This is my 5,014th day on YouTube, and as I write this on February 19, 2025, I'm genuinely excited. We just hit 6,000 followers on Twitch. That took years and years of going from about 3,000 to 6,000, and it was a lot of work. I'll admit something that feels almost embarrassing now: I literally paid my very first followers $20 a piece to follow me. Back in 2016 I knew how hard it was to get started on Twitch, so I put up the most clickbait title I could think of, something like "$20 to follow," and I sent the money back through PayPal before crypto made that kind of thing easy. Now I'm thinking we can really get to 10k. When ICP blows up, we're going to get to 10k. Most of this recent growth is people pouring over from ICP and from OpenChat, so I really appreciate it. Six thousand followers on Twitch.
Six channels and a new publishing schedule
I'm going live again, just filming all my YouTube videos. I've got six channels now. Yesterday I gave two people five ICP each, and then I gave 10 ICP to someone for hitting 1,000, so I've given away more than 20 ICP in the last day. I ran a giveaway where Haban was very close and Touch technically got the exact answer right, so even though I'd said I'd give away five, I ended up giving away 20. I think that's good. I had to load some more ICP into my OpenChat wallet out of my main wallet to cover it.
I filmed two crypto videos today that I'm really happy about. I'm going back to one crypto video a day on my YouTube channel. Yesterday I filmed a sponsored video on Decide AI, which I feel great about doing. And I feel a sense of completeness now with all six of these channels up and running. I've got a new publishing schedule that I keep accidentally closing in Excel, but here's how it looks: crypto reviews go out at midnight, gaming at four, experience at eight, the crypto main channel at noon, music at four, and autobiography at 8 p.m. Two of those, gaming and experience, are mostly old videos. I've got thousands of old videos I want to re-upload on those two channels, plus a couple of crypto videos a day.
This is probably the 15th-plus channel I've created. Today we've only got one single video going out here, so we have fewer viewers than usual, but I need to get everything up on all my other channels too. I love these gaming videos I just put up yesterday. They're so cool, and I'm really grateful for being able to be a YouTuber.
Loving myself on the tennis court
I did yoga this morning and played tennis. I lost the first set 6-0 and the second set 6-4, but I had more fun and was more grateful than I've been some other times. Here's something funny that happened: one time I ran up and hit a shot into the net, and the very first thought I had was "I hate myself." Then the second thought was, why would hitting a tennis ball into a net lead me to think "I hate myself"? It's time to reprogram that. I love myself for being able to run all over the tennis court. The only reason I can even play against people who are significantly better than me at tennis skill is because I can run all over the court and get to shots everywhere. I amaze myself sometimes with the shots I'm able to run down, and I love myself for that.
I love that I've taken such good care of this body that, at this point in its life, it's in great shape. It feels great, it looks great, it performs great. What else could you hope for? I believe this is the best performance this body has ever had, and it's the best I've ever treated it. I've taken great care of it, so I'm really happy about that. I came home and had some jalapeno hummus with a carrot and some wheat crackers, a banana, and a couple of bites of the peanut butter pie that Laura got for dinner last night. One viewer on Twitch put it perfectly: you can't love another until you love yourself. Exactly. I'm really grateful for that reminder.
Streaming, the brick patio, and figuring out the plan
I had a week where I was deciding I'd try to optimize my Twitch stream by just doing music streams. But then I put this gaming channel back up, and I thought, well, what if I want to stream games someday? And what about all the crypto videos I film? Why shouldn't I film my crypto videos live when I can do it? So I came back around to streaming everything.
On the home front, I haven't finished the brick patio yet, but I went to Home Depot yesterday and loaded 60 bricks into the back of my Toyota RAV4. My son and I unloaded them together. I think we need about 50 more bricks and the patio will finally be done. Then I just need to push some of the other blocks in as edging to get the edges right, and take a few bags of sand or some dirt. Here in Florida my dirt is pretty much sand anyway, so we just need to put some sand in between the bricks after we really smush them all in. The patio is almost done.
Going wide on X and deeper with people
I've been enjoying posting things besides videos on X. I posted a picture of my dogs yesterday. Last week I tried a strategy of just posting no videos at all, but I got really tired of it, because my specialty is being a video creator. I tried all these different kinds of posts, but I've come back now to posting all six of those videos on X as well, so you can get everything in one spot there.
On X I also shared more of my life. My dog Bo is a flat-coated retriever, born in 2012. Melanie is a Shar-Pei shepherd mix, about two years old. We had a third dog, Roxanne, who we sent back to the foster, and they ended up adopting her themselves, which was their first foster, so you could say they failed at fostering. I posted the Easter egg hunt on X too. For all of you who didn't know me as a gamer, I'm now able to show you that side, like my very first Warzone win, which was so cool to share. I've got my music on X, my autobiographies, and I posted a long-format autobiography too.
One of the craziest things, though, is how shallow people can be. I posted on my crypto channel asking, do you really want to get to know me? And about 76% of people said no, they're just here for the crypto. I get that. But at the same time, I always want to go deeper. I don't just want superficial relationships; I want to dive deeper and get into what people really care about. I hope you'll go deeper too, and the odds are you probably do want to.
Why I segment my audience across six channels
It's important on YouTube to segment your audience. I could put autobiography content on my crypto channel, and I was putting crypto reviews there too, but when I look at the polls, the main thing people want on that channel is ICP hype. So it makes sense to move the crypto reviews to another channel and get the people who want crypto reviews over to that one. No, I'm not a developer. And I appreciate everyone subscribing across all the channels.
Was there money to be made when I was gaming? Most of the time there wasn't. Most of the time I was not profitable gaming. But in 2021, that was a great year to have been game streaming for years and to have millions of followers. I made over $100,000 in 2021 streaming games, mostly on Facebook but also on YouTube and Twitch. That was a limited-time opportunity, and I was prepared for it when it came.
More channels seems to work better on YouTube. On X, it would be too much to try to optimize that hard. To me, it's nice to combine different content on X, where a wide variety in one place seems to work better than it does on YouTube. If you want to see more of how I think through all of this, I share a lot of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
That's where I'm at today. I've had fun filming a couple of crypto videos before this. After this, I'm going to wrap up with the music video. I've got a crypto video scheduled on my main channel, my autobiography done, the crypto review ready, everything scheduled already. Then I'm going to pick my daughter up from school, and I'll have plenty of time to upload everything later. I appreciate each of you who spends time with me here, and I'm so grateful for all of it.