It's my 5,007th day on YouTube. Today is February 12th, 2025, and this is a video for my Jerry Banfield Experience channel. I'm going back to the vlog that I started here. I uploaded an old video yesterday about how to turn fear into power, and honestly, I've been all over the place with what I want to do. I'm grateful for that freedom. I woke up this morning, went to yoga, and I kept asking myself: what do I want to do? What do I want to create? Do I want to make instrumental music, freestyles, vlogs? Do I want to put my old videos back up, the gaming videos, the crypto videos? What do I care the most about?
Well, I care the most about making music. And I want to do a good job with making vlogs too. I want to make vlogs that I'd actually like to watch 10 or 20 years from now. I want to make sure this is a channel mostly for me, something that's kind of an autobiography for my life.
Regretting the channels I deleted
Last night when I was going to bed, I really regretted all the YouTube channels I deleted. I had an awesome autobiography channel with all these stories from my life, and I deleted it. Then again, I can tell most of those stories back as I film this. I had all these gaming videos, so many gaming videos, probably thousands on my original channel. I had two or three more gaming channels, and I deleted those too. I caught myself thinking, should I start a fourth gaming channel? Well, no.
Then I started thinking about what's best for the world. What do I want to create in the world? To me, music is the answer. I just love making music. It's fun. Out of all the stuff I create, music is the thing I enjoy the most. I love listening back to my music. I listened to some of my freestyles today. And sure, when you listen to Harry Mack's freestyles and then listen to mine, yeah, mine are not as practiced as his. But I'd love to get better, and I'm improving.
What Harry Mack taught me about practice
I listened to Harry Mack after dropping the kids off from school today. I found this website, Omegle, which I guess used to be like Chatroulette or whatever those things were called back like 15 years ago, where you just pop on a random camera with somebody, and half the time it was exactly what you'd think it'd be. I saw Harry Mack mention Omegle a whole bunch of times, and I finally watched one of his videos where he recorded himself on it. Omegle is a chat roulette website where you get matched with a random person on camera and you can talk to them. It was really cool that Harry was freestyling on Omegle, meeting up with a random person, having them give him words, and dropping freestyles. That's so creative.
Sometimes having someone who inspires you, or a mentor, can actually be demotivating. You think, well, my freestyles suck compared to that. But I listened to Harry and he said he practiced his freestyles. Somebody asked him, how are you so good? He said, I practiced. I've done like a hundred and something freestyles now. And if I do another 500 freestyles, plus listening to a bunch of Harry's freestyles and all kinds of others, I'll keep getting better. You have to be careful what you take in, though. I still have the gangster rap, the Tupac, the Eminem stuff in my head. All these songs I've listened to still bounce around in my head, even though I haven't listened to some of them in a long time. So I want to make music that's good when it bounces around in your head, or that's inspirational. That's different. Harry Mack is a mentor and a role model for me. I want to make freestyles like that.
I don't want to be limited to just freestyles, though. I like doing dance music sometimes. I like doing ambient sometimes. But I'm glad that I at least figured out today that music is what I really want to do. And I don't want to let anything get in the way of that. Playing video games, for me, is one of those things that gets in the way. If I play video games, I don't make music. Music is one of those things where I'll often do everything else before I get to it.
Turning Twitch into a music stream
I'm also planning to pivot my Twitch to just be a music stream. If I could have people pay attention to me doing anything, what would it be? My mind says first it'd be video games, but I already did that. I've had millions of people watch me play video games, triumph over people countless times, and flop and fail countless more times. What am I going to do in gaming that's going to compare to what I've done before? And most of my gaming videos, I didn't even watch back. I'd do these long live streams and never watch them. I didn't want to see it. But with music, most of my songs I listen to anywhere from 2 to 30 times. The least I'll listen to a song, a freestyle, is twice: once right after I do it, and then another time in the car or something.
So on Twitch, if I could choose to have people watch me do anything, I want people to watch me do music. I tried to be a Twitch music streamer back in 2018. I gave up because there was no money in it. But now I've got crypto to make money. If you ask me what I would do if I had all the money in the world to do whatever I wanted, I'd be a music streamer. I'd hang out, make music, have fun, laugh. Out of all the things I do, music tends to be one of the things I laugh the most while I'm doing it. I laugh, or I get really hyped up on my dance music, but my freestyles, I laugh so much doing those. I laugh at the random stuff I come up with. I made a dance song with Om once. I basically did a dance beat, but then I used Om for everything, even for the bass. I literally put a drum kit in, then my mic, and just Om. It was a funny song.
Taking time to think about the possibilities
It really helps to take a lot of time to think about what you want to set your sights on. What I didn't do 20-plus years ago, when I was planning my life, was take much time to think about all the possibilities. I'm grateful for what I've done the last six months. I've thought about all kinds of other possibilities for my life. At least I've thought about them. I've considered being a massage therapist, a hypnotherapist, a garbage man, a handyman, a contractor, a musician who performs in person, a stand-up comedian, all kinds of different YouTubers. And I've actually tried a lot of stuff. I was a full-time gaming streamer, actually making money, for at least a couple of years. Gaming was my job. Gaming paid the bills. Gaming was my audience. Sometimes I miss that. But I remember, when I did it, so many days feeling like I hated it. Maybe there's an element of that to everything, but I don't have very many times where I feel like I hate doing music.
Would I want to be forced to make money off my music? No. But I believe that if I crank out a thousand, two thousand more songs, I'm going to get paid full time to do my music. I would love to have a thousand subs on Twitch who came and showed up for my music streams every day. I would love that. Which means no more crypto videos, no more vlogs on my live stream. The crypto videos are to pay the bills, and I'll stop doing those as soon as I can. The vlogs are for me, like a journal entry to myself. And then the music is for me and for the audience.
Why I'm sticking with video over text
I also got clear on something else. I tried posting on X, essentially doing my vlog on X instead of on YouTube. That was cool. I posted all these pictures and stuff. But I'd rather just post my videos on X. Even if the average watch time is only 22 seconds, that's more than you're getting by having somebody scroll past a text post. And even if I get the same or fewer impressions, at least the videos give me a chance to make more of a meaningful impact in somebody's life.
Videos and live streams are what I do best. Writing is not what I do best. In this world of specialization, it makes sense to really bear down and focus on what you do best. What do I do best? I can put on an awesome live show. I can play around with music in ways that most people would be embarrassed by, ways that most people who know how to do it would never think to use the equipment. That's something valuable. And I can film videos really rapidly. So it doesn't make sense to dump my time and energy into posts on X with pictures of my garden, my lunch, and my shoes. So I'm not going to do that. But I tested it, and I'm glad I test so many of these ideas in my life. If you want to follow along with how I think through all of this, I share a lot more of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
I hope I can stick with doing this vlog just like this. Not the clickbait title stuff, just February 12th with Jerry Banfield. There you go. I don't want to keep trying to do clickbait titles on this vlog, because it takes away from the authentic experience of my life.