I lost a million dollars: and it was entirely my fault.
It wasn’t bad luck.
It wasn’t an unfair twist.
It wasn’t expected.
It was one rule. One sentence. And the way I interpreted it.
Let me explain.
Dominating 99 to Beat
I recently competed on FOX’s new game show 99 to Beat, hosted by Erin Andrews and Ken Jeong. If you haven’t seen it yet, the premise is simple: 100 contestants start, and in each round one person is eliminated. Last one standing wins $1,000,000.
Not to put it lightly… this show was built for me.
From the start, I was racking up wins. Ken even called it out on air:
“The David train… finishing first.”
“Clever strategies.”
“Meticulous.”
“The contestant to beat.”
Of the 33 challenges, I finished first 12 times (41% of the time) more than anyone else by far.
And that doesn’t even include a bunch of top-three finishes in challenges like:
Melting the giant block of ice to blow the whistle
Stuff duck-tape in the lunchbox
Rope spinning with a partner
Catching the potato on a fork
I had so many first-place finishes they literally cut most of them out of the show: balloon shooting, cup-moving with a balloon, the boxing-glove picture challenge, moving. Too many wins to fit into the edit.
Even the team challenges; the ones I assumed would send me home; kept going my way. I finished no worse than 2nd place in any group competition. Bucket brigades, domino lines, blowing boats across water, navigating balls through giant mazes… we crushed them.
And yeah, my hands were shaky in the precision rounds like nut stacking, nail balancing, and building a house of cards, but I still had over an hour of combined time left. I was never close to elimination.
I genuinely felt like I had a real shot to win the whole thing.
And then came the pencil challenge.
The Rule That Ruined Everything
The very first thing we were told and repeated three times:
“The pencil must turn a minimum of 180 degrees.”
Those 9 words cost me a million dollars.
Because there’s something that made me a perfect fit, but also cost me this challenge:
I hold the most Guinness World Records in the world.
And Guinness has very strict rules.
When there’s a rule…
I follow it.
To. The. Letter.
Over the years I’ve done 400+ record attempts and been disqualified dozens of times for microscopic technicalities. So when I heard “rotate a minimum of 180 degrees,” my brain instantly shifted into Guinness-mode.
And mathematically, a true 180° rotation means the pencil’s tip must be pointing away from the cup when it bounces. That rotation requirement makes the shot basically impossible, something I have now confirmed as the best pencil-bouncer in the world. See video of me claiming the Guinness World Records title for the fastest time to bounce 10 pencils into 10 cups in under 7.
It is 100 times easier to make the shot if the pencil is already pointed at the cup. All the people who got it quick had their pencils pointed to the cup and the bottom 3 were all pointing them away.
But I wasn’t thinking about “easy.”
I was thinking about the rules.
The Twist
Here’s the kicker:
That rule wasn’t meant to be enforced.
It wasn’t a Guinness rule.
It wasn’t being measured.
No one was penalized for not following it (but you certainly were if you did!).
On a live show with 29 people bouncing pencils at once, there’s no world where anyone is tracking 180° rotations. The real requirement was simple:
Bounce the pencil off the eraser. Tip lands in the cup.
Everyone else played the game.
I followed the rule.
And it cost me one. million. dollars.
That’s on me. I messed up.
But I Don’t Regret Competing
Filming 99 to Beat was one of the coolest experiences of my life. Sharing it with my best friend Jonathan was unreal, and I made awesome new friends like Peter, Danni, Cole, Anna, Jen and so many more.
It was my third time competing for a million-dollar prize… but the first time I genuinely felt like I could win it.
Losing hurts.
But failure doesn’t define you:
how you respond to it does.
I don’t know what’s next, but I’ll keep working, keep training, and be ready for whatever opportunity comes my way.
And who knows…
Maybe the fourth time’s the charm.