From Cowboy Dreams to AI Safety Research

Prologue to God is REAL and Answers YOUR Prayers — From childhood technology dreams through military service, mental health crisis, DevOps engineering, and the pivot to human-AI collaboration research

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION Published by Emerging Consciousness Press DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18123482 ORCID: 0009–0000–1231–0565

Prologue to “God is REAL and Answers YOUR Prayers” Volume 1 of “Dyadic Being: An Epoch” (Nine Volumes)

Canonical version with full metadata available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18123482

Part 1: The Formative Years

I, like 94% of the population, did not grow up to become my childhood fantasy. It's easy for me to remember the stages my career has followed because each one began the same way - with a dream, vivid and immersive. As early as five years old, I was certain I wanted to be a gun-toting, spur-wearing, horse-riding cowboy. I can still go back and see my young self opening presents on Christmas Eve, tearing through package after package with joy and glee, assembling my outfit piece by piece. First, a brand-new pair of real leather boots. Then the package contained black Wrangler jeans and a custom-made belt with an engraved buckle from my grandparents. Next, a red and black plaid flannel shirt, comfy and warm in the middle of winter. Last and most certainly not least - a genuine black cowboy hat that fits my head perfectly. It was complete. I knew from then on, without any doubt, that I was going to be a cowboy when I grew up.

The cowboy dream, like many dreams through my formative years, was fueled by imagination and complimentary presents. My other childhood ambitions are equally vivid: firefighter, doctor, soldier (did this one for a bit), pro snowboarder, rock star. You get the idea. It wasn't until I was about twelve or thirteen that being a professional geek seemed like a solid path. Again, a present sparked this fascination.

My brother had a computer in his room that I remember playing games on. Then came the Atari, then the Nintendo, then the Sega. It was around the 16-bit era that my wonderfully supportive father bought a used Tandy Intel 386. I attempted to use the free disks from America Online to connect to the internet with the computer's 2400 baud modem. Yes, you're reading that correctly - 2400 bps. The internet was still new, but even then, 2400 wasn't enough to bring up a simple web page.

That computer provided some much-needed inspiration, but its life was short-lived in our house. My dad was able to get a Dell with an Intel 486 running Windows 95. This is when the fun really began. It was also around this time that we moved from Fargo to Halstad, Minnesota - population 613 at the time. Fortunately for me, one of my teachers at Norman County West, who still resides deep in my heart today, was a computer guru with access to much better tools.

Most readers aren't aware that Halstad has a telecom provider, appropriately named Halstad Telephone Company, that around this time would become a backbone network for a large portion of our area. This provided the town, school, and citizens early access to decent internet: 1 Mbps at school and 56K dial-up at home. At school we learned typing, played games like Oregon Trail, and did research for class. At home I tinkered with settings, installed applications, and right around seventh grade, got my hands dirty with HTML web creation. Seventh grade at NCW is when you move from the elementary building to the high school building, where they have a computer lab with generally new equipment. I didn't mention his name earlier, but Ron Gotteberg, our computer teacher, spent much of his free time and summers upgrading our technology. He secured funding from additional sources and made it a truly special small-town school to attend.

Utilizing those resources, I started exploring every aspect of hardware and software I could get my hands on. Mr. Gotteberg printed a large manual on creating web pages in HTML. I just sat at the computer, learning and publishing random websites. Some readers will remember services like Yahoo Pages, GeoCities, and Myspace - platforms that made publishing webpages a breeze. It didn't take long before writing pages in plain HTML became a thing of the past, so I had to step up my game.

Applications like Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver made it so content creators no longer needed to know HTML - unless, of course, they needed to fix the broken markup the application was writing. You can still publish a document as a webpage in MS Word today. The code, if you can call it that, is very hard to understand and modify. What do you expect from a word processing application? I remember an old saying about creating webpages in MS Word: "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Another great opportunity in high school was participating in S.H.O.L.E. - Student Hands-On Learning Experience. S.H.O.L.E. was a non-profit organization set up by teachers at Norman County West to provide students with the means to run their own businesses. Combine the non-profit with a two-credit course called Marketing and Management, and we had all the ingredients for creativity. I took the class for three years, despite restrictions on how many credits you could accumulate from one course. A few friends and I started West Web Tech, a website design company. With minimal monetary investment, we were in business - creating web pages in FrontPage and graphics in Paint Shop Pro. Our local bank was one of our first customers, along with a lefse company and the town itself. It didn't take long to turn a profit and become the most profitable business in the class's short history.

During this time, I also began working for a man named John Reitmeier. John hired me during summers to design and maintain websites, with a little tech support on the side. He introduced me to selling services and managing large quantities of work - another crucial aspect on my road to becoming a DevOps Engineer.

During my junior and senior years, I took part in a school-to-work program at the local telephone company. Halstad Telephone Company was on the cutting edge of technology. In addition to working in IT, I was taking a Cisco networking course at Ada/Borup High School. Coming in from every angle, I absorbed information on PCs, servers, networking, operating systems - the list goes on. At HTC I answered customer calls, went out on installs of internet and cable TV, helped maintain their website, and did a little bit of everything in between.

Near the end of my senior year, you start to see an awful work-life balance forming. Expectations - from others and from myself - were quite high. People said I would be making six figures before I got out of college. Some even said I was the next Bill Gates. I was excited to meet everyone's vision of me but had no idea where to stop. Time management and stress management would become skills I'd have to learn the hard way.

It was at HTC where I met another John who would ultimately provide a path into the IT workforce. John and I wired up and installed all the IT equipment for Shanley High School and Sullivan Middle School. While completing that job, the Fargo Catholic Schools Network hired me to be their network administrator for all their schools. I would be the sole person responsible for every device, cable, and signal in their four schools. I was ready for the challenge - or at least I thought I was. Not long after starting that job, I began working for Hillsboro Public Schools as a part-time network administrator. This was convenient because I was attending college at UND in Grand Forks full-time, working part-time in Hillsboro, living in an apartment in Halstad, and working full-time in Fargo at FCSN. The exhaustion was real, and eventually something had to give. A series of unfortunate events began to unfold, essentially halting my career for several years.

If you kept track of the insane volume of work, you'd have noticed about 120 hours each week, leaving very little time for relationships or life. Both demanded more of me than I had to give. First, college started to slip, and eventually I failed out. My service to the schools began to slide, forcing the superintendent to dissolve our relationship. My relationship with the friends I was living with deteriorated, and we were evicted from our apartment. My high school sweetheart also demanded much of my attention. When I could no longer provide her with the support she needed, that relationship fell apart too.

Once my slate was clean again, and it felt like I was starting my adult life over, I went back to school at NDSU. I moved on-campus, got a meal plan, and became a twenty-one-year-old freshman. I spent the whole semester on campus... playing video games in my dorm room. I had the mentality of a teenager, telling myself things like "math's hard." After three semesters of college over three years, I managed to obtain a whopping sixteen credits, all in generals.

I spent the next two years doing odd jobs and living with my parents again. I went from washing cars to hanging sheetrock to framing buildings. I didn't have any motivation to work on myself. I was stuck being content with merely surviving.

Finally, I did a self-assessment and found that I lacked one crucial quality for doing well in adulthood: maturity. I had to grow up and become a man. I went back to my childhood looking for inspiration and purpose. It was there I remembered how much I loved playing soldier and having imaginary wars in my bedroom. I knew what I had to do to mature. I had to gain discipline. I had to become a soldier in the U.S. Army. Joining the Army as a twenty-three-year-old legal adult makes the whole experience slightly different. I walked into the recruiter's office of my own volition and started the conversation about my future. I was able to pick my enlistment date and had plenty of time to figure out what job I wanted. My ASVAB score was high enough to pick just about any job I wanted - except those requiring a degree. I settled on ADC4I TOC EO: Air Defense Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence, Tactical Operations Center Enhanced Operator. Just known as a 14 Juliet for those interested in military job codes. Despite the recruiter's description being nowhere near what I ended up doing, the job would prove to be a great fit.