Joe Schaller lives in Gallup, New Mexico with his wife Louise. He grew up in the college town of Pullman Washington. As a hipper counter-culture dropout he returned to college in 1973 and graduated from Eastern Washington State College in 1977 with a bachelor of science in nursing. He became a commissioned officer with the Public Health Service stationed at Gallup Indian Medical Center and eventually obtained a private sector job as a turquoise dealer lasting 26 years. Schaller was a Sierra Club activist in the 1980s before rejecting liberalism in the 1990s. He became an expert in basketball quantitative analytics with his Total Performance Ratings, doing a 16 year stretch with rivals.com. He has utilized his array of lifetime experiences and dogged research to write as a citizen watchdog and conservative columnist for various Gallup newspaper publications.