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.
I am proud of the contribution I made to humanity, even though it came at a real personal cost. I absolutely hated being demonetized on Facebook. In some ways, it was worse than what happened with Udemy. At least with Udemy, I was banned and that chapter was over. I could not be on the platform anymore, and there was a strange clarity in that. With Facebook, I still had my profile, and I still had massive reach. My posts were still going out to huge numbers of people. But when I went live without monetization, I made almost no money at all. People had become such creatures of habit that if they could not give through Facebook itself, they were not going to give anywhere else. More than ninety percent of the people who had previously given me money through Facebook would not click a Streamlabs link or follow me to Twitch or YouTube to support me there. That was when I realized something disturbing. I was not just creating content. I was feeding people’s addictions to specific platforms.
I asked people repeatedly to come watch me on Twitch or YouTube, where I was still monetized. I had tens of thousands of engaged followers on Facebook, millions of total followers across everything. Almost no one came. A few hundred people, maybe a thousand at most, were willing to leave Facebook and watch me somewhere else. That number horrified me. It showed me how deeply addicted people were, not just to their phones, but to a single app on their phone. I remember thinking this is insane. They do not actually care about watching me. They care about staying inside their comfort loop. People would say things like, I like Facebook, I do not want to watch you on Twitch or YouTube. I could not believe what I was hearing. These are all free apps. They are all on the same phone. And yet the resistance was overwhelming. I found myself thinking more and more about what my life might look like if I deleted everything and stopped doing anything online right then and there. Instead of acting on that impulse, I felt lost, unmoored, and unsure of what direction to take.
Financially, I was buffered for a short time. I still had tens of thousands of dollars coming in from Facebook Gaming payouts that were already owed to me, which gave me a few months to experiment without immediately needing to make money. At the same time, almost perfectly aligned, my ex-wife got a really good job at the beginning of February. That mattered more than I initially realized. It gave me a sense of safety. It made me more willing to speak my truth and accept the consequences, knowing that she could now cover most of the bills. I had played a significant role in helping her get that job. I encouraged her to negotiate her salary higher. I helped her believe in herself when she was convinced she could not get anything better. In 2020, she had been stuck in a job she hated, one that paid poorly and drained her. I remember clearly being the one saying, you can do better than this. Aim higher. Ask for more. Keep applying. Keep leveling up. She did exactly that. She landed a job she was genuinely happy with, a job she still has to this day, and she makes fantastic money doing it.
To me, that is what a spouse is supposed to do. A spouse is supposed to light a fire under you, to believe in you when you doubt yourself, to support your growth and your work. Around this time, I started to feel deeply discouraged because my ex-wife was not doing that for me. She was not firing me up about my work. She was clearly resenting me for it. That resentment did not just disappear. It settled in, hardened, and began shaping the years that followed, in ways that would become impossible to ignore.
One thing I am genuinely glad I did by putting my accounts back up is that I ultimately got the last word on my race change. I kept speaking. I kept making videos. I released a video called I’m Black Now: Day 30 and posted it across platforms. I clipped a video from Charlemagne the God, the Black celebrity who hosts The Breakfast Club and wrote the book Black Privilege. In that book, he talks openly about how being Black can be a massive asset in life, how it can open doors and create opportunities that white people might struggle to access, and how race can work in your favor if you approach life with the right mindset. I thought it was a fantastic book. In his video, he supported my race change outright. He said Black History Month was the perfect time to do it, that it made sense, and that he backed me. I stitched his clip together with mine and posted it.
That video got reported for hate speech and taken down on TikTok. I appealed it. TikTok put it back up. It went viral. It got millions of views. What really blew my mind was that women at AA meetings had seen it, recognized me, and immediately liked me. That video traveled far beyond my own audience. I got to say my piece clearly and publicly. I kept posting videos explaining why I changed my race and what I believed it meant for humanity to move beyond these rigid racial boxes. After the haters got bored and moved on to something else, millions of people were left with my actual explanation, not just a headline or an outrage clip.
Around that time, I saw a video from Andrew Tate where he said something that stuck with me. He said racism is for poor people. It is a tool used to keep poor people divided and fighting each other, because the last thing anyone in power wants is poor people working together. You need poor white people blaming poor Black people. You need poor liberals fighting poor conservatives. You need infinite divisions, because if poor people ever came together and asked, what the fuck is actually going on here, they would start looking in a very different direction. They would look at who has all the money, all the power, all the resources, and ask why the rest of us are scrambling for scraps. To prevent that, you have to keep people fighting over identity.
When you look around the planet today, it is hard not to see a kind of modern slavery everywhere. There are millions of people in literal human slavery through trafficking. Beyond that, there are hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people who are effectively slaves without chains. They are trapped in systems where their labor produces far more than they will ever receive, where working harder does not meaningfully improve their lives, where hope itself gets slowly drained out of them. This is not living. People are slaves to their phones, slaves to their jobs, slaves to algorithms that tell them what to think, who to date, and how much they are worth. The difference between now and earlier forms of slavery is not control, it is method. The control is mental. It always was. Chains alone are never enough. You need mind control. You need people policing themselves and each other.
My goal, whether people understood it or not, was to help people see through a small part of that control system. I did not want to preach. I wanted to lead by example. I wanted to demonstrate how absurd and arbitrary these identity structures really are when you push on them. I believe I did that. I also paid for it. The example caused me endless problems with money, with my ex-wife, with her family, and with friends. Even in real life spaces like AA meetings, the story followed me. It had gone so viral that I would sit in meetings wondering who in the room was judging me, which white liberals were offended, which Black people were angry, and which Black people loved what I did.
The reactions were extreme on both ends. Some people absolutely loved it. They laughed, hugged me, told me it was the craziest, funniest, smartest thing they had ever seen. Some of them still bring it up years later. Others quietly stopped talking to me, drifted away, or kept their distance as much as possible. That was the cost. I am still proud of what I did. I am still proud of the conversation I started. But there is no denying that choosing to lead by example, instead of staying quiet and safe, came with a very real and very personal price.
Meanwhile, I felt completely lost. After building my gaming presence up to something massive, the irony was brutal. For a long time, when I still had monetization on Facebook, it never felt like enough. Then it was gone, and all I wanted was to have it back. I desperately wished I could get my Facebook monetization restored because I still had this enormous audience. I started experimenting frantically. I was making as many as twenty-four text posts a day. Those posts were going out to hundreds of thousands of people daily. Changing my race, combined with everything else I had already done, gave me the biggest reach I had ever had in my life. The attention was massive. And yet there was almost no money in it. Nearly all the money I could make depended on getting people off Facebook, and almost nobody wanted to leave. People simply would not go watch me on another platform.
I was painfully unprepared for that reality. I did not have anything meaningful set up elsewhere to make money. I did not have books ready to sell. I wish I had. I wish I had written a book about my race change before I did it and referenced that book while everything was going viral. That might have worked. Instead, I was scrambling. Over the course of that year, I became increasingly desperate for money. The crypto market had gone absolutely insane in 2021, and that chaos started pulling me back in. There was a friend I have since cut off who kept pushing his coin relentlessly. In 2021, I gave him three hundred dollars just to make him stop talking. That three hundred dollars turned into fifteen thousand dollars in the middle of 2022. When it spiked, I sold near the top and took the fifteen thousand. Then I promptly did something stupid. I wasted seven thousand dollars of it chasing other coins. I bought into Cronos CRO after a friend had been hyping it up. I bought enough to qualify for the debit card, and then it tanked almost immediately. I lost around seventy-five percent of what I put into it.
That experience did not scare me away. Instead, it pulled me back in deeper. Joe Parys and another crypto YouTuber, Michael Supo, better known as Suppoman, both wanted me back in crypto. They had watched how committed I was to gaming. They had not pushed me much while I was focused there, but once they saw me flailing and searching for something that could make money again, they pulled me back toward crypto. By the end of 2022, I was fully back in it. In the summer of 2022, when Bitcoin dropped to around eighteen or nineteen thousand dollars, I bought an entire Bitcoin. Even today, at the time I am recording this, that Bitcoin would still be worth around seventy thousand dollars. I would have made more than fifty thousand dollars on that single purchase over time. But I did not have the conviction. I had paper hands. I sold almost immediately.
Throughout the rest of the year, I kept dabbling. I made crypto videos. I tested the waters. I went back and forth, never fully committing, never fully stepping away. By the end of the year, the desperation was undeniable. I needed something that worked. I could see it clearly. If I started another crypto channel, it would pay all the bills. I knew exactly how to do it. And once again, I was standing at the edge of a familiar path, torn between what I knew could make money and the growing sense that chasing it might cost me something I was no longer sure I could afford to lose.
At the same time, I had gotten back into gaming on Twitch and YouTube and tried starting a brand-new gaming channel on YouTube. I had huge aspirations for it. I was saying things like I was going to get a million subscribers on my new YouTube gaming channel. Within six months, I deleted it. I had uploaded around a hundred gaming videos, including a bunch of old streams. A few hundred people did come over to Facebook, but streaming on YouTube felt absolutely miserable. I would be live for hours with maybe five people watching and no monetization, while I knew I could go live on Facebook and instantly get far more views. What made it worse was that almost nobody from Facebook would come over and help me get monetized on YouTube. I was monetized on Twitch, and I actually picked up lots of new Twitch followers from the race change. Some of the people in my chat were fascinating.
The transgender Black community, in particular, really loved my race change because they felt like I genuinely understood them. During 2021 and 2022, I also streamed a lot wearing a women’s green tube top. On Twitch, men were not allowed to show their nipples, and I had started experimenting with a more exposed camera angle. I used a vertical camera setup with the tube top covering my nipples, so it looked like my chest was cut out and you could see the game underneath. The transgender Black community became a big part of my Twitch audience. There were men and women, and sometimes it was hard to tell who was who, but there was always support in the chat. Financially, it was not much, but there were consistently people hanging out and talking with me. Even so, streaming games started to frustrate me. No matter what I played, people would constantly derail the stream to ask about my race change with the lovers wanting all the same details I’d shared a thousand times and the haters using all the same nasty words. It was nonstop chaos. I could not do a single live stream without someone jumping in and saying something like, are you still Black or you’re a racist. Then the people who loved me would jump in and start fighting them. I would just sit there thinking, how did my dream of helping humanity turn into such a pile of shit.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.