[This was around 11 years ago]

KG loved doing impressions of antagonists from old movies. He should have become an actor; instead, sales and entrepreneurship sucked him in.

It was towards the end of the previous episode that our paths first crossed.

I’d been invited to join a private business group  by an acquaintance of mine: Kris. One of the many strange occurrences during a decade, where I should have been out of place in a group, but found myself right where I needed to be.

Kris wanted me there because he felt I had a discerning factor they all lacked: Taste. I didn't quite understand what he meant (by it) at this point.

The group was a collection of consultants, investors and entrepreneurs. But what was most interesting is, they were all in one form or another drawn to the spiritual side of life — no atheists in this episode.

Kris, had worked at tech company for many years, but had now come into a large inheritance. He quit his job, began investing, traveling to personal development seminars across the globe (accumulating a million flying miles in the process), and paying silly sums of money to be part of inner circles of guys like Kiyosaki & Robbins.

Through him, I had access to every mindset & marketing program money could buy. But my interest didn't lie in how to use this vault of unlimited information; I just wanted to understand the dark patterns I ultimately wanted to avoid.

Kris’ spiritual outlook had changed when he escaped a series of bombings in a city he was visiting to catch up with old friends. Instead of being on the train where one of the explosions took place, he found himself in a park having a transcendent experience: Mesmerized by the beauty of a flower, as the first bombs in the city went off.

An hour earlier, his friend had contacted him saying he was delayed by a work meeting — this delay, having saved Kris' life.

Next up was Kevin, a former corporate executive, who was now coaching other execs. He was quite the character: Spoke 5 languages fluently, lived in as many continents, and had a tale to tell on any topic you could bring up in a conversation.

He wasn’t getting paid for his expertise in a particular field, as much as for his ability to contextualize any given problem through a story; he was great at this.

Then there was Kel, who was split between 2 distinct lives. One, as a very successful property developer, and the other, which she'd only recently revealed: An Astrologer.

I had some amazing conversations with her over time. Some of the things she told me became important pillars of perspective through my treacherous journeys in years to come.

To round up the group, there was Karim, Kim, and Koe, who owned call centre's, hair salons and web development companies.

Finally, there was KG.

He was the youngest of the group, but definitely the most insane. The product of an Anarchist father and a Hippie mother, he turned out to be their perfect nightmare: a Capitalist.

We got along right away; we could see each others madness without its formal introduction. He loved the fact I had access to the entire Straight Line Persuasion sales script (this was years before the Jordan Belfort movie).

He wanted nothing more than to make money; he was obsessed with people like Belfort. He'd gone to the extent of spending almost 30k to buy private time with him, and subsequently with some other guy, who was also part of the business self-help universe of dubious characters.

Of course, with KG needing to recoup his money, he tried selling them both on some KG scheme in return. To his credit, he did score himself a deal with the other dude, only to get promptly screwed over.

Karma is a bitch.

KG could be profound in conversations about life (well beyond his age), but he was a bit of a charlatan in the world of commerce. The contrast being hard to describe.

We caught up a bunch of times outside our group meetups: He’d invite me to his co-working space for unlimited coffee and an all-you-can-eat buffet. He was always trying to rope me into his next little trick, but I had scant interest in his penny-grab setups.

These tricks changed every month on the recommendation of his sales coach, Eddy, who was a piece of work. Eddy and I hated each others guts. I'd never seen anyone else make up the kind of bullshit like he did, just to get a sale across the line — not even his own granny was spared. Watching him in action was a bizarre combo of nauseating, yet impressive.

As for me, small & cheap selling held no interest because I didn't need much then.

I had a couch to sleep on at a Design Agency, consulting gigs via Jared when he needed a young person to "speak tech" to corporate oldies, and I was on the internet at every which hour — deep down the rabbit hole.

Most importantly, this period of my life was about the discovery of something powerful within myself.

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[So as to not get confused by the timeline, the above section was talking about the period when I was already living at the Design Agency.

We'll now go back to a time when I was sleeping out on the streets, and we'll find our way back to KG again.]

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Mark had lived an adventurous life: A juvenile delinquent, Hell's Angel, stunt double in Hollywood, spent a portion of his life with Shamans across the Americas, & was now running sales conferences.

I received a call one day from him out of the blue, asking if I might attend one of his conferences as a silent observer. He wanted feedback on what I thought about his event.

Although conferences weren't my thing, I had an odd feeling that I should do it.

I attended the event a few day later, took some mental notes on what I observed, and stayed fairly invisible through the first half. But then, in an unguarded moment, during the post interval session Mark put me on the spot.

While speaking to his audience on the topic of being real, he directed a question at me. An interesting back-and-forth ensued, and he artfully maneuvered the scene to request me to get on stage to say a few words.

I would have been fine turning him down, but I had this feeling I should go with the flow. I had no idea what to say — having never spoken on stage I was understandably nervous — so I just talked about what was most real to me: About the difficulty of protecting one's dignity on the streets.
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This topic touched the heart of one person, in particular, who approached me at the end of the event, and offered me 24/7 access to their Design Studio.

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Awakening Taste

You can possess talents & sensibilities that can shape the course of your life, but you can be completely unaware of them. For me, this lay at the intersection of aesthetics and a yet-to-be-explored complex landscape of information.

The 1st step towards the reveal was access to high-quality equipment & software at this studio. The 2nd was a few conversations about mathematical & visual balance in creating an interface.

That's it, that's all it took to activate something which was dormant.

A few weeks on, my implementations were unrecognizable from the primitive trash I’d been creating on old library PC’s using software like Gimp. Strange as it may seem, I could now, both, produce and direct others to design at a completely different level.

There is something to this; the closest relative I can find is in sport, where certain players are pretty average in their output in smaller leagues. Put them on the right stage, however, and they come into their own.

But my sense of taste really didn't really come together fully, until the 3rd part of the equation was realized. This one took some time.

Dom, who owned the Design Agency was a conspiracy buff. His tendency to question things came from his father, who'd brought him up to be suspicious about everything laid out by authority.

For me it wasn't so binary, because I was not the kind to be influenced by adults to like or dislike anything. But I had questions of my own that started arising in my early teens.

It was mainly around 3 topics: Rule of Law, Money and Ancient Civilizations. I didn't know why, but I felt there was something off about what I was being told about them.

Unraveling mysteries down the rabbit hole (at my time at the Design Studio) thus became one of the most satisfying intellectual experiences of my life.

I no longer had a sense of time, as I went on fascinating adventures through the worlds of admiralty maritime jurisdictions, astounding ancient megalithic constructions, paranormal ranches, civilization-ending catastrophes, the weird gaps & leaps in the homo sapien (evolutionary) timeline, the history of money, banking, and other never ending tangents — most of them truly bizarre.

But after finding answers to many of the questions I'd been asking throughout young adult life, something powerful dawned upon me: I realized that this deep dive wasn't about knowledge or information; instead, it was about exposing myself to large amounts of information & noise, and quickly learning to separate the signals.

Combining this with the gift of aesthetics which I'd discovered earlier, I now possessed a weapon which I could explicitly use for the first time in my life.

Of course, the talk about finding signal when researching controversial topics can be dismissed as confirmation bias, but there is something to be said about the type of discernment that comes from developing your own intuition.

Fittingly, it was my intuition that got me out of this rabbit hole, where I could have gotten permanently lost. I knew that peculiar feeling from my past experiences, so when it spoke to me this time, I knew I had to put a stop to my explorations. This meant even giving up an online video channel I'd curated from scratch with thousands of subscribers.

But it had to be done.

Spiritually, this period had also been very tough: I had not been able to find any connection with the world at large. My only real companion through this period was Krishnamurti's 'Talk's with American Students'.

Opening random pages of this book always gave me the feeling that in some form, I was still on the right pathless road.

Matters of the soul don't have short term solutions, but in terms of the material world I had clearly come to the point where, I didn’t want to be that person who felt like a powerless victim of some shadowy elites, or a bunch of conspiracies.

I wanted to be someone who would go out and shape the world, regardless.

The starting point however was an issue; I had no clarity on how to enter back into the chaos of society, which I'd left behind such a long time ago. I felt I needed some time to figure this out, so I decided that I would go to a beach town and work as a barista.

But what followed my plan, unsurprisingly, was an extended bout of procrastination.

After preventing the actual action from taking place for a few weeks, I woke up one morning and decided to just take the leap. I said my goodbyes to Dom and the crew at the studio, and made my way to the train station to buy my ticket.

There I was, waiting in line at the ticket booth, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Well, who else? It was KG; we hadn’t seen each other in months.

I asked him what he was up to, and in typical KG style he said: "I just closed this c*** for a 1000 dollar consulting session."

Ah, yes, I’d be hearing a lot of this in months to come.

He asked me what I’m up to, and I said: ‘I’m about to go work at a beach town for a couple of months.’

He immediately interrupts: "Dude, can you hold off the ticket purchase for a bit? I want to speak to you about something important."

I was back in the flow of life, so I said yes. Over lunch, he went on to tell me that he’d finally hit upon a legitimate idea, and there was a company worth building around it.

We didn’t have any filters between us, so I asked: 'Ok, what's the scam?'

He laughed: “Honest to God, no scam. No more copy/paste websites."

As it turned out, he had hit jackpot via a contact at one of the Big 4 accounting firms. Having worked there years ago, he'd become pals with a guy named Bill. Although you could never fully believe what came out of KG’s mouth, Bill was allegedly a coke snorting, whore mongering, psychopath,  i.e., their gun salesman.

It's just the way KG rolled, and how he described colorful characters he knew.

Bill had hit a mid-life crisis and quit his position at the firm, but before going on his sabbatical, he connected KG with one of his high net-worth contacts.

This contact needed a lot of help in transitioning to the new web, and in turn, he had a rolodex full of business contacts (flush with cash) needing to get up to speed with the new web too.

Interesting as this was, it still wasn't enough to change my mind because I knew KG's "thing" would always end up in somewhere in the dark arts of SEO as the golden solution.

He knew my distrust of it, but he also couldn't help himself; he loved doing his dog & pony show upfront. Then, just as I was about to wish him good luck and leave, he asked me: "You remember our chats about why Agencies suck?"

Over time, we had both observed that Agencies only knew how to create over-priced websites and brochures, but they lacked the knowledge & skill in helping their clients convert new customers — let alone, create further engagement.

Today, of course, conversions and user experience is well understood on the internet, but back then these concepts were poorly known about.

We knew if we set up a well thought out and enticing sales script around this point of difference, closing warm leads would be quite doable. Between consulting services, development team overseas to fulfill delivery of websites with good conversion principles, and retainers, there was clearly money to be made.

"Lets do it man!", he said, "I've got one big fish locked up, and I really need your help with acquiring the rest. I know you won't commit long term, but can you at least help me set up the foundations across a few months?"

I had never done something that involved selling to multiple potential clients, let alone, represent an entity. But I was comfortable knowing that while I was in this type of flow mode, new landscapes didn't phase me.

I would obviously be challenged on things I had been conservative about until now, and I'd have to make upgrades to parts of my psyche, but I knew this needed to happen anyway.

Dealing with KG was the main asterisk in this whole affair because he was going to grind against my personal values (unclear ethics, lacking taste, etc), but the universe was asking me to jump into the deep end. This was purely an intuitive play, so no amount of analysis was going to help.

I knew this ride would lead to the next vital realization in my life.

I jumped in.