When someone says they love learning, can they really say they love it so much they're less than ten credits away from five different degrees they never finished?

If you're like me, then yes. You love learning.

Some will call me a polymath. Others would say I like giving money away to higher learning institutions. Yes and no to both counts. I learned—eventually—that it's more cost-efficient to finish one degree. So I settled on a BA in General Studies with an emphasis in Mathematics.

Know who else has a General Studies degree? Tom Fucking Brady.

So if you were thinking, wow, Dennis is such a loser—who gets a General Studies degree? Champions, that's who. Just like Tom Brady.

Psychology. Military history. Creative writing. Theater. Sociology. Electrical engineering. I pulled at every thread I could find because I couldn't stop learning. Still can't. Einstein said, "Once you stop learning, you start dying." I've carried that with me through every chapter of my life—and there have been a few.

The first one started underground in Wyoming, maintaining nuclear missile facilities for the Air Force. Precision work. The kind where mistakes aren't an option. When I got out, I was lost. Depressed. Angry. I felt like the world was holding me back, stopping me from becoming whoever I was supposed to be.

Turns out, it was me. I just didn't know how to be uncomfortable yet.

Improv saved my life.

I studied at Second City in Las Vegas—completed their conservatory program right before the 2008 collapse shuttered it. Then The Groundlings in Los Angeles. The West Side Comedy Theater in Santa Monica. Then I moved to Chicago and trained at iO under Charna Halpern and Liz Allen, did Second City's sketch writing program, spent late nights in workshops turning frustration into punchlines. What I found wasn't just comedy—it was a way of being. Improv taught me to say "yes, and" to the waves crashing into me instead of fighting them. Once I stopped resisting and started learning, I stopped drowning. I've been surfing ever since.

For eight years, I worked surveillance at MGM Resorts in Las Vegas—analyzing player data, catching cheaters, building cases for law enforcement. Detective work meets data science. Pattern recognition became second nature.

Then Madison, Wisconsin. I co-founded Alesian Strategies, a consultancy helping startups craft pitch decks and business plans. I watched brilliant entrepreneurs struggle to break through without the financial backing that seems to come so easily to the already well-connected. That frustration deepened something in me. It led me to build my own ventures: HouseItGo, a marketplace for blue-collar entrepreneurs, and now CritCash, a competitive gaming platform where players compete in tournaments for player-funded prize pools.

CritCash is the biggest thing I've ever built—tournament infrastructure for esports with secure escrow, AI-powered match verification, and instant fund distribution. It's everything I've learned combined: data analysis, pattern recognition, building systems under pressure, and the collaborative mindset I picked up on stage.

In 2024, I wrote Golden Weakness: Platinum Failures—my first book. It's about the intersection of business and politics, about how the wealthy keep profiting from their failures while the rest of us get stuck cleaning up the mess. Writing it was cathartic. Because that same year, I worked with the Wisconsin Democratic Party during the election. Democracy matters to me. So does history. I spent months training volunteers, making calls, knocking on doors. Sixteen-hour days, six days a week. We went 4 for 6 in my district: a U.S. Senator, a state senator, a state representative, and two assemblymen. We lost a congressman and the presidency, but we showed up. We fought. We moved the needle. And I'd do it again.

Why do I do any of this?

I'm a husband and a father. I have an amazing wife, Felicia, and a brilliant, curious daughter, Violet. Everything I build is for them. Every late night, every risk, every door I knocked—it's to create a better life for my family and to leave something behind that matters. Something that maybe, just maybe, makes the world a little less absurd for the people coming after us.

I've been a missile technician, a comedian, a casino analyst, a consultant, a political organizer, an author, and a founder. The through-line is simple: I love learning, I can't stand systems that reward failure at the top while punishing it everywhere else, and I believe discomfort is where growth lives.

Keep questioning. Keep laughing. Keep calling it what it is.

Now, go forth and disrupt.