Defiant
Generalist
In a world of
unrealized specialists.
Modern culture keeps pushing us towards narrow specialization. I embrace being a Generalized Specialist instead.
I grew up inside a high-control religious environment that I didn't fully leave until my thirties. That experience gave me something I didn't expect: the ability to see how control systems are built, maintained, and disguised as something normal.
I founded GenZen in 2016 to apply that pattern recognition where it matters most. The work has taken me from cult extraction to federal investigations to preventing million-dollar fraud. Every case starts the same way: someone's trusted systems have been turned against them, and nobody around them can see how.
In 2017 I left the United States and haven't gone back. Nineteen countries so far, mostly across Europe and Southeast Asia, always slow. I stay long enough to stop being a tourist and start seeing how a place actually works.
Living as a perpetual foreigner sharpens the same skill that drives the rest of my work: noticing what everyone around you has stopped noticing. Different cultures hide different things in plain sight. Walking 10km a day through unfamiliar cities is how I keep that lens calibrated.
The name GenZen started as a nickname. Someone close to me years ago described my style as "gentleman zen." It stuck because it was accurate. I care deeply about how things are made, how they feel, and whether the craft is honest.
That extends to everything. The systems I design, the tools I build, the way I communicate. Simple yet significant. Craft over convenience. If something exists, it should be made well or not at all.
A Generalized Specialist builds deep expertise in a central domain while pulling knowledge from everywhere else. That cross-pollination is what lets me spot connections others miss and build solutions that wouldn't emerge from any single discipline.
Counter-exploitation, agentic system design, open-source product development. These don't belong together on paper. But autonomy doesn't live inside one field. Restoring it requires someone willing to work across all of them. Every initiative I run is an autonomy initiative. The breadth is what makes that possible.
GenZen
I founded GenZen in 2016. Every initiative under it is an autonomy initiative.
The core practice is counter-exploitation. When trusted relationships, business structures, or family systems get weaponized against the people they're supposed to protect, GenZen maps how control was established and engineers its reversal. We've extracted people from cults, guided executives through federal investigations, identified million-dollar fraud before it closed, and restored family systems shattered by coercive control.
The work is getting people free.
Sogo
Your productivity data lives on someone else's server, in someone else's format. You pay monthly rent to access your own work.
Sogo is a VS Code extension I co-developed that brings structured databases into the editor. Tables, kanban boards, calendars, galleries. Each database saves as a file on your filesystem. Any AI agent already running in VS Code reads and writes those files directly. No API. No account. No cloud dependency.
Open source. Local first. Your data stays yours.
AI Partnership Design
Most people use AI like a search engine with manners. Open a chat, explain your business from scratch, get a decent answer, close the tab. Next morning, start all over again. And again.
GenZen runs on an agentic-centric system I built over three years. Instead of bolting AI onto a dozen apps that don't talk to each other, I designed our operations so AI works as a native partner with full context. One environment. Our data on our filesystem. An AI that knows the business because it lives inside it. I published the methodology as the AI COO Framework.
Now I help other founders build the same thing for their businesses.
Your tools should conform to your work. Not the other way around.
The AI COO Framework
Your AI could be a real partner. It just needs the right setup. Seven steps to an AI that actually operates, developed over 3+ years of real practice.
Read →The Case for the Generalized Specialist
Why the most important solutions come from people who refuse to stay in one lane.
Read →Since 2017, I've been slow-traveling across 19 countries so far, absorbing cultural perspectives and observing life through the lens of the perpetual foreigner.
Developing the A.I. powered C.O.O.
Learning and testing A.I. assisted coding — discovering what's now possible to build when coding is no longer the barrier.