shortening, of high-stress jobs of 60-hour weeks, mandatory restaurant meals (I was forced to give up my vegetarian ways), and drinking alcohol at the regular cocktail parties. At the management level, those parties were nearly daily. Mandatory retirement was age 55 at that firm, and I never heard of one of the partners live to age 70, and that included several in my circles.

During my second “busy season” of auditing, which were the winter months, as most firms had calendar-year reporting practices, I could not get a full lung of air, which went away when the busy season ended. But the next year, it did not go away when the busy season ended, as I gasped all day. I eventually got a medical exam, the MD recommended that I quit my job or face a health catastrophe, and I was only 27. Some colleagues began getting gray hair at that age.

I still read the LA Times each morning before work, and another sign of my growing cognitive dissonance was subscribing to Christian Science Monitor, to get a more thoughtful perspective on the news. I had a lot to learn.

My career in public accounting was largely a failure. I earned my CPA certificate, but I was kind of a lost waif in the office that floated around to the worst engagements. My second year on that savings and loan bank marked the end of my days in public accounting. I had a drinking problem, could not get a full lung of air, dreaded each day, and a friend remarked that I looked ten years older than I was. I had tried to find work in Seattle in the summer of 1985, but I was unsuccessful.

In February of 1986, my loyalty to the firm was rewarded with my being able to look for work and not come into the office until I found the job that I wanted. I lived at the beach in LA, which was the only place in LA that I could stand living, but there were no career jobs there and I was offered work in the industrial-wasteland towns of LA where I did a lot of my auditing. It looked like I would never be able to pursue my energy dreams, which was far in the back of my mind at that time. I was a stress-ridden wreck.

I felt trapped in LA, eight years after that voice told me to study business. For the second and so far last time in my life, I desperately prayed for guidance, and I again fell into a dreamless sleep. When I awoke, it was not as dramatic as eight years earlier, but suddenly I decided that moving to Seattle and starving beat anything in LA. That voice knew what it was doing. Ten days later, I walked into Dennis Lee’s company, and the rest, as they say, is history. I still have a hard time believing that a voice in my head led me to Dennis like that. My wild ride was about to begin.