Growing up in Hollywood has informed Zox's art throughout his life. At Van Nuys High School, where he was a surfer and Captain of the Bee Football Team, Zox led a crew who painted hallway-spanning banners advertising school events. He began to realize how powerful imagery could be when his banner portrait of Fidel Castro was censored: The teacher painted a bag over Castro’s cabasa. At San Diego State University, Zox designed his own creativity major that included art, photography, film and writing. Inspired, he painted a replica of a moose from his dictionary on the humanities building and was apprehended in the middle of writing his definition: “It's not only what one paints; where one paints might be more powerful”. Zox met Andy Warhol for the first time at SDSU along with Viva, Nico and Paul Morrissey. Warhol gave Zox telling advice on being an artist—If you love it, do it. If you do it, it’s doable. That adage made art a possible life-path option.