It's my 4,997th day on YouTube. I'm Jerry Banfield, and it's February 2nd, 2025. The largest part of my day, today and yesterday, I spent working on a patio in my backyard. I've never built a patio before, and I'm aiming to build this one out of bricks. I dug up the area next to the concrete slab, and I paid my son for a couple of hours to help me. He's six years old. We used the wheelbarrow and shoveled sand in there together. I put 10 or 15 or 20 bags of gravel and sand right there, and we're going to fill the rest of it in.
I was kind of annoyed when I started this morning, but I feel really satisfied doing physical labor, trying something new, challenging myself. I've never built a patio before. I've watched some videos on it, and it's going to be about this big. I took the tree leaves and put them down on the bottom, both to get rid of them and because, I don't know, it'll probably make it sink more, but we'll put the gravel on top of them and pack it down.
Teaching my kids to value their time
I pay my son and daughter $20 an hour to do work for me, because I'm the first one setting their value when it comes to money. A lot of us as parents don't help our children value their time. We just make them do stuff for free. I want to be the first one who helps my kids value their time, so I pay them. To me, $20 an hour is minimum wage in my house. I'm so happy about it. My daughter painted and earned $10 today. My son earned $40 or $50.
He cried and got upset when I discouraged him from buying a scooter or a hoverboard. I told him, your sister has one and you don't even use it. Don't just waste $100. Don't work all this time and then waste your money. Think about what you're going to spend your money on first. That's the lesson I keep coming back to with them.
The crypto channel and the algorithm
I saw talk that Dominic is stepping down today, which is pretty big news. That is pretty gigantic news, but I don't have any information about it either.
I logged on to my crypto channel today, and this has been about the most annoying part of my day. I go on my crypto channel and hardly anybody wants to watch, comparatively. If I do a video like XRP versus ICP, that gets a thousand views in two hours. If I do an educational video with some really quality information, it gets 250 views. It's like, if I don't give some sensational dopamine hit, I don't get the views, and then people don't even want to hear the advice.
I have such an internal struggle with this. Do I do sensational crap and constantly chase views, or do I provide something useful? Because it is useful to go through and get more of a real education in crypto, to go through a whole course and hear all these different terms. But it's the YouTube algorithm. The algorithm didn't used to be so sensational. Now the algorithm wants sensational content, and it seems to try to determine whether your content is sensational or not. That's why I love Twitch. I don't have to do sensational content on Twitch, and I love everyone being here live when I record videos there.
An afternoon with the kids
My kids played with the neighbors for an hour or two today. There's a kid in fifth grade, and he had a friend over in third grade. My daughter's in fourth grade and my son's in first grade. He loves to get out there and play sports, so they all went out and played. I even played with them for a while. I had my daughter team up with the third grade boy, and since the fifth grade boy is very athletic, I teamed him up with my son. I played all-time quarterback and played some football with them. That was fun.
I also kind of lurked and watched them play, because I can't see them from my house. I still keep a pretty close eye on my kids. I vacuumed out the cars while keeping an eye on them, and I talked to my sponsor today. Then I had a huge salad. I had the equivalent of a whole can of beans, but it's really in a carton from Whole Foods, organic beans with hardly any salt. My wife made fried rice, so I had some of that. I had romaine lettuce out of my hydroponic garden in the house and made my own dressing, which has a bunch of oils, olive oil, avocado oil, sesame oil, vinegar, and a bunch of seasonings. I threw some tortilla chips in as croutons. It was so good.
Looking at the prices
I looked at the ICP price today and I'm like, FML, man. The Bitcoin price just took a fat dump too, and so did a bunch of other altcoins. Ethereum is below 2,000, XRP slipped toward 2.50, Solana is close to 200 and down 20% in seven days, Dogecoin is down, and Avalanche is down 25% in the last week. The internet computer isn't down as much as some of those others.
That said, to me, this is a really good reason to take some real time to learn, and not just chase sensational clickbait stuff. This is the constant thing with being a content creator on YouTube. Do I martyr myself making a course that, if you watch all the videos, is probably going to be really good for you? But if you look at the top viewed videos on my channel, the Coinbase one was useful. Sure, that one was useful. Then I have videos about ICP, which unfortunately have mostly been wrong so far in terms of price. And a lot of these top ones are just total clickbait crap.
One is just a clickbait title I stole from another Bitcoin video. Another is clickbait I took from money rules. There's a blatant clickbait price prediction video. There's a title like "how many ICP to be a millionaire," another I borrowed from somebody else. I personally think these are bad videos. There's the Casper crypto going to zero one too. Then you have Kyle today saying we shouldn't talk down to other ecosystems. But for those of us who have a community, this is one of my most watched videos in the last year.
So far the Casper price has sucked, along with the ICP price. Casper was much higher up in the market cap, and it slipped down significantly. In the last year, Casper is up 14% and ICP is down 40% in terms of price, but Casper has actually slipped significantly in market cap. Casper and ICP were right next to each other when it was up. It was at like 16 cents at some point. Casper used to be closer, and it slipped against ICP up and down at various points.
Being in the right position
I'm so glad I did this patio today, because of what these videos do to me. I made a music video last night, and my daughter had a friend over who didn't sleep. My wife took her home at like midnight. It's like, can't kids just stay in bed? I don't care if you're awake.
Sometimes I wake up at three in the morning. I sleep in the room with my kids. They have bunk beds and I have my own bed, because they wanted me to sleep in there. I've slept in there for years, and they sleep better if I'm there. Sometimes I wake up at three in the morning and roll around in bed for four hours. It's like, just sleep. I don't care if you're awake, lay in the bed and roll around, because at least you're in the right position. At some point you might get what you want, which is to go to sleep. But if you get up and start watching TV and doing all this other stuff, you're not going to get to sleep doing that.
You know what? Maybe that's a good analogy for ICP. It's like you're in the right position. If you just stay there, you're going to get what you want. And maybe that's the thing for my YouTube videos too. I'm in the right position. I'm making content I'm proud of. I'm not proud of the clickbait crap that gets lots of views. I made a video about XRP that says "maybe I'm wrong," and it has 15,000 views. I'm not proud of that, though. It's just junk clickbait. If you want to see more of the work I'm actually proud of, I keep it together in my Money playlist.