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.
Going All In on Internet Computer Protocol
When I first started to understand this bigger picture in crypto, Internet Computer Protocol looked like the one crypto that could solve all the problems I had been pointing out for years. It was the only blockchain I had ever seen where you could go directly to a website hosted fully on-chain. The technology is so advanced that you could type in a URL and step straight into the blockchain itself. ICP makes it possible to self-custody everything with ease and to run every kind of transaction you could think of directly on-chain—playing an entire crypto game, streaming videos, publishing a podcast, hosting pictures and files, even creating coins with their own websites. All of it can be natively on-chain.
When I realized this, I thought I had struck gold. I told myself, I’ve got the best information in crypto, and hardly anybody knows about this. The lone exception was Dominic Williams of Dfinity occasionally talking about it on his X profile and a few people with smaller followings than me in the ICP community. After years of refusing to ever go all in on a single coin—especially after being burned in 2018 when Steemit Inc rug pulled Steem—I went all in on Internet Computer Protocol.
That decision turned my crypto channel into chaos. My audience was in uproar because I was abandoning every coin I had promoted before. I even gave up on Bitcoin, saying publicly that ICP was the future and not Bitcoin. When I made this change in October 2023, the ICP price was $3 and the Bitcoin price was around $30,000. You can do some simple math to see how that has worked out for me so far.
Initially when I went all in on ICP, a flood of new people showed up who were excited about also finding something real to invest in. The ICP price was sitting at all-time lows, and in the next few months it spiked to the highest levels it had seen since the disastrous manipulated launch. Other projects were launching on ICP at the same time, and I promoted them freely. I gave them exposure that other influencers would have charged tens of thousands of dollars for, but I did not ask the teams for anything because I just wanted to support the ICP community.
Over the following year, I created hundreds of videos about ICP. Dfinity even gave me $25,000 in support after I applied for a couple of community grants, and I brought record numbers of new people into the ecosystem for free. In just a few months, I became the number one voice online for ICP. For a while, it felt like everything was finally aligning and I was so proud all the haters who said I would never get another sponsorship were so wrong that I now had my largest deal ever.
Then, just like before, I started to see how rigged and corrupt the entire system was. At first, I thought the only issue was ignorance—that people just didn’t understand. I kept believing if I explained how ICP was different clearly enough, people would get it. After a year, though, it hit me: the problem wasn’t ignorance. The entire system was corrupt.
People were operating in crypto just as blindly and mindlessly as they had watching gaming streams or buying courses. Once they had been tricked into buying a certain coin, they didn’t want to hear about anything better. They covered their ears when I explained there was a blockchain that rendered their investment irrelevant. They unsubscribed when I showed them data proving their coins were built on fraud. Instead of thanking me, most of them turned hostile.
When I said ICP was the best technology in the world, they cheered me on as long as the price went up. At the end of 2023, when ICP reached a local high, my crypto channel viewership peaked. In May 2024, when it shot up again, people rallied behind me. The moment the price started to drop, though, the same people turned on me.
I had believed that when people finally understood ICP the way I had, they would sell off their entire altcoin portfolios and put everything into ICP. I thought it was obvious that the truth would speak for itself. What I came to realize, painfully, was that I had been naive and idealistic all over again. Meanwhile, I noticed that so many of the top crypto YouTubers were corrupt. From my perspective, they cared more about hype and profit than about real technology.
I personally introduced two of the biggest names in the space to Internet Computer Protocol, a project I believed was the best technology in all of crypto. These were people with massive audiences, and yet they had literally never heard of it. If they had, it was only in passing—dismissed as a rug and written off without a second glance. I brought them into it and even appeared on their channels, making videos to talk about ICP. Their audiences hated it. They didn’t want to hear about a slow and steady, legitimate project that required patience and vision. They wanted the Ponzi-scheme vibe, the hype coins, the promises of an instant 10x. ICP wasn’t that. It didn’t vibe with what they were addicted to.
As the price of Internet Computer kept dropping, everything I said started to sound wrong to people. They pointed out that a lot of the coins I had trashed had gone on to make massive gains. I had given some of those coins one-star reviews, called them garbage, and yet they had 10x’ed while ICP had fallen. From their perspective, the technology I was championing looked useless if the price fell.
By July 2024, I felt hopeless again. I was a year and a half into building a new crypto channel, convinced I had found the most valuable and most important information in the industry. Yet it seemed like most people didn’t just ignore it—they actively resisted it. They fought against me, bashed me, unsubscribed, and flat out refused to watch.
Even the people who had stuck with me grew weary. My original viewers burned out from seeing me talk about ICP day after day. At the same time, my most loyal fans demanded that I repeat myself endlessly to assure them that ICP really was as good as I said it was despite the price dropping. If I tried to teach viewers how to do research, they tuned out. If I explained how I discovered these insights for myself, viewers got bored. None of it seemed to matter.
What the hardcore fans really wanted was the same thing every single day: an Internet Computer Protocol price prediction. That was it. They wanted me to say the price was going to go up. I gave them plenty of those videos. I gave them what they wanted, even as I felt like I was wasting my life. I even told them that if I was wrong about Internet Computer Protocol, I would delete my channel and walk away from the internet for good.
Another Burnout
I hit such a wall of burnout in July 2024 that I announced I was quitting. I said I was done, just like I had back in 2020 when I declared I was finished with everything. Unlike 2020 when I sold all my equipment and later bought it back, this time I thought it would be smarter not to sell everything right away.
Thanks to all the Facebook gaming money, I had a proper studio built again. I had two computers I’d put together in 2021, and between the two they cost about $5,000. I had an incredible livestreaming and gaming setup where I could go for three or four hours straight, streaming crypto talk the entire time. Many of my ICP livestreams would make me hundreds of dollars when the price was up. Sometimes people even dropped $100 or $200 tips, thanking me for the profits they believed they’d made because of me.
The second the price dropped, though—even just from $10 to $9, or from $14 to $12, or from $9 to $8—people spiraled into dysphoria. They blamed me, told me I was wrong, and the tips stopped cold. It was the same cycle I had lived through on Facebook Gaming and on Udemy. I started to believe this was how the entire internet worked. Everywhere I went online, it was the same nonsense: the same narrow-minded viewers, the same restrictive platforms, the same cheating and lies at the top.
I felt the same despair I had felt in 2020 resulting in a two hour live stream titled Goodbye, explaining to my viewers why I was done. I told them I was tired of all this online crap. I said I felt like I had failed, that I was useless in crypto. Nobody wanted to hear the truth. Nobody cared about real technology. All people seemed to want was confirmation bias, lies, bribery, and to follow the same person repeating the same garbage day after day. I told people I was done with this online grind and that I wanted to move offline. I wanted to do something real. I was already thinking about massage school, yoga teacher training, hypnotherapy, or some real skill I could apply to help people in person.
I remembered being in the depths of my frustration back in 2022, when I took a five-hour driving meditation. I didn’t listen to music, didn’t play audiobooks, didn’t make phone calls. For those hours, I just asked myself one question: What do I do with my life now? This was three or four months after I had been canceled on Facebook. I had just gotten my mom a new dog and driven him from Miami, Florida to her small town in Mississippi. On the way back to St. Petersburg, Florida, I let that question simmer: What do I do with myself now?
The clear answer I heard was life coaching. That was where I could really help people. I had the skills and the experience. I’d lived through so much—fixing my own health problems, addiction and recovery, building and maintaining a happy marriage, parenting, going through business transitions. I had real experience that mattered and that could make a difference for people. Unfortunately, my mindset in 2022 was still locked on doing everything online. I tried offering life coaching through Zoom. Almost nobody was interested because no one saw me as someone who could help them with life. They only saw me as a gamer and wanted me to keep being the gaming guy. They wanted me to stay stuck in the role I had outgrown.
Struggling to Quit and Reinvent Myself
My attempt to quit in July 2024 was thwarted by financial insecurity and impatience. I had so much of my money tied up in crypto, and most of the profits I’d made had gone right back into ICP. That left me with very little cash in the bank. As a family, we didn’t have much on hand either, which meant if I stopped doing YouTube, I would need to find new income quickly. Otherwise, I’d have to depend on my ex-wife to support me, and she was not thrilled about that idea. She had already gone through 5 years of financial insecurity with only a brief break when I blew up on Facebook gaming. She valued me making my own money and made it clear she didn’t want to carry the weight for both of us. At the very least, she expected me to pay my half of the bills which came out to several thousand a month.
She was already paying the mortgage and her student loans, which ate up most of her paycheck. She wanted me to keep covering things like groceries, utilities, and my monthly massages. After a few weeks of flailing and trying to figure out what to do, I bounced through ideas like becoming an in-person life coach or going to massage school. I even reached out to a local massage school about enrolling, but I couldn’t see how I would afford it. The thought of spending eight months in school without steady income terrified me. If I did that, we’d be broke. I knew I’d run out of money within a month or two. All my crypto was locked up, I couldn’t cash it out, and even selling my accounts wasn’t a simple option.
That’s when I started thinking of writing books. I thought maybe if I wrote books, they could generate leads for life coaching and eventually lead to in-person events. I gave it a shot for a week, but quickly got frustrated with the process. I tried dictating, but I didn’t yet have a solid workflow with ChatGPT like I do now. Writing by hand felt painfully slow. The first idea I had was to write a book about mastering yourself, something I imagined I could use locally as a magnet for life coaching clients.
At the same time, I started reaching out to people I’d known for years in AA and at yoga, asking to meet in person. Those conversations were incredible. They reminded me of 2020, which was one of the biggest growth periods of my life. Back then, I had spent a few months mostly offline, doing my in-person show, meeting tons of new people, and building friendships in real life at a time when everyone else was moving online. I felt that spark again, connecting with people face-to-face and talking deeply.
Still, writing remained a challenge. I couldn’t write fast enough, and I grew frustrated with how inefficient my workflow felt. I shifted from the self-mastery idea into a more general life coaching book, but then I thought, I have all these crypto followers—I should write a crypto book first. I began working on it, but after a few days, I was already frustrated with how long it was taking. That’s when I had the thought: why not just make videos for the book instead?
As soon as I started making videos for the book, I rationalized that posting them as regular videos would be more efficient. So I ended up taking what was supposed to be a book and turned it into a three-hour crypto video. Since most of my followers thought I was done with content, they were excited to see anything from me at all. This wasn’t just any video—it was a deep, three-hour dive into the insane system I just explained concluding with why ICP was the only crypto I invested in. To my surprise, that video did far better than most of my content had been doing before. It spread widely on YouTube and gave me a momentary sense of revival, even though I had originally intended it to be a book.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my ICP Crypto playlist.