THE STORY

In December of 2012, my youngest brother (who was 21-years-old at the time) was having difficulties in his life.  He had already dropped out of two colleges, he was hanging with the wrong crowd, he lost his job, and he was thinking of doing something illegal out of desperation. He thought he was approaching everything in his life the wrong way.

That’s when he asked me to teach him how to be a man.

It’s hard to say no to a question like that. But he also appealed to my sensibilities as an educator.  I wondered if it was actually possible to teach someone exactly how to be a man.

I agreed to let my brother move in immediately after the New Year holiday of 2013.

For my brother’s birthday that year, I designed a beautiful customized deck of cards, and gave him the Ace of Spades. Along with the Ace of Spades card was a print out of an assignment that I wanted him to complete. If he completed the assignment, then the following week I would give him another card with another assignment. The idea was that there are 52 cards in a deck, and there are 52 weeks in a year.  If he collected all the cards by completing all the assignments, then he’d be a mature, responsible man by his next birthday.

Those 52 manhood lessons were collected in a book and finally published in May of 2016. That book, Joker to King, was the grand prize winner of the Southern California Book Festival, and it was Amazon’s most downloaded self-help book Father’s Day week of 2016. Since then, the book and the brand have grown. A second edition of Joker to King was published in 2021.

The Joker to King mission is to help guys become healthier men.  There is an ancient Japanese saying: “To know and not do is to not know.”  My hope for you is that this website leads to information and transformation.