Hey, it's Jerry Banfield. Let me whisper in your ear and tell you about my life, something you might like to hear. Let me show you my day and see if you like it. It's January 9th, 2025. I've been a YouTuber forever at this point, and I love talking about my life. I'm glad I took the time today to share what I did.
Cancelling the racket club membership
I just played tennis before this at the racket club near my house, and I think I'm going to cancel my racket club membership. I've been a member for about five or six months now, and I'm at the point with tennis where it's either do a lot more or quit. Maybe I'll go play casually at a court sometime if I have somebody to play with. I do these coaching camps every week at the racket club, and I did one tonight.
It's been hard to find people to play with at the racket club. Everybody is either way too good or not good enough. There are people who are so bad I beat them so badly it's hard to even play, or there are people who are way too good and they don't want to train me how to play tennis better. So then I feel like I need coaching all the time. I started playing tennis because I thought it'd be fun to learn something new and experience the racket club membership down the street.
I think it's time to cancel the membership and maybe play a little more basketball, do a little more running, and do some more stuff around the house. Something needs to go in my life. I want to play a sport that's also a good workout, and unless I'm playing singles against somebody better than me, tennis isn't that good of a workout. A lot of the people at the racket club are old guys playing doubles, which is basically just standing around, and that's what I was doing a lot of. But I'm really glad I did it.
The racket club membership is around $240 a month, so that's a significant expense, especially considering it's after-tax income. I basically have to do an hour-long call to pay for that membership every month after taxes. I think it's time to let it go and make some space for something new. I'm always analyzing the things in my life.
The little details at home
It's been so nice lately. You can see the counter my son built into a police station, and my daughter has her Lego that she's building. I'm always interested to see what the kitchen counter looks like in my house, so I took a picture of the background, because that's something I wish I had pictures of. I probably have a picture of the kitchen counter from years past that I don't look at anymore.
It's been cold today. I actually played in a hoodie this morning, which is unusual in Florida, but it warmed up enough and I played enough that I ended up in a t-shirt and some pants. I'm doing laundry right now.
Filming crypto videos and how compromised the space is
Did I film two ICP videos today? Yeah, I filmed a really long one this morning: "Top 24 Altcoins Ready for a Crypto Bull Run in 2025," covering 24 different ICP altcoins. That took a lot of research to put together. After that, I realized I need to make a whole video about one point in particular, which is how compromised crypto is. There are all these backhand deals and payments going around that viewers are almost completely unaware of, and that's what's dictating which coins people put in their portfolios and which coins these content creators hype up. People latch onto certain content creators and certain coins, and they're just getting fooled and shilled all the way down. At least I can be transparent about it.
Making my 293rd song
I also made my 293rd song today. I just showed up, button-mashed again in my studio, and had fun. I'm so glad I did, because I was thinking, oh, I should make dance music. Deadmau5 says that if he wants to get paid, he has to put a kick drum in his music. Well, I don't need to get paid off my music. There's enough dance music out there already, and there's all of Deadmau5's music, so just listen to that. You don't need my dance music.
But what can I offer? I like to think about what I can offer uniquely to the world. I'm one of the few people in the world who just gets around, fools around, button-mashes, and then puts that out as a video, which makes for interesting, experimental, unusual music. You can hear some new sounds, and it's fun to do.
Why I don't treat everything like work
I'm a big believer that it's okay if some days my crypto stuff is work, because that pays the bills. But I shouldn't be doing my music channel and my vlogs like they're work, because they're not paying the bills. In my experience, I'm not a believer in doing work like it's work unless you're getting paid for it or unless it's fun.
That's been an interesting journey for me, because as a content creator I felt like I needed to approach everything I do as though it should pay. I stressed so much over my video gaming stuff in the past when it didn't pay, even though I was making plenty of money in crypto and plenty of money on Udemy. I'd stress out about my video gaming stuff like it needed to pay the bills. What I've come to believe is that if you've got something that pays the bills, then you can relax about everything else as a content creator.
What I ate and how I move
I had another bean taco thing for lunch today, another bean taco lunch. I also had a couple of packets of oatmeal from Whole Foods, organic maple-flavored oatmeal, which is tasty. I just dump it down dry. I don't even microwave it. I just rip the top off the bag and dump it in there to get that sugar. The sugar tastes better before it's all in water. I dump the dry oats down because I'm not interested in using my time on the microwave. I do have the time, I'm just not interested in spending it that way.
I played tennis twice today, and that's probably why I'm at the point of needing to cancel the racket club membership. I played this morning with a guy in his 70s and had a nice talk with him. At the same time, I beat him at every single thing we did. I let him have one game, but I won both sets and all the ground games we played. It's nice for him to hit with me, but I'm sure there's another old guy on his level he could hit with. Meanwhile I'm thinking, man, this isn't even that good of a workout, I'm just standing around. If I'd played basketball for an hour and a half, I'd have been worked out.
I had fun playing basketball the other day. Probably four months from now I'll be saying basketball sucks and I'm playing ultimate frisbee now or whatever, but that's good. It's nice to learn new things. I'm really enjoying shooting three-pointers in basketball. It's surprisingly satisfying.
My body and playing tennis don't fully agree. My wrist has been jacked up for a few months, and it's a little better now. I'm not going to the doctor to have them screw around putting stuff on my wrist. It seems like the main thing I've done to aggravate my wrist over the last few months has been playing tennis, and the starting and stopping on the tennis court has made my knees a little tight too. So basketball is good. I play basketball all kinds of times. You might sprain an ankle here and there, but my ankles are about as strong as they've been thanks to doing yoga, relative to my body size.
Telling the kids about working in prison
I picked the kids up from school today, which was great. I picked my niece up too, so I had three kids, and I told them about being a correction officer, what it was like working in prison with the kids in there who had done the worst crimes imaginable. I was in there as a correction officer. The youngest kid was like 10 or 11 or 12, a short kid; my daughter is taller than him already at nine years old. And the oldest kids in there were 18. These were real thugs off the street: murderers, big boys too. You had to be careful. One of my coworkers got beaten nearly to death in the eight months I worked there. If you said the wrong thing at the wrong time or put yourself in the wrong situation, your life was in danger.
I got close to some of those situations, and I'm grateful. My empathic readings would tell me things. There was this one day, I still remember the kid's name, but for privacy I won't say it, though it's a generic name anyway. I walked into his room. I worked night shift, so you got more time, while during the day you had to be on your game more. But it sucked being in there all night. The kids would have all kinds of shenanigans, sometimes while sleeping. Then I'm there having to wake them up and get them out to go eat breakfast at the cafeteria. I had to get them on a school bus or a van and drive them across the prison, just hoping they didn't beat each other up the whole time or beat me up. They'd be talking junk the whole morning and not cooperating, just like regular kids do, except these kids might punch your face in or stab you with a shank they carved out of a fork in the cafeteria.
I enjoyed it, though. This was after college, and I figured the last thing I wanted was a boring job, and this was not boring. You say the wrong thing or make the wrong move and you might get disabled, beaten up pretty bad, disabled for life, or killed in there. And if you lost your temper, you might end up going to prison yourself.
One of my coworkers proved that point. Two guys were working together. One night, a whole bunch of the kids jumped one of them and beat him nearly to death. The next night, the same coworker came back, a guy who'd been in my training class, and he beat up on one of these kids. Then the police came in, arrested him, and took him out of work in a police car for child abuse. You've got juveniles in there, so if you beat up on a juvenile, all of a sudden it's child abuse. It was the craziest, most dangerous work environment.
Most of the white guys in there didn't last a single night, from what I saw during my time working there. There was this big, tough-looking white guy who came in one night and quit the next morning. He had some kid held up against a wall, and then he quit. They tried to get me to quit too.
My response back then was basically, "Nah, this is fine. I'm not leaving until I get a job as a police officer." I don't know why I get so set on getting exactly what I want. Sometimes the better move is to change what you want. I had decided I wanted to be a police officer back in college, and then I smoked weed senior year, which slowed down my police officer applications quite a bit. They ask you straight out, "Have you done any illegal drugs?" Well, sure. Six months ago, I smoked weed. And they say, "You need to wait until it's been three years." Waiting until junior and senior year to try marijuana for the first time when I wanted to be a police officer was a bad idea. I should have gotten that out of the way in high school, or freshman or sophomore year. But there you go.
How I Ended Up in Corrections
So I ended up being a correction officer because none of the police departments would hire me. But being a correction officer is exactly what led to me getting hired by a police department that wasn't quite as picky. They were happy to take me. Their attitude was, "This guy survived in juvenile corrections for half a year. We'll hire him. We're confident he can get through the police academy." And that's how I got into being a police officer.
I told the kids about being a correction officer. It was brutal in there. They would beat each other up. They would beat you up. You'd see a kid in the morning with his whole face swollen up because he got punched in the face. It was rough. It could certainly have been worse, but it was rough. There was crazy stuff going on too. There were correction officers bringing contraband in. The kids would tell me they'd give me a hundred dollars for a pack of cigarettes. I never took them up on it, because I knew once they got you to do that, they'd have leverage over you. I didn't want any of those kids to have leverage over me. But I had a coworker who I think was bringing them cigarettes, because they treated him a lot better, and he didn't seem to have the ethical dilemma that I did. He was willing to risk it to make the extra money and to have that better relationship with them.
I had coworkers who would turn the radio on to music I couldn't stand and crank it up loud while I was trying to read my book. Then they'd fall asleep. We'd have battles over it. I'd turn the radio off, and they'd get back up and turn it on us. And I remember, while I was working in there, I wrote a plan on a piece of paper one night to be President of the United States. I guess that's what makes me a little special. I've never let my outside circumstances dictate my dreams. If you take anything from this, take that: don't let your outside circumstances dictate your dreams.
A Minority Behind the Walls
I was making twenty thousand dollars a year and risking my life. I was a minority in race, gender, and age. Most of the officers were older black females, and here I was, this 22-year-old white guy. Most of the inmates were young black men, though they did have a couple of girls' units too. I'll admit the girls in there would holler at me when I walked by. You'd get some catcalls walking past the girls' units, and I always tried to time my walks by to catch them if I could. I still remember those catcalls. They'd yell some dirty stuff out, because they were locked up just like the boys. So it was a good time. You should see how they celebrate Christmas in there. It's just what you'd think it is. But I didn't go into too graphic detail with my kids on the way home today.
I had fun picking the kids up from school. And on a lighter note, I searched for "ICP crypto" top videos on YouTube, and it's like some other guy who just did a video for it, and then it's my video, and my video again. We really have this niche locked down. If anybody searches ICP crypto, your boy has search results coming up. I love doing these vlogs. I'm wondering what I'll put for the title on this one. Those correction officer catcalls, though, those are good.
The stories you'd hear around that place were crazy, so crazy. I'm glad I made it out of there. It seems like another life now, so different from the life I have today. It's like that was somebody else's life. At this point it just feels like some story I'm telling. Did that even happen? It was almost 20 years ago at this point. Can you even picture me as a correction officer?
The Kid and the Light
I didn't finish that story about one kid, though. There was this kid, 18 years old. I went in to wake him up one morning. I turned his light on, which was the standard way you'd wake the kids up. You'd turn their lights on, and that was their sign to get up. The cooperative ones would get up and get ready to go. And there'd often be a kid or two, or five, who were like, "F you," but you still had to get your entire unit ready, get them on the bus or in the van, and get them to breakfast on time. I'm amazed I was able to do that.
This one day, this one kid was bigger than me. He had thick arms. He could have beaten me to death pretty easily. And I was about 70 pounds heavier than him, with bigger muscles and a lot of fat. I could take a punch back then better than I can take one now, that's for sure. My face was ready to take punches back then. Sometimes I'd get hit in the face and fall on my face. But this kid, I turned his light on a couple of times, and I went to turn it on a third time, and he said, "Banfield, you touch my light again and you're going to regret it." He said it in a cold, completely normal tone of voice. I don't know how, but I could just tell: this morning, this kid is going to absolutely lose it. Lots of mornings he wasn't any trouble at all. But for some reason I could read that today was not the day. Leave his light off, hope he gets up, and if he won't come out, it's not worth getting beat up over.
But I had a moment with him in line later, where he tied his shoes up. When they tied their shoes up while standing in line outside the cafeteria, that meant they were ready for action, because usually they'd have their shoes untied all the time. You'd see one bend down and tie his shoes, and you knew he was getting ready to run on somebody. So I did the same thing to him I'd done that morning. I said, "I saw you lace your shoes up. If you run on this kid, I'm going to tackle you in the middle of all these other kids out here." Because if he'd done that, I wasn't going to have my line looking all jacked up, with my line starting the riot. They would have riots in there. Things would go off and get nuts, and they'd have to call in backup from outside the facility. There were nowhere near enough officers to keep all those kids in check. I say kids, but at least half of them were grown men who had done the worst stuff possible. And we didn't have any weapons. We had nothing but a radio. You'd better pray you could get on that radio if you needed help. The cameras weren't watched too closely a lot of the time, but at least they recorded.
Feeling Invincible
It's crazy. I felt very invincible. I still feel invincible now. I just also recognize that if you mess this body up, it could take some work to transition out of it and get a fresh one. Back in my 20s, I wasn't worried about that at all. This thing could die and it's not a big deal, I'll just get another one. I felt invincible because on some level I knew my own immortality. I know I live forever, so I'm not worried about it. I could go do whatever I wanted. I was very fearless. The only thing I hated was being bored. I liked danger. I liked to fight.
Some days in corrections were really satisfying. You'd get on a bus first thing in the morning and everybody's punching each other, and you'd break the fight up by grabbing kids. You had to try not to hurt anybody, but you'd have to swing and hit the kid who was on top of the other kid to get him off. It was satisfying. I'd go home thinking, "Well, I don't know how many kids I hit today." It was wild. I liked the wildness.
But now I like the calm too. Thinking back on making twenty thousand dollars a year to risk my life like that, my whole relationship with money has completely changed since those days, and that's a big part of what I share over on my Money playlist. My son wants to fight all the time, and I try to play with him sometimes. He slapped me on the stomach so many times tonight that my stomach turned red. It's so funny to look at how he acts with me versus how I acted with my dad. I cannot picture slapping my dad on the stomach. I would have gotten cracked upside the head immediately. My dad wouldn't even have thought about it. There wouldn't have been an interval of "maybe I should react." It would have been instant. My son just hauls off and whacks me because he knows I'm not going to do anything. But that's a good thing, isn't it?