About Me

I was a weird, joyous, and creative little kid.

A relentless tinkerer,

deeply curious,

& naturally expressive.

I’d obsess over things like Rubik’s cubes, skateboarding and YouTube.

I started filming skate videos in my basement, editing them & posting them to YouTube when I was 10 years old.

And I absolutely loved it.

But as I got older, I started to dread “growing up”, which I thought meant:

Getting serious 😐

Getting a “real job” 💼

And leaving my fun, creative hobbies behind 😢

Like many of us, I learned that in order to succeed in this life, I had to follow a certain path & fit a certain mold.

So, I started to dim my light.

I became shy & reserved.

Even though I had so much to say, I almost never raised my hand in class.

I became embarrassed about my YouTube Channel.

I started to do things I didn’t really care about, but that I thought I had to in order to succeed.

I didn’t know it at the time, but people-pleasing, performing, hiding, & mask-wearing were becoming my second nature.

Rather than doing what felt intuitive & energizing to me, I learned to judge my inner leanings, question if they were “right”, usually decide “no”, and instead, do the thing that I thought I had to in order to gain approval.

And I just thought that was life!

Fast forward to college, and still unconsciously acting out of this conditioning, I chose to major in computer science not because my heart was in it, but because I thought it would get me the high paying job and therefore the happiness that I thought would come in the future if I followed all the “rules”.

Thankfully, the dread of a career I didn’t care about pushed me to make my first attempt to break free.

Half-way through my freshman year of college, I decided to take my YouTube channel seriously.

(I owe a huge thank you to Josh Katz, Andy Schrock, John Hill, Brett Conti, and others for showing me that it was possible to make a living doing something I loved).

I poured my heart out into my weekly skate vlogs, and I didn’t miss an upload for my entire four years of college.

By the time I graduated, I reached 100k subscribers on my channel and I was earning enough on ad-revenue, sponsorships, and merch sales to move out on my own.

I did it, I broke free!

So I thought.

But as it turns out, this was just the very beginning of a journey that never ends.

The high of “making it” as a full-time YouTuber only lasted about a year before things started to feel wrong.

I slowly lost interest in the skate videos I was making week after week, but now depended on for money. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel as I became increasingly burnt out, confused, and anxious.

I thought the solution to my problems lied in getting better at skateboarding, making more money, growing my YouTube channel even more, moving apartments, or some combination of the above.

But as I kept grinding, my feelings of burnout, confusion, and anxiety only intensified.

Thankfully, on a skate trip to Philadelphia, my friend and mentor Chad Caruso recommended I try meditation.

Now, up until that point, I was the kind of person who thought meditation was “woo-woo.” I thought meditation was for monks, nuns, and spiritual recluses. I didn’t think it was relevant to me.

But at this point, it was becoming clear to me that more views, more subscribers, and more money wasn’t helping, so I was willing to try it.

Plus, Chad being a skateboarder helped a lot. I didn’t know skaters could meditate.

Well, it wasn’t long before meditation became my next obsession.

I started meditated every day.

I read countless self-help & spiritual books.

I listened to countless hours of spiritual lectures.

I fell in love with Eastern Spiritual Philosophy.

I was determined to figure out why I was anxious & unhappy.

Through my meditation practice, I slowly started to question and unravel the layers of conditioned beliefs that I had previously assumed to be tru

This was a tremendously healing and liberating time for me.

I became less anxious, more brave, more honest, more expressive, and significantly happier.

I also found my creative spark again!

Rather than confining myself to the niche of skateboarding, I began to set myself creatively free. I shared whatever my heart desired, including insights from my meditation journey. Creative freedom is now one of my core values that I practice and preach.

After three years into my meditation journey, I even took a 200 hour course at a Buddhist center in New York City to become a certified meditation teacher.

You want to know something crazy? This quote from the beginning?

“I was a weird, joyous, and creative little kid.

A relentless tinkerer,

deeply curious,

& naturally expressive.”

My whole journey, all the efforts to break free, all the meditation, it’s all just brought me back to being this kid again. Weird, joyous, and creative. A relentless tinkerer. Naturally expressive.

Thank you for reading my so-far story. I want to leave you with this:

We are all completely perfect.

Yes, you too. You are absolutely perfect.

The only thing limiting us is the limiting stories we carry in our minds, which are not even our own. We learned them from someone else.

The truth of who we are, beyond the conditioned beliefs that we carry, is a perfect essence, and that full expression of ourselves is exactly who we should be.