This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
As 2025 went on, I became completely burned out and increasingly toxic in crypto. I started to see very clearly how I was being used. For a long time, I had promoted projects for free out of goodwill because I had enough views and enough income already. I believed in the ecosystem. I wanted to help. Many of these projects made millions of dollars off the back of my videos and my audience. People put real money into buying all kinds of garbage coins on ICP because I talked about them. After a year and a half of that, I finally snapped. I started demanding my share. I thought, fuck this. If you are not willing to pay me to speak positively about your project, then I am going to start telling the truth publicly.
So I did. I started tearing into some of the same projects I had once supported. In many cases, they deserved it. A year and a half later, a lot of them had delivered absolutely nothing. Some projects paid up because they wanted marketing and did not want to be criticized. Tens of thousands of dollars started coming in from projects that understood the value of what I was providing. Others refused, acted righteous, and continued exploiting creators while sitting on massive treasuries. I went after them hard. I called them out. I tore them down publicly. The ICP community went into an uproar. I was fighting constantly, and that conflict started bleeding into every part of my life.
At the same time, for months, I had been thinking about how much I missed video games. After resisting it for a long time, I finally gave in. I bought another console. I ended up getting my last PlayStation 5 back because I had given it to my yoga instructor in 2024, and now his girlfriend already had one. Meanwhile, earlier that year, my ex-wife and I had talked the kids into giving up their tablets and gaming systems because we felt the tablets and gaming had taken over far too much of their lives. My ex-wife also got off social media. Somehow, I rationalized that my gaming and online activity was work, so it was different. I brought the PlayStation back into the house. I started gaming again. I started live streaming again.
At the same time, my paranoia around crypto intensified. One project followed up criticism with a copyright strike and I sent a counter notification to force them to sue me if they wanted the video down. I realized I had criticized hundreds of projects, and there were billions of dollars moving through the crypto ecosystem I was fighting. I was deep into conspiracy books, and it started to dawn on me that I was messing with people who had enough money and enough incentive to do real harm. Getting someone killed was not out of the question at that level. I started getting threats. I realized that one of the fastest ways I was growing was by attacking other projects. In my mind, I was protecting people from horrible financial decisions. In their minds, I was an enemy who needed to be silenced.
Around that time, I launched a meme coin. Then I tried to give it utility for a day. People warned me that I could face serious legal trouble if I kept promoting it that way. I panicked. I pumped the coin. I backed off. That whole saga is covered in detail in I Was Famous on the Internet, but the end result was extreme. I deleted all of my crypto videos. Thousands of videos. Nearly all of my income. Years of work. My ad revenue went from thousands per month to almost nothing overnight. My YouTube crypto audience was effectively erased. I still had tens of thousands of followers on X, and I still got strong engagement there, but YouTube was dead.
I tried posting new crypto videos, but they barely got any views. Out of frustration, I decided to consolidate everything. I was back to running five or six YouTube channels again. My music videos got almost no views. My gaming videos got almost no views on my now fourth Jerry Banfield Gaming channel. My diary style videos, what would later become my Daily Autobiography series, were also getting almost no traction. I had been dictating ten to twenty minutes a day and posting them for months, and nobody was watching. I was furious.
So I deleted more. I deleted my crypto channel with around fifty thousand subscribers. I wiped it out. I went all in on my original YouTube channel, the one that had existed since 2011 and was clearly shadow banned and loaded with years of negative feedback and algorithmic baggage. I started posting everything there. People watching from the outside thought I was losing my mind. They assumed I would quit again soon. From their perspective, it probably looked exactly like that. From the inside, it felt like desperation mixed with clarity, like tearing everything down because none of it felt real anymore.
In the middle of all of this, when I came back to gaming, I told myself I was not going to play Warzone or Marvel Snap. And of course, that lasted about a month. I fired up Warzone again, and that was the beginning of the end. In June 2025, I started live streaming Warzone again. They had brought Verdansk back, and I had already ripped the mode publicly, made a video trashing it, saying it was lazy, recycled, not worth anyone’s time. At this point, I was flooding my original YouTube channel. Some days I was uploading ten or twenty videos. Shorts, mid-length videos, live streams, clips, everything. I was publishing something every few hours. Some days I had eight scheduled uploads. Some days twelve. Some days I cranked out twenty shorts. I was trying so hard and the results were less than ever. I was making maybe a thousand dollars a month in ad revenue, plus whatever crypto sponsorship money I could scrape together. It felt insulting. It felt like I was putting everything I had into the machine and getting crumbs back.
I was missing almost everything with my ex-wife’s family. When I saw my mom at night, I was usually stressed and irritable. Almost all I talked about with my ex-wife was my work and how frustrating it was. I was spiraling, getting more aggravated by the day, convincing myself that if I could just play video games again and make even more content, that would somehow fix everything. Every day felt like pressure. I was obsessed with output. I scheduled videos every three hours. I woke up thinking about what to upload next. I went to bed thinking about analytics. I had completely lost perspective.
Then I installed Warzone on my PlayStation 5. Verdansk. Solos. They had added bots. I originally loaded it up just to talk shit about it, to make another video explaining why it was bad. But then I played it. And it was fun. That was the problem. Even now, months later, just talking about it, it still sounds fun. The bots were terrible, which meant I could play aggressively for once. I could push. I could run around and rack up ten kills without getting instantly deleted. Every once in a while you ran into a real player, and that was a different story, but the loop hooked me immediately.
I started binging. One day I played three or four hours live on Twitch and YouTube. The next day I streamed seven hours straight. In the middle of that stream, I did a two-hour crypto interview with someone from the ICP community, and on either side of it I played two or three more hours of Warzone. Three days in a row, I logged something like twelve hours of gameplay. I was exhausted and wired at the same time. The comments were killing me. Almost everything people said felt critical. Three years later, people were still bringing up the race change. Others trashed my new content strategy. They told me to stop wasting time and go back to crypto. They called me a shitty husband living off my ex-wife. When you share as much as I do, people have unlimited ammo. Eventually I snapped and locked comments down so people had to pay to comment. The result was silence.
I was streaming simultaneously on Twitch and YouTube for hours, and almost nobody was talking. I might get ten people interacting over a seven-hour stream. I had members on my crypto channel before, but I had deleted it, and almost none of those people followed me over. I was sitting there talking into the void, miserable, angry, obsessed with winning on this stupid map. I wanted to prove something, even though I did not know what anymore.
On the third day, I streamed three hours. In the last match, everything lined up. I played it perfectly. I was at the prison on the lower right of the map. I had a helicopter. I had high ground. I had the rotation planned. Everyone died except one guy. It was just me and him. And of course, he was one of those hyper-aggressive push-everything players. I was rusty. I had not played seriously enough to be sharp. I got nervous. And he destroyed me. Second place. He wiped the floor with me. I shut the game off furious, empty, and completely spent. That moment felt like a mirror. All that effort. All that obsession. All that time poured into something that gave me a brief hit of excitement and then left me feeling even worse than before. That loss was not just about the game. It was about everything I was doing to avoid facing my life.
Meanwhile, my kids were in a summer camp, working all week on a little theater play they were going to perform. I remember thinking, you know what, I’ll just skip that. My ex-wife and her family will be there. The kids don’t really need me. I can just skip it and play Warzone for another three hours. That was the justification running through my head. Fortunately, nobody was chatting in the stream to validate me playing. I wasn’t making money. I could see how insane I was being. I remember thinking, holy shit, I feel like I’m on drugs. I’ve been sober for eleven years at this point, and I’m so sensitive now that the feeling was unmistakable. I’ve never done meth or coke, but I imagine Warzone is like a milder version of that same loop. I was agitated, shaky, not hungry, completely jacked up on adrenaline. I was pacing, snapping, wired. I thought, this is exactly what using feels like. This is insane.
I shut the stream off and went to the kids’ play with my ex-wife’s family, and I felt like I was withdrawing. Everything felt flat and boring. My body felt empty, like I had burned through all my dopamine and adrenaline in one binge. I knew exactly what was coming next if I didn’t change something: depression. In that moment, it finally clicked. I had tried to quit being a video creator before. I tried in 2020. I tried again in 2024. Every time, I left an escape hatch. I left the channels up. I left the accounts. I left the option to come back. And this time I saw it clearly. The only thing I hadn’t done was delete everything.
I waited a couple of days and put up one final video. I said I was deleting everything. I said I was gone for real. No coming back. People laughed. They said I didn’t mean it, that I’d be back like always. My ex-wife and everyone else told me to just leave the channels up and take the passive income. But I made a very specific commitment to myself. I said, if I even think about uploading another video after this goodbye, I will delete everything immediately. Three days later, I caught myself thinking about posting one more video to explain things better. That was it.
I deleted everything. I deleted my original YouTube channel, my first channel, the one with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, where I had just spent months grinding out six, eight, ten, sometimes twelve videos a day. All of it gone. I deleted my X account with tens of thousands of followers. I prepared my Twitch for deletion. I went through and erased everything I could get my hands on. Years of work. Thousands of videos. Entire audiences. Gone.
What I finally understood was that the real barrier to deleting everything wasn’t money or pride. It was my marriage. If I deleted everything, there would be no escape anymore. No distraction. No place to hide. I would have to look directly at my marriage and deal with it. That was the truth I had been running from for years. I sold all my gaming consoles. I shut every door.
After that, my ex-wife and I went on a two week road trip. We had already taken one earlier in the summer that helped inspire the deletion, including a trip to DC. Right after I deleted everything, we took another two-week road trip. Both trips ended with day-long fights. Long stretches of silence. Tension you could feel in your chest. Name-calling. Nasty words. Everything that had been avoided came right to the surface. That carried us into July 2025.
That is where the next phase begins. Because even after deleting everything, I realized something else just as clearly. I still needed to create. I didn’t know what my life was going to look like. I didn’t know how I was going to make money. I didn’t know what direction I was going to go. But I knew I couldn’t stop creating. That is where my Daily Autobiography series begins. The days immediately after deleting everything are where my book Author in St. Petersburg picks up, right where this story leaves off.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.