About

I joined the U.S. Air Force in 2006. For four years I worked on the weapons systems of A-10 attack aircraft and HH-60 rescue helicopters at Davis-Monthan. I spent most of the next four as a recruiter, and left as a Staff Sergeant.

After the Air Force I led about 100 licensed agents at Primerica and ran a personal training business, Gruntz Fitness, which grew from 3 clients to more than 90 in eight months.

In 2017 I went back to school at RIT. I finished a B.S. in psychology summa cum laude in 2020 and an M.S. in experimental psychology in 2023. My research there asked how language reveals cognition: what the words someone uses to describe a hard experience say about how they are processing it.

That question is personal. I live with PTSD, and in 2018 I published a memoir about it, The American Nightmare and the Art of Failure. My thesis on written narratives and PTSD symptoms grew out of the same interest.

NSF I-Corps customer discovery in late 2023 turned the research into Cogbias AI, where I am co-founder and Chief Science Officer. Today I run R&D there, build and maintain the Sales Performance Compass for Ramerman Leadership Group, teach psychology at RIT, and consult for teams that ship AI systems. My second book, The Time Illusion: Quantum Psychology and the Mind's Greatest Invention, is with the editor.