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.
More importantly, I was back to gaming. And this time, the viewers showed up immediately. With most of the world locked down and online, my viewership picked up right where it had left off a year earlier. On Facebook, I instantly had hundreds of concurrent viewers. It felt like the universe was conspiring to give me exactly what I wanted. Views poured in. One of the top zombie streamers on YouTube raided me on one of my first streams back, dumping his audience into my channel while I was playing zombies. I was having a blast almost immediately. I had missed gaming so much, and my followers were thrilled I was back. New followers kept rolling in.
I spent a few days warming up on zombies, then jumped into Call of Duty: Warzone. At first, I got absolutely shit on. Warzone solos are brutal—150-person free-for-all battle royale—and it took me eighty-two games to get my first win. I finished second multiple times. Third several times. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth—over and over. I was in the top ten probably twenty or thirty times in those first eighty-two games. Then it finally happened.
The final circle pulled perfectly in my direction. I was set up behind cover. The other guy got unlucky and had to sprint straight toward me. I jumped out to the left side of the cover and sprayed him. He returned fire. I jumped to the right, aimed, and killed him. The moment I won that first Warzone game, I hit peak euphoria. It was electric. It was confirmation. Right then, I knew. Shit. If I can do this—just wait. I thought, Wait until you see what I can do if I keep going.
What people really connected with on my live streams was how much fun I was having. Back in 2018 and 2019, when I streamed, I was the guy who had already made all this money. I wore suits and costumes, talked about business, tried to sell courses, and played this larger-than-life role. People watched, but they didn’t really vibe with me. When I came back to gaming in 2020, I was the opposite of that guy. I was barely scraping by, chasing a dream, streaming on a ghetto setup that I’d pieced together for under $1,000. I talked openly about how broke I was, how messed up my finances were, and people related to that immediately. One of my first live streams in the gaming program pulled in over $700 in donations. People were getting stimulus checks, sitting at home drunk or high, lonely, desperate for connection, and they were throwing real money at my stream because it felt alive.
They loved the rawness. They loved the honesty. That same energy I’d felt when I calmed the screaming homeless guy—that grounded, present, loving intensity—I poured straight into my live streams, and people felt it. The time off gaming and working on myself had paid off big. The channel started growing fast. As I got better at Call of Duty: Warzone, the growth accelerated. I started winning more games, and instead of just flexing wins, I taught people exactly how I was doing it. What made my stream different was that I wasn’t relying on cracked reaction times or hyper-aggressive Twitch-style gameplay. I showed people how to win with strategy. I taught people how to be a little camping bitch—sit in a corner, hold position, wait for the elevator door to open, and spray someone when the moment was right. It was patient. It was sneaky. And it worked.
That approach attracted a very specific crowd. People who felt like they didn’t belong in the hyper-competitive gaming world. People who felt too slow, too awkward, too shitty to even enjoy watching other streamers. They’d come into my stream and think, This guy gets me. At the same time, I was talking about sobriety, health, inspiration, and ripping into all the bullshit happening in the world. It wasn’t just a gaming stream. It felt like a hangout with someone real.
From a marketing standpoint, I knew exactly what was happening. Facebook was pushing live streams hard in the algorithm, and I knew how to take advantage of that. While most gamers had zero understanding of digital marketing, I had a decade of experience. Most streamers would title their streams with dumb shit like, Call of Duty Warzone Solos | 5KD | Pro Player, or whatever sweaty nonsense they copied from bigger channels. The big streamers did it, the small ones copied it, and they all blended together.
I did the opposite. I wrote full paragraphs in my descriptions about my life. I talked about being sober for six years in Alcoholics Anonymous. I mentioned being inspired by Wayne Dyer. I talked about yoga, meditation, and personal growth. Facebook had all this user data, and with live streams boosted in the algorithm, it started showing my streams to people who had never watched gaming content in their lives. People would show up in the chat saying they didn’t even play video games and had no idea how they ended up there. For many of them, I was the first person they ever watched play a video game on Facebook—and I definitely wasn’t the last. That was the magic of it. I wasn’t just another gamer. I was a human being playing games, fully myself, and Facebook’s algorithm amplified that in a way I hadn’t seen before.
As my viewership kept climbing, I started asking myself how I could push it to the next level. I noticed that a lot of hot women were streaming, and it was obvious why people stopped scrolling. There was one streamer in particular I remember watching and thinking that the camera was doing a lot of the work. On screen, all you saw was a blonde woman in a tank top, and that alone was enough to make people pause. What struck me was how boring the stream itself was. No personality. Not especially good at the game. Just hacking around, barely engaging. In my head, I was judging hard—dismissing her as someone throwing on a sports bra and letting horny dudes pile into the chat. And yet, it worked.
That made me think: How do I trigger that same scroll-stopping effect? What could I do that would make people pause the way those streams did? The answer I came up with was simple and extreme. I started streaming naked. Completely naked. My camera only framed me from the shoulders up, so nothing explicit was visible, but yeah—below the frame, I was naked. I told myself it made me more vulnerable, more raw, more real, and maybe that was true. For a couple of weeks, I streamed like that, and my viewership went insane.
At the time, I don’t remember seeing any other guys streaming shirtless, let alone naked off-camera. Maybe some were, but I hadn’t seen it. What I do know is that my shirtless streams stopped people dead in their scroll. People would wander into the chat asking, Where’s your shirt? Are you on drugs? It was instant engagement, and Facebook loved that. One person would comment, then their friends would jump in, and suddenly the chat would explode. Before I took my shirt off, my audience was mostly people who already liked me, plus some new viewers. After I started streaming shirtless, the numbers skyrocketed. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, sometimes five hundred concurrent viewers. Followers poured in. Donations increased. The growth was unreal.
The downside was that the chat became absolutely toxic. The comments were brutal. People attacked my gameplay, my family, and me personally, and told me to disappear in the ugliest terms imaginable. Anything you can imagine, people said it. A lot of them got blocked by Facebook for it. Ironically, many of the people who genuinely loved me ended up getting their own accounts suspended or blocked from commenting because they were fighting back in the chat. I’d get private messages saying, Man, I can’t comment on your stream for a week because I went after some guy who was talking shit. It was chaotic, ugly, and incredibly toxic. And Facebook absolutely loved it. The platform pushed my stream everywhere. The controversy, the arguments, the nonstop engagement—it was exactly what the algorithm wanted, and it amplified me relentlessly.
One thing after another kept happening in a way that felt almost perfectly, divinely aligned. There was this moment when a new Easter egg dropped in Warzone—the Juggernaut Easter egg. You could get this insane suit that gave you something like twenty times the normal health and a minigun with infinite ammo. I was absolutely wrecking people with it. I was just blasting lobbies, taking on three or four people at once sometimes, feeling unstoppable. Then this one guy rolled up while I was in the Juggernaut suit and ran me over with a car, which somehow took out about two-thirds of my health. After that, he sprayed me so hard that he finished me off completely. Most people would have lost their shit in that moment. I didn’t. I started praising him like he was a god. I was saying things like, Holy shit, that’s the best Call of Duty gameplay I’ve ever seen. You’re unbelievable. I can’t believe you just did that.
What I didn’t know at the time was that this guy was one of the top professional players in Mexico—possibly the top Call of Duty streamer in the country on Facebook. He had thousands of people watching him live, something like three or four thousand viewers, and all of them were hearing me hype him up instead of rage. He sent his entire audience over to my stream. Suddenly, I had this massive influx of new viewers and followers, and then those people started sharing me out even further. It snowballed fast.
As 2021 approached, I started becoming one of the recognizable names on Facebook for Call of Duty: Warzone. There were maybe ten top Warzone streamers on the platform, and I was consistently in that group. I was showing up in other people’s live streams, donating to them, interacting, building real relationships. At the same time, the money finally started coming in. I was making thousands of dollars a month just from Facebook streaming. On top of that, I was posting videos on YouTube and experimenting with live streams on Twitch. For the first time in a long time, it felt like something was actually working.
There was still one thing that pissed me off, though. I hadn’t been accepted into the Facebook Gaming partner program yet. I was pulling more views than a lot of people who already had partner status, but I still didn’t have the invite. I kept checking my dashboard, waiting for it to show up, and nothing happened. Eventually, multiple followers told me I needed to contact Facebook support directly. I resisted for a while, but finally I did it. I sent a message basically saying, What the fuck? I clearly meet the requirements. I should have the partner invite, and it’s not there.
Facebook support replied and told me they couldn’t help me. That was it. Then, within twenty-four hours of that response, the option to apply for partner suddenly appeared on my page. Someone had clearly gone in manually and fixed something. My page was old. I’d been part of Facebook’s gaming ecosystem early on, and something about it wasn’t triggering correctly anymore. Whatever it was, it got corrected, and I finally received the partner invite I had been chasing since 2018. It was wild to think about. The thing I had wanted so desperately years earlier—back when everything was falling apart—finally showed up after I had stripped everything down, rebuilt from nothing, and committed fully to what I actually loved doing.
I finally got the partner invite. Then I read the terms. They came with a non-disclosure agreement, which immediately set off alarm bells for me. Any time someone hands you an NDA, something fucked up is happening, because they’re asking you not to talk about it. I’m not going to spell out exactly what it said, because this book is public, but the terms were disgusting. Reading them made something click in a way that honestly nauseated me. I realized that this must be how the entire internet actually works. All the biggest voices, all the people with the most reach—most of them must have signed agreements like this. Maybe not every single one, but enough that it shapes the narrative. Agreements where you’re not allowed to speak honestly about certain things, where you’re nudged—sometimes explicitly—into saying things a particular way.
Looking at those terms, I remember thinking, Oh… this is how it’s being done. This is how people are being steered. This is how public perception gets molded. Some of the clauses were so bad that if the average person saw them, they’d want to throw up. It hit me that the top voices online weren’t necessarily lying because they wanted to—they were being boxed in. Silenced selectively. Directed. And that realization made me sick. I signed it anyway.
I wanted it too badly to walk away at that point. I told myself I’d just try to be a good boy. That alone should tell you how fucked the situation was, because I can’t be tamed. I figured I’d do my best not to violate the terms and stay just inside the lines. I also realized that the public didn’t know about the agreement, so they couldn’t report me for violating it. Only other Facebook partners and Facebook itself knew what was off-limits. As long as I stayed discreet, I’d be fine. That was the logic. It killed me, though, because I’m an extremely direct person. After signing that NDA, I stopped openly talking about some of the things I’d been running my mouth about and started being much more indirect—at least for a while.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.