Behind the Tragic, Instagram-Perfect Life of an

Ex-Disney Executive
When Dave Hollis quit his plum Disney job to
join his wife Rachel’s self-help empire, the pair
built a business around sharing some of their
darkest feelings on social media. The reality
was even worse.

THE DAY was starting at Dave Hollis’s Texas home when

he opened Instagram and pressed “live.” Dave, who’d been a
top executive at Disney before quitting to become a self-help
influencer, was streaming one of his occasional virtual
coffees from the poolside area he’d branded his “Patio of
Peace.” For his viewers, it was another chance to spend time
with a man they’d seen evolve from a skeptic of wellness to
a proselytizer of living a deeper life. But on this particular
morning in October 2021, fans could see something was off.

Dave had been following in the footsteps of his wife, Rachel

Hollis, the author of the bestselling manifesto Girl, Wash
Your Face. In just three years, she had built a multimillion-dollar business telling women to
embrace their imperfections. Dave eventually embraced that ethos too. He shared his personal
struggles with alcohol and his insecurities and built a following of nearly half a million people.
Together, he and Rachel mined their everyday lives—issues they had as a couple, intimate moments
with their four children—to churn out podcasts, memoirs, coaching sessions, merchandise and
more.

But the rapid success soon took its toll. In the year leading up to that fall morning in 2021, the
couple had announced their divorce, Rachel’s popularity had cratered, and Dave was now
demanding fans buy his second self-help guide.

“I bled into this!” he yelled as he held up the book, Built Through Courage. It was a nautical-
themed collection of stories and advice inspired by a quote tattooed on his right forearm: “A ship in
harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

Presales for the book had been weak and Dave was livid that his followers weren’t buying it.

Then came a voice from someone Dave’s followers knew well: his then-4-year-old daughter, Noah.
Barging into the frame, she sweetly asked if her dad could come make her Mickey Mouse pancakes.
He blew her off, saying he was talking to “our internet friends.” Later, she popped in again.

“Get a life,” he told her, a bad joke that sounded unnecessarily harsh—and certainly not in keeping
with the friendly dad persona he’d cultivated online.

The stream went on for two hours, as the chorus of comments grew sharper: Sign off, his followers
urged him. Go have breakfast with your kids—offline.
Livestream commentators soon swarmed a Hollis-family Reddit group to castigate Dave, naming
the episode “Pancakegate.”

Dave eventually posted an apology. “I don’t recognize the person in the video,” he wrote.

Three months later, he logged off of Instagram and checked into rehab, according to friends. “I am
feeling completely broken from the pressure of this strange public life,” he wrote in a post.

A year later he was dead.

The rise and fall of Dave Hollis offers an unusual glimpse into the pressures of the weirdly intimate
world of social-media influencers, where you are personally the product and everything you do in
your life can be produced into a commercial event.

This story weaves together interviews with friends of Dave’s from childhood, Hollywood and his
time as a self-help influencer. It includes
interviews with former employees and
colleagues. It also draws from the many books,
hours of podcasts and other outlets where Dave
and Rachel publicly shared details about their
lives. Rachel Hollis declined to comment for this
piece.

DAVE HOLLIS GREW UP in Southern California, the son of a contractor and a devoutly
Christian mom. He was top of his class in high school and a DJ at the Pepperdine University radio
station. Hustling in L.A. in his mid-20s, he soon met his wife, Rachel, then a 19-year-old assistant
at Miramax.

Rachel had come to Los Angeles from a small town where her father was a Pentecostal minister,
she would later write. She was so religious that when she discovered the body of her older brother
who had died by suicide, she remembered asking the 911 dispatcher if he was going to hell.

Dave liked taking care of this “small baby rabbit,” he’d later write. They married in 2004.

Dave was the provider, Rachel the attractive but approachable spouse wrangling a bunch of kids.
She tried attending acting school, writing novels and, finally, event planning and self-help. Dave
saw his job as keeping her expectations in check. Once, when she outlined deals that might take her
self-help business to another level, Dave calculated the chance of them happening at 3 percent.

Then, in 2015, Rachel posted a photo of herself on the beach to Facebook. She was laughing at the
camera in an orange-and-blue bikini, showing off “a belly that’s permanently flabby from carrying
three giant babies.”

“They aren’t scars, ladies,” she wrote. “Flaunt that body with pride!”
The post landed Rachel national attention, a viral cry from
a new, fearless spokesperson for the unvarnished side of
womanhood. Her first self-help book, Girl, Wash Your
Face, was released by a Christian publisher.

At first Dave was humiliated by its revelations—Rachel

talked about her hairy toes and their lousy sex. But it soon
sold two million copies.

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Its success also meant that suddenly Rachel was making far more money than he was, Dave would
later write in his first self-help guide. “Now that she doesn’t need me,” he wrote, “will she still want
me?”

When Girl, Wash Your Face published, Dave was the head of global distribution for Disney. He
spent his days pitching release strategies to stars like Dwayne Johnson and booking blockbusters
like Star Wars: The Force Awakens into theaters. It was a job that came with stock options and
tickets to the Oscars.

In the spring of 2018, he invited his childhood friend Shawn Wehan for lunch on the studio lot.
Sitting in an executive dining room one table over from Bob Iger, the legendary Disney CEO,
Wehan remembers Dave telling him, “I could have that job in 10 years.”

But he told Wehan he didn’t want it. In his mid-40s, he was feeling unfulfilled. And for the first
time in maybe his entire life, he wanted to take a risk.

So he quit.

Rachel and Dave Hollis during

a promotional interview for
Rachel’s first book, ‘Girl,
Wash Your Face.’ PHOTO: AP
IN JUNE 2018, four months after Girl,
Wash Your Face was released, the
Hollises moved their family to Dripping
Springs, outside Austin, Texas. They
were going to build Hollis Co. into a
self-help empire.

A team of employees started to manage

Dave’s Instagram account too, a task the boss didn’t take to naturally. He’d had a public job at
Disney, leading conference keynotes and taking calls from reporters when a new movie premiered.
But becoming the brand himself wasn’t so easy.

Then, in the summer of 2019, Dave had a fleeting moment that made him more comfortable in the
spotlight, according to an employee who worked closely with him. He was at a three-day self-
empowerment retreat that Hollis Co. designed. Dave was running from one fire to another when
Whitney Bass, a hairstylist from outside Minneapolis, stopped him. Bass remembers telling him that
her husband tuned into the Hollis podcasts because he shared Dave’s skepticism of the self-help
world.

“I appreciate that,” she remembers Dave telling her. “I want to be relatable to people who are
married to the unrelatable.”

She asked for a selfie. Soon a line of more fans formed, and Dave’s second career began to take
shape.

Dave, once embarrassed by Rachel’s candor, soon was sharing his own insecurities and intimate
details of their marriage. He went along with it when Rachel encouraged followers to join them in
“Sexy September” and commit to having sex every day of the month.

Suddenly even the most mundane moments were spun into carefully curated posts. One afternoon,
he ran late to a meeting at company headquarters, an employee who worked directly with Dave
recalls. As she waited for him, she saw on his Instagram that he’d just finished traveling with all
four kids on his own. A superdad on the go.

“You must be so tired,” she remembers saying when he arrived.

“We had our nanny flying with us,” she says Dave told her. “But that doesn’t do as great on
social.”

His Instagram account, once dedicated to occasional pictures of his kids and pretty sunsets, became
a stream of branded narrative often averaging more than one post a day for an audience that grew to
more than 400,000. The Bronco he drove became “The Incredible Hulk.” His four children became
recurring characters, especially his youngest, Noah. Playtime with her became a show called “Tea
Time with Noah.” And there was one call after another to preorder his first book, Get Out of Your
Own Way, before it debuted in March 2020.

In the book, Dave admits he was once like his reader—convinced the world of self-improvement
was full of “charlatans, peddling feel-good mysticism to weak souls.” Now he was so comfortable
with it, he opened his book with the raw story of reading Girl, Wash Your Face for the first time.

“I drank a handle of vodka. In a day and a half. By myself” was its opening, describing what it took
for him to get through Rachel’s oversharing.

Mortification, it turned out, made for good content. The rest of Dave’s book took anecdotes drawn
from life and explored the lies we tell ourselves, including “real men don’t show emotion.” His
team had transformed his skepticism into a strength. Dave read direct messages and comments
regularly—and his fans say he responded, and then followed up with out-of-the-blue check-ins.

But as his star rose, former employees at the time detected a rivalry forming between the couple.
When Rachel created a production arm, she named it 3% Chance Productions—a reference to
Dave’s one-time assessment of her potential success.

Then in June 2020, Hollis Co. staff received a Slack message delivering shocking news. Rachel and
Dave were getting a divorce.
“We have worked endlessly over the last three years to make this work….” Rachel noted in an
Instagram post announcing the split below a photo of the couple smiling.

“[Fans] were just instantly pissed,” says Bass, the fan who’d stopped him for a selfie in
Minneapolis. The couple had sold themselves as a model for others—while on the verge of
separating?

Dave grew self-conscious when he realized he agreed with them. “How much more inauthentic
could we have been?” Wehan remembers him asking.
PHOTO: INSTAGRAM (6); SHAWN WEHAN
A DIVORCE between two people who were supposed to have it all set disgruntled Reddit
commentators ablaze. And Rachel, in the words of one popular critic, Kayla O’Brien, soon became
a “never-ending content machine.”

In punchy YouTube videos, O’Brien tore apart the junk science, odd teachings and hypocrisy she
felt she saw in popular influencers and TikTok scam artists. A video criticizing Rachel soon became
her most watched. “It is a business,” O’Brien says, noting she can make $1,500 a month off the
videos. “But I do believe what I say.”

One controversy followed another in the year after the split. The biggest one was when Rachel
dismissed a housekeeper as the woman who “cleans the toilets.” When a follower said such
language made her “privileged” and “unrelatable,” Rachel shot back.

“Sis, literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can’t relate to,” she said in
a TikTok video, writing in a caption that she wanted to be like women she admired, such as Harriet
Tubman, Malala Yousafzai and Wu Zetian, the first female emperor of China.

“All Unrelatable AF,” she wrote in the video’s caption.

The comments had come in April 2021, as a broader racial reckoning was shaking American
business and culture. Rachel’s brand was tarnished, and followers started to leave.

“I’m so deeply sorry for the things I said in my recent posts,” Rachel posted to Instagram.

It did little to quell the uproar. The company Dave had helped to build was in a mushroom cloud.

“HE WAS JUST a puddle of sadness,” says Lynn McKay of the first time she laid eyes on Dave,
jogging on a back road in the summer of 2020, soon after she and her family had moved to the area
from Los Angeles. It wasn’t just about the business. He missed his wife, his kids, his old life.

On Instagram, Dave projected a single dad taking it one day at a time. He talked about the
#GoalGetterChallenge and how to “break apart perfectionism.” He introduced the McKays to his
followers, telling them that he believed God had delivered the couple’s arrival.

“We were the guest stars, the neighbors,” Lynn says.

They joined him for workout sessions in his gym, often streamed for his followers. Athleisure
brands shipped leggings to his house, requesting they be passed along for Lynn to wear on camera
during their workouts. After their first appearance, Lynn’s husband got 10,000 new Instagram
followers overnight.

But Lynn was concerned. She says she often pictured Dave at night, alone in his house and
obsessively reading the comments left on posts telling his followers to let go of what others thought
about them. “Listen to your own advice!” she’d tell him.

On Valentine’s Day 2021, Dave revealed that he was in a new relationship with Instagram fitness
influencer Heidi Powell, who’d built her name on ABC’s Extreme Weight Loss.

Heidi Powell on an episode of ‘Extreme Weight Loss.’ PHOTO: DISNEY

GENERAL ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT VIA GETTY IMAGES
As soon as the announcement was posted, Heidi remembers him grabbing her phone to monitor
incoming comments, deleting the negative ones. “It actually was a sweet thing,” she says.

Over time, Dave revealed that he knew some of the more frequent critics, rattling off their social
handles. He must read these all of the time, Heidi says she thought to herself. “The hate sites,” she
calls them.

Heidi says she had never heard of Reddit. “I’ve been busy my whole life,” she says, by way of
explanation. But Dave was obsessed.

When Dave took her off-roading in the Incredible Hulk for the first time, he mounted a dashcam
and uploaded the footage.

“Other people feel pressure from themselves to post their highlight reel. We felt pressure from the
world because we let them in,” she says. “It’s like The Truman Show.”

After Pancakegate and the rehab that followed in early 2022, it was about four months before the
“itch” to return to social media drove him to log back on, he would write on Instagram. His friends
could see how much Dave thrived on helping people—one woman said she had thrown away her
suicide letters after discovering his videos—and they urged him to focus on the one-on-one
coaching he loved. But they also wondered why their smart and successful (and 47-year-old) friend
was bothering with Reddit bullies and $7,000 sponsored posts.

“I want my cake & wanna eat it too. Want to protect my mental health & stay connected to a
community that has been by my side through everything,” Dave wrote in his return post.

Followers saw an avatar of health online, spray-tanned and teeth whitened for Dave’s newest
hobby: bodybuilding. It felt like yet another late-season plot twist—a new narrative that could
sustain several weeks of posts about perseverance and showing up. In real life, neighbors saw him
buying alcohol as early as 7 a.m. before heading home to record podcasts with titles like: You Are
Worthy of Unconditional Love.
 One evening i February
2023, Dave was at home
with his kids, Heidi
recalls him telling her.
His birthday was coming
up, and one of his sons
asked him what he
wanted. Keep it simple,
Dave said. Draw me a
picture. His son went
online to find a photo of
his dad to use as
inspiration. But the
search also turned up a
critic’s YouTube video tearing his dad apart.

“How do I tell them what a great dad you are?” he asked Dave.

Dave got in touch with Heidi. “I don’t know what to do,” he texted her, according to messages she’s
kept. “I hate this part of my life.”

She said he could leave the spotlight—and let them win. Or he could continue to flood the internet
with positive Dave Hollis content. There were even SEO experts, she noted, that he could hire to
help drown out the negativity.

Dave’s response: “I am in on option 2.” Followers in early February didn’t see anything amiss.
Dave posted a photo of his daughter fishing, and uploaded a podcast asking, Does Technology
Make Me Happy?

THE SALVE of a new plan didn’t last long. A week later, friends say he got so drunk he needed a
ride home. Before Dave headed inside, he committed to attending an Alcoholics Anonymous
meeting and church the next morning, friends said.

Dave was alone at home, Heidi says, when he called her. She could tell something was wrong—his
breathing was heavy, and he said he was ready to get help. When he didn’t show up for the AA
meeting a family friend went to check on him.

He was found dead in bed.

At the funeral, details about what happened were hazy to even some of Dave’s closest friends. They
knew he had recently gone to the hospital with high blood pressure—commentators speculated that
he’d had a heart attack.

At a memorial service held in February 2023, a list of speakers represented the many chapters of
Dave’s life. There were friends who knew him from schoolyard soccer like Wehan; colleagues from
Disney; fellow self-help influencers. Rachel was there but didn’t speak. (“I have no words and my
heart is too broken to find them,” she wrote on Instagram. “Please wrap the kids up in prayers.”)
Lynn McKay, Dave’s neighbor, listened as several speakers provided the Instagram-ready version
of events, incomplete eulogies that mentioned only Dave’s humor, compassion and charity. She
wanted to scream. Then Dave’s mother spoke and acknowledged that her son, like so many, was
complicated. He’d struggled. Lynn felt a wave of relief. Someone had finally broken through the
filter.

An autopsy report later ruled Dave’s death as accidental. He was found with toxic levels of cocaine,
ethanol and fentanyl in his system, a combination that interacted lethally with an “underlying
natural disease of the heart.”

But Lynn says she believes those drugs were treatments Dave sought for a different problem. She
blames viral fame for his death and the platforms that power it. “They’re all drugs.”

Months later, Wehan described Dave’s drug use as the “locked door” that influencers never open to
their followers. At the memorial service, Wehan tried to piece together his own memories with
snapshots from strangers who knew Dave from his online life, fragments he struggled to put into a
fuller picture. Most troubling of all was how Dave, the man who’d surrounded himself with friends
since childhood, who had nearly half a million followers at his command, had died alone.

Dave was found, he learned, with his phone on his chest.

Write to Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com