This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Reborn in Crypto
After testing more than a hundred ways to make money online and a wide variety of content, I found that crypto videos on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were the best opportunity moving forward. I threw myself into crypto with the same mindset I had as an instructor: I wanted to win, to be number one, to maximize sales. I made hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting different coins over the next two years. Whenever I thought it was the right time to buy, I made videos hyping them up and saying I was all in. Then, when I decided it was time to sell, I would make another video saying the coin sucked, that I had been wrong, and I was getting out. The hype raised prices, and when I exited, I moved on to the next one.
Steem was the one crypto I stuck with for a year. That’s when I saw, once again, the same ugly truth I had seen at the top of other industries. At a high enough level, integrity disappeared. It was all about paying people off, bribing influencers and insiders to do what you wanted, while insiders keep this activity hidden from the public. I made waves in the crypto world by being flagrant and open about what was really happening. I openly engaged in some of the same bribery that everyone else was doing behind the scenes. The very people who were doing the same or worse behind closed doors publicly roasted me because I exposed what they wanted to keep hidden. I became an easy scapegoat.
Finally, the ugliest truth hit me when I realized that core team behind Steem, Steemit Inc, was about to rug pull in the summer of 2018. I could see it in their transactions and I could feel it in my experiences meeting them in person. Every time I promoted Steem, the team dumped millions of dollars’ worth as the price pumped. They clearly didn’t believe in their own project. I eventually realized they were lying and cheating everyone. I called it out right before it collapsed and unlike Udemy, they had no ability to defend themselves from my criticisms.
Just months after hyping Steem as the next Bitcoin, the price began crashing to eventually less than 5% of what it had been at the high. Unfortunately, many of the people who followed me didn’t listen when I admitted I had been wrong and said I was selling everything. Some of my followers rode it all the way to near zero and lost tens of thousands of dollars hoping things would turn around. I even hooked one of the other top crypto influencers when the Steem price was at its highest and it looks like he lost millions of dollars just before getting arrested for promoting some serious crypto scams like BitConnect.
Crypto Collapse and the Failed Business Dream
An annoying thing happened after I sold all my crypto. For the first time, my integrity hit me so hard that I felt like I was a bad person. In the first years of creating online, I had convinced myself that I was a virtuous person trying to help everyone, and anything bad that happened to me was because I was the victim of other people’s greed and cruelty. With crypto, though, I saw that I had been the maker of the madness. I was the one who got people excited about these cryptos, and I was the one who led them into a trap where they ended up wrecked. This was before hardly anyone else was even talking about crypto on YouTube. I had been one of the very top crypto YouTubers, and in 2018 I quit after seeing how disgusting it all was.
That decision left me with nothing to do. I had already quit gaming in 2016 because I hated League of Legends so much and my viewers hated if I played any other game. I also felt like when I was gaming, I was wasting my time and not doing anything truly useful. For the first time, I had wondered what my life would be like without gaming. The energy I had once put into gaming went into crypto, and from there into music.
By 2018, after just a year and a half of making music, I had composed 70 different songs and was live streaming my music production on Twitch. I had previously found success there by building a following through video games like League of Legends, but my music streams were absolutely dead. I went back to gaming in June 2018 after seeing that Facebook was launching a gaming platform with the hope that maybe this time I could achieve my dream of being a professional gamer.
At the same time, I was weighed down by guilt over everything I had done with crypto. I felt like such a loser, even though anyone looking at my bank statements and the money I had made would think my life was going great. On the inside, though, I was starting to feel the consequences of what I felt I had done to other people. Even though I had personally profited greatly and made sure what I was doing was 100% legal, others had lost a lot of money investing in cryptos I once promoted, and I felt bad about that.
When you feel bad about yourself, you will often gravitate toward situations that punish you, which is exactly what I did. I came up with what I thought was a great business idea—to compete with Udemy and create my own version of it, where people could sell private label rights courses. My name for the platform was Uthena named after the Greek goddess Athena.
After years of earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit each with my business, I had credit cards limits into the hundreds of thousands of dollars too and access to business loans for the same amounts. Just six years earlier, I had went off on my ex-wife because she was paying a few dollars a month of credit card interest on one of her cards. Apparently, I forgot all about this while I rationalized that if I wanted to earn big, I needed to be ambitious and spend big. I spent all the cash I had to hire freelancers to make online courses for me, just like the ones I had created on Udemy.
In creating my own platform, I saw how Udemy had exploited me as an instructor. I had brought so much value to them, and they had kept most of it. I was left with nothing, while all the people who discovered Udemy because of me were spending money with them instead of me. These realizations were my first awakening to what an exploitive environment the online world really is. I felt like I was nothing more than a prostitute working for a pimp on the corner—easily disposable whenever they didn’t need me anymore, whenever I didn’t produce what they wanted, or whenever I pissed them off.
I Deleted My Studio
By the fall of 2019, for the first time, I realized I hated my online business and wanted to do something in person instead. I had just quit gaming for the second time after a year of reclaiming my very enthusiastic audience on Facebook Gaming. Back in 2016, I had become one of the biggest gamers on Facebook—probably the number one gamer on the entire platform before I quit. At that time and all the way through 2019, it was incredibly difficult to monetize a following on Facebook gaming. Hardly anyone donated to streamers and there were no ads available to run on my live videos. It was almost impossible to get people to pay me for playing games, because many still had the sanity to see that tipping a guy just for playing video games didn’t really make sense. After quitting for a year and a half at the end of 2016, I had started up again for a year in 2018 and quit again in the summer of 2019 because of a lack of financial support and a desire to focus on my Udemy competitor. At this point, what was about to happen would seem unlikely based on what I’ve told you so far.
In December of 2019, after visiting a bankruptcy attorney and realizing I didn’t want my life story to include declaring bankruptcy, my first thought was to grind and hustle my way forward by creating online courses again, just without Udemy and without paying anyone else to make them. I cranked out a whole bunch of new courses in just a few months, but the effort burned me out severely.
By May 2020, I said to myself, this is it, I’m done. I had accumulated a studio packed with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of computers, lights, cameras, and equipment. I dumped all of it for just a few thousand dollars locally on Facebook Marketplace. Meanwhile, everybody else was trying to get into the very thing I was walking away from.
In June 2020, I launched an in-person show less than a year after my first attempt to start an in person show led to an empty room. For a little while, I felt like I had clarity. I could see the world going insane, and it seemed obvious that moving everything online was exactly the wrong approach. I looked at all the stuff I had done online and saw it as a trap, a trick, where I had been used and discarded. The millions of followers I had meant nothing. It was easy for me to make no money at all, even with millions of people supposedly interested in what I created. There was no stability in it. I couldn’t depend on my following for income unless I constantly extracted from them by selling things like online courses, which I was exhausted from doing. On top of that, I felt guilty for how much I had already extracted through crypto, and that guilt made it nearly impossible to even sell to the people who still wanted to buy.
The brutal reality was that my in-person show in 2020 sucked. It was basically a YouTube video filmed in front of a live audience of around 20 people where I just talked, but I never really connected with anyone. I made no attempt to get participation from the audience outside of laughter. The more shows I did, the more people stopped coming. They realized they could just watch a video and have the same experience.
After just a few months of insisting I was never coming back online, I hit another low point. I had multiple shows where not a single person showed up, despite all my best online marketing efforts—running ads, posting videos, announcing I’d be live at a certain place. Nothing worked. I had millions of followers, but they were scattered around the world, and only a handful lived in St. Petersburg, Florida. The algorithms did a terrible job of reaching the people near me. Almost everyone who came to my shows was someone I had invited manually via text or Facebook message. All the videos and ads I put out locally did almost nothing to get people to show up in real life, although I do remember one or two people that came from ads.
Looking back, the biggest mistake I made in 2020 was that I didn’t delete anything. I left all those accounts with millions of followers sitting there. In the back of my mind, I knew that all I had to do was start posting again and maybe something would happen. Out of desperation, I did a Facebook live stream in August 2020, asking my followers what I should do with myself. The people who had missed my gaming streams for the past year begged me to come back and start streaming again.
My followers planted the idea that if I came back to gaming this time would be different. I remember the exact moment I could see what was coming if I went back into live streaming on Facebook. I was jumping on the trampoline in my house during a workout. In August 2020, I had no gaming systems, no PC, no cameras, no equipment—just one 5 year old laptop and barely enough money to make my minimum payments. I had not actually played any video games for a year and had told my ex-wife I was done for good the year before.
At the peak euphoria of the trampoline workout listening to some dance music, I had this clear vision: Call of Duty: Warzone was blowing up and if I played Warzone, I could finally become a professional gamer. The audience was there, the timing was right, and my dream was ready to become reality if I took the leap of faith which seemed large given my current life situation. I didn’t spend a single thought on what consequences that might be for anyone else. My mind was consumed only with the possibility of glory, fame, and money. After years of wishing I could be a professional gamer, after years of building an audience but making hardly any money from it, I felt like my chance had finally come to play a game I enjoyed and be financially supported in doing so.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Money playlist.