Rebuilding Trust In Yourself After A Business Implosion
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David Wood opens by describing the moment his company came apart in public: on May 30th, 2017, he appeared on Facebook, as he puts it, “all drugged out, having clawed the skin off of my face, rubbing the lip and all over my face.” He says he cannot even remember what he told people that day, only that it was bad. He had taken what he believed were medicinal plants, but someone inside the company had slipped crystal meth into them, and he lost control on camera in front of everyone who had ever followed him.
From flyers in Walmart to hundreds of millions in sales
Before any of that, Wood had been a network marketer walking through shopping malls, Safeway, and Walmart, passing out flyers and asking strangers for their phone numbers. In 2009 he learned attraction marketing, the practice of making people come to you instead of chasing them. He describes the effect bluntly: people would show up “with their credit card in hand” and “literally begging” to buy from him, comparing it to a dog drooling over a piece of steak.
The results were fast. His second year online he made about half a million dollars. In year three he started Empower Network, which did about 35 million dollars in sales its first year, then around 70 million the next, and eventually more than 200 million. He says he helped people who are now recognized as some of the biggest names in the industry get their start working with him, building teams of up to half a million people and speaking on stages around the world.
Then, in his words, the company “kind of fizzled out” and stopped growing no matter what they tried, before it shrank and finally imploded with the Facebook incident.
Losing everyone except two people
What followed the public breakdown was the loss of nearly everyone in his life. He says that with the exception of two people, everyone he considered a best friend cut contact with him, including the friend he grew up with. He lost his family. He had believed in network marketing as a model where a team locks arms for life, fighting together in the trenches, and when that turned out not to be true for him, it broke something in how he saw the whole industry.
“When I kind of woke up to that and I discovered that, that kind of broke the model that I had of how the world is supposed to be… And when that turned out to not be true, I kind of started to see the network marketing message as a delusion of some kind. And I still think it is, actually.”
The two people who stayed were James Hudson, someone he had worked with since James was twelve, and Darren Little, a friend from working online who kept calling and telling him “I believe in you, bro” even when Wood was going off about things Darren had no interest in.
The deeper loss, he says, was his son Gabriel. Wood was in the hospital room when Gabriel was born and was the first person to hold him into the sunlight. Since the breakup with Gabriel’s mother, Priscilla, he says he has fought and fought to see his son and been cut off, with no protection from courts, country, or family. He says this loss did more damage to his motivation than anything else that happened.
Cancer, six hours of reading a day, and not knowing what the lesson is
About a month before recording this, one of his testicles started hurting for no reason. A doctor told him he had probably just bumped it. Two weeks later, still hurting, he went to the emergency room in Costa Rica, where he lives, and an ultrasound found testicular cancer, the more dangerous carcinoma type. He had surgery about three weeks before this recording and expects to need a round of chemotherapy. He says he caught it before it spread because he went to the doctor the moment he had symptoms, and that while he was sitting with the diagnosis, the only thing on his mind was his son.
Since around April of that year, Wood has been reading roughly six hours a day, sometimes ten, at a pace of 350 to 500 words a minute, working through about 160 books cover to cover in six or seven months. Among the ones on his desk when he recorded this were Radhanath Swami’s Journey Home, the last volume of The Lord of the Rings, and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. He says he plans to keep this up and get through roughly 250 books a year going forward.
He is direct about not having resolved what any of it means:
“I don’t know the purpose or the reason of why I’ve been through some of the stuff that I’ve been through. I don’t know what the learnings are for a lot of it… What do you learn from somebody you consider to be one of your best friends trying to kill you? What do you learn from people you care about sabotaging your company? What do you learn from your family leaving you and taking your kids away, and never telling you why?”
What he says he does know is that a person can bounce back from anything, and that he has personally experienced stepping into a kind of power he didn’t know was possible.
The caterpillar that cannot be let out of the cocoon
Wood closes with an image he says is about himself: a butterfly struggling inside a cocoon. He points out that if you try to help a butterfly out of the cocoon early, it will never be able to fly, because the strength it needs comes from the struggle itself, from beating its wings against the sides when it feels like it is going to die. He calls this “the transformation metaphor” for what people go through when they become something better than they were.
He says he now carries new labels alongside the old ones: cancer survivor, attempted murder survivor, sabotage survivor, and, in his words, “more than anything, survivor, driver.” He describes looking at the current marketplace and concluding that none of what other people are building compares to what he already built once, which leaves him with what he calls his own Goliath, needing to outdo the shadow he cast for himself. He mentions his brother Aki once telling him, “Dude, you cast a pretty big shadow, Dave,” and says he now has to fight through that shadow himself. He does not name a new project yet, only that he intends to build one, and to keep reading, and to keep talking, in whatever form this channel or the next one takes.
Written up from the original recording. The full transcript is below.
Read the full transcript (45 min talk, 7,691 words)
Hey, what's going on? This is Dave Wood. I wanted to do a video and say hello. I probably was just gonna put this video on YouTube. I have not been, you know, putting out content regularly, but I intend on doing a little bit more of it at one point or another in the future as I begin to work on new projects that, of course, are going to be strategically designed in order to be able to help a lot of people to make a lot of money. If you're watching this video, I want you to listen to the sound of my voice.
I want you to hear me. And, of course, if you're on the channel, I want you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. I don't even know if I'm gonna build this channel out or another one, to be honest with you. I'm kind of like all over the place with it. But a little bit about me. Those of you that don't know who I am.
So I want to tell a little bit about my story. Then I want to talk about what I've been doing for the last, I don't know, year. I guess. I could go a lot longer than a year, just because of how long it's been since I put a video on here. But my name is Dave Wood and, you know, I originally, I started marketing on the internet about 2009 after a very long time of struggling in the network marketing industry where I used to walk around in shopping malls, Safeway, Walmart, things like this. I used to pass out flyers, ask people for their phone numbers, say, hey, you look like a sharp person, and stuff like this.
Well, in 2009, I ran into the principles of attraction marketing. And what happened was, is I started to learn how to make people come to me who were looking for what it is that I was selling. So rather than me going to them, they were coming to me. Instead of chasing them, essentially, I learned how to make people chase me. And it made this massive difference for me when I figured out, like, you can just get people to just come to you. And what they say in the sales videos is really true.
Like, if you know what you're doing, you can have people come to you. And when they come to you, they have their credit card in hand, and, you know, they're literally begging to buy from you. They're like, please, can I please buy from you, please? They're begging. They're begging for it. They're literally begging for it.
It's no different than the way that a dog drools, you know, after a little steak bite or something like that. Like, you, they're sitting there, and they're drooling. They're saying, please, give it to me. And that's how people are, but they're wanting to give you their credit cards. And so, anyway, I learned how to do traction marketing, you know, and hope you can hear the humor in my voice. Anyway, I really started to succeed, and then I started to make a lot of money.
And my second year online, I think I made about a half million dollars. And then year number three online, I started my own company called Empower Network. Empower Network, our first year, I think, we did about 35 million in sales, and then the next year we did, you know, 70 or something like that. And we ended up doing over 200. And I helped a lot of people make a lot of money. Like, I helped, like, legends.
Like, a lot of people that, you know, you see on the internet that have really big companies, they got their start working with me. A lot of biggest ones. And then, of course, you know, the company kind of, like, fizzled out a little bit and got to a point where it, you know, I couldn't grow it. Like, no matter what we did, it wouldn't grow. And then it started to shrink. And then what happened was it imploded on, I still remember, it was like something like in May, May 30th, 2000 and, you know, 2017.
But it didn't just implode. I mean, what happened was I appeared on Facebook all drugged out, having clawed the skin off of my face, rubbing the lip and all over my face. And, you know, I can't even remember what I said to people, but it was, it was pretty bad. It was bad. And what had happened was I'd actually been drugged. So I was taking drugs, but I was taking something that wouldn't have done that.
I was taking, you know, medicinal plants. And then there had been somebody in the company that had had slipped a whole bunch of crystal meth in it. And, you know, I essentially just lost it. I lost it. But in losing it, I also lost my business. I lost my company.
And the way that that happened, I had, you know, basically all my best friends, the people that I thought were my best friends, except for two people, cut contact with me. And so this included, like, my best friend I grew up with, cut contact with me. Like, he just wouldn't even talk to me anymore. Friends that I knew when I was a kid, they cut contact with me. Lost my family, you know. And there's more to it than what I'm saying in this video, because this is obviously a very short version of the story.
But, you know, I've battled with this for quite a long time because, you know, I've talked to a lot of people about this. Psychologists, I went to, you know, help groups and stuff like this. And I tell them the story and I tell them exactly what happened, which is a much longer version of it. And, you know, the responses range from, well, that's fucking crazy, to people saying, you know, that really wasn't your fault. And me, of course, you know, taking the blame for it. But basically, you know, I lost everything important to me.
And the thing that I, you know, so you got to keep in mind, you know, if you go from zero, you know, being a van man, homeless van man to making, you know, 100,000 year, 200,000 year, 500,000 year, then all of a sudden you're making millions of dollars a year. And then you're on top of the world. And everybody listens to you like, you know, you're Jesus or something like that, you know, following you around videos and tape recorders. And then it goes from that to like where, like your best friends won't even return your phone call, you know, it takes a little bit of a number on you. And so it's taken me a little bit to get back. And the reason for that is I've not been motivated, you know, I've been hurt.
And I can't express that to you. And the reason is, you know, when I was doing network marketing, let me explain it like this. I don't even know if this channel is going to be about network marketing. I don't know if I'm going to talk about network marketing. I don't know if I'm going to do it. I might do it a little bit.
I fell in love with this idea that you build a team and that team sticks with you for the rest of your life. And you know, you you go lock arms, you fight the forces of evil, you're fighting in the trenches together. You know, you build something incredible together. And, you know, I did that. And I did it at a level that very few people have done it where, you know, I had teams of, you know, half million people speaking on the stage all over the world. And they didn't stick with me forever.
And, you know, they actually weren't even a lot of them turning out to be real friends at all. So, you know, when I when I kind of woke up to that and I discovered that, I that kind of broke the model that I had of how the world is supposed to be, right? Like, hey, I thought we were going to do something for the rest of our lives, you know? Isn't that why we were doing this? It's why I was doing it. And when that turned out to not be true, I kind of started to see the network marketing message as, you know, it's a delusion of some kind.
And I still think it is, actually. But I still, you know, might build something in it. But I started to see it as a delusion, you know, to where we're preaching something as a dream that doesn't really happen, you know? And I think it's really important that we're authentic with, you know, ourselves and who we are. And that if we're saying something, it's because we mean it at least. And if I can't mean something, then I probably am just not going to say it unless there's a slip up or something like that.
I mean, I'm perfect for any stretch of the imagination. And overall, the hardest thing for me to have to learn to get through was learning how to believe in myself again, learning how to clean up the mess that had happened inside. And the biggest thing that was the hardest thing for me, truth be told, was losing my family. My family broke apart, and I just always thought we'd get back together. And I was waiting for them. And I mean, I don't think that's going to happen necessarily, but it hasn't happened to this point.
And that just shattered my soul and, you know, my strength to do the kind of things I used to do. And if you don't know me, you don't know what I'm talking about. But if you do know me, you do know what I'm talking about, where like, I can be quite the hoss with certain kinds of things. I mean, I really know how to build big companies. And just my motivation for doing that is just gone, you know, because my motivation was my son. I never get to see my son.
And I'm trying to see him. And I've been trying and fighting and trying and fighting and trying and fighting. And then having to fight through that with that hurt and then having to fight through trying to figure things out again. And I'll tell you something. Losing everything and having everything taken away from you after essentially you've made it. And then in that time when I was coming back, there's only two people that stuck by my side.
Only two. Everybody else bailed on me. And those two people were James Hudson and Darren Little. James is a guy I've been working with since he was 12. And then Darren is a friend of mine that I developed essentially working online. And he just, you know, Darren just kept calling me and listening to my, listening to me go off on things that he wasn't interested in.
And he would just keep talking to me and keep talking to me and keep talking to me and just kept saying, Hey, I believe in you, bro. And same thing with my friend James, you know. That was it. Two people, you know. So I don't know what I'm gonna do with this channel. I don't know what I'm gonna do with these videos.
I've thought about building up a YouTube channel. I don't know if I really want to bother doing it, to be honest. But at some point coming up here soon, I'm at least gonna build another company. I don't know that I'm gonna build another company that's at all in any way that was like in Power Network was. But I'm gonna do something or a series of things. So I wanted to put something out and talk about it and also maybe perhaps be a little bit authentic.
One of the things I've struggled with over the last few years in particular has just been asking the question like, how do I even be authentic anymore? Right? How do I even do it? And somebody would say like, you know, well just, you know, tell people, you know, be raw. It's like, well, you know, most people that are gonna relate with me, you know, have never done anything remotely like what I did and they've never kind of imploded in the way that I did. So how can I even connect to them?
You know, my story makes no sense to them anymore. You know, I used to have a story that actually made quite a lot of sense. And now it's like, yeah, I used to have this very cute story. It was like I lived in a van. I was married to this very pretty girl named Ashley. Then of course Ashley and I broke apart.
And then I was with a girl named Priscilla, the mother of my son, and, you know, she would always leave me and abandon me and take my kid away, you know. And I met other guys that have gone through, you know, things like that. I've looked up online. I'm like, what the hell is even going on? Like, why does somebody even do this? And I don't want to say anything obviously bad about her, you know, because I've really worked hard on letting my pain go, but it's still there obviously because I need to hold my boy and I can't and she just, you know, I've tried everything.
And so it's like, how I even be authentic and really tell people my story anymore, you know, because I don't really think my story is awesome anymore. So I guess maybe I'm starting this channel or putting this video up there with the intention on building a new story that's awesome. Because one thing that I believe is I believe that we build, essentially, I think we, I believe that we build our own story. I believe that we create our own story through a combination of our words, the value that we put out or lack of value, the emotions that we hold on the inside that enter the kind of the energy, think about like the overall humanoid energetic matrix that we have, right? That we create our own story through particularly our words, but it's really the energy, the alignment that we have between our heart and our mind and our words. So it's like I need to build a new story and I don't know what story to build because I have to learn to care about something again.
I care about people, you know. I care about people. I care about my son. I love my son. You know, I loved his mom. And, you know, but I really love my son, you know, Gabriel.
So I mean, I don't even know like what to do, you know, like how do you be a dad when, you know, when you can't even communicate with the son that you love even though you try and you keep getting cut off and and how do you even do that and when the when the when the country won't protect you and the courts won't protect you and nobody in the family will help. How do you, how do you, how do you even be, how do you be a dad? I don't even know. I'm trying to figure it out, right? Like one of the things I've been doing so the last year in particular was around April I decided I'm gonna read from now on. I'm gonna read six hours a day.
And yeah, you're like six hours a day. That's a lot. Sometimes I do like ten, but it's a lot, right? It's a lot of reading. I've never done that much reading ever in my life. I've always read but I've never read like this, you know.
I've gone through since maybe April this year to now so this is what like six, seven months. Probably about 160 books from cover to cover and I read them all the way through like, you know, I'd show you, I mean the ones I read last, you know, this month already but if I stand up I'm only in my underwear so I don't know that that'll work out but I'll show you the ones I'm reading right now but I might, the light might adjust because I've just got this light sitting over here. Hold on a second. Like right now I'm reading this. It's called Journey Home. This is a book about, really about spiritual awakening, you know, because I found spiritual awakening and then I felt like I lost it.
Like I lost connection with it and I got it all tangled up in religion, which I don't know that that's supposed to happen. It's like the reverse almost. I'm reading this. This is another one I'm reading is the, you know, The Lord of the Rings. This is the last one in the series and I'm reading this right now as well. Steve Jobs.
I'll finish actually all these probably by, you know, in the next four or five days I'll finish all these. Actually, particularly out of the ones I'm reading right now, I really like these two. Journey Home. This is by Radhannath Swami. I keep forgetting his name and then this is, of course, by Walter Isaacson about Steve Jobs. I might do book reviews.
I don't know. I'm really getting a tremendous amount out of all these books that I'm reading. I'll tell you that. I'm getting a tremendous amount out of it where it kind of rebuilt like my thinking, I guess, about life doing this. And I just really have started it. I read about 160 books but I'm gonna keep doing it so probably every year I'll probably end up going through about 250 and I'll keep doing that for some time.
If I get super busy maybe I'm gonna have to tone it down if I'm building a big company and it requires a lot of work or something like that. And I'm reading some other stuff about Bitcoin and whatever as well. Let me put this light back up here so I like it better over there. But in any case, like, one thing that I do want to do again is like, hold on a second here, I want to, like, I want to build a team and I want to build a team that is like the greatest team that has ever existed. I don't know that I particularly want to do that in network marketing. I might.
That's what I know how to do. But I want to build like the greatest team that has ever existed. And I can. I know that I can. I know that I have the ability. And that involves, of course, building a lot of people up and helping a lot of people.
And it probably is not going to start whatever I start with is probably not going to be the greatest thing that ever exists. I'll probably start with something that'll, you know, kind of go and then I'll do something that'll be a little bit bigger and then I'll do something a little bit bigger and maybe we'll flop a few times along the way because that's what happens. But I want to build the greatest team that's ever existed. It helped people just really transform, you know, lift up, wake, become, you know, what they're really meant to be and who they're really meant to be. So another thing that just happened to me, right, so about a month ago, right, this is going to be just getting raw and personal here. It's about a month ago one of my testicles starts hurting, right, and there's no reason for it, right, like I didn't do anything that wasn't normal.
And I was like, why is my testicle hurting? So I went to a doctor and I was like, like, what's going on? And he's like, oh, you just bumped it. I'm like, yeah, I normally don't have in my day-to-day operations, you know, like a testicle that's hurting for several days, you know what I mean? If it gets kicked really hard or something, maybe, you know, if I'm doing martial arts, but you know, that's not actually quite so normal. Anyways, it'd be fine.
So I ignored it and then two weeks later feels the same. So I go to the emergency room down in Cairn, Costa Rica. I live in Costa Rica and they do an ultrasound and it turns out I had testicular cancer. So I had to get, you know, true story, this just happened, right. So first of all, I just I stopped eating. I started fast because I'm like, well, you know, I'm gonna, you know, fasting can retard tumor growth or whatever.
So I start fasting and well, I asked a whole bunch of like, you know, second opinions and stuff like this and basically they ended up doing a surgery and removing it. And that was about three weeks ago now. So now I'm about three weeks out of the surgery. Probably next month I'm gonna have to do about one round of chemotherapy. So I actually don't know where that last video had got cut off, but I think it got cut off with me talking about the testicular cancer. So in any case, I'll be fine.
Highly curable and, you know, I went to the doctor the second I had symptoms so I didn't get a chance to spread around the body, but I had the most dangerous kind, which is some sort of carcinoma type stuff. And, you know, that happened and, you know, the only thing that was important to me when I was going through that is I was sitting there and I was just thinking about my little son, Gabriel, who I love and he loves me. I'm thinking about how awesome of a kid he is and how the only thing that really matters to me as far as in the world that things that I personally, like on a personal level that impact me, are the most important things is like my son being okay and being able to have a good future, right? That's the most important thing. And there's a lot that's connected to that. There's a lot that's tied to that and I don't know how to do that because I don't even know.
I grew up where, you know, your family and your parents are there together and they just stay together all your lives. And then, of course, my first marriage didn't work out, you know, and I'm not gonna get into that. Blessings on her. And then, you know, my son Gabriel, never gonna see him and I love, love, love, love, love, love, love Gabriel. Some of you don't know because you don't know me back in the day, you know, a lot of people they have kids for different reasons. Gabriel wasn't an accident baby.
I had Gabriel because I was really in love with his mom and I wanted a baby. Maybe it wasn't under the total best circumstances there possibly could have been, if any of you know the story, but I really loved his mom and I really wanted a baby. And, you know, eventually she gets pregnant and I was there in the hospital when little Gabriel was born. I was the first one to hold him into the sunlight, you know. So these have been frustrations and things in my life that have happened. And I think eventually you just got to get up to a point where you just say, do you know what, enough of the bullshit, let's just do something great just because, right, just because, just because I want to do something great, just because I want to do something awesome.
You know, that's eventually where I got to when I, when I started in Power Network, you know, which I started, you know, out of my house in Costa Rica, signed the paperwork September 15, 2011, I believe it was, and then, you know, started putting the corporation together, started putting the company together, launched October 31st, and, you know, we built something that filled the world. It wasn't just a marketing thing that I built, that we built, that our teams built. It wasn't just a marketing company. It wasn't just a sales message. It wasn't just something to get rich in. It wasn't just something that made a lot of people money and made a lot of really great leaders from zero, which we did.
Or we were a part of initiating the growth of those leaders, I'd say. Because, you know, with a leader, one thing is when you're a leader, this is just like, I'm just going to give you some heads up on just some stuff to keep in mind. If you're a leader in impacting other people, you always want to treat where you came from, the way you want to be treated later on, because there's going to be a time when people leave you. You know, one of the things I went through for a long time was, I really, and I really struggled with this, is the lack of thankfulness from really people that I personally really helped out a lot to where, when push comes to shove, they owe me. And there's people that owe me. They owe me for their whole name.
There's people out there, a lot of them. And they're not thankful. And when they're even talking about me, because of what happened, they don't even mention my name anymore. They blur me out of photos. It's to an embarrassing, sickening level. They're not thankful.
And I think that it's important to always be thankful from where you come from, and always give credit where credit is due. But I had to get over that, where I had to get to a spot where, no matter what happened, and no matter what happened, no matter what the past happened, and no matter how people treated me, I know who I am. I know what I can create. I know what I'm going to do. I know where I'm going to go. I know who I'm going to help.
And I know what we have the ability to do together. Right? There's a little bit of background noise in the background going on right now. My neighbor is working on a car. So if you hear that, just pay more attention to the sound of my voice. I don't even know if you can hear it.
And this is really the purpose of me putting this video out there. I don't know if this is the right video, and I don't know if this is the right message. Right? Because I don't really have a message. And that's what I'm just telling you. It's something I've struggled with.
I've struggled with this idea of like, what is my story anymore? What is it? Who am I in relation to the marketplace anymore? Right? Like, what does this stuff that happened to me mean? Some of it I might talk about in a little bit more detail later on when I have better answers to those questions.
Because right now, I don't have good answers to some of those questions. I don't know what it means. Right? I don't know the purpose or the reason of why I've been through some of the stuff that I've been through. I don't know what the learnings are for a lot of it. I can't tell you, like, I can't draw out, oh, here's what I learned from X or Y experience.
I don't know. Right? But before, I used to, you know, stand on a whiteboard, I used to, you know, paint out a picture, and I used to be like, well, here's what I learned from this, and here's what I learned from this. And it's like, what do you learn from somebody you consider to be one of your best friends trying to kill you? You know, what do you learn from, this is just part of these stories, right? What do you learn from, you know, people you care about sabotaging your company?
What do you learn from, you know, your family leaving you and taking your kids away, and never telling you why, never explaining, hey, here's why. Never giving you any notice of it, just vanishing. What do you learn from any of this? The answer is I don't know. Right? You could say, well, put better safeguards up.
Always make sure, you know, terms and conditions are laid out very clear in contracts, for example. You could try to put up some sort of like mystical reason, like, you know, you're attracting something from the vibrations of your heart or whatever. But the truth is, I don't know what to learn from any of that stuff. You know, what I do know from it, I know that a person has the ability, the power, to bounce back from anything. I know from the successes that I've created and that I've had and experienced personally that it's possible for a person to step into a kind of power that they didn't know that was possible and to do things that they didn't know were possible. I know that that's the truth.
I mean, I know that's the truth. Right? I know that I'm incredibly resilient. I've learned that. But I knew that before. Really, I wanted to put something out there and just update you.
So, right now I'm in this growth journey, well, this massive growth journey. If you've never done it, reading six hours a day, you finish, I mean, if you read it in normal speed, which I do. I'm not super fast. I can read fast, but you start losing information if you go too fast. So, I read at a pace that's constantly pushing myself, but never to the point where I can't understand what it means, right? So, maybe 350, 400 words a minute, maybe sometimes 500, right?
Which is decently fast, but not super fast. But, in doing this, I get through maybe a book every one to three days, depending on the size of the book. And it is a lot of work to go through that much material if you've never done it before. A lot of work. And in the process, I've learned how to do things I don't know how to do. I've learned how to build better companies.
I've learned how to build better organizations and teams. I've learned how to communicate better than I could in a lot of ways before. And, more than anything, I've gained this tremendous hope that people can transform their situation and they can do something that they just didn't even know was possible. We all go on a journey of ups and downs through life. Stuff happens. Stuff happens that you just never guessed would happen, right?
Stuff happens that you just never thought that would happen. Great stuff happens that you just never thought was even possible. Stuff happens and you're like, well, how did that even happen? And then there's stuff that happens and you wish that it didn't happen, but it did, and you're like, how did that even happen? The same response to very different meanings. I think one of the things I want to do eventually is just, I've got to build my name back up to be great because I've got to vindicate myself.
Both from things that were my fault and things that weren't. For myself. But also, I just think that there's a lot of great things to do in the world, right? So now I guess I can say, and I hope it remains, cancer survivor, attempted murder survivor, sabotage survivor, and more than anything, survivor, driver. And I think that it's time or close time to do something awesome. I just, I don't know, I get the feeling.
If you're watching this, particularly if you know me and if you were around, you know the great things that I have the ability to do. If you were a part of it, you know. And on this journey of reconstructing a better future than I've ever had of a past. Which at this point, I really got to do something. You know what I mean? Because it's like, I got, now I got to like, you know, like my brother, Aki, once.
He said, dude, you cast a pretty big shadow, Dave. And I do, you know. Now I got to, I got to fight through my own shadow. I cast for myself, you know. So I have to do something awesome. And this has been, this has also been somewhat of a battle is because, you know, I've looked out there in the marketplace and I've seen just all the stuff that everyone's doing.
And I don't think any of it is as awesome as the stuff I've already done. I just think, I think zero of it is as awesome. Like none of it is awesome. You know what I mean? Like I've looked out there and I've said, like, all right, what business models are people doing? And I've subscribed to all their lists and looked at all their offers.
And I just think that just like basically all the stuff that is out there sucks compared to what I used to do. Compared to what I've also done. So this is like my own Goliath. My personal Goliath is now surpassing my own shadow I've cast. So I know how my brother used to feel. So this is a video as part of my journey.
And maybe I'll just start putting more authentic videos out there now and figure out how to do it in a way that makes a message that reaches people and is impactful and that people can connect with and the parts of it that can, you can relate with, that people can relate with. You know, I know there's a lot of guys out there, for example, that have been through divorces. I know that there is a lot of people out there that have men and women, and there's women that have been through, there's just many women, there's men that have been through divorces. That's how that works. And there is, there is a lot of people out there that have lost everything at one point or another. You know, there's people out there, they've been canceled.
You know, they've had people they care about run, you know. They've, there's a lot of people that have made it and lost everything and more than anything. I think everybody loves a good comeback story. I think the comeback, the art of the comeback, it's like the art of the deal. It's the magic of connecting things together in a way that is beautiful. The magic of making a new story out of a bunch of situations that were just doing nothing.
It's like turning life into its own metaphors, the beautiful act of, you know, a caterpillar. I actually got, the other day I got bit by a caterpillar or something. I was worried it was poisonous, but it didn't even go through my skin, so I wasn't really that worried. But like I was, I itched on my stomach and it was like, ugh, I had a caterpillar on it. I was standing underneath something like a tree and a caterpillar had fallen on me. You know, Costa Rica, I'm like, I'm like, man, my stomach is like, I'm like this, I'm like, ugh!
It's like a black, you know, like spiky caterpillar, you know, caterpillar on this thing. But like, you know, the caterpillar, you know, climbs inside a cocoon and it goes inside the cocoon and like, you know, it rests for a while and then turns into a butterfly after it's there for a while. And then it tries to get out and it can't and it really starts freaking out because it's just taking all this time growing inside this cocoon from this very ugly creature to a very beautiful creature and this is what I see happen with people is that people turn from something a lot of times that is ugly, right, in their past before they make a change, before they make a decision that they are going to change, that they're changing now, that they're making a decision right now to change. They, they, they were something in an ugly position. Maybe they even look, maybe they even look a little ugly, right? Or they did something ugly or they feel some sort of ugliness inside, right?
And then that process of getting out of the cocoon when you know you've turned into something beautiful is not very easy. It takes a lot of work and actually if you ever see a butterfly struggling to get out of the cocoon, you can't let it out. You see it batting around in there and you can't let it out because if you let it out it will never be able to fly because the strength that it gains to be able to fly, it comes from the struggle. It comes from that ruthless time when it feels like it's going to die, when it can't get out anymore and it's beating its freaking wings against the side of the cocoon and it can't get out anymore. It's, it's, you know, and then boom it cracks through and it breaks out in its beautiful butterfly. That's like the transformation metaphor, the transformation metaphor for what we go through when we're turning into something better that we never knew we could be, right?
And sometimes it takes some pain to get out of the cocoon to be the beautiful butterfly that you know you can be. In case you didn't realize this, this metaphor is about myself because of course I'm a beautiful butterfly. This is a metaphor about struggle, it's a metaphor about change, it's a metaphor about transformation, right? Because anybody that says you can't do something great and you can't become something different than what you are, they just never seen a caterpillar turn into a butterfly before because the truth is that you can transform, you can change into something new, something beautiful, somebody new, somebody beautiful, somebody that you know that you're destined to become. I saw people go from nobodies to heroes, I saw people go from poor to rich, I saw people go from not confident to confident, marrying the woman of their dreams and actually some of them, they're even still married if you can imagine that. You know, I've seen people do amazing great things before.
So that's, I guess, if anything what I want to do is I want to help people be great. Because you can be great, you have the ability to be great, you have the power to be great, you have the power to make a lot of money. You could go out there and make way more money than you've ever made. Actually just the world is so easy to make money now. It's never been easier to get traffic in any other time in history than it is right now. It's never been easier to take a product to the marketplace.
You've never had better systems of technology that you didn't have to pay a lot of money for and as a result you probably have never had this much competition even. But you really, really, really have to break out to do something great, to do something transformational, to create something new, to go somewhere that's just enchanting to be a part of, enchanting to go to, to step into a new vision that you never knew was possible for you until maybe even right now when you're realizing suddenly on the inside that you have the power to become, you do have the power to become great. Be careful out there. The world is changing fast. New things are coming that have never been here before. I've got to turn on the third part of the video, 20 minute sections of video and then I've got to edit this together and put it up.
Go do some yoga, right? The world's changing fast right now, I'll tell you that. Some of the big things that are changing and some of the stuff I'm learning more about right now and I'm always interested in learning about big changes that are happening in the world. Technology is changing lightning fast. You know this year we had chat GPT roll out, changed the dynamic between humans and machines in a way that really nothing is done since the internet came out. Like, you know, the way artificial intelligence is going to change the future right now is so unbelievably massive.
The question is, we all have got to be asking in 10 years, what are we all going to even be doing for a living? I actually don't even have answers for you because I don't know at all what the world is going to be like in 10 years. But what's coming is such a radical change and departure from what is normal to us now, the one thing we all have got to be good at is adapting and learning new things. Because probably in 10 years we're not going to be doing the same thing that we're doing right now, most likely. Technology is changing really fast. The world is in a tense place right now.
Got two wars going on, each one of which has the ability to flip into a world war and let's all pray that it doesn't, but it can. Both, you know, Ukraine and what's happening, you know, the Gaza Strip. And we got wars going on. We got some economic chaos. We've had some inflation that started to get out of control and right now seems to be kind of reigning back in and getting back under control but that control might last a long time, might be temporary. You know, the cost of living is just shot through the roof everywhere in the world.
The price of groceries has gone up. The world is changing fast, right? In a lot of different ways and the most important way I think that it's changing is actually technology. Technology is changing so radically fast. We're sitting right at the cusp of another digital currency boom right now. There's just a lot of opportunities and a lot of change happening and remember every time that there's change, what change actually means is money changing hands, right?
Any time there's change, money changes hands. So some big things happening and we got to figure out what to do about it. We got to figure out something that we're going to do together. We got to figure out something that we're going to build together. Something that we're going to do that we've never done. So that's what this video is all about.
Maybe me putting a declaration out into the world that it's time to do something great. I'm a little bit sick right now actually too. Almost better though. It's time to do something great. It's time to build something together. It's time to become something more than we are.
It's time to step out from our comfort zone to our uncomfortable zone. Because that's where all the magic happens. That's where all the growth happens. That's where all the truth is, is right outside the comfort zone. Right beyond the pain. Right beyond the discomfort, right?
Pushing through the pains where all the transformation is already. It's through the pain. It's facing the terribleness of it. Taking a look at what happened to you and the shit that you've been through that you don't want to talk about. Rather than pulling out another 40 in the night or drinking yourself to drunken sleep in the night to hide yourself from the pain. Maybe looking yourself in the eyes again and saying enough's enough.
Realizing what's there and looking at it. Looking at it for the horribleness of it. For the truth of it. Getting down to the center of it and deciding to change it. Deciding to do something different. Deciding to be your best self.
Deciding to have your best day ever. Your best year ever. Your best month ever. Your best week ever. Maybe not in that order. Right?
Deciding that this is your year to win. That this is your year to change. That it's time to do something new. It's time to do something beautiful. That it's time to lock arms together. To fight before we do something incredible that we've never done before.
So anyway, thanks for watching this video. What was it about? I still don't know. But stay tuned and at some point, sometime here soon I will be working on some cool projects that I'll let you know about. Or some intermediate projects because I figure why not build something awesome. Hope that helps you.
Bye bye.