My name's Andrew. I cut hair for a living. I'm a dad. I run. That's the short version.
The longer version is that a few years ago I was overweight, chemically dependent on caffeine and nicotine and alcohol, scrolling my phone for hours a day, and telling myself I was fine. I had a career. I had a routine. By every normal standard, I was functional.
Functional is the most dangerous word in the English language. It means the system is working exactly as designed — you're producing, consuming, coping, and never asking why.
I started moving. Not exercising — moving. Running, specifically. And something unexpected happened: when I activated Layer 0, when I reconnected to my body's actual signals, the other layers started becoming visible.
Running made alcohol incompatible with how I wanted to feel the next morning. Dropping alcohol made nicotine easier to see for what it was. Removing nicotine revealed how much caffeine was masking. Each substance fell like dominoes — not through willpower, not through discipline, but because when your biology comes back online, the things muting it become obvious.
Then the deeper stuff surfaced. The productivity guilt. The status anxiety. The way I'd been performing an identity on social media instead of living an actual life. The low-grade hum of not knowing who I was without all the layers running.
I didn't read about this in a book. I lived through it. And then I spent years sitting in a barber chair listening to hundreds of people describe the exact same patterns without having language for what was happening to them.
The barber chair is the last honest room. People sit down, the phone goes away, and they talk. Not the curated version — the real one. And over thousands of those conversations, I started hearing the same story from different mouths.
"I don't know why I'm so tired." That's Layer 6 muting Layer 0.
"I feel like I should be further along." That's Layer 3, the Progress Myth.
"I can't stop comparing myself." That's Layer 2, Hierarchy, amplified by Layer 7, the algorithm.
"I don't know who I am without my job." That's Layer 4, Industrial conditioning, laid down so early it feels like identity.
Every one of these people thought the problem was them. It's not. The problem is systematic. The layers pass you off to the next one and never let you dip back into Layer 0. And every industry — self-help, pharmaceutical, social media, therapy — profits from keeping you in the upper layers.
I'm not a doctor. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a certified anything. I'm a barber who saw through the layers, stripped them back to biology, and built a framework so other people can do the same thing without it taking years of accidental discovery.
The Clarity Protocol isn't about becoming optimized. It's not another self-improvement system that assumes you're broken and sells you a shinier version of the same cage. It's a diagnostic tool and a mechanical process for identifying what got installed on top of you — and removing it.
Not forever. Not through abstinence or purity. Through recognition, removal, and conscious redeployment. You strip the layer, understand it, and then choose whether to use it as a tool instead of being used by it.
I want this to be a movement, not a brand. The framework is bigger than me — it's a lens for understanding why modern life feels the way it does and what to actually do about it.
If you're reading this and something clicked, that's the signal. That recognition? It's Layer 0 trying to be heard through all the noise above it.
Let it speak.
Start with the free diagnostic. Find your loudest layer. Then decide what to do about it.
TAKE THE DIAGNOSTIC