My dear friend Pete died on July 1st, 2021, of Stage 4 brain cancer. For the past 12 years, he’d lived in Denmark. A memorial service was held for him on July 8th.

I first met Pete in 2012. He was just finishing up an “epic project” in Bogota, Colombia, as part of the program abroad with Kaospilot students. Thanks to Skype, which only then was becoming more widely utilized by entrepreneurs, Pete and I were able to speak while he was in Bogota and I in Brooklyn.

As we hopped on the call, it turned out that Pete had forgotten his earbuds and couldn’t find them just then. As a result, the entire conversation was held via the chat field. And what did we write about? It was, I later found out, one of Pete’s favorite subjects: how to reform Kaospilots the school by rethinking the curriculum from the ground up.

Pete, a dreamer yes, was more so a schemer. He liked to hatch plots, but even before hatching plots, he liked to see how everything–everything- fit together. Before he was a designer, then, he was a philosopher. It wasn’t enough to synthesize this and that; he wanted to see the whole thing resolved into an elegant and complete form.

Therefore, before he was a designer and a philosopher, he was an artist. Only his canvas was a school, his medium a curriculum, and his ambition to see beautiful souls–that is, resourceful, bright, relevant, and with-it students–arise out of the lost souls that they were when they first arrived three years before.

I’ll miss my dear friend Pete. Psychonaut Terence McKenna once told us to “find the others.” Pete was one of my others, someone I’d found and we’d lost too soon.

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In the next post on Pete, I’d like to speak about what is truest about Pete and that was his love of friendship.