About

About 1,000 years ago, I was a journalist. The job taught me three things I still use every day: a reader decides in a second whether to keep going, the deadline doesn’t care how you feel, and the best pitch is a short pitch.

Then I crossed the desk. Became a young, try-hard flack at a small PR agency, certain I knew more than most and wrote better than most. One of those turned out to be true. Eventually. On good days.

The work that stuck was work nobody wanted. Fighting ballot-box initiatives. Being on the news every night defending billion-dollar projects not everyone was happy about. Helping towns make their peace with change and the costs that came with it. Along the way, I joined a local public affairs shop in Kansas City and left it winning work across the country. After that? My own shop, West Third Group, which for 20 years has prepared public agencies for the fight before it arrives, counseled the lawyers once it has, and taken the podium when the podium is the job.

Over time, I realized the rules mattered more than any one fight, and got into policy work. Did stints at two think tanks and co-founded a third; today I’m a senior counselor at America First Policy Institute, one of the fastest-growing policy organizations in Washington. I help lead the AI-enabled policy shop. I advise Cabinet secretaries and serve as a senior advisor to one, and I work with state leaders and others on strategic communications, AI and how to get more—and more good—done in a hurry.

Across all of it, the job is the same. Somebody has a project or an idea, and somewhere there’s a room where somebody else can say no. I go to the room and try to understand what it wants, which is usually to be taken seriously. Then I find the version of yes it can live with, and, when I can, I work on the rules so the next yes comes cheaper.

I live in Carson City, Nevada, and start most days with a 50-ounce Coke Zero. People don’t usually remember that part.

They remember the yes.