I'm a full-time YouTuber, and this is day 4,978. It's January 14th, 2025. What I'm thinking about today is how I can get the community more involved in my ICP videos. Yesterday I was wondering whether I should go full crypto degen and trade all these different coins, and you all gave me lots of different viewpoints. What feels best to me is staying more of an observer and a reporter, less boots on the ground in the middle of the action. That way I can talk from a better point of view. If I buy a coin and hold it, I inevitably am going to try and sell you on it. And I know from the past that if I buy a coin, profit off of it because you bought it, and then I sell it, I feel bad. So that's not going to work.
I'm actually trying to think of ways I can get rid of even some of my SNS neurons. I might see if I could dump some of them and really collapse my crypto portfolio down to just ICP, and maybe OpenChat as a second one. But what I really want to do is give more of you a chance to be a part of my videos collaboratively.
Why I want to bring the community into my videos
I did a poll in the past, and people said they just like my ICP hype videos. But I get bored doing ICP hype videos over and over again, and they're repetitive. Some of you watch them anyway, but I think I can offer something even better. My OpenChat community has 12,000 people in it. There are 18 members of my $100-a-month mastermind for ICP coin marketing. I've had several paid calls and several interviews, and I did one with Aaron yesterday that was awesome. Everything's going great except the ICP price in the short term. Everything else is going awesome. I'm on top, things are great, and now's the time to really enjoy it and to try to get other people more involved too. I get enough attention, and there are so many people in the community who would love to have a few minutes to talk about their coin or make a point.
So here's the big idea I'm really excited to try tomorrow. I'm going to see if I can do a YouTube live, a Twitch live, and an X Twitter Space all at the same time. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I'm going to see if I can run all three at once. I think that would be really fun, because then I can pull people in on X and make them a speaker if they're in my coin mastermind, or if I really want to hear what they have to say. If Bobby O pops in, I can make people speakers so they can talk not only on the X Space, but on YouTube and on Twitch as well. I think that would make my videos really fun. I'd love to get more of the voices from the community into my videos. I can always do the intro for 10 or 20 minutes, but I want to do more live streams.
Optimizing for quality instead of views
I swear I say that, and then I do the live streams, and then I stop doing them. That's because I've consistently optimized for how I get the most views and the most watch time. But I'm seeing there's a better way to think about this. How do I put out the highest-quality product? How do I make something that's really interesting to watch? I'd rather make three or four live streams a week than have to crank a video out every single day. I'd rather do four, five, or six live streams that are fun and that get the community involved than to constantly put out videos where it's me all the time, or just people who pay to do an interview with me.
I loved the video I did with Aaron. The average watch time was 15 minutes on that video. The click-through rate was a bit lower, and it didn't get as many views, but the average watch time was two to three times higher than most of my videos. So I'm really loving the long-form content. I've looked, and some other crypto YouTubers are doing great with these live streams that bring different points of view in. One thing I love about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is that you have all these different people talk. It's really interesting to hear all those different opinions. So I'm really excited to give this idea a shot tomorrow.
It'll cross-pollinate all my platforms too. Twitch is best if you always want to know when I'm live. YouTube is the best place to watch after the live. And X will be great if people want to pop in and share. I want people to follow everywhere and to go back and forth between all the platforms. I want to hear what more people have to say, and I want to put on the best show I'm capable of making.
The studio setup that makes this possible
I'm in a unique position with the studio setup I've got, with this mic and this Rodecaster Duo. I'm able to run a Twitter X Space on one computer, the performance PC at the bottom. Then on the top one, I can live stream it to YouTube and Twitch, which is an insane setup. There are probably few people in the world who have a setup like this. It's so good. I can have an awesome mic on my X Space, get my headphones on to listen, and manage that on one computer. Then on the second computer, I'm live on Twitch and YouTube. I've got four monitors, so I can pull up the chat from every platform: Twitch on the top one, X on the one in the middle, YouTube chat on the right, and OpenChat on the left. It's such a sick setup.
Thinking forward about where this all leads
What I love that I'm doing in my life right now is thinking more forward. Something a lot of us don't do is ask: if I repeat what I'm doing today, how's that going to work out? When I used to drink liquor and play video games all night by myself, I didn't think like that. I just had this survival, do-whatever-I-need-to-do-to-get-by mindset. I didn't ask myself, if you just keep drinking and playing video games every night, how's that going to work out in 20 years? Well, I got to become a professional gamer in 2021, and I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous in 2014. That went a lot better than it could have, for sure.
So I'm thinking about my crypto content the same way. If I do crypto live streams and bring people in from the ICP community every day, or most days whenever I can, how's that going to work out compared to doing ICP hype videos by myself, alone? One of my biggest challenges has been learning to play better with others. So I'm excited to see what I can do. I've got such a great position in the ICP community to bring people together.
I've been telling people in my OpenChat ICP coin mastermind that if you've got a coin, you should be working together with the other coins. The other coins are not your competitors, because someone can hold both of your coins. If you all work together, you're going to come out ahead compared to just trying to compete. Look at MegaSynergy, doing this meme coin synergy or hybrid, putting multiple ICP meme coins together. To me, that's super smart marketing. You bring multiple coins together, you bring communities together, and you work together. One reason ICP gets left out of so much in crypto is that many of these other projects are working together, but ICP isn't working with very many of them. They're kind of on an island with the advanced technology, while a lot of these other cryptos are working together, pumping each other, and overlapping communities. So I'm really interested to see what I'm capable of and how the community will react. I want to always be pushing that growth edge, always trying something new, always interested to hear more viewpoints, and always working to put on a better and better show.
My music as a wide-open canvas
I've also been wondering what I want to do with my music. I'm grateful that over the last two days I've taken a lot of time to play with it. I made an Ableton Live set today with 24 synthesizers loaded. On the Oxygen Pro 61, I had eight synthesizers loaded and mapped to it in Ableton. On the APC Key 25, I had eight more loaded so I could just push a button to turn one on and push a button to turn it off. And on the Push 3, I had another eight loaded. I recorded all of them onto one track in Ableton, put it out, and mastered it. It sounded pretty good.
My music is one of my biggest growth places right now. It's this wide-open canvas in my brain. There's so much I can do and so much to explore. Crypto by comparison feels like I'm trying to barely push out in one direction or another. But what's cool is that I've noticed in my life that when I expand in one place, it often helps me expand in another. As I've been playing more with my music and getting a little more creative, it carries over. It's not about competing with others. For me, it's about competing with myself. Can I make my videos better than yesterday? Can I make the live streams better than the ones I did before?
I had some incredible gaming live streams, and I still think about gaming pretty consistently. I was even thinking: let's say ICP does all the money I think it's going to do. I get all my bills paid off and have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank after all the taxes are paid. Then what? Am I going to just keep talking ICP coins when money is no longer an object, when I have all the money I need? Or is it time to start playing video games again, grinding it out, asking myself why I even played video games before?
Why I want to show my creative process
Music, to me, is something I'd love to have more time for. There's so much freedom of creative expression in it. I was thinking maybe I could do my music and just show my creative process, kind of like a vlog. Here's what I'm doing today to make a song, and here's my process making it. I love this approach. I've watched hours of Deadmau5 making one single song, and it was just so interesting to see his workflow. I love making a song, listening back to it, and thinking, I made that. I just want to keep making my songs better. I've made hundreds of songs. There are a few of them where I think, banger. And some of them I didn't even put much effort into. I'd like other people to be able to see my workflow, and I'd like to go back and see how I did things myself, because I barely remember how I made some of my songs years ago.
So I love doing this. This is a vlog channel, and I'm happy to see that I really am passionate about growing it too. The Jerry Banfield experience, and then posting these on X as well. I'm seeing that it's a great strategy to just talk. If I want to do an ICP kind of video, I can work that into a vlog and it fits nicely. Then I can make my crypto channel more of an ICP show, a live show that brings people in, a total crypto ICP show. And if I want to do more of a regular old hype video, I can just talk about that in my vlog. That's a great way to bring people into my vlog who might then be interested in the crypto side, and the other way around too. Once you're on the vlog channel, maybe some ICP content will bring you in, and vice versa. But this channel is also for talking about personal life. That's what I'm thinking about today. It's a nice format without all the pressure of a perfect clickbait title or anything.
A friend moving back home
One of the big things that happened today is that I have a friend who's probably my best friend in St. Pete, which is where I live. So maybe my best friend. She's a massage therapist, and she's moving back home. I'm sad that she's going back home. At the same time, I'm happy for her, because I think it's going to be a great thing for her to move back. It's so nice to be able to hold both of those perspectives at once.
What I feel is that I constantly get richer in my life through each relationship where I really get to know somebody and we talk, have really deep conversations, really explore our lives together and try to help each other, work on our marriages together. My friend and I have talked a lot about our marriages to our respective partners, about the rest of our life situations. We've really both helped each other a lot. Our perspectives have helped each other. She's helped me be a better husband by getting me to think about things with my wife I hadn't thought about. The relationship I've had with her as a best friend has helped me grow in a way that's ongoing. The more relationships like that I have, even if I don't get to keep adding much to them, the richer I am. When she moves away, talking on the phone won't be the same as seeing her in person, but I'm richer because of having had that relationship.
Relationships as the number one form of wealth
What I'm seeing in life is that relationships are the number one form of wealth, maybe combined with health. In a book called Mind Over Medicine, one of the number one drivers of health is relationships. And not just having a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a husband, but having a bunch of people. Ideally a spouse or a partner, kids or parents, siblings, an entire community, family, friends, co-workers. And not just surface level, how's-the-weather relationships, but deep relationships where you can ask, hey, how are things going with your wife? How's your health? What's on your mind that you don't want to tell anybody about? People you can have conversations like that with.
That's what I discovered when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought, wow, I can tell people the innermost thoughts I'm having, the craziest things I'm thinking about. And once I started doing that with people at Alcoholics Anonymous, I realized I can do this with anyone who's open to it. I've had the same kind of conversations with massage therapists that I've had with people at AA. I'm working to deepen some relationships at yoga too. Yoga has been kind of slow and surface level compared to AA and massage, but I have great conversations with all kinds of people everywhere in my life.
I want to start making better relationships in the ICP community. In order to do that, I've got to be in a position to share the spotlight, to let you all come on and talk, and to listen. Ideally it's most efficient for me to have people come talk on my channel, because then I'm listening, and then I know whose videos I might want to watch, and people share all the best information. Then I become a hub: if you want information about ICP, we're talking ICP, and it's not just me. Because it gets boring, I don't care who the creator is, it can get boring watching the same person over and over again. What doesn't get boring is hearing a bunch of different people. That's why AA is special. When you go to AA, there are always so many people sharing.
What I learned at AA today
I went to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and met my sponsor there today. The topic was maintaining your spiritual condition. For me, it's sharing what's going on with me that really helps with that. Especially when I first got sober, talking about how much I was struggling, honestly, openly, vulnerably, and then letting people help me and give me feedback. Today I talked to a guy who's in his first year sober and working on his fourth step. I tried to tell him exactly what the process was like for me, listen to where he's at, and encourage him to share with me where he's at. There have been some people I've had conversations like that with where it was really helpful. Plenty of times it hasn't been helpful and they went back and drank. But you know what? It's not up to me to drive results. It's up to me to make an effort, to accept feedback on my efforts, and then to adjust my efforts.
So I know I can do a better show than I've been doing. So many of you are happy with my ICP videos, and now I'm thinking I can do even better than this. If you want to follow along with that side of what I'm doing, you can find my ICP Crypto playlist. It's been a really nice day as usual.
Health, habits, and choosing your inner circle
I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I'm going to go pick the kids up from my mom's house. Today I took my son to hip hop. I had some hummus, Larabars, almond butter, the usual food, a whole plant-based diet, and I feel great. I went for a run today, 2.2 miles, and it felt much better than the one a couple of days ago.
It's amazing how much having a partner do something will rub off on you. When I went to Disney this last weekend, there were a lot more people who were morbidly obese than there were the previous weekend when all the races were on. And it's not just the people running the races, because running 13 miles is harder if you're bigger. But if you have a wife like I do who runs a marathon, I'm also more likely not to be letting myself go and laying around on the couch all day. Just my wife running a marathon left me wanting to run more.
So one of the most important decisions you make in your life is who's going to be in your inner circle. I've gotten really strict about it: you're not in my inner circle unless there's a deep love there, and unless you can help me aspire to be like you in some way. That's my vlog for today.