This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
After that, I decided it might be fun to start making music. One of the guys I had coached in 2016—someone who hired me after seeing my Udemy success—played a role in that shift. At the time, he barely had enough money to pay rent, yet he paid me hundreds of dollars an hour to help him figure out what to do on Udemy. That coaching worked. Ten years later, he’s still making a great living from his online courses. Seeing his success and spending time talking with him pulled me toward the idea of making music next.
I had almost no interest in music for most of my life, but after quitting gaming, it suddenly sounded fun to learn something completely new. Within a few weeks, I was deep into music production. I ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment based on my friend’s recommendations—an Ableton Push 2, an Oxygen keyboard, and an APC launchpad with a mini keyboard. All of it ended up crammed into the tiny bedroom where I already had my office set up. I didn’t care. I was having a blast. I’d make music offline at first, just experimenting, and then I figured out how to route everything so I could produce music live on stream.
The music live streams were a total disaster. People absolutely hated them. They wouldn’t tune in, and the ones who did were furious. The comment sections were brutal. Everyone told me to go back to gaming. They said I sucked at making music, that it sounded terrible, and that I should stop embarrassing myself. The negativity was relentless and toxic. And yet, I kept streaming it and kept making music anyway, mostly because I was enjoying it and learning something new, even if nobody else wanted to hear it.
At the same time, I went all in on crypto heading into 2017. I shifted the majority of my content over to crypto for the next year and a half. I made tons of videos, covering anything and everything in the space. I picked one cryptocurrency that a friend told me was going to pump and that supposedly had strong fundamentals. I did my own research, promoted it heavily, and helped push it from about $11 per coin up to $87. I had bought 1,000 coins early, so at the beginning of 2017 I turned roughly $11,000 into $87,000. At the time, that felt amazing. I felt smart. I felt validated.
Then I found another cryptocurrency through that same friend. Ten years later, that friend is blocked on my phone because he kept hyping coins I wanted no part of. Back then, though, he was the guy who got me into Bitcoin, then Dash, and later Steem. I originally got into Steem after I got fed up with the Dash team. I had been doing what I considered incredible marketing for Dash, and I asked them for what felt like a very reasonable amount of money—just a few thousand dollars—to justify continuing. They didn’t like that I was posting without checking in with them first, and they voted against some of my proposals. I took that personally. I sold all my Dash and moved everything into Steem instead.
Not long after that, Dash exploded again. The price went from around $87 to over $1,000. Watching that happen made me feel like an absolute moron. Instead of riding that wave, I had cashed out early and walked away. I couldn’t help thinking that I should have fully capitalized on all the marketing I’d done and all the momentum I helped create. Instead, I pivoted hard into Steem, and my entire life revolved around it for the next year.
Steem was a blockchain with a built-in social media platform, and it hit me at exactly the right moment. I became the number one author on Steem, built a following of around 40,000 people, and at certain points was making as much as $1,000 per blog post. It felt unreal—like printing free money. In 2017 and 2018, I made well over $100,000 in profit each year, almost entirely fueled by crypto, with only small contributions from online course sales, YouTube ad revenue, and other minor income streams.
Meanwhile, the diet kept working astonishingly well. At my lowest point, I dropped all the way down to 160 pounds. At my heaviest, I had been around 250. That meant a total swing of about ninety pounds. Getting sober combined with a whole plant-based diet did that. If I had simply gotten sober and gone plant-based without doing anything else, I probably would have lost those ninety pounds without any calorie tracking. My blood pressure dropped dramatically too, falling about twenty points—from roughly 120/80 down to around 100/60—as far as I can tell, purely as a result of changing how I ate.
There was a downside, though. When we moved to St. Petersburg, I dropped personal training. I missed my Sarasota trainer, and while I worked out with my brother-in-law a few times, I never really replaced that structure. Over time, I let my physical fitness slide. From the end of 2016 through 2019, my exercise was mostly just walking the dog a couple miles every day. I wasn’t lifting weights. I wasn’t doing anything strenuous. As a result, I lost a ton of muscle. In my experience, walking alone didn’t preserve my muscle mass, and I wouldn’t take a multi-year break from real exercise again. That said, I genuinely loved those walks with the dogs around the neighborhood, and they were one of the few grounding routines I had during that period.
Socially, my world stayed small. I still talked to one friend from Xbox, but most of those relationships faded after I quit gaming. My ex-wife and I continued to get along well overall, though I felt a shift in the power dynamic of our relationship. Before my daughter, I felt like I had been the dominant force between us. After our daughter was born, it felt like that flipped, and my ex-wife became the dominant one. That wasn’t my idea of a good time. There were plenty of moments where we were equals, but especially around parenting, intimacy, and planning, my ex-wife set hard boundaries. Trip planning shifted from me mostly leading to my ex-wife mostly leading. That change mattered to me more than I realized at the time.
I don’t want to follow. I want to lead. I like figuring out what to do. And yet, despite that tension, my ex-wife and I still had many genuinely good years together throughout 2016, 2017, and 2018. She loved the money I was making with crypto. I was still sending her thousands of dollars a month. I even encouraged her to invest some of her own money into Steem, and she made a small profit doing that. In 2017, we took a hurricane evacuation trip right in the middle of my Steem grind, packing up and leaving as storms rolled in while my online income kept flowing.
Let me back up for a minute to set the next story up. After my daughter was born, we were trying for a second child from late 2015. That stretch is burned into my memory because it felt like everything was coming back online at once: intimacy, excitement, energy. From late 2015 through the fall of 2017, we kept trying to expand our family, even as everything else in my life—career, health, identity, and direction—was still very much in flux.
My ex-wife was getting increasingly frustrated that she hadn’t gotten pregnant again. I kept telling her not to worry about it. Everything had worked just fine the first time, and in my mind it was obvious that it would happen again when the timing was right. My ex-wife didn’t see it that way. She got frustrated enough to pursue outside help, which I completely disagreed with. I thought the whole thing was unnecessary. At the same time, I figured that whatever she felt she needed to do to get herself right, that was her call. I wasn’t going to fight her on it.
In August 2017, another month went by without my ex-wife getting pregnant and she responded by having a cry on the couch in frustration. This time, instead of arguing or reassuring her in abstract terms, I sat down on the couch with her and tried something different. I said, look, we know this worked before. Why don’t we talk about this as if we’re already going to have another baby? Let’s make it real. I asked her what the baby’s name would be. She said, well, obviously, if it’s a boy, he’s going to be named after me—the fourth to carry my name. I said, okay, we already know that. Then I asked her what the name would be if it was a girl. What names do you actually like?
She thought for a moment and then said she loved the name June, a name from her side of the family. We said it out loud together—our June baby. And there was something that happened in that moment that I still don’t have a rational explanation for. It felt like our future son was in the room with us, spiritually present in the same way I imagine my parents might have felt my presence if they had been paying attention when they conceived me in some cheap hotel room years earlier. There was a distinct, unmistakable feeling. When we said our June baby, it felt real. It felt done. There was a kind of quiet certainty in the room that hadn’t been there before.
Do you know what month our son was born the following year? June. My ex-wife got pregnant the very next cycle. I am completely convinced we spoke our baby into existence. I came to believe we didn’t need any of it. What we needed was to stop grasping and start calling it into being as if it already existed. The moment we were truly ready for our son and talked about him like he was already on his way, he showed up. I swear we could feel him that night choosing to be with us.
Right after that, we had to evacuate for a hurricane. My ex-wife was so wrapped up in the logistics of evacuation that she stopped obsessing over the timing. Meanwhile, I was doing what I always did—staying relaxed and not worrying about any of it. Sure enough, she got pregnant almost immediately. The trip ended up being fantastic. We were thrilled. The excitement of knowing another baby was coming shifted everything.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.