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 knew she had investments, and I knew this was going to wipe them out too. I could see that we were going to barely survive this, and even that wasn’t guaranteed. I felt completely emasculated. I felt like I had failed my family at the most fundamental level. I felt like the biggest fucking idiot in the world for making so much money and then blowing it like this. The business system I had worked so hard to build—the thing I had trusted more than anything—had failed, and I was standing there with nothing left to hide behind.
One of the realizations that hit me the hardest was almost absurd in how obvious it was once I saw it. I could have literally just played video games. I could have played video games all year—starting in 2018 and all the way through 2019—had fun, streamed, and done nothing else. I could have not brought in any of that borrowed money, not chased another business, not tried to recreate some big comeback. If I had just coasted and played video games, I would have come out far better than I did with everything I tried. Even if I barely made any money gaming, even if I had asked my ex-wife for help earlier and she worked more, we probably would have only been a few thousand more dollars in debt. Instead, we were hundreds of thousands deeper. If my daughter hadn’t gone to that school, we would have been at least $12,000 better off. That realization devastated me. I remember thinking, How fucking stupid is this? I tried so hard, pushed so aggressively, and the outcome was worse than if I had done absolutely nothing.
That became the lesson. I remember thinking, God, let me never forget this. I never wanted to do something again that was supposedly a means to an end when it would have been better to do nothing at all. As the year dragged toward its end, I was desperate to make money somehow. I had already quit gaming again. I stopped spending money trying to prop up Uthena, mostly because there was no money left to spend. Ironically, as soon as I stopped pushing Uthena and stopped throwing money at it, a few people started saying they might be able to connect me with investors. But by then, the Uthena dream was already dead. Once it died, I felt completely hopeless and clueless about what to do next with my business.
Around that same time, I tried to do an in-person show again. Technically, I had tried a couple of times years earlier in Sarasota around 2013, and nobody had shown up then either. This time, I ran YouTube ads and posted to all my followers. I promoted it everywhere I knew how. Once again, nobody showed up. Standing there with an empty room, I remember thinking, I have to get off the internet. I don’t know how yet, but I have to get off doing all this internet crap. I didn’t know what the alternative was, but I knew I couldn’t keep going like this.
As 2019 came to a close, my ex-wife insisted that I go see a bankruptcy attorney. I sat down in her office and laid everything out—every loan, every card, every obligation. When we totaled it up, we were around $650,000 in debt. What shocked me most was how little bankruptcy would actually help. If I declared personal bankruptcy, the maximum I could wipe out was about $50,000, mostly personal credit cards. All of my business credit cards—many of which had as much or more balance than the personal ones—couldn’t be discharged through personal bankruptcy. My ex-wife’s student loans and my student loans were untouchable. The mortgage would still have to be paid. I remember thinking, This is insane. You’re telling me I could destroy my personal credit for years, declare bankruptcy, and only escape a tiny fraction of the debt?
The attorney explained that I could also declare business bankruptcy, but that would require surrendering all my business assets. I stared at her and thought, So what, I’d have to give up all my social media accounts? All my followers? Everything I could possibly use to make money? Then what? On top of that, we would lose our car too, since I had signed the title over for a loan. Sitting there, it became painfully clear that bankruptcy wasn’t some clean reset. It was just another dead end, and there was no obvious escape hatch left.
I walked out of the bankruptcy attorney’s office thinking, fuck that. I was not declaring bankruptcy. I was going to get out of this some other way. I remember having this very specific thought as I left: If I could just get some low-interest government loans, this would all work out. If I could refinance everything with cheap, long-term debt, I could survive this. I remember thinking that clearly in December 2019. But in that moment, it felt impossible. My credit was wrecked. I was buried in loans. I kept asking myself how someone in my position was supposed to qualify for low-interest SBA loans. It seemed completely unrealistic at the time. I remember thinking, There’s no way this is going to happen.
As we moved toward the end of the year, the anxiety and stress around money were relentless. The pressure never let up. At the same time, I was oddly present. I was paying attention to what was happening inside me. I had been practicing the ideas from You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, paying closer attention to my body and my emotions. I was also continuing to give out my books at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, especially Speaker Meeting 2017. I had been handing that book out everywhere for a year or two by then. Eventually, that started causing problems. The second chapter of Speaker Meeting 2017 includes a section on sex addiction where I’m brutally honest about my sexual experiences. Everything is in there. Nothing is held back.
What happened was that I gave out a batch of books, and one of them went to a young woman in the meeting, along with several other young women. From what I later heard, she skipped straight to the sex addiction chapter. Soon after, they were gossiping about it, laughing, and making fun of me. They then talked to some of the older men in the group. Despite the fact that I was married, monogamous, and had never once hit on any of these women or made any inappropriate moves, some of the older guys decided I must be using my book as a way to pick women up at meetings. They told me to stop bringing my book to AA.
Up until then, I had brought Speaker Meeting 2017 to every meeting, set it on the table next to me, and openly offered copies for free even though they cost $10 to print. I had given out at least thirty or forty of them. Some people read it and were deeply moved. They opened up to me about their hardest life experiences and thanked me for being honest. But after that incident, going to certain AA meetings became miserable. Some of the women would snicker or whisper while I shared. Some of the men were openly hostile. A few told me I couldn’t bring my book anymore and tried to push me toward different home groups. Sometimes I’d criticize their behavior during meetings, and they’d get defensive and escalate things further. It turned ugly.
Over time, I started associating my books with drama. On top of that, they weren’t making any money. I didn’t make money selling Speaker Meeting 2017. I tried promoting it across all my social media accounts to millions of followers, and almost nobody bought it. I took transcriptions from it and put them up on Steam. Nothing happened except an increase in toxic comments. I tried different formats, different platforms, and it just wouldn’t sell. I was furious and confused. Between the AA drama and the total lack of sales, books felt like a failure on every level. I got through that turbulence in AA, but it left a mark.
What’s funny now is that I’m recording this in 2026, completely immersed in writing books, when back in 2018 and 2019 I had basically written books off entirely. I thought they were useless. Still, near the end of 2019, as Uthena continued to prove ineffective, I recorded what would be my last audiobook for a while: Officer Banfield. I went through all my stories from being a police officer and put them down honestly. Just a couple weeks ago, a guy I know told me he had read Officer Banfield and loved it. That’s what I love about books. Seven years later, someone can pick one up, read it, and genuinely enjoy it.
It’s strange to look back now and realize that at the exact moment I was convinced books were a waste of time, I was still creating something that would matter years later. At the time, though, after everything that happened with Speaker Meeting 2017, I was convinced books sucked, didn’t work, and weren’t worth the trouble. The irony of that isn’t lost on me now.
Meanwhile, there was another thread running through all of this that I didn’t fully recognize at the time. I remembered a night back in 2016, right around when I quit playing video games the first time, talking to a friend on the phone. I casually said, I don’t like reading. The moment the words came out of my mouth, I stopped myself. Wait a minute—that’s a lie. I realized immediately that I loved reading. I had been consuming audiobooks constantly ever since graduate school. I might not have been sitting down with paper books all the time, but I absolutely loved reading. I still do. Books like You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay were deeply transformative for me. They helped turn my life around and gave me tools to make real changes when everything felt like it was collapsing. That moment made me start noticing these little lies I told myself—things like I don’t read—and calling bullshit on them. I read constantly. I always had.
Around that same time, my energy was often extremely high. Sometimes that caused friction in AA meetings and triggered people, leading to conflict. Other times, though, I started noticing something very different. One night outside an AA meeting—the same meeting where people had given me a lot of shit about my books—there was a homeless guy walking down the street screaming at everyone who passed. He was yelling things like fuck you, you stupid bitch, asshole, fucker, just raging at the world. When I saw him, I intentionally put out what people would probably describe as Jesus or Buddha energy—pure love, acceptance, and compassion—and I aimed it directly at him, full force. I looked at him and consciously thought about how much I loved him and how, underneath everything, he was a perfect human being.
As he walked toward me on the sidewalk, something incredible happened. When he got within about ten feet of me, he went completely silent. He dropped his head and walked right past me without saying a word. It was like simply entering that space around me calmed him. As soon as he got about ten feet past me, he lifted his head again. Once he was fifteen or twenty feet away, he started shouting at people all over again, screaming threats and insults just like before. I remember thinking, Wow. That’s a powerful effect. It wasn’t something special about me as a person—it was about the state I was holding. I became convinced that all of us could have that kind of impact on people if we paid attention to how we managed our energy. That led me to wonder how that kind of presence could be communicated online, through content, through videos, through whatever I was doing.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.