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Key LIfe Events
11 scenes, 5 minutes, 1 unconventional journey.
I began questioning myself & the world around me in my early teens. It led me down a dark path I wasn’t ready for, ending up in deep depression when I turned 19.
3 yrs later, I tried to end it all...
On the other side of the hard fall, I had an epiphany.
The epiphany led me to give away my material possessions — including my old sense of misery — and walk into the unknown.
With just $20 in my pocket, stripped of all safety nets, there was little choice but to trust my intuition in knowing which way to advance.
An unexpected detour led me to a Roulette table, opening the door to one of the best years of my life.
But in unexpected moments, the whisper of intuition would be felt, and I'd follow it to odd places.
Little portals.. connecting me to sign posts & strangers along a road less traveled.
With uncertainty as the main adversary, every part of me got tested against it.
I quietly endured, learned lessons & stayed invisible...
as I pieced myself together from my own observed truths, rather than those borrowed from society.
As the magical year began to recede, the real journey began.
I spent the next 5 yrs living homeless, while writing a book from public libraries.
This was a raw existence out on the cold streets of society.
One such stranger invited me his conference to act as a quiet observer, but in an unguarded moment he put me on the spot, & asked me to speak to the audience.
Not knowing what to say, I spoke about what was real to me: About the difficulty of protecting one's dignity on the streets.
This touched the heart of one person who approached me after the event, and offered me 24/7 access to a Design Studio.
Moving into a space with high-quality equipment & software, allowed a latent sensibility to explode to the surface.
And for the 1st time in my life, I discovered and explicitly possessed a weapon:
Of Taste.
One moment I thought I was headed to a beach town to work for $20 an hour; the next, I was thrown into the world of tech, making $2500 for half a days work.
Crossing paths with a crazy entrepreneur led to a wild ride that lasted as briefly as it shone brightly, but the extremely transactional nature of tech was impossible to ignore.
Within the strange conditions of experiencing both, validation & hollowness, the vital seeds were sowed: Meaning had to merge with technology.
ZENBLACK
ZEN
BLACK
After walking away from the startup, and surrendering to the uncertain space in between two worlds, I had managed to unburden myself.
Back again in the state of pure feeling, an impulsive moment led me to a random cafe.
Little did I know that someone else would be drawn to the same spot — a quote on a chalkboard calling her in.
2 outsiders meeting in a strange land realizing the universe has an adventure for us to undertake..
Zen Black was like everything else until, and after this point: Unexpected & Insane.
With our belief in exponential leaps, we jumped into things we didn’t know how we’d achieve.
But despite having no prior experience, we built a Bitcoin Exchange whose design & ease of use was ahead of it's time — the majority of exchanges in 2014 were awful).
Yet on completion of the venture, the message was clear: We could never sell our time for money again.
Life can turn at the drop of a bitcoin.
The project completion “high” soon gave way to an abrupt change of fortunes, as challenges with an unethical real estate agency led to a dubious eviction from our home.
A series of absurd events then followed this situation, which forced us to make a decision to live in a car.
The 6 month mobile living plan turned into a 4 YEAR stretch of living in cars, broken down vans, and our tiny storage unit.
Our grit & determination were tested beyond the edge, not just to keep our spirit intact, but move forward with exceptional amount of resourcefulness.
To keep the chaos at bay, we had to transcend it with something crazy.
So we decided to architect & build 3 complex products from scratch during this period.
Life is bitter sweet.
In the morning (late 2017), our Startups had come to an abrupt halt. That evening, we discovered Eric Weinstein.
5 minutes into Eric discussing Cephalopods on his 1st Joe Rogan appearance it was obvious, we were looking at a unique sensibility.
This triggered a fascinating exploration of everything he'd written or spoken about — evolving into the curation of (likely) the first 100+ tweet thread on Twitter.
2,000,000 views later, it seems we'd created something special.
A week after the Mega Thread & our Intuition Blog Series were released, we were forced to vacate our beloved office space.
This office had been our sleeping quarters through most of 2018, so at short notice we had nowhere else to go.
We spent the next 4 months sleeping in a tiny gap on the floor of our storage unit, where a brutal flu almost killed me.
But 16 weeks later, the insanity subsided. We were released from the storage unit life and we entered our first home in 4 years.
The extended lockdowns of 2020/21, although debilitating, led us to an important question:
After a 5-year rollercoaster ride through life, and 3 major products in cryo-sleep or death, where to for Zen Black?
When the answer to that question was a deep & uncomfortable silence, we knew the exploration of a new world had already begun.
With no signposts to guide, we were going to have to create our way through this unknown terrain.
We razed our souls across the next 18 months..
gaining one piece of clarity at a time, while painting onto a blank digital canvas.
What came to life through trusting our muse along this incredible process, is what you see here today.
As we now further the pursuit to bring the next clue — Anti-Expert — to life.
