I started my first YouTube channel in 2011 with no audience, no connections, and no idea how far the internet would take me.
I became one of the top instructors on Udemy and made millions of dollars in online course sales.
Then Udemy banned me.
I rebuilt on YouTube. A League of Legends coaching livestream went from almost nobody watching live to hundreds of thousands of views.
Then I burned out on gaming.
I became one of the early crypto YouTubers. I researched thousands of coins, worked with projects, took sponsorships, made money, lost money, and watched the industry from inside the machine.
Then the market changed, my incentives got ugly, and I had to face what I was participating in.
I went all in on another business idea, borrowed aggressively, spent too fast, and ended up sitting in a bankruptcy attorney’s office.
Then I rebuilt again.
I became one of Facebook Gaming’s top partners. I reached people all over the world, earned a full-time income livestreaming, and built a verified page with millions of followers.
Then Facebook demonetized me, the support disappeared, the audience would not follow me elsewhere, and the platform that looked like freedom felt like another addiction.
In June 2025, I deleted nearly everything.
At the same time, I have lived through problems that no analytics dashboard can explain.
I drank alcoholically and got sober through Alcoholics Anonymous in 2014.
I was about 80 pounds heavier than I am today. I tried diets, programs, calorie tracking, restriction, and repeated restarts before building a way of eating and living I could sustain.
I was married for more than twelve years and shared a home with my ex-wife for fourteen. We chose a kind divorce, learned to co-parent in two homes, and stayed family while letting the marriage end.
I learned to live alone again.
I started dating again and discovered that being experienced, successful, healthy, and confident does not protect anyone from loneliness, rejection, ghosting, confusion, or ridiculous decisions.
I have been a millionaire more than once. As I write this in July 2026, I am also publicly rebuilding with a negative net worth of roughly $200,000 while borrowing money, feeling calm, raising my children, creating every day, and refusing to let shame make my decisions.
I have been a police officer and corrections officer. I earned a master’s degree in criminology and left a PhD program to build a business. I have made more than 10,000 videos, generated more than a billion online impressions, published 35 books, built more than twenty YouTube channels, been banned, demonetized, viral, ignored, wealthy, broke, married, divorced, addicted, sober, overweight, athletic, famous, and anonymous.
Today I use ChatGPT, Claude Fable, Claude Code, Gemini, Caffeine AI, and ICP to build things that would have sounded impossible to me a few years ago. I dictate ideas and turn them into books, websites, blog posts, thumbnails, sales pages, workflows, and games. In July 2026, I used ChatGPT Pro and a single Claude Fable prompt to create my own first-person shooter game and serve it from the Internet Computer blockchain.
I am not telling you all of this to say I have a perfect answer for everything.
I am telling you because there is a good chance I have been somewhere near the problem you are facing.
That lets me recognize patterns quickly.
It also lets me say the sentence a lot of us most need to hear:
You are not uniquely broken. You are in a situation. Situations can change.