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.
By 2016, I was at the absolute peak of making money online. That year alone, I earned close to a quarter million dollars in profit and roughly $1,000,000 in total sales. On Udemy specifically, I had one month where I made $80,000 and another where I pulled in around $90,000. I felt untouchable. I was obsessed with becoming the number one instructor on the platform, and I had systems running everywhere to make that happen. I was spending hundreds of dollars a day on Google Ads, running affiliate remarketing links that funneled massive amounts of traffic into my courses. If someone bought any course on Udemy after clicking my link, I got paid. The machine was humming, and I was feeding it constantly.
I was also paying people well. I had a friend on a $5,000-per-month retainer helping me manage my Udemy presence and work on his websites tied into my ecosystem. Technically, his work more than paid for itself, and when I looked at it honestly, he was probably earning somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour helping me. Some people later told me I should have saved more or paid down debt, but that’s never been how I operate. When I’m blessed, I hook my friends up. That’s the kind of guy I am. I also brought in another Xbox friend and had just started paying him $5,000 a month to help with my Google Ads. That arrangement was literally in its first week when everything blew up.
It was the middle of June 2016. My ex-wife and I had just moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, into a house we rented near her parents. I remember the timing vividly because the chaos hit right in the middle of what should have been an exciting transition. A friend who worked with me on my courses—he had been helping me on Udemy for over a year—called me sounding panicked. He said something had happened to my Udemy profile. I opened the email and saw that Udemy had banned me outright for what they called policy violations. Reading it felt surreal.
One of the violations claimed that some of my reviews looked sketchy and appeared to come from sources like Fiverr, as if I had paid for them. Even according to their own statistics, it was less than ten percent of my reviews. What had actually happened was obvious to anyone paying attention: I had given out hundreds of thousands of free coupons to my courses. Some of those coupons ended up on sites like Fiverr, where people were reselling access to free courses. People took the courses for free, left reviews, and somehow that became evidence against me.
The second violation was labeled “improper co-instructor relationships.” They claimed that co-instructors complained I had been added to their courses and then used those courses to promote my own. I knew exactly which instructor reported me. What made it even more absurd was that after the ban, she reached out saying she felt terrible and wanted to help me get back on Udemy. It reminded me of the kind of people in Alcoholics Anonymous who joke about stealing your wallet and then helping you look for it. I was sitting there thinking, seriously—you did this, and now you want to undo it?
She had been pissed because I took her three-hour digital marketing course and added three more hours of video, turning it into a six-hour course. I doubled the material and made it worth buying. Then I sent a promotional announcement that included all of my courses, which she decided was unfair. That complaint was a major factor in Udemy banning me. The whole thing was ridiculous. If anyone else had done the same thing, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I wasn’t just anyone. I was the biggest personality on the platform, and I had the loudest mouth.
Right before the ban, I had publicly gone after Udemy on YouTube and on their own platform for making a policy change that forced instructors to sell courses for no less than $10. I thought it was a stupid move, and I said so very loudly and very publicly. I’m almost certain that video—and the broader criticism I made of them—was the final straw. They decided they’d had enough of me and were ready to shut my big mouth for good.
Ironically, while I hated losing the income from Udemy, I genuinely loved the freedom it gave me. Even with the ban hanging over everything, 2016 turned into a year of exploration. I wandered into all kinds of new territory—crypto, gaming, and other experiments that had nothing to do with online courses. That was also the year I published several of my original books online. Without courses to anchor my identity or income, I figured I might as well test new formats and see what stuck. Looking back now, if I had the chance to do it over, I might skip most of what I did back then and just write books while building a local, in-person business. Of course, if I had taken the sensible route, the story you’re about to hear would be far less interesting.
One of the experiments I ran in 2016 involved League of Legends. Out of probably a hundred random ideas I tested that year, this one was almost accidental. I was absolutely terrible at the game. It’s a shitty game in my opinion, and I still don’t understand how it became so popular. That said, all my friends were playing it. I wanted to play with them, and more importantly, I wanted to stop sucking. So I tried something simple: I paid a retired professional League of Legends player who was working as a coach. He charged thirty euros an hour. We got on Skype, I screen-shared my gameplay, and he coached me live. This was 2016—way ahead of the curve. Hardly anyone was doing anything like this at the time.
I took it a step further and live streamed the entire thing on YouTube. I titled the stream, Can a Pro Coach Help Me Get Out of Bronze in League of Legends?—which, in hindsight, was an absolutely brilliant title. When the stream actually happened, nothing special occurred. It was just me and the coach. I played a single game with him because League games take forever, I won that one match, and then I wrapped the stream. I hired him again for another session afterward, but for whatever reason I didn’t even manage to get that one live on YouTube. At the time, it all felt forgettable. Hardly anyone watched while I was live.
Around then, I was testing live streaming everywhere—Twitch, YouTube, Facebook—throwing gameplay online and seeing what happened. There was absolutely no money in gaming at that point. No donations, no memberships, no stars. Twitch might have had subscribers, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting any. There were sometimes decent view counts, but there was no income attached to any of it. I did that League of Legends coaching stream in the spring of 2016 and completely forgot about it.
Then one day, while obsessively checking my YouTube analytics like I always did, I noticed something strange. That old live stream had broken out. It was suddenly pulling in tens of thousands of views per day and generating hundreds of thousands of impressions daily. YouTube was pushing it all over the League of Legends community. I remember staring at the numbers thinking, What the hell is happening? The beginning of the video was awkward as hell—me going live while the coach and I were still getting connected on Skype, five or ten minutes of clumsy small talk before the game even started. And yet YouTube was blasting this out to everyone interested in League of Legends.
The title was doing heavy lifting, and the average watch time was massive. That combination made the algorithm fall in love with it. One live stream that almost nobody watched in real time ended up delivering me a huge League of Legends audience. For the deeper version of my internet career, all of that is laid out in I Was Famous on the Internet, and I don’t need to repeat it here. I’m telling this League of Legends story because it sets up what comes next perfectly.
At the same time, 2016 turned into a breakout year for my health. After a full year of tracking calories and actually following through, I had my weight down to 190 pounds. I was incredibly proud of the physical shape I was in. The last time I had been anywhere near that weight was years earlier, when I had lived with my parents for a year and followed a strict routine: eating during the day, not eating after dinner except for the popcorn with my mom, staying up late, going to the gym consistently, and not drinking. I had gotten into great shape back then, and six years later I was back there again. I was doing personal training, I felt strong, lean, and confident, and everything in my body felt like it was clicking into place. Physically, I felt fantastic.
Right in the middle of all of this, we made a major personal change. At the time, we were living in the Sarasota area, technically in Bradenton near the Sarasota airport. My ex-wife and her family kept dropping subtle hints about how nice it would be to live in St. Petersburg now that we had a baby. Our daughter, my daughter, was six months old at the beginning of 2016 and turned one in August. Everyone seemed to really want us closer so they could see her more often. My ex-wife wouldn’t have to drive as much, and for family dinners we wouldn’t all have to do a two-hour round trip from Sarasota. It was framed as convenience, connection, and family time, and over months it slowly worked its way into my head.
I remember standing in the shower one day, thinking it would actually be a brilliant idea for us to move to St. Petersburg. At the time, we were living in an amazing house—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge living room, a screened-in lanai, a pool in the backyard, a fully fenced yard, and a big, beautiful corner lot in the front. We paid $168,000 for it. Technically, the city address was Sarasota, and the house itself was absolutely perfect. Meanwhile, St. Pete was significantly more expensive. To get anything comparable, we would have needed to pay at least $50,000 to $100,000 more, easily.
I came out of the shower and told my ex-wife that we should move to St. Petersburg, presenting it like it was my idea. Almost immediately afterward, it hit me what had happened. It felt like I’d been on the receiving end of some Inception-level manipulation. If you’ve seen Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio, the entire premise is planting ideas in someone’s mind in such a subtle way that they believe it was their own thought. That’s exactly what it felt like. I realized how smooth my ex-wife and her family were about it. In my family, people would have argued it directly—laid out the logic, explained why it made sense, and debated it openly. My ex-wife’s family did the opposite. They let the idea bloom quietly until I thought I had discovered it myself.
Looking back, it makes perfect sense why they did it that way. If they had tried to push the move directly, I probably would have resisted hard. I had a very solid life in Sarasota. I had my Alcoholics Anonymous group where I got sober and where I was deeply connected to people. I had my personal training setup, my massage therapist, my routines, and a house I genuinely loved. The mortgage was cheap, and everything felt stable and dialed in. Moving to St. Petersburg meant disrupting all of that.
Years later, my ex-wife and I still wonder what would have happened if we had stayed in Sarasota. Financially, staying in that house would have been an incredibly smart decision. The mortgage we ended up with later was more than double what that house cost, for a smaller place with no pool. That choice had long-term consequences, and I’ll come back to that later.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.