Where to begin?

Dave's bio could be a blog all its own.  

Born and raised in New York City, he was a prep school brat turned prep school dropout.  Complicated family circumstances forced him along the road less taken, then the road not taken, and then finally to machete his way through the wilderness leaving trails along roads no one would take in his considerable intellectual, spiritual, and experiental wake.  

As a Rock & Roll drummer turned prodigy classical musician, he enjoyed an outside perspective in almost every field he has pursued.  He won concerto and composition competitions at Juilliard before moving on to the even more prestigious (but less well known) Curtis Institute of Music.

He quickly lost faith with the prospects of a career in the pre-fab classical music "industry," and eventually worked out all of free market economics theory from his experience in the dead and deadening field.  But not before he built his own symphony orchestra, based on the musical and spiritual values he imbibed as a young man. He produced and conducted 5 seasons of concert tours in the Northeast US (dropping out of college along the way) before making the painful decision to either burn out and join the 27 club or detach for a while to regain his health.  

He moved to the Bay Area to start this journey which took far more detours than the young, ambitious artiste could have imagined.  Through numerous spiritual pursuits, he eventually studied economics more formally and validated all of his experiences in the arts - why there was no money, no innovation, everyone was miserable, and the concerts all sucked.  He eventually came to feel that Economics was the crown jewel in all of his spiritual studies AND that it more perfectly encapslulated the many spiritual truths he had learned as a reclusive mystic than the more ephemeral subjects did themselves.  

After his extended foray into said reclusiveness, he forced himself "out into the world" of rural Colorado to learn "Amurican" ways and teach himself how to fly airplanes, ironically the most "grounding" pursuit he had taken in years.  

During his time living in the woods, he was informally "adopted" by his redneck flight instructor and his wife, who taught him the "ways" of a culture that was as foreign to him as a New Yorker as Timbuktu or Madagsascar.  

Through their surrogacy, he began to appreicate schools of thought that he had been raised not only to reject but to completely ignore and dismiss without a second thought.  Eventually he discovered that the lifestyle and values were so compelling that his coastal cultures required such a drastic pre-dismissal lest any earnest inquisitor might not just find them justifiable but outright superior to their own.  

Dave spent the next several years attempting to bridge the gap between his "native" coastal cultures and the exotic interior cultures of red state America.  

But living in Colorado was not without its problems.  Dehydrated and Bar-B-Q obsessed, Dave got fatter and unhealthier than he ever had before, and no amount of working out seemed to make any difference.  

As luck would have it, he returned to New York City to be greeted by an old friend who had had tremendous health turnarounds by drinking "Green Juice."  Dave jumped into the program immediately and eventually adopted a full raw food and detox regiment that lost him over 100 lbs in a year and made him a natural health convert.  He spent over 7 years as a mostly raw, alkaline, detox practitioner and experienced a health and rejuvenation resurgence that supports his life to this day.  

But after a while, he got restless with what was then the "freak show" contingent of the health world who were the primary citizens of the raw vegan tribe.  Wanting a larger pool and to engage the world more, he switched to pizza and beer and within a few months was back in "the world," heavier, but back to normal.

During his fasting years, Dave digested thousands of political and economics articles and posts that cemented his expansive world view of the power of economics and commerce to transform the world for the better.

In the end, he decided to do something about it and start a company.  He sold his home in New York City, bought 4 RVs (and put them into three different states), and began developing Coco Jack, a tool for opening coconuts and removing the meat while living full time on the road and visiting all of the lower 48 states.

Coco Jack was a blow up and runaway success.  In fact it ran away so fast that he could never keep up with demand, even before a Shark Tank "victory" accelerated its growth even further.

After years of growth and struggle with supply, an embezzlement from his manufacturer tipped him over the edge.  Dave  spent a year pushing to recover with a long sprint, trying - and failing - to raise capital in, despite his grueling youth, what he describes as the worst experience of his life.  

At the same time as he experienced this professional crisis, Dave began getting sicker and sicker and weaker and weaker.  It wasn't until years later that he realized that a leak in his Airstream had created a mold situation that was slowly killing him.

He battled with mental fog, nearing on insanity, debilitating weakness, and pain.  He was barely able to sit up in bed or walk, much less work consistently, and eventually he lost nearly everything except the last corner of his mind.  For nearly a year subsisted off of handouts and occasionally food donated by strangers or that he found on the street.  

Fortunately, Covid came along and paid him to stay home.  He made a brief pivot into the horrifyingly corrupt and scandalous PPE game (masks & gloves), where he worked alongside massive Hedge Funds, Private Equity Groups, and OIl & Gas moguls to participate in a multi trillion dollar shadow economy that took his financial education to a whole new level and the very last of his economic innocence.  

In the end, these many experiences challenged Dave's philosophical tent poles and blew the roof off of the tent itself as he experienced first hand just how far away real business life was from theoretical econmoics life.  While still anchored spiritually in the former, he now lives squarly and unapologetically in the latter and has brought his vast experince to bear in helping younger, doe-eyed founders make their way through the muck of business that might otherwise drown them.  

In 2022, after a brief stint launching a cargo airline, Dave sold everything and moved to Bali to complete his health recovery in the jungle, gorging himself on fruits and coconuts, which slowly returned him to the realm of the living that for so long he feared he woud never see again.  

Today he is building multiple businesses, advising others, and guiding others through the fundraising process that had nearly killed him just a few years earlier.

As a lifetime writer and storyteller, Dave decided to launch Scatter to finally provide an outlet for his thoughts and adventures that until now had only been shared by a handful of Facebook buddies (to wild, but limited acclaim).  

Along with Roger and Ramón, Dave has pieced together a team of unbelievably deep and expansive thinkers who are yet thoroughly entertainig to read.  All three share a passion to root out the deepest most fundamental elements of human existence and hold them up as beacons to illuminate the paths to our best lives here on earth.

Dave plans to stay in Bali as long as the gods allow him, and he has several new ventures in the pipeline.  But you'll have to stay tuned to read about those. . .

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