You're about to experience March 12th, 2025 here with me, Jerry Banfield. I'm actually filming this the next day, and I think everyone should do a vlog like this because it's really helpful to take inventory of your life.
Finding My Confidence With the ICP Grants
One of the most interesting things that happened was a big change in how I look at the projects I'm working with on Internet Computer Protocol. I had asked five of them for thousands of dollars worth of their tokens in exchange for promoting their project. I went into it with this attitude of defensiveness, feeling like they should give it to me but betting they probably wouldn't, and being overly sensitive to comments. Then for some reason I had a shift. It was like, hold on, I found my confidence. Wait a minute, I'm one of the best people in the world to do marketing for OpenChat, Decide AI, ICPSwap, Water Neuron, Tracks, Gold DAO. There's hardly anybody else in the world in a better position than me to do marketing to help them sell more of their tokens. And they have more to gain from my marketing than anybody else.
I did one Decide AI video and it moved the market cap millions of dollars. I didn't even hype the price. I just talked about the tech and how I'm using it. People put in hundreds plus thousands of dollars, it stacked up, and that moved the market cap up millions. So I remembered my value. I started thinking back to how I used to approach dating. I just asked girl after girl out, went out on date after date, and got rejected over and over again. The first time I asked a girl out she said no, and I was all sensitive and hurt. But a decade later, I'm so used to getting rejected that it actually leaves me feeling good. At least I'm trying.
I remembered that in my crypto situation too. These projects only cost anywhere from a dollar to ask. The most expensive one, Decide AI, costs like $20 or $30 if you get rejected because they already sent the money. Some of the other projects only cost a dollar or two to ask. So the most I could even lose is five or ten bucks on some of these to ask for thousands. I realized I'd been doing this all wrong. These projects are going to give me this money, and I'm going to ask until they give it to me, and I'm going to tweak my pitch. The more of them that give it to me, the more the others will feel like they want in also.
Decide AI already sent the first one. Several of the others are passing currently, except I still need to submit one to Water Neuron, and I need to wait a little because they already transferred a bunch out. But I got my confidence. I'm going to ask until they give me the money, and in my mind there's nothing better they could do with this money than give it to me. I'm good at marketing, so I'm easily able to convince them of that. It's funny, a radical transformation from being all squeamish and awkward to being like, show me the money. It's a really nice transformation.
Part of that came from listening to Vanessa Van Edwards talk on Mel Robbins' podcast. Sometimes things just click. I noticed I was feeling anxious when I went in to look at the proposals, and I thought, what am I doing? I'm going to get in here and dominate this, because that's how I got here. I got to be a full-time creator by getting in and dominating, getting rejected, getting suspended, and getting banned, and taking one thing after another by having thousands of videos that hardly anybody watches, and just keep going and going. I'm grateful to record this in a vlog, because this was a day of big transformation.
The Rest of the Day: Kids, Bobby O, and Yoga
What else did I do? I got up and took the kids to school, was there by eight o'clock, and spent a little time snuggling in the back with my son after dropping my daughter off for safety patrol. I read my OpenChat messages and listened to Bobby O's older videos. Bobby O is the number one person who gets me hyped up about Internet Computer Protocol. He sees the big picture and how the tech fits in, and that's what really matters. The price, the graph, the charts, the narratives, even the individual projects don't really matter. It's the big-picture tech fit that really matters.
Then I got to my yoga class. I'm enjoying being a friendly person, and I can exercise my personality in a way to be popular. The way to do that is to like other people, so I'm really practicing that, especially at yoga, to like other people and to appreciate other people. And it's working. In most of the yoga classes I go to, there's somebody chatting me up. I'm very friendly with a lot of the people there, and I'm always trying to get to know people better.
I got to yoga class about 15 minutes early. I told my brain to just remember where I put my mat the day before and all the other details. There was a guy I hadn't seen in quite a while, so I put my mat next to him to catch up. This was a guy I had been a little cold with before, because sometimes if somebody's a bit too warm, we get like, hey, what's going on, why does this person want so much out of me? And I realized that I was pushing away the very people who could be my friends, like I wanted to be lonely. So I had a good chat with this guy and asked him what was going on and where he'd been. I had a nice yoga flow.
Tennis Against a Better Player
Then I went to play tennis. I'm grateful the weather was cooperative. The last two times I went to play tennis the weather was good, except for the coaching clinic, so I guess two out of three times. I got nice weather, no wind, nice sun. I won the second game, then lost the first set 6-1 and lost the second set 6-3. Anytime I can get three wins in against the guy I play on Wednesdays, I feel really good, because he's a significantly better tennis player. He's got a hard, fast serve, he can run all over the court, and he can hit pretty accurate shots. If I play up to the net, he'll easily lob them or hit them past me to the side. This is a guy who has played more tennis than me and is better than me, and I'm really grateful to get to play him. I won at least four games out of 16, which is doing great for me. I had a good chat with him and went home.
A Crypto Video for Friends and Family
That's when I had this transformation about what I'm doing with these grants. I need to be in there, confident, let's go. There's nothing better you could do with your treasury than to send it to me and have me promote it. After that nice transformation, I filmed a couple of crypto videos.
I had a great conversation with my wife and realized that I need to have a video crafted for my friends and family. I do all these crypto videos for people around the world, millions and millions of impressions, and people spend thousands and thousands of hours watching my channel every month. And yet I hardly send any of this information to my friends and family. I need a video crafted for friends and family who know nothing about crypto, who are busy, and who would just like to find an investment they can make some more money on. So I recorded a video specifically to send to them, and I hope it'll be useful for other people to send to their own friends and family who aren't crypto people but just should know about this.
I'm thinking, what happens when I'm ultra rich off of ICP and my friends and family say, hey man, why didn't you tell me about that? The price is so low right now, it's the perfect time to tell them all about it. I practiced doing the video with Laura. I gave her the basic version and she said I needed to dumb it down further. So much of this stuff, you think you're simplifying, but she doesn't know how money works on the back end, doesn't know how the internet works or the tech. I was telling her about stuff she didn't even know why she needed, because she didn't know how money and the internet work, which most people don't. So I made the video with that in mind. It's nice with friends and family because I can see the questions they're asking and make specific videos.
Reaching the Non-Crypto Masses
I also had a realization about my videos. I've been thinking about how to get out to a broader audience, but I'd been mistaking that for trying to reach a broader crypto audience, when really where I need to get to is the non-crypto masses. That's the broad audience. I need basic videos that explain basic stuff, bring ICP into that, and those are the videos that are easily shareable.
At the same time, I've made a bunch of videos for a more advanced crypto audience, and sometimes they don't like the beginner ones. But the beginner ones are often the ones that do really well over time, especially if you make something nobody has covered before. If you're the 500th video about Bitcoin mining, that's not going to get as many views because a bunch of other people already covered it. So I'm going to try to find where I can really fit in videos that people haven't done before and explain things for beginners in a way that nobody else has, in a way that's not covered well. I feel really good about that.
Forgetting a Paid Call
I was on a live on Twitch and I filmed some music videos too, and I completely spaced. Somebody paid $333 to talk to me for an hour, and for the first time I forgot. I straight up forgot. I was on my live stream and realized, oh my God, the call started 15 minutes ago, and I was literally on a computer and just had to click start Zoom, start meeting, and be in it. I messaged them on OpenChat, thankfully because they'd already messaged me there first, and said I was sorry, I'd been on a live stream and totally forgot, and that I could start now or they could reschedule. They said let's just reschedule, they'd already left. So I sent them a coupon.
A week off the calls and time with family
They rescheduled to Saturday, so I'm glad that was something we could handle. I want to make sure I remember the schedule: I had a call Thursday, Friday, and now Saturday, and then I have no calls for a week, which is great. I don't get the $300 an hour during that stretch, but I also get a whole week to spend with the family. We're going to go glamping and go to Universal, so I'm going to have a nice week without the calls to spend with the family, and I'm looking forward to that.
Getting asked to speak at the AA meeting
Then I went to the 5:30 Alcoholics Anonymous meeting today. I actually drove instead of walking, so I ended up getting there early for once. One guy asked me, he's like, hey, the other speaker didn't show up, do you want to speak? I'm like, sure, I'm always down to speak. The first guy spoke and really warmed the audience up. I love this guy, we have great talks. He got a little swearing in and there was lots of laughter, and I'm like, I'm gonna let it out now.
So I talked a lot about early sobriety. If you want to see a similar meeting I have online, you can search for Jerry Banfield's seven-year AA speaker meeting on the Jerry Banfield Experience YouTube channel. That seven-year AA speaker meeting was pretty similar to this one. Man, I had that room tearing up. The guy before me who spoke was laughing so hard he could hardly stop. The guy to my left when I was sharing was just laughing the whole time too. And at the same time, another guy was like, I really appreciate it, the way you shared leaves me feeling like I'm not alone. Because early sobriety is often a time of facing your own insanity and how crazy you are without a drink. Then you can see why you drink, because you're that crazy sober. So I really enjoyed sharing that.
A successful moment of parenting
I got home and had a really successful interaction with the kids. Madeline was kicking a soccer ball too hard and scaring Jack, and taking the soccer ball I just got for them and playing with it herself. Jack was crying. I encouraged him to express his feelings and talk about what was happening. As Madeline saw him start talking, she just walked off. I got my feelings hurt by that same kind of behavior last year and made a three-month resentment out of it, so I get it.
But Jack shared his feelings and was able to not spiral. And Madeline was able to move on without spiraling either. Nobody got in a fight or got in trouble. I told Jack, I love how you got your feelings hurt, you talked about it, you got it out, you learned something. That's incredibly productive. He kept saying, Dad, I got my feelings out, you like that? I'm like, yes, I love that. That's so much better than going into all this insane behavior and fighting and resenting. What you did is you processed hurt feelings and moved on very quickly, very effectively. In my experience, that is a really valuable skill. Some people die and never learn how to do that. I didn't learn how to do it until just years ago, and it's still hard sometimes.
So I'm so proud. I love that I get to parent my kids and help them learn these skills so much faster than I did. I helped put the kids to bed last night, took the dog for a walk, and listened to an old Bobby O video. I really got down with the idea that I want to do videos like this, ones that have such great information in them. You can find more of these everyday reflections in my Life playlist. I visited my mom for a little bit, then went to bed nice and early with Laura at 10:20.