About Me — Josh Noles
It makes sense to start an “about me” with the most important part of my identity: I’m a husband and a father. It’s the lens in which all of my decisions are filtered through. I have a beautiful wife and three amazing kids. Most parents think their kids are the best in the world, so I’ll avoid the cliché myself and just say that I think mine are pretty cool. My wife is obviously my favorite person (as evidenced by my spending the past 16 years with her).
Anyway, I’m a husband and a dad and that’s important to note.
I work in healthcare. I’m a respiratory therapist both in a regional hospital in Nevada and in the Air National Guard.
I’m a veteran. I’m not an aggressive veteran, but my work in the military does come up in conversation more than I would like. I have some cool stories. I’ve traveled a lot, have a few overseas trips, and did some cool training. I’ve worked with guys that will inevitably write books when they retire. Maybe I’ll write down some of my own military stories.
I travel a lot. I write mostly about travel and adventure topics. I climb rocks, ice, and mountains (often together). I find myself searching online for content that doesn’t exist on how best to accomplish tasks pertaining to climbing, and have to figure it out myself. While I enjoy that, I’d like to bring some of what I’ve learned to the world and help others.
I travel with my family too and like to write about how my kids see the world, and how to avoid booking cabins in the fjords of Norway that have death stairs. Stuff like that.
I love culture. I studied anthropology, history, literature, and theology and really enjoy the patterns people create. Put simply, anthropology is the study of culture, but I like to look at it as living philosophy. Culture is what drives decisions, what shapes individual understanding. If you can observe someone’s culture, you can understand what moves them.
I sometimes write about cultural topics because it’s important that occasionally an article might pop up on your feed that doesn’t involve the topics of AI or Tech startups.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon but have lived all over the West Coast. My Grandpa invented the phone book (an interesting story I’ll one day write about that involves Cold War espionage and the Secret Service). My parents are both freelance writers and my Dad has even published a few books. My parents ran a small, niche newspaper when I was growing up, the kind you on the racks by the front doors in small businesses.
I started a publishing company, published a single book (not written by me), helped more books get published via other avenues, and then got deployed and had to shut it down. I would one day like to see it back up and running. I guess you could say writing is in my blood.
Like a typical ADHD’er, I have too many degrees, have held too many jobs, like to tell stories loaded with unnecessary detail, and end my stories abruptly because I got bored. I’m working on fixing that last one…
Find me on Instagram at @rogueoutlaw
