A Date at the Same Venue Where I Got Married
Welcome to my real-life vlog for August 5, 2026 — full-time YouTuber, single dad, trying to date, ultra-healthy guy, trying to be a role model out here. First, I want to say thank you. I am really grateful for all the time you have spent following along with me.
I have a date scheduled for this afternoon with a woman in Sarasota, and it is actually scheduled at the same venue my ex-wife and I got married at, which is kind of funny. I am going to text her to confirm. I met her off of Hinge, and my mind keeps going, why does this woman even like me? I have spent $350 on Hinge in the last week, and it looks like I may get one in-person date out of it. She is about a decade younger than me, and she doesn't drink or smoke or use drugs, which is really nice. And I'm sitting here going, why does this woman even want to go out with me? And why do all the other ones not?
I sent all these roses. I even sent a message to one of the moms of my kids' friends — not the mom of my kids, but the mom of one of my kids' friends — because I just felt like it. I sent her something like, hey, I've always liked you, let's go out. Even though I know she is totally not right for me, I am just going for it. There is no rejection. In one of my last dating videos I talked about how Kobe Bryant helped my dating life, which I thought was a really good title — I called it How Kobe Bryant Fixed My Dating Life — but I guess the algorithm is not thinking it's that great so far. My attitude is: I'm just going to take all the shots I can with all the women I have any interest in, have fun, and see what happens.
Removed From Hinge for Potentially Fraudulent Behavior
Then I had two tennis dates scheduled for tomorrow. This morning I got an email from Hinge saying the woman I'd scheduled the first date with — what did it say exactly? It said: notification from Hinge, one of your matches, and then her name, was removed from Hinge based on potentially fraudulent behavior. We're notifying you because you were matched with this user. It advised me to remain cautious. And I'm like, dang, I wonder what you have to do to get removed off of Hinge for fraudulent behavior. Was she trying to charge for something? How did that even go?
I also bought a thousand — technically 997 — more ICP today, and I'm making sure I keep around $10,000 in cash, though I may take another cash advance to cover that. I've got $20,000 or so in ICP now and $10,000 in cash, and I still have $10,000-plus in personal credit and $40,000 in business credit available.
Back to the women. The one from yesterday is funny. I matched with her on Hinge and there was not much back and forth. Then all of a sudden yesterday she starts texting fast and getting interested. She says she is going to be out of town, so basically the only chance I have to see her is this afternoon. So I asked for the phone number, got the phone number, exchanged a few texts, and planned a date. Because here's the thing — y'all aren't planning dates. So I plan, and I'm going on a date. She goes, you do YouTube? And says, I don't watch YouTube much. I'm like, good, don't. The women I'm dating should not be watching my videos. Although I would hope that if a woman did watch my videos and actually enjoyed them, it would be the right match. But there have definitely been women I've dated who watched my videos and decided they didn't want to date me anymore. And you know what? Fuck them. If you watch my videos and decide you don't want to date me because of them, then fuck off. I make these videos mostly for the men who watch. If you're going to watch my videos and get a bad attitude about it, I don't need to date you. I want a woman who will be proud of what I do, who can handle the truth of my life, who I don't have to play games with and hide from and do all this cat-and-mouse crap with all the time.
ChatGPT Talked Me Out of Texting the Queen
Speaking of that, I just had what ChatGPT called a bad idea. I was thinking, maybe I should text the queen. It's been a week since she sent that last message. I was thinking of texting something like, hey, we haven't talked for a week — do you think this is better, or do you miss me? I ran it by ChatGPT first — I feel like I need to check with ChatGPT on all these things now — and ChatGPT said: don't send that message. "Was it better this way or did you miss me?" asks her to reconsider her feelings and give you reassurance after she already told you she wasn't romantically in the same place. It will put her back in a position of comforting or rejecting you again. She may miss you, but she might still not want to date you. It also said: you've gone a week without pursuing her, accepted her answer, and begun moving forward — it wouldn't be good to go back. ChatGPT's opinion is that if she does have a change of heart, it's up to her to reach out, even if it feels awkward for her to do so. I would love for her to have a change of heart. At the same time, I'm going to go out with as many women as I can and see if anything happens with any of them.
It was kind of a sad day otherwise. I played tennis and my friend whooped my ass, and I was feeling kind of defeated. Then he had something in his head that he was all spun up about, which seemed pretty silly to me — and I realized what I'm spun up about in dating is probably pretty silly too. If you fast-forward a year or two from now and I've got an amazing woman in my life and everything is going great, I would look back and say: you should have enjoyed this time being single. You should have just had fun and dated as many girls as you could. Because when I was married, meeting new people was not so easy. Dating is one of the easiest contexts where you have a good excuse and a real opportunity to just meet new people. I'm leaving for this date in about four hours, and when you're married, there's no context like that where you get to go meet somebody new with excitement and potential. This is the time to really enjoy it, because I might live the next 50-plus years without ever doing this again.
The Problems Our Minds Make Room For
And yet, as I was telling my friend, I think all of our minds have space to make a problem out of something. I remember in high school — junior to senior year — there was about a year where I was obsessed, scared, and anxious that my penis was not going to get big enough. Wow. And there was literal lightning right when I said that out loud, like God was saying, hey, I remember that. And Jesus going, don't worry, I got you, bro — I made that thing grow. Speaking of which, I need to read my Bible a little today. I decided to go back and start at the beginning of the New Testament in the New Living Translation, because I had read a bit of it before — I almost said her name — I'd read a bit of it in the queen's Bible. I still have her Bible. If she wants it back, she can text me. Maybe it'll be an excuse.
What I keep reflecting on is that we always seem to have space for a problem. In high school I was afraid about that, and for the next twenty-some years the fear has looked ridiculous. It worked out just fine — it's perfectly average, and it's not even that big of a deal either way. When I told my friend this story, he said, yeah, I've got a friend who's tiny and he's never had a problem with women. I spent a year in high school anxious about something that has clearly been a non-issue for the last 20 years. Although I did have an ex in college who cheated on me — and honestly, I agree with her cheating on me. She should have. She was having a hard time dumping me, she cheated, and then she felt good about dumping me after that. She told me, yeah, he was bigger than you, but he didn't know how to use it as well as you. I'm like, all right, I'll take expertise over size without skill — although in theory you could learn to use size. That is the only comment I've ever heard about it in my whole life, and she didn't end up with that guy either. So him being perhaps a tiny bit bigger didn't matter. See, that's the kind of random conversation today turned into.
The Time Machine Dream
Then there was the dream I had last night. In the dream, I pushed some dude off a ledge — I was going around actually trying to kill this guy. He fell, and I guess he didn't die, so he was telling people that I did it. And for some reason I had this time machine, a little handheld device, almost like one of those things at the gym you put your hands on to measure your body fat percentage. When I pushed him off the ledge I dropped the time machine, and I didn't pick it up immediately, but I hadn't been caught yet, so I went over and managed to grab it. Then everybody was chasing me. I managed to set it to go back a couple of months before I did it — I set the date while jumping down an escalator, to something like August 2, 2026, which in the dream was a couple of months back, because in the dream it was around September or October. As soon as I hit start, everything started going black. And then I woke up in the day I had set the time machine to, and I was like, yes — so glad this thing works.
Waking Up and Asking My Ex-Wife If We Were Still Married
Then I looked around in the dream, and there was this guy there that I was apparently friends with. I don't know him in this lifetime, but I have a lot of dreams where I know all these people I don't know in this life. I even have a number of dreams where I don't remember anything about this body or this mind — I'm dreaming some other life that feels completely familiar inside the dream but has nothing to do with this life or this body. So in this dream I wake up and I'm still me, but there's this friend, and he's there with his woman, who for some reason is in a bunk bed above him. And then I start wondering about my now ex-wife — wondering if I traveled far enough back in time that we didn't get divorced. She's really happy to see me. I ask her, hey, are we still married? And she says, yeah, of course — with a big smile. And then I woke up, and that hit me really hard this morning. I was like, damn, that really hurts my feelings a little bit.
But then I asked myself: would I really want to go back in time before I was divorced and do something different? I remember two years ago thinking that I needed to get divorced. I remember deciding to choose this timeline. I chose to go this direction — and I've come to believe there are opportunities to choose to go in other directions too.
Timelines, and the Computer We Boot Into
This is going to get even weirder. I remember in 2009 I was in a very dark place, and I believe there is a timeline where I decided not to continue. The way I experienced it, I think I actually went down that timeline first, and then I was able to dial back and say, all right, let's try out what it would have been like if I didn't do that. And for a year or two afterward, I was very aware of that other timeline, and I felt so grateful just to be alive. It felt amazing. I was aware of going down that other path, pulling back, and taking this different path instead. I hope sharing these kinds of ideas gets you a lot more open-minded about life — this is my experience and my belief, and the way I see it, we're not just on one timeline.
The way I think about it, you really could wake up in almost any scenario, because it's like turning your computer on. If you put a certain set of memory and programs into the computer, the computer has no idea whether it was that way yesterday or whether you just loaded in new memories on new hardware. The computer is just processing and running, and in my view these brains are kind of like that. You can wake up in almost any scenario and take it for granted that you were there the day before — but maybe you weren't. I've had dreams — though I don't know for sure that they were dreams — where I was living other lifetimes, and then I was shocked, or very surprised and grateful, to wake up back in this body. I've come to believe that when we go to sleep, we can go off and do anything. Sometimes maybe we don't journey that far. Other times I've woken up with the sensation that I've been gone hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and it feels clunky restarting this computer with this set of memories — clunky that I'm back in this body.
My Hinge Niche: Women Who Don't Drink
Oh — I just got a match on Hinge, right in the middle of all this. What happened? So this woman: I sent a rose to her. She put on her dating profile that she doesn't drink, but then she also had a line on her profile about "I'll choose the wine." I pointed that out — she doesn't drink, but she'll choose the wine — and she just changed it after my comment, and then she matched with me. I don't know if she matched just to address my comment or because she's interested, but it's funny. I've been getting more matches lately. I guess my dating profile has gotten better — I've shared the profile I'm using before, back when I made the video about paying Hinge $200 and staying invisible, or actually the one where I said I deleted Hinge three times, and I've made some slight changes since then. This profile has been getting a lot better attention.
What it seems like is that on Hinge, my niche is women who don't drink or use marijuana, because the number of guys out there who don't drink or use marijuana is very narrow. This woman I'm meeting today answered that she doesn't drink or use marijuana or drugs, and I think that's something some women take really seriously. If a woman who doesn't drink or do drugs sees a guy who doesn't drink or do drugs either, that reads as a major green flag — okay, good, I want to give this guy a chance. So I'm really grateful for the chance to do this today. You can follow the whole saga of these dating adventures in my Dating playlist.
I really am grateful for all of you who keep growing the Jerry Banfield Show, and I hope that sharing my real, raw, authentic life with you is useful. If you want me to get to know you, and if you want to give me feedback, join the Jerry Banfield Family. I don't read comments on YouTube anymore — when I have people who are paying to talk to me, I'm not going to spend time looking at comments for free. If you want to give me feedback, I genuinely want to hear what you have to say, but from my view, you need to show me you're worth listening to. I'm out here talking, and I'm grateful my videos are getting five or ten thousand views a day now across all my channels, so I'm giving a ton away for free. I want to get to know you and I would love to hear what you have to say.
I look forward to seeing what kind of stuff I have to talk about tomorrow.