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.
As 2016 went on, I became increasingly desperate to find new income sources. Even though I had made a ton of money on Udemy, I didn’t want to cut my expenses. I felt terrible about stopping the $5,000-a-month payments to my friend, even though he didn’t actually need the money. He wasn’t bothered by it at all, but I still felt awful. I paid him for several more months even when I didn’t really need his help anymore, just to give him time to transition.
By that point in 2016, I was experimenting with everything. That was the year the League of Legends live stream unexpectedly took off, and it was also when I started getting into crypto. I tried videos on all kinds of random topics, throwing things at the wall to see what stuck. Pretty quickly, a pattern emerged: the majority of the views I was getting were coming from crypto videos and League of Legends content. As the year went on, my entrepreneurial energy went into overdrive. I was creating audiobooks, filming more courses, trying to sell courses directly on my website, and chasing new angles constantly.
There was one instructor I had partnered with on a hacking course. After I was banned, I actually talked Udemy into letting him take the course back from me and put it up under his own name. They agreed to it, which I thought was pretty decent of them. And honestly, I did that guy a huge favor. That’s just how I operate. I take care of people when I can. By the end of 2016, I had built a very engaged League of Legends audience. I was pulling hundreds of concurrent viewers during live streams and had become one of the top League of Legends streamers in the world on YouTube at the time.
I was playing a lot of video games, and I had to make the physical setup work in a much smaller house. The place we moved into in St. Petersburg, near my ex-wife’s parents, was a two-bedroom, one-bath house. The bedrooms were right next to each other. There was a nice big living room and dining area, plus a one-car garage that no one ever actually parked in—quite a downgrade from the two-car garage we actively used in Sarasota. I ended up setting up my desk in our bedroom, hanging a green curtain right next to the bed, and turning part of the room into my entire office. I rationalized it by telling myself that most of the time, after we got up, we weren’t even in the bedroom, so I’d only be using the office when we weren’t sleeping.
At that point, my daughter was still waking up frequently and not sleeping consistently. We discovered that if I went into her room when she woke up and simply put my hand on her, she would settle back down and sleep longer. My ex-wife and I were on the same page about not having her sleep in the bed with us. Part of that was practical—we didn’t want to wreck everyone’s sleep—and we didn’t want to start a pattern that would be hard to undo. What worked, though, was having one of us physically present in her room when she stirred.
At first, I sat on the couch with her some mornings. Then I tried sleeping on the floor next to her crib with just a blanket, which was miserable and cold. Eventually, I brought in a thicker blanket, and finally I moved a mattress into her room. That way, when she woke up, I could go in, lie down, and sleep the rest of the night there. She stayed asleep much longer that way, and it felt incredibly satisfying to figure out a solution that actually worked. While all of that was happening, my office was still in our bedroom, and I was pumping out videos nonstop.
From the outside, things looked like they were exploding in a good way. My gaming live streams were blowing up on YouTube, and my audience kept growing. Internally, though, I was constantly frustrated. Nothing ever felt like enough. The quality of my videos was often low. I was grinding out endless content, much of it rushed and poorly thought out. Looking back now, it’s wild to realize that out of the decade-plus I spent as a full-time online content creator, the year I made the most money often felt like I was failing.
I remember waking up on many mornings furious at Udemy, ranting to my ex-wife that I should sue them. She shut that idea down fast. She explained that Udemy had an entire legal department designed to deal with people exactly like me and to shield themselves from their own bad behavior. Unless I could afford to seriously take them on in court—which I couldn’t—I was basically powerless. Hearing that left me feeling completely defeated. I had a hard time owning what I had contributed to the situation, and compared to the massive income I had made on Udemy, everything else felt insignificant.
I kept showing up to my business looking for validation, wishing I could somehow get back to where I had been before. At the same time, I had huge amounts of traffic and attention coming my way. It created this bizarre psychological split: a massive audience and an inflated ego on one side, and a deep sense of inferiority and not-being-good-enough on the other. No matter how much I produced or how many people watched, it never felt like it was enough.
By the end of 2016, I was genuinely asking myself what the hell I was going to do for income, because nothing felt like it was really working. The one clear signal I could see was crypto. Every crypto video I made pulled in tons of views, and it looked like there was a massive opportunity there. Crypto was starting to blow up, and anything I posted about it got traction. At the same time, I knew I didn’t have enough focus to fully lean into it. I was still playing a lot of video games, and while my gaming live streams were exploding in terms of viewership, they made essentially no money.
I loved gaming live streams—as long as I wasn’t playing League of Legends. League of Legends felt like a total grind. I hated it, but I kept playing anyway because it consistently brought the most viewers. One of the videos did make some decent ad revenue after the live stream ended, but YouTube ad revenue back then was minimal. There were no sponsorship offers, no brand deals, nothing like that. My gaming content was purely a labor of love. It was time-intensive, emotionally consuming, and financially pointless.
Around that time, I read Tony Robbins’ book Money: Master the Game, and it hit me that if I actually wanted to master the money game, I was going to need more free time and far more focus. Not long after that, I was out walking the dog one night when I asked myself a simple but uncomfortable question: What would my life be like if I didn’t play video games? Video games were a huge part of my life at that point, and they had been ever since I got sober. One of the biggest thrills of sobriety for me was realizing I wasn’t constantly sabotaging myself anymore. I felt sharp again. I felt capable. I loved being as good at video games as I had ever been.
I had moments that reinforced that attachment. One in particular stands out. I was playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 with my friends, recording the session. We were playing hardcore Search and Destroy. I started the match terribly, going 0–2, dying twice in two rounds without a single kill. I was also a little sick that day, sitting in my chair back when I still played sitting down instead of standing. At the end of the second round, I said out loud, half joking and half serious, “All right, that’s it. I’m dropping six kills this next round.” I had never, ever dropped six kills in a single hardcore Search and Destroy round—not once in thousands of games.
The next round, my entire team wiped almost immediately. I killed every single member of the opposing team myself and defused the bomb. It was the best round of Search and Destroy I had ever played in my life. I recorded it, uploaded the video, and felt incredibly proud of it. My friends were blown away. Moments like that kept me hooked. We played Battlefield, we played Zombies, and we messed around constantly. Eventually, though, even my friends gave up on League of Legends. As soon as I started playing it heavily, they lost interest. Even though they were ranked higher than me, they didn’t want to play ranked matches together, and by the time my viewership took off, most of them would only play unranked games with me, if at all. That was disappointing.
By the end of the year, I had these distinct tribes of fans. Some loved my Call of Duty content. Others were there exclusively for League of Legends. Some followed me no matter what I played. My Call of Duty live streams on Facebook went absolutely insane. Facebook had just introduced live streaming, and at that time, if someone liked your page, Facebook aggressively pushed your live streams directly to them. I had millions of page likes. My streams regularly reached hundreds of thousands of people, with hundreds of concurrent viewers watching live. In 2016, I was probably the number one live gaming streamer on Facebook and one of top League of Legends live streamers on YouTube.
And yet, despite all that attention, I was making almost no money from it because the monetization tools simply weren’t there. It was endlessly frustrating. I tried everything I could think of to turn that audience into income, and nothing worked. Tons of people wanted to play with me and jump into my games, but the moment I tried charging something like $20 to hop into a game, people lost their minds. The backlash was immediate and vicious. My comment sections were always a nightmare. No matter what I did, someone was pissed. If I played Call of Duty, people told me to go play League of Legends. If I played League of Legends, they told me how bad I was and flooded me with vicious abuse. If I posted a crypto video, it got massive views, but it also attracted bots and angry commenters telling me I sucked at crypto or demanding I make different content.
Back then, I read most of the comments. That was a mistake. They got under my skin constantly. They hurt my feelings, chipped away at me, and reinforced this feeling that nothing I did was ever good enough. So when I took that walk with the dogs and asked myself what my life would be like without video games, I wasn’t asking casually. I was genuinely curious. I wanted to know what would happen if I removed that entire piece of my life.
Right after that, on Christmas Eve 2016, I did a League of Legends livestream that felt like a complete waste of time. It wasn’t fun. It felt like a job, and I didn’t make any money. Sitting there afterward, it was obvious that this wasn’t what I needed to keep doing. If I could do it over again, I don’t know that I would have quit gaming entirely, but I absolutely would have quit League of Legends or at least found a way to make it fun again. Instead, I did what I often did in those years—I made an extreme change. I quit playing all video games.
That decision was especially strange because I was still having an incredible amount of fun with Call of Duty. One moment from 2016 stands out vividly. When the Revelations Zombies map was released, it launched first on PlayStation 4. I had both a PS4 and an Xbox, so I jumped on immediately. That day, I reached the number one spot in the world on the Call of Duty Revelations Zombies leaderboard. I did it live on stream. I had planned the strategy perfectly, focusing on blasting through rounds as fast as possible so that when I eventually died, my score would land me at the top. I didn’t hold the number one spot for long, but hitting it at all felt incredible.
I had amazing experiences like that with my friends. One friend in particular—the same guy I used to drive out of state to stay with—played Zombies with me for hours. On Zetsubou No Shima in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, we made it to round 82 during a six-hour live stream. That was the highest I had ever reached on any Zombies map. It was genuinely fun. Looking back, I’m still amazed that I couldn’t separate the parts of gaming that energized me from the parts that drained me. Instead of cutting out what I hated, I cut out everything.
When I quit gaming entirely at the end of 2016, my followers were furious. The League of Legends fans were pissed. The Call of Duty fans were pissed. It feel like everyone was pissed. More than that, it meant I stopped hanging out with my friends. My Xbox friends, who had been a huge part of my life for years, instantly lost access to me. Those relationships never recovered. Time and shared experience matter, and once I removed myself completely, the connections faded.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.