Episode 13. The guest is Dave — ADHDavePicks on YouTube, one third of the Trash to Cash podcast, and a dude I had completely the wrong read on for a long time. The title isn’t bait. I really did have him pegged as the villain of his own podcast and I really was wrong about it. The arc of this episode is me saying that out loud, with him on the other end of the call, and the conversation that came out of it.

The cold open and the apology

[6:07] “I didn’t understand you very well at first, but ever since I came on y’all’s podcast, I pretty much watch all y’all’s podcasts now. And I understand you a lot better than I used to.” I said it almost as soon as we started. Dave plays a heel on Trash to Cash — the loud one, the one who’ll grill Kevin, the one who turns the conversation toward whatever will get the comments going. Watching that from the outside, I had a version of him in my head that wasn’t fair to the actual person. “This dude is really a lot like me,” I told him. He reads Dungeon Crawler Carl. He printed a Carl bookend pushing up his other books. We have, it turns out, a lot of the same wiring.

The 3D printer compound interest

[9:55] Five printers paid for since Black Friday. Dave bought his first Bambu on Black Friday. Since then, the products he’s been making and selling on his Shopify store (DKMKT — Dave’s Kitchen Market, but he tells the reseller crowd it’s Dave’s Crafted Market with a K) have paid for five more printers — P2S’s, P1S’s, and the $1,600 H2S. Ryan and I told him the Shed Flips magnets paid for our two A1’s, which felt small in comparison and exactly right. Dave’s bit: “I’m going to get a 3D printer to make some money — but then you’re just getting money to get more 3D printers and fill them.”

The Pegasus detour

[24:01] A chunk of the back half of hour one is Pegasus Lounge — Dave thinks he has a hero complex (“He says he wants to save people from the evil grip of reselling”). It’s also where Dave laid out his theory of why the reselling community is uniquely brutal in the comments compared to, say, the cooking community. In cooking, you’re there for fun. In reselling, viewers see it as a business; when they don’t like how you do your business they get personally offended in a way cooking viewers never do. The Shed Flips Water Cooler Facebook group hits the same notes most weeks.

Comments off for three weeks

[31:23] Dave turned his YouTube comments off for three weeks last year. Ryan brought up that I’d been messaging him during that stretch, worried about Dave — “I really feel for Dave right now. He’s probably going through it.” I’d been there. I still go three months at a time without looking at my own comments and I check with Ryan first when I do. [33:55] Dave’s reason wasn’t the obvious mean ones — those slid off. It was the no-win loop: people complaining he was 3D printing instead of sourcing for eBay, then calling him an idiot when he went and sourced for eBay. Plus the “fat boy’s at the theme park again” drumbeat about him going to Disney and Universal on his off days. “They’re not going to define my life,” he said. He turned them off, his ad revenue didn’t drop a cent, and he could’ve left them off forever.

The childhood that explains the rest of it

[53:30] Dave told us he had a sibling who was “a difficult child for my parents,” and he had to learn conflict resolution young — managing fights between a parent and a sibling both older than him, by his teens. He told a story about his dad cutting his finger off with a saw in 10th grade, his mom screaming, Dave totally calm, “I’m going to call 911,” picking up the finger and putting it in an ice bag. Ryan said the thing that needed to be said: “That makes sense with how you handle stuff.” It does. The Dave who corners a podcast guest until the conflict is on the table is the same teenager who picked up the finger.

Niched into keto against his will

[1:01:24] Dave’s cooking channel is fantastic and it sits at a particular ceiling because YouTube niched him into keto against his will. One viral keto cottage cheese flatbread reshaped the audience entirely. Now anything non-keto flops at 2,000–3,000 views; keto can pull 100,000–200,000. “They’ve niched me down to the point where I can’t do non-keto videos.” He’s seriously considering launching a second cooking channel — same kitchen, same format, maybe a different color apron — to escape the trap. I told him on the call I think it’s a million-sub channel. Worth filing if you’ve ever wondered whether a viral hit is always the win it looks like.

Burning the integration bridges

[1:13:08] Dave fired his sponsorship agent and stopped doing brand integrations after one company had him reshoot eight cooking shorts from scratch — three days of work, $80–$100 in groceries — because they didn’t like any of them. The kicker: since he stopped, his ad revenue doubled — more than the integration income added on top. He turned down a $2,400 60-second ad the day we recorded.

The Rev Resells $5-a-month gag

[1:24:23] Dave has a running bit on Trash to Cash where he pretends not to know who other resellers are when his cohosts bring them up. This week’s mark was Rev Resells. Rev posted a response video and then sent Dave $5 on Patreon with the message “I’m the guy that is sliding you $5 a month.” Another $5 came through during our recording. The episode that triggered it was a [1:25:43] debate over whether you should lowball at sourcing — Rev said negotiate with good morals, Kevin heard immoral to lowball, and the internet did the rest. Dave’s position once Ryan walked him through it: “I felt inclined in that podcast to fight for the guy out there who does need every last penny.” It’s the most generous version of the lowballer’s case I’ve heard a reseller make.

Closer

[1:38:00] Dave’s sign-off: “Subscribe to whatever crappy channel I’m running.” That’s about right. There’s ADHDavePicks, the cooking channel, Found and Forgotten (old footage with current commentary), and Trash to Cash. Pick the one that fits. I needed to write this post the way I did because I owed it to him on the record — not just on the call. The Dave I had in my head a year ago wasn’t the Dave who showed up to the podcast, and the gap between the two is a useful reminder that watching somebody play a role in their own format is not the same as knowing them.

We’ll see y’all on the next one.

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