This is March 9th, 2025 with Jerry Banfield, and this is my daily vlog. In my opinion, this is a great way to write an autobiography. It was the daylight savings time change last night, which my mom says is her least favorite day of the year because you get an hour less of sleep. I'm grateful the kids still slept in until 7:30, and we got up a little before 8.
A trip to Whole Foods and a lesson in sugar
I needed to get some groceries, so I took the kids to Whole Foods. I go there with them and we buy tons of healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables, and then we get to the bakery and they're like, "I want a cookie." So I get each of them a cookie, then I get Laura a donut, and I head home. It's so cute, too: I let each of them get their own little cart, so they each push their cart and we split up loading all the groceries into them. Then they each go to their own self-checkout line and I help both of them with it. It ends up being about $170 total.
I get home and we give Laura the donut, and the kids start eating their cookies. I don't need anything for myself. I figure I can just share. These are big cookies, so I could have a bite here and there. Well, then Jack's complaining that I've taken too big of a bite off his Easter bunny cookie, and meanwhile he takes gigantic bites off of Laura's donut. She gets upset. And I'm just sitting there thinking, why? Why did I do this again? Why do we have all this sugar crap in the house?
It's not even about weight. The kids are very healthy weights. It's the opportunity cost. You bring stuff like this home and then that's all they want to eat. Whereas yesterday, Jack ate several apples in a row, but that was only because they'd run out of ice cream cones and icies to eat. When you have this junk in the house, they'll eat that instead. Now, it's not a huge deal, they're very healthy, but at the same time it's an opportunity to learn and to stop. Why not just say no cookies, no donuts, we don't need any of that stuff? We've got fruit, we've got vegetables, we've got nuts, we've got lots of stuff to eat at home. You don't need a cookie.
In the past, I've gone back and forth on this a bunch of times. We're not going to buy all this sugar crap, this processed food with no nutritional value, outside of the fact that if you were starving, sure, a cookie might help you not starve. But we're not starving. And there's a chance to eat foods that are nutritious, like fruits and vegetables, which the kids love eating, unless you bring the junk around, in which case they prioritize the junk. They're not thinking the way I'm thinking. I look at the food differently, but even they suck me into it, and then we get to have all this junk in the house and I get into the habit of eating it. After every meal I feel like I need a double-stuffed Oreo to wash it down, or a piece of candy or an ice cream cone. Maybe not after breakfast, but sometimes even then.
The Kevin Hart concert and a gentler approach
We've done this before. About a year ago, Laura and I were going to see Kevin Hart one day, and I came in after a similar morning experience and said, "We need to throw out all the junk food in the house. I'm tired of it." I threw out some stuff that Laura thought was hers, and she got all offended. It was a pissy day all the way through the Kevin Hart concert. Laura hadn't even eaten by 4 p.m. that day. It was insane. So this time I didn't want to repeat that same outcome, just a bit more gentle.
I said, "Can we just, we're the parents, can we stop bringing this junk food into the house?" Junk food being ultra-processed food that has almost no nutrition. If the kids eat it somewhere else, that's fine. But our home should be a place of safety in the sense of food, where anything you reach for is good for you, and anything you eat a lot of is good for you, has nutrition, and is filling. The problem I see with all these cookies is that they have almost no useful nutrition and they're not that filling, but they do fill the kids just enough that they won't eat as many fruits and vegetables. They spoil your taste buds for the good stuff. They're set up to give you this instant rush when you eat them, but on the back end, when you're digesting, you're not getting all the good stuff your body could get.
This is especially true when you eat mostly a whole-plant diet. My brother changed to eating vegetarian, but he just ate all these processed foods without much nutrition, and he got really thin and then broke his hip skateboarding. He wasn't getting enough good stuff in his body doing that. In my experience, it's easier to get some of the things your body needs eating meat, so when you're eating a whole-plant diet you need to make sure you're really eating whole plants. A couple of beans will have as much protein as a steak, and if you combine that with other fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains, you're going to get great nutrition. You're going to be full, you're going to feel good, and you're going to look good. But if you're eating a bunch of processed junk, you're not getting hardly any nutrition.
So we had this conversation much more gently than the year before. We've been through this several times, and the kids are like, "Oh, this again." I'm like, "Yeah, this again, because look what you guys did. I bought you these cookies and Laura this donut, and I came home and everybody's pissy." Maybe Madeline wasn't as pissy over it, but the whole household had this negative, whiny, fighting environment over this food that's being treated like it's so scarce.
Now, I've listened to some stuff that says the opposite, that you should just stuff your house with junk food as a kind of reverse psychology. The theory is that people go crazy over it because they think it's so scarce. I did that. I was not happy with the results. You know what the kids do if you stuff the house with junk food? They eat it constantly. They'll go from potato chips to ice cream cones to icies. There's almost no limit to the amount of junk food they'll eat when you stuff the house with it. We did this for months, just to try it, and I was not happy with the results. It seems the best results come from no junk food in the house at all. If you want to eat it somewhere else, fine, but we're not going to keep it in the house. This is our place where we can reach for anything.
I talked to my mom about that, and she's like, "Well, that's not a problem for me." And I'm like, "Mom, your teeth are all falling out because all you do is eat sugar." My mom has more junk food in the house than anybody I know. She eats less nutritious food than anybody in my inner circle whose diet I know. It's like she's delusional, absolutely delusional, to think she doesn't have a problem. In my view she is absolutely addicted to sugar, and that's almost all she eats. I think she only eats maybe one thing a day that's not candy, cake, ice cream, icies, or cookies. That's all she eats, and her teeth are just rotting away because she has sugar on them all the time.
Lunch on the grill and a crypto call
Beyond that, I had a call at 12:30, which was great. I had a nice big lunch first. We got the grill out, the little Weber barbecue, fired the coals up, and cooked a package of organic grass-fed hot dogs for the family. Then I cooked a couple of four-packs of vegan dogs for myself, toasted the buns in the toaster oven, and we had a nice hot dog lunch for everybody. The kids both ate real hot dogs along with Laura, and as lean as they are, I'm happy for them to have some meat. They're so lean at this point that I wouldn't want them to lose any more weight. I'd rather them gain weight than lose it right now, and if you want to gain weight, eating meat is one of the easiest ways to do it. So I've actually switched a lot on that. I used to try to feed the kids whole-plant as much as possible, but now they literally don't even want as much meat as they could eat. I never try to force them to eat meat, or anything, generally.
After lunch, I went in and had a call with a guy who paid $300 to talk to me for an hour about Internet Computer Protocol. It's amazing how similar so many of these calls are. He had a lot of money on a crypto exchange spread across a bunch of different altcoins. ICP was the top one in this case, but this guy even had altcoins he didn't even like in his portfolio, thousands of dollars of them. So I made a video on my crypto channel today called the most important crypto video you'll ever watch. Obviously, most people don't seem to think it's that important, but it has the basic takeaways from that call in it.
Meanwhile, Laura took the kids to Vertical Ventures during my call. I jumped on and did my live stream, cranked out some crypto videos, crypto reviews, and an autobiography. Then everybody got back home. The kids went to play with the neighbor across the street, which is great. I'm glad they've got somebody who likes to play outside, and getting them off their tablets has really helped them value playing outside more. I washed up the kitchen a bit and packed up to go to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
An AA meeting and two people I love
I get there and the topic is the steps. I can't always go through with that, because the steps kind of seem like a lot, but really it comes down to drinking, using drugs, and ruining your life with addiction. That stuff takes a lot of energy, and I'm glad I'm not doing any of it today. I shared my experience, basically what I just said here, and I've got lots more AA videos I'm putting up on the Jerry Banfield Experience channel.
Then I talked to a bunch of people afterward. The last conversation I had was with a guy I've known for years in AA. It's helped me a lot to learn from some of his faults, and he's inspired me to make music, for example, and to be more considerate with my wife. I talked to him and a new girl afterward. She's got a little less than a year sober, and she's helped me see the value of my work. She enjoys it, she loves how joyful I am, and she said she wants to be that joyful. She actually listens to my AA music that I did on Spotify and some of my other music, and I even named one of my songs after her. I had a nice talk with the three of them.
Then I could tell they wanted to talk without me, so I left with the two of them talking to each other, looking pretty cozy. I like both of them. The guy is someone I say "I love you" to; I feel pretty close with him, and I gave him a hug and said, "I love you, man." I gave her a hug right afterward, and she said, "Oh, I appreciate your music so much," and I said, "I love you, too," and she said, "That's nice." I appreciate both of them and get along with them. I'm closer with them than most people in the meetings. So I saw how the two of them were talking, and I thought, if they're going to hook up or something, I hope this goes well. A lot of hookups in AA don't go so well, but some of them do; people end up dating and having happy marriages and families, and it works out really well. The way they were talking to each other, it looked to me like that's where it's headed. Something's going to go down, and I hope everyone has a nice time and not a bad time, and I hope it doesn't end with me not getting to see either of them anymore because they stop coming to this meeting. We'll see what happens.
I got home, called my mom, walked the dog, and managed to get in bed before 11 o'clock, even after the time change and everything. If you enjoy these daily entries, you can find more of them in my Life playlist.