In this first episode of How to Be 3D, Gabriel Pickus sits down with Dave and Dave's father — also named Dave — for a raw, unfiltered conversation about the illness that Dave Sr. nearly didn't survive, and the son who saved his life.

It starts with a story that sounds ordinary at first — a cold that wouldn't go away after a family trip in the winter of 2019 into 2020. Except it wasn't ordinary, and it wasn't a cold. Months before anyone had a name for it, Dave Sr. was living through what was almost certainly COVID-19 — at a time when no one watching him get sicker by the day had any idea what they were up against.

Over the course of an hour, Dave and his father — 89 years old at the time of recording — walk through what it actually looked like, day by day, to come to the edge and find a way back.

In this episode:

• How a routine illness spiraled into weeks of relentless coughing, extreme weakness, and total loss of appetite — and the moment it became clear this was something far more serious, before COVID even had a name
• The night Dave Sr. hit rock bottom, and the quiet, private decision he made about whether to keep fighting — a decision he talks about with striking honesty
• How Dave used breath and body awareness — techniques rooted in Systema, the Russian martial art he teaches — to physically help save his father's life, pulling his breathing back down out of his throat and into his body at the exact moment it mattered most
• The garlic honey, the vitamin C and D protocols, and the strange, intense case of scurvy that showed up only after the worst of the illness had passed
• What it took, physically and emotionally, for Dave Sr. to rebuild the strength to walk, to get up off the floor, and to reclaim an active, independent life — not "someday," but through months of deliberate, unglamorous work
• A father and son reflecting honestly on mortality, choice, and what it means to decide — more than once — that you want to live

This isn't a polished inspirational story. It's messy, funny in places, honest about fear, and full of small, practical details that matter if you or someone you love is ever facing something similar.

Update: Dave Sr. is now 92 — still practicing and evolving these same techniques daily, and increasingly walking without a cane.

This episode is the first in a series of conversations with wisdom keepers, healers, and movement practitioners exploring what it means to survive and thrive as a star being in a body. It's also a preview of themes explored more fully in the upcoming book How to Be 3D: Surviving and Thriving on Planet Earth, co-authored by Gabriel and Dave.