How I got here.

I've always been fascinated by treasure hunting. Long before I ever picked up a metal detector, I spent countless hours watching DALLMYD (Jake Koehler) recover lost treasures while scuba diving and Pioneer Pauly chase gold in the mountains.

I loved both styles of treasure hunting, but they also came with barriers. Scuba diving requires expensive gear and training, and gold prospecting often means traveling to claims and investing a lot of time and money.

Around that same time, I was looking for a way to become more active after transitioning from a physically demanding job to a desk job. I wanted something that would actually get me moving, not just another excuse to go for a walk.

Then YouTube started recommending beach metal detecting videos.

It checked every box I was looking for. It was affordable to get started, I could do it close to home, every hunt was a new adventure, and most importantly, it meant walking several miles without it feeling like exercise.

At first, YouTube mostly showed me detectorists hunting the beaches of Florida. Once I realized I wanted to give it a shot myself, I started searching for videos from my local Southern California beaches.

That's when I found creators like Monterey Magnet Man, Seek and Detect, and a whole community of California detectorists.

If you hear me using certain phrases or notice similarities in the way I hunt, there's a good reason for it: those guys are where I learned almost everything I know.

They were my teachers before I ever stepped onto the beach with a detector, and I'm grateful they shared so much knowledge with the rest of us.