The short version is that online fame cost me far more than it ever paid me, and I have decided to accept it anyway. For more than a decade I chased views, followers and income across Udemy, YouTube, Steem and Facebook Gaming, and the bill came due in my marriage, my peace, my family time and my integrity. Most people who copy my path never see the bill.
The newest section, No More Emergency Brakes: I'm Ready to Accept As Much Fame As I Get, comes from one of my live streams. I have had over a billion impressions and maybe 50 to 100 million people who actually saw my work, and strangers still stop me as "the Dash guy" from my 2017 crypto videos. For years I started to take off and then sabotaged it, partly because my ex-wife hated me being public. Now I want what is coming to me, as long as I never shill a coin or a diet I do not believe in for views.
My view of the content grind is that it is a freedom that is not free. The money looks like independence until a platform changes its rules, the algorithm moves on, or you burn out. I made close to a quarter million dollars in profit in 2016 alone, and I still ended up depending on systems I could not control. I went back in during the summer of 2026.
The first turning point was June 2016, when Udemy banned me over reviews it said looked sketchy and a complaint from a co-instructor. I wrote about it in The Year Udemy Banned Me and Set Me Free. The ban did not end my hunger for attention. It sent me looking for the next platform, and a League of Legends coaching stream turned into one of the biggest audiences I ever had.
The cost became hard to hide around 2021. In Winning Online While My Marriage Unraveled I describe the Facebook Gaming years, when retro game streams earned me more than $10,000 in some months while I was quietly unraveling at home. From the outside it looked like winning. Inside I felt split in half, and I often was not present with my kids.
SteemFest in Portugal shows the same pattern in a smaller room. Famous, Miserable, and Finally Saying What I Wanted is about strangers who adored me while I could not remember their names. In 2018 I released explicit stand-up material to sell, and it made less than $50. Lots of attention, very little return.
By August 2025 my view of the whole business had changed. In A Decade Online and Little to Show for It I counted close to ten thousand videos and estimated that only 500 to 1,000 carried anything evergreen, mostly stories from my own life. In Why I'm Done Chasing the Content Grind I wrote that books are the foundation I want, because a well-made book keeps working and a daily upload does not.
The marriage is the cost I think about most. My ex-wife and I agreed to divorce in September 2025, and I wrote about those conversations in How Chasing Fame Cost Me My Marriage. In The Highest Price I Paid Online Was My Marriage I tried to be honest about how much of the distraction was mine: for years I was home in body and gone in spirit. The rest is on my divorce page.
In June 2025 I deleted the channels, the followers, the videos and the passive income. What Internet Fame Really Cost Me covers the rest of the bill, including a swatting, death threats and tens of thousands of hateful comments. The people who kept me steady were the ones I could sit across from. My Alcoholics Anonymous page covers that side.
I want to be honest about where I am. In Going All In on YouTube, written on July 31, 2026, I said I was going all in on YouTube again, with six channels and a goal of ten thousand dollars a month. It is the same pattern this whole page is about, and the newest section is me choosing it on purpose with my eyes open.
The sections below run newest first, from 2025 journal entries to 2026 memoir excerpts and stream write-ups. Start at the bottom for the whole arc.
If you are holding a coin, a channel or a business built on attention and want a second opinion from someone who has lived inside that machine, you can book a personal video review with me.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- No More Emergency Brakes: I'm Ready to Accept As Much Fame As I Get (October 17, 2026)
- Going All In on YouTube (July 31, 2026)
- The Year Udemy Banned Me and Set Me Free (June 21, 2026)
- Winning Online While My Marriage Unraveled (June 21, 2026)
- What Internet Fame Cost Me and Why I Stepped Away From Content (June 21, 2026)
- What Internet Fame Really Cost Me (October 30, 2025)
- I Had Millions of Followers and Almost No Real Friends (October 30, 2025)
- Online Made Me Care About Things That Don't Matter (October 30, 2025)
- I Traded a Decade for Numbers, and I Have No Regrets (October 30, 2025)
- The Highest Price I Paid Online Was My Marriage (October 30, 2025)
- How Chasing Fame Cost Me My Marriage (September 28, 2025)
- Why I'm Done Chasing the Content Grind (August 24, 2025)
- A Decade Online and Little to Show for It (August 22, 2025)
No More Emergency Brakes: I'm Ready to Accept As Much Fame As I Get
From my live stream on October 17, 2026.
No more training wheels, no more emergency brakes, and no more pumping the gas and then hitting the brakes. That is where I landed on fame during one of my live streams, after years of starting to take off and then finding some way to sabotage it. I want to be as famous as I am going to get, and I am ready to accept it.
Over a Billion Impressions
I have gotten over a billion impressions online. I got over 500 million on Facebook alone. I got hundreds of millions on YouTube, millions on TikTok, and a bunch on Twitter. I had a Twitter account back around 2011, and I used to just auto post and do follow for follow. So I have a billion impressions, but I would say probably 50 to 100 million people have actually seen something I created.
A lot of my Facebook impressions were global because I ran ads in the cheapest countries in the world, and I built a huge global following that way. From about 2014 to 2017, when I was running ads hard, if I had walked around in Vietnam, India or some of the other countries where ads were cheapest, people there would have seen 10 or 20 of my Facebook ads. They would have said, "Hey, I saw that guy's ads." In the US, tens of millions of people have seen my videos, and I run into them all the time.
"You're the Dash Guy"
One of the best stories I have about this involves Angela Hutchinson, who I had just gone to a show with. Back when she was with her ex-boyfriend, Lev, I was hanging out with the two of them. Lev was a guy who had met me in person several times and who I had done business with. He used to bring me local fruit, and I would pay him about a hundred dollars for a box. The fruit was good as hell. My ex-wife would give me a hard time about it: "You're spending my money on a hundred-dollar box of fruit."
So we were sitting at the house. Angela was at the table, and Lev was standing up, giving me this real long stare. Then he said, "You're the Dash guy. You are the Dash guy." I said, "Yeah, I made Dash videos." He said, "Holy shit. I used to watch all your crypto videos in 2017. You are the Dash guy." I said, "Yeah, that's me." He had met me several times and done business with me and never put it together. A lot of people do not even realize they have watched my videos until they see the name.
Another time I was at Crunch, the gym, wearing one of my shirts, and a guy walked up to me and said, "Oh, Jerry, dude! I used to watch you on Facebook Gaming in 2016. You got me in your lobby. We played Call of Duty Black Ops 3 zombies together. Do you remember me?" I kind of did. He told me his username, and he said, "Oh man, it's so good to see you." That was nine years later. I wrote more about that era in how I got famous playing Call of Duty.
Not Invited to the Celebrity AA Meeting
So I have a lot of impressions. Then my friend threw me under the bus. He told me, "Yeah, I started a celebrity AA meeting." I said, "Why don't you invite me to that?" And he said, "Nah." I told him that was messed up. You are going to tell me about the celebrity AA meeting you started and then not invite me, because you do not feel I am a real celebrity like Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga? Thanks a lot. Way to just dump a pile of crap on me. Maybe one day.
He threw Stuttering John under the bus too. I had been trying to tell him about the Dabbleverse, and he did not know anything about the Dabbleverse or any of that YouTube world. I mentioned Stuttering John, who was the announcer on The Tonight Show, and I was actually talking about Stuttering John and alcoholism through that whole conversation. When I brought up the celebrity AA meeting, he said, "Nah, not Stuttering John either." I thought that was funny. Stuttering John is not enough of a celebrity to get invited to my friend's celebrity AA meeting, and neither am I.
Why I Kept Hitting the Brakes
I have had qualms about being famous in the past. There were a lot of times I thought, I do not want to be like MrBeast. I do not want my entire ordinary life ruined. Now I am like, forget it. I want to be as famous as I am going to get. I want what is coming to me, and I am ready to accept it.
Maybe it had something to do with being with my ex-wife. When I was with her, I realized she very much did not want me to be famous. She hated it when I went viral, whether I was getting banned on Udemy, blowing up on Facebook Gaming, getting canceled on Facebook Gaming, or running a huge amount of ads. She hated me being a public figure. I am not saying she was wrong for that. A lot of women would not want to be with a guy like me, or with a guy who is famous.
The pattern I felt with her all the time was that I would start to get famous and then sabotage it. I would start to take off, and then I would do something to sabotage it, or I would manifest something that sabotaged it. In some ways that was pleasing my ex. It was like driving with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.
Accepting All of It
Now I am like, I will have the weirdest life if I have to from being famous, and I will just accept that. I will accept all the viewership and all the financial support. I am going to do what I need to do, put myself out there, and take as many views as the world is going to give me.
I will optimize however I can in a way that is authentic. I am not going to say whatever I need to say to get money and views, but I am going to laser in on what is most effective. I am going to put on the best titles I can and the best thumbnails I can, and I am going to accept as much fame as life wants to offer. If that messes up other aspects of my life, I accept that.
Whichever woman I am with next is going to love what I do and help me get where I am going. I like to think I have a destiny, and I have already gotten a good start on it. Whoever is going to be the real queen is going to accept that up front: look, I am putting myself out there as much as I can, and if you do not like that, this is not going to work. I went deeper on the end of my marriage on my divorce page.
The Line I Will Not Cross
Accepting fame does not mean saying anything for views. I am not going to go shill some garbage coin that I did not launch. There are things I could just say to get a lot more views. I could probably start talking positively about the carnivore diet or keto, which I think are both garbage, get a bunch of bots to push my videos, and then get a bunch of people who actually believe that stuff to watch. I am not going to do it. I am not going to push stuff I do not believe in just to get views.
If you want to support me putting myself out there this way, with no brakes and no shilling, you can leave me a tip on my tip page, and every one helps me keep making this.
Going All In on YouTube
From my video published July 31, 2026.
I'm Jerry Banfield. It's July 31st, 2026. I'm a full-time YouTuber, and this is the daily vlog I do to communicate real, raw, authentic living. I'm a role model — I'm trying to live a life here and share and show others how to do it. So here's what's happened in the last 24 hours. Who would find any of this interesting if you haven't known me? I think it is interesting.
Going All In on YouTube
I realized in the last 24 hours that I need to just go all in on YouTube. The idea of me trying to do business locally is a bit unrealistic. I know what I'm doing on YouTube. I've been praying about it — please guide me on my work — because I want to make a full-time income, like ten-plus thousand a month, doing what I do. I'm grateful that I'm up to maybe a couple thousand a month right now, from zero in just two months, with six YouTube channels I started four months ago.
The TikTok Seller Conversation
One of the best things that happened in the last 24 hours was an amazing conversation with a guy I ran into at a meeting. He's going through a divorce himself and struggling, but one thing he said in his share is that he got a call from his divorce attorney while he was on camera. I thought, I'm going to have to talk to him afterwards about that. Same as when I picked that woman up at yoga a few weeks ago — anytime I hear anybody talking about content creation, I've got to figure out what's going on there.
So I talked to this guy after the meeting and asked, what do you do on camera? He says he sells stuff on TikTok. You sell stuff on TikTok? He tells me exactly how he does it. He's making a fortune doing it, and he puts in a lot of work doing the livestreams too. I told him I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself, and he said TikTok and YouTube are where it's at — you've got to be able to find something to do on YouTube, you're in the right place already. We ended up talking about all kinds of different games and stuff that he sold before, and when I brought up Magic: The Gathering Arena, he said, dude, Magic: The Gathering Arena is so popular, there's so much money you can make around that game. Really? Because I love playing Magic: The Gathering. I played as a kid. I got to Mythic. And right now, out of my six YouTube channels, my gaming channel is the weak spot. All the other channels are growing pretty consistently, and if the gaming channel could pull in an audience, that might be critical mass. So I left thinking, thank you for the guidance — YouTube is exactly what I need to be doing.
The Numbers Behind My Setup
Behind me in my vlogs is a $10,000-plus YouTube setup. My light alone is several hundred dollars. Claude Code runs a $200-a-month AI workflow on my videos in the background, and my spreadsheet shows I've uploaded 371 videos since May 18th. I've averaged five videos a day, even going on vacation, even changing my strategy to livestreams. I've averaged 73 minutes of content a day — that's 90 hours of content I've uploaded since May 18th, with OBS running right there in my studio. Almost nobody gets this kind of a setup. With this kind of setup, I know I can make at least 10 grand a month. And at this point it's like, okay, what do I need to do to get there? Just keep grinding out YouTube videos. You went from zero to 2,000 a month. There's no reason you can't go from two to three, three to four, four to five, five to six, six to seven, seven to ten. There's no reason you can't just grind out videos and make a full-time living on YouTube.
I'm really grateful for that realization. All I need to do is go back to cranking out six videos a day. I will eventually get some sponsorships — I do need to put my business email in all my channels — and everything should escalate. Right now I only have two monetized channels, and they bring in $500 a month in ad revenue. What happens when I get three, four, five, six monetized channels and they start bringing in $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month in ad revenue?
The Jerry Banfield Family
I made the Jerry Banfield Family super affordable so that anyone can easily join. In there you can talk, you can post to everybody else who's in there, you can introduce yourself, you can DM me, and I'm putting my own courses and video archives up in there. If you want to support me, if you want a direct connection, if you want me to read your comments, that's the place to do it. And if you want a one-on-one call a month, you can upgrade, or if you want a one-on-one call every week, you can upgrade in there. So I've got a nice business system set up right now. And if the ICP price would ever kick off, I'm so set — I'm already in the right position. All I need to do is keep grinding out content and stay focused, which most of the last few months I have done. But in the last week I started getting distracted. I've had this idea that there are these big opportunities for me locally, but I've got to say that's unrealistic. Most local stuff comes from face-to-face networking and in-person connections, and I have very little of that. I don't enjoy doing that a whole bunch either. I'm good at all this tech stuff, so we're going to keep doing that.
Back on Hinge
I also rejoined Hinge yesterday. I know, cringe, but I'm going to keep doing that, and I am going to document it on my Jerry Banfield dating channel. Look — Hinge day one, just rejoined, here's my profile, here's my strategy, let's see how long it is before I either meet someone or delete it. I was thinking about the woman I went out with from yoga that I got all excited about — she was on Hinge also, and she had some guy cancel a date on her. And I know on Hinge, if you send roses, that is a pretty easy way to get attention from a woman. I think I've made my best Hinge profile, and you can be the judge of that on Jerry Banfield dating.
I've also decided I don't need to put these vlogs out a full two weeks behind. So I'm going to start cranking out the ones I've filmed every day. There should still be a few days' delay on the vlog, in case I get a little embarrassed that I filmed a video crying — we're just going to censor that one. I don't have to put out every single moment of my life. One guy was messaging me saying, well, your YouTube makes it hard, because women are going to be able to see everything going on with you. And this is important: if I'm going to date a woman, she needs to be comfortable with what I do on YouTube. That was one of the big points of friction while I got divorced. My ex hated my very public life, that I would put everything out there. She hated being a part of that. Now, many women will feel the same way, but some women will be very happy to have that kind of lifestyle, where we live a transparent life. I want a woman who would film videos with me and be a part of my vlogs and film dating videos with me. Maybe play a game with me or something. Maybe hop on the crypto channel once a month. I want a woman who will cooperate with my YouTube channel, who is proud of what I do, and who is happy to support me with that. So I'm not going to try to hide or minimize my YouTube. On Hinge, I put that I'm a YouTuber in my description. My shirts have my name on them — it says Jerry Banfield. Who knows?
I've also been thinking about the woman at yoga. She's pulled away. Maybe she'll come back, maybe not. It doesn't matter that much, because what matters is I keep getting out there and making an effort myself. I picked my friend up from the airport yesterday and had a nice conversation with him, and I was listening to some of his videos. I decided I'm going to watch some more of Andrew Tate's course — and I don't agree with a significant portion of it — but I'm feeling really grateful, like I'm getting back to what I know, what I already learned about dating. The woman who was supposed to come over today canceled. She first rescheduled, and then she said, oh, I'm not feeling good, can I reschedule? I'm just going to leave that. For me, if you're canceling or rescheduling, I'm going to figure you're not interested, and I'm just going to withdraw any attention from there. If she wants to try again sometime later, cool. But I really don't like canceling or rescheduling — to me, that indicates you're unstable, that you can't commit to the things you say you're going to do. And with the woman from yoga, the queen, I should have immediately pulled back a hundred percent when she canceled that date — just been like, I'm out — and maybe then she decides she misses me and then she's pursuing after that. But I'm grateful for all these lessons I've learned.
Be Careful Who You Listen To
I'm grateful for all of you watching and supporting. That said, if you want to talk with me or share your opinions with me, you've got to be a member of the Family, because the YouTube comments have been too damaging to me over the years. Negative little amounts of feedback are so toxic that I can read nine positive comments and one negative comment sticks. Who's posting these comments? I don't know if the comments are from bots. I don't know if the comments are from some miserable, lonely person. I don't need to hear that.
I know it's really important in life to be careful who you listen to, and random people commenting on my videos are not who I need to listen to. I need to listen to people who have something invested in me, who care about what I'm doing, who want to support me, for whom my videos make a difference. I got some really nice messages on Skool yesterday from a guy saying my videos have made such a big difference in his life. That's what I need to hear. I don't need to hear from somebody who's just out there, coming over from some other video, wanting to talk a bunch of junk. So be careful who you listen to in life. My goal with all that I create is to be a person worth listening to, if you want to have a life that's satisfying, that's fun, that's authentic, that's full of joy.
I'll keep you updated with everything on my Life playlist. I'm also shortening things up — if I go over 10 minutes on a video, I'll be back with another video. It's time to wrap it up, because if I'm going to do six videos a day, I probably shouldn't be putting out more than 60 minutes a day of content right now, and I've been averaging 73 minutes a day. It seems the number one thing I can do to grow all my channels is crank one video a day out on every single channel. If I want to make 10 grand a month on YouTube, then if I put six videos a day out for the next six months, that'll be a little less than a thousand videos. That gives me pretty high confidence there's going to be a lot of reach and discovery. So we're going to wrap this up. Hope to see you on tomorrow's vlog.
The Year Udemy Banned Me and Set Me Free
Originally published June 21, 2026.
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.
By 2016, I was at the absolute peak of making money online. That year alone, I earned close to a quarter million dollars in profit and roughly $1,000,000 in total sales. On Udemy specifically, I had one month where I made $80,000 and another where I pulled in around $90,000. I felt untouchable. I was obsessed with becoming the number one instructor on the platform, and I had systems running everywhere to make that happen. I was spending hundreds of dollars a day on Google Ads, running affiliate remarketing links that funneled massive amounts of traffic into my courses. If someone bought any course on Udemy after clicking my link, I got paid. The machine was humming, and I was feeding it constantly.
I was also paying people well. I had a friend on a $5,000-per-month retainer helping me manage my Udemy presence and work on his websites tied into my ecosystem. Technically, his work more than paid for itself, and when I looked at it honestly, he was probably earning somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour helping me. Some people later told me I should have saved more or paid down debt, but that’s never been how I operate. When I’m blessed, I hook my friends up. That’s the kind of guy I am. I also brought in another Xbox friend and had just started paying him $5,000 a month to help with my Google Ads. That arrangement was literally in its first week when everything blew up.
It was the middle of June 2016. My ex-wife and I had just moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, into a house we rented near her parents. I remember the timing vividly because the chaos hit right in the middle of what should have been an exciting transition. A friend who worked with me on my courses—he had been helping me on Udemy for over a year—called me sounding panicked. He said something had happened to my Udemy profile. I opened the email and saw that Udemy had banned me outright for what they called policy violations. Reading it felt surreal.
One of the violations claimed that some of my reviews looked sketchy and appeared to come from sources like Fiverr, as if I had paid for them. Even according to their own statistics, it was less than ten percent of my reviews. What had actually happened was obvious to anyone paying attention: I had given out hundreds of thousands of free coupons to my courses. Some of those coupons ended up on sites like Fiverr, where people were reselling access to free courses. People took the courses for free, left reviews, and somehow that became evidence against me.
The second violation was labeled “improper co-instructor relationships.” They claimed that co-instructors complained I had been added to their courses and then used those courses to promote my own. I knew exactly which instructor reported me. What made it even more absurd was that after the ban, she reached out saying she felt terrible and wanted to help me get back on Udemy. It reminded me of the kind of people in Alcoholics Anonymous who joke about stealing your wallet and then helping you look for it. I was sitting there thinking, seriously—you did this, and now you want to undo it?
She had been pissed because I took her three-hour digital marketing course and added three more hours of video, turning it into a six-hour course. I doubled the material and made it worth buying. Then I sent a promotional announcement that included all of my courses, which she decided was unfair. That complaint was a major factor in Udemy banning me. The whole thing was ridiculous. If anyone else had done the same thing, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I wasn’t just anyone. I was the biggest personality on the platform, and I had the loudest mouth.
Right before the ban, I had publicly gone after Udemy on YouTube and on their own platform for making a policy change that forced instructors to sell courses for no less than $10. I thought it was a stupid move, and I said so very loudly and very publicly. I’m almost certain that video—and the broader criticism I made of them—was the final straw. They decided they’d had enough of me and were ready to shut my big mouth for good.
Ironically, while I hated losing the income from Udemy, I genuinely loved the freedom it gave me. Even with the ban hanging over everything, 2016 turned into a year of exploration. I wandered into all kinds of new territory—crypto, gaming, and other experiments that had nothing to do with online courses. That was also the year I published several of my original books online. Without courses to anchor my identity or income, I figured I might as well test new formats and see what stuck. Looking back now, if I had the chance to do it over, I might skip most of what I did back then and just write books while building a local, in-person business. Of course, if I had taken the sensible route, the story you’re about to hear would be far less interesting.
One of the experiments I ran in 2016 involved League of Legends. Out of probably a hundred random ideas I tested that year, this one was almost accidental. I was absolutely terrible at the game. It’s a shitty game in my opinion, and I still don’t understand how it became so popular. That said, all my friends were playing it. I wanted to play with them, and more importantly, I wanted to stop sucking. So I tried something simple: I paid a retired professional League of Legends player who was working as a coach. He charged thirty euros an hour. We got on Skype, I screen-shared my gameplay, and he coached me live. This was 2016—way ahead of the curve. Hardly anyone was doing anything like this at the time. I still believe in getting real-time feedback from someone who has been there, so if you want that kind of direct input on whatever you’re building, you can schedule a private call with me.
I took it a step further and live streamed the entire thing on YouTube. I titled the stream, Can a Pro Coach Help Me Get Out of Bronze in League of Legends?—which, in hindsight, was an absolutely brilliant title. When the stream actually happened, nothing special occurred. It was just me and the coach. I played a single game with him because League games take forever, I won that one match, and then I wrapped the stream. I hired him again for another session afterward, but for whatever reason I didn’t even manage to get that one live on YouTube. At the time, it all felt forgettable. Hardly anyone watched while I was live.
Around then, I was testing live streaming everywhere—Twitch, YouTube, Facebook—throwing gameplay online and seeing what happened. There was absolutely no money in gaming at that point. No donations, no memberships, no stars. Twitch might have had subscribers, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting any. There were sometimes decent view counts, but there was no income attached to any of it. I did that League of Legends coaching stream in the spring of 2016 and completely forgot about it.
Then one day, while obsessively checking my YouTube analytics like I always did, I noticed something strange. That old live stream had broken out. It was suddenly pulling in tens of thousands of views per day and generating hundreds of thousands of impressions daily. YouTube was pushing it all over the League of Legends community. I remember staring at the numbers thinking, What the hell is happening? The beginning of the video was awkward as hell—me going live while the coach and I were still getting connected on Skype, five or ten minutes of clumsy small talk before the game even started. And yet YouTube was blasting this out to everyone interested in League of Legends.
The title was doing heavy lifting, and the average watch time was massive. That combination made the algorithm fall in love with it. One live stream that almost nobody watched in real time ended up delivering me a huge League of Legends audience. For the deeper version of my internet career, all of that is laid out in I Was Famous on the Internet, and I don’t need to repeat it here. I’m telling this League of Legends story because it sets up what comes next perfectly.
At the same time, 2016 turned into a breakout year for my health. After a full year of tracking calories and actually following through, I had my weight down to 190 pounds. I was incredibly proud of the physical shape I was in. The last time I had been anywhere near that weight was years earlier, when I had lived with my parents for a year and followed a strict routine: eating during the day, not eating after dinner except for the popcorn with my mom, staying up late, going to the gym consistently, and not drinking. I had gotten into great shape back then, and six years later I was back there again. I was doing personal training, I felt strong, lean, and confident, and everything in my body felt like it was clicking into place. Physically, I felt fantastic.
Right in the middle of all of this, we made a major personal change. At the time, we were living in the Sarasota area, technically in Bradenton near the Sarasota airport. My ex-wife and her family kept dropping subtle hints about how nice it would be to live in St. Petersburg now that we had a baby. Our daughter, my daughter, was six months old at the beginning of 2016 and turned one in August. Everyone seemed to really want us closer so they could see her more often. My ex-wife wouldn’t have to drive as much, and for family dinners we wouldn’t all have to do a two-hour round trip from Sarasota. It was framed as convenience, connection, and family time, and over months it slowly worked its way into my head.
I remember standing in the shower one day, thinking it would actually be a brilliant idea for us to move to St. Petersburg. At the time, we were living in an amazing house—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge living room, a screened-in lanai, a pool in the backyard, a fully fenced yard, and a big, beautiful corner lot in the front. We paid $168,000 for it. Technically, the city address was Sarasota, and the house itself was absolutely perfect. Meanwhile, St. Pete was significantly more expensive. To get anything comparable, we would have needed to pay at least $50,000 to $100,000 more, easily.
I came out of the shower and told my ex-wife that we should move to St. Petersburg, presenting it like it was my idea. Almost immediately afterward, it hit me what had happened. It felt like I’d been on the receiving end of some Inception-level manipulation. If you’ve seen Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio, the entire premise is planting ideas in someone’s mind in such a subtle way that they believe it was their own thought. That’s exactly what it felt like. I realized how smooth my ex-wife and her family were about it. In my family, people would have argued it directly—laid out the logic, explained why it made sense, and debated it openly. My ex-wife’s family did the opposite. They let the idea bloom quietly until I thought I had discovered it myself.
Looking back, it makes perfect sense why they did it that way. If they had tried to push the move directly, I probably would have resisted hard. I had a very solid life in Sarasota. I had my Alcoholics Anonymous group where I got sober and where I was deeply connected to people. I had my personal training setup, my massage therapist, my routines, and a house I genuinely loved. The mortgage was cheap, and everything felt stable and dialed in. Moving to St. Petersburg meant disrupting all of that.
Years later, my ex-wife and I still wonder what would have happened if we had stayed in Sarasota. Financially, staying in that house would have been an incredibly smart decision. The mortgage we ended up with later was more than double what that house cost, for a smaller place with no pool. That choice had long-term consequences, and I’ll come back to that later.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Winning Online While My Marriage Unraveled
Originally published June 21, 2026.
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.
At the same time, my personal life was getting complicated in ways I didn’t expect. I met this absolutely stunning woman in Alcoholics Anonymous, and she really liked me, largely because of my sobriety and how solid I was in it. I developed a real crush on her, the kind that actually scared me. I was talking to my friends about it, asking what the hell was going on in my head. I started thinking things I’d never seriously thought before, like maybe I wanted to leave my ex-wife and be with this woman instead. I found myself thinking, This is who I want to be with. I don’t want to be with my ex-wife anymore.
That realization hit me hard. I felt horrible about it. I didn’t understand what was happening because this hadn’t happened before. I’d been with my ex-wife for ten years at that point. Sure, over the years there had been moments of attraction, some light flirting, occasional energy with other women, but nothing like this. I’d never felt genuinely sad that I wasn’t single, or wished I could be with someone else. Now I did. And all of it—Warzone, the gaming addiction, the success, the pressure—wrapped together into one tangled mess. Video games became the easiest way to escape that feeling. I buried myself in streaming instead of talking to my ex-wife about what was going on inside me, and the crush sat there unspoken, quietly eating away at me, leaving me frustrated, conflicted, and increasingly disconnected from my real life.
I kept asking myself why my marriage wasn’t something I felt that excited about anymore. I remembered a time when I felt like I worshipped my ex-wife, when being with her felt grounding and obvious. But after the financial disaster, the differences we had around the kids, and then the deeper I fell back into video games, it felt like we slowly started drifting apart. By 2021, once I was fully immersed in gaming again and everything around COVID had created such a deep divide between me and her family, it became clear that we weren’t on the same page anymore. The distance kept widening. My ex-wife later said that having a crush is usually a symptom of a problem in the marriage, not just a personal failure of the person who has the crush. I think she was right. It wasn’t just me. Something had already shifted between us. Her excitement about me had faded, and then this other woman showed up and that energy was suddenly there again. It felt intoxicating. It felt alive. If you have ever felt that quiet drift in your own marriage and want people who will not flinch when you talk about it honestly, you can schedule a private call with me and work through it alongside me and others who have been on the call.
I remember the first time I met her at an AA meeting. There were probably thirty or more people there, sitting outside. I saw this drop-dead gorgeous woman, and without hesitation I walked straight over and put my chair next to hers. When it was my turn to share, I shared the most euphoric, polished, magnetic version of myself I could summon. Right after the meeting ended, I asked for her phone number and got it. I started texting her and coordinating meetings, and we kept running into each other again and again. Eventually she told me she was concerned that something might be developing between us that shouldn’t be, and she didn’t want to go down that road. I told her not to worry, that I was monogamous, that I was just being friendly. We hugged. We told each other we loved each other. There was a lot of emotion there, and it was very real. But afterward, I felt disgusting. I felt like I had lied to her.
If I had been honest, the truth would have sounded very different. The truth would have been that I wasn’t happy in my marriage anymore, that I was thinking about divorce, and that part of me wanted her to be my next wife. That was the truth underneath everything. But I didn’t feel allowed to say it. I didn’t even feel allowed to fully think it. It felt forbidden, like something that couldn’t be real or valid. All of this was happening in the background while, on the surface, my life looked wildly successful. Online, people either saw a guy streaming shirtless and acting unhinged or they saw success. They saw massive view counts, big money, influence. People wanted what I had on Facebook Gaming. There were months where I made $10,000, like when the GoldenEye and NBA Jam streams hit back to back. From the outside, it looked like I was winning.
Inside, my marriage was quietly unraveling, and I had no idea what to do about it or how to be honest about what I was feeling. Instead of facing it, I escaped. Most days I was either playing video games or watching other people play Warzone. I stayed glued to everything happening in the ecosystem so I wouldn’t miss a trend or a strategy, so nobody else would figure something out before I did. Hours and hours disappeared that way. All of my energy and attention went into gaming—testing new games, experimenting with Twitch and YouTube, trying to move people across platforms, trying to stay on top. You’d think it would have been enough. In many ways, 2021 really did feel like the peak. I had more attention and views than ever before. I’d finally made it. I felt incredible about myself at times.
At the same time, I also felt like absolute shit. There were moments when all the nasty comments felt true, when I believed the people telling me I was a loser or a shitty parent. I often wasn’t present with my kids because my mind was somewhere else entirely, thinking about streams, algorithms, games, and growth. I was split in half—on top of the world and quietly miserable—unable to reconcile the success everyone saw with the life that was slipping through my fingers right in front of me. If you are living that same split—winning on the outside while something quietly slips away at home—I offer a space to talk it through when you schedule a one-on-one call with me.
I also got my kids onto tablets during this period. My ex-wife was the one who bought them, but the reality is that the kids were soon spending an hour or two a day on their tablets, every day. They started watching YouTube Kids heavily, playing games, watching videos, watching movies, and slowly spending more and more of their time on screens. Looking back, the shift in how I showed up as a parent is obvious. There was a time when I was much more active with my kids, when I’d go to the park and play with them, be fully engaged, running around, present. By this point, that had changed. I was still around them physically, but a lot of that time was spent doing chores—washing dishes, cleaning up, handling household tasks—while my ex-wife worked. She had ramped up her freelancing by then, and financially things were improving fast. In 2021 alone, I made over $100,000 again in my business, and my ex-wife brought in solid money too. After everything we’d been through, our finances completely turned around within a couple of years, and from the outside it looked like we were finally back on a strong, positive track.
As I leaned harder into retro games in 2021, I started doing presentations showing people exactly how I was making more than $10,000 a month on Facebook Gaming. I shared my analytics, my stats, my strategies, laid it all out. What I noticed, though, was a huge disconnect between what I was doing and what other people could realistically replicate. I had a verified blue checkmark next to my name. I had millions of followers. I had a partner badge. I had years of deep digital marketing experience. Most people had none of that. I could show them the process, but when they tried to copy it, it didn’t work. They’d stream GoldenEye and get a few hundred views. I’d play the same games and pull hundreds of thousands of views. And I just kept doing it again and again. The success kept replicating for me with retro games in a way it didn’t for almost anyone else.
I went all in. I hit retro game stores and dropped thousands of dollars multiple times, buying hundreds and hundreds of old games. I scoured eBay and bought obscure titles—Harry Potter on GameCube, Top Gun on NES, all kinds of random shit. I played StarCraft. I went back and played literally a hundred different games. I started thinking of my live streams less as live events and more as videos that just happened to be recorded live. I’d do the stream, but most of the views would come afterward. I played the Family Guy video game on Xbox and that one blew up. I started wearing clothes again for some of the streams, getting into outfits, leaning into characters. My creativity was going wild.
At the same time, I started blatantly violating the non-disclosure agreement. I could feel myself crossing lines, and I didn’t really care anymore. I had reached a point where I felt untouchable. I kept looking at that partner badge, knowing it was temporary, knowing it could disappear at any time, and that actually made me less cautious, not more. I knew it wouldn’t last forever. And I also knew that there was no way I was going to sit there quietly and be a good little boy just to preserve some badge. If I had a platform and an audience, it felt pointless if I couldn’t say what I actually wanted to say. So I ran my mouth on my live streams. I pushed boundaries. I spoke openly. I stopped pretending. And even though part of me knew I was playing with fire, another part of me felt like that honesty was the only thing that made any of it worth doing at all.
I started pushing into stand-up comedy in a way that took things to an entirely different level, and it pissed people off more than anything I’d done up to that point. I was listening constantly to stand-up comics and conspiracy content, and I’d developed this belief that one of the most powerful spiritual skills a person could have was the ability to laugh at anything. If you could find humor even in the darkest, most horrific places, then nothing really had power over you anymore. That idea obsessed me. I wanted to test it. I wanted to see how far it could go.
I deliberately went looking for the darkest material imaginable, not because I supported it or believed in it, but because I wanted to see if humor could exist even there. I became focused on the act of transmutation itself—taking something unspeakably heavy and flipping it into laughter as a way of reclaiming psychological power. Some of the jokes crossed into territory I won’t recreate here, blending shock humor with imagery drawn from one of the darkest moments in human history.
What mattered to me wasn’t the specific joke. It was the fact that I felt I had crossed some internal boundary and proven something to myself. I felt proud that I’d found a way—at least in my own mind—to laugh in a place where laughter felt forbidden. To me, that felt like spiritual sovereignty. Other people did not see it that way.
Some people went absolutely nuclear. They were threatening to report my page, telling me I was going to lose my partner status, saying I’d get banned, saying they were coming after me. I’d already heard rumors by that point about how Facebook actually worked at the upper levels—that once you crossed a certain threshold, your account was no longer subject to automated enforcement. Regular accounts could be taken down by mass reporting, often by bots. Enough reports and the system would just nuke the page. But once you reached a certain status, that stopped working. At that level, only manual intervention mattered. A human being had to decide to take action. In mob terms, you were a made man.
That was my account. People reported me constantly, and nothing happened. The reports just bounced off. I talked outrageous amounts of shit. I pushed boundaries relentlessly. I even did live streams where I blatantly violated the non-disclosure agreement—saying the exact opposite of what I’d been explicitly told not to say. And nothing happened. No warnings. No strikes. No consequences. None of the other partners snitched on me. Nobody at Facebook manually intervened. And all the people who were furious enough to report me were powerless to do anything about it. I said whatever I wanted, and the platform just kept amplifying me. At that point, I felt untouchable.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
What Internet Fame Cost Me and Why I Stepped Away From Content
Originally published June 21, 2026.
The short version is that online fame cost me far more than it ever paid me. For more than a decade I chased views, followers and income across Udemy, YouTube, Steem and Facebook Gaming. By the time I stepped away, the bill had come due in my marriage, my peace, my family time and my integrity. Most people who copy my path never see the bill.
My view now is that the content grind is a freedom that is not free. The money looks like independence until a platform changes its rules, the algorithm moves on, or you burn out and realize every good month set a bar you have to clear the next month. I know this from the inside. I made close to a quarter million dollars in profit in 2016 alone, and I still ended up depending on systems I could not control. I went back in during the summer of 2026.
The first turning point was June 2016, when Udemy banned me. The platform cited reviews it said looked sketchy and a complaint from a co-instructor, and I still think the whole thing was ridiculous. I wrote about it in The Year Udemy Banned Me and Set Me Free. The ban did not end my hunger for attention. It sent me looking for the next platform, and a League of Legends coaching stream I had almost forgotten turned into one of the biggest audiences I ever had.
The cost became hard to hide around 2021. In Winning Online While My Marriage Unraveled I describe the Facebook Gaming years, when retro game streams earned me more than $10,000 in some months, while I was falling for someone I met at an AA meeting and quietly unraveling at home. From the outside it looked like winning. Inside I felt split in half, and I often was not present with my kids.
SteemFest in Portugal shows the same pattern in a smaller room. Famous, Miserable, and Finally Saying What I Wanted is about strangers who adored me while I could not remember their names, and about feeling I had almost nothing to give back. Then, in 2018, I released explicit stand-up material to sell, and it made less than $50. Lots of attention, very little return. That is the arc of a lot of online success.
By August 2025 my view of the whole business had changed. In A Decade Online and Little to Show for It I counted close to ten thousand videos made over a decade, and I estimated that only maybe 500 to 1,000 carried anything evergreen, mostly stories from my own life. In Why I'm Done Chasing the Content Grind I wrote that books are the foundation I want, because a well-made book keeps working and a daily upload does not.
The marriage is the cost I think about most. My ex-wife and I agreed to divorce in September 2025, and I wrote about those conversations in How Chasing Fame Cost Me My Marriage. In The Highest Price I Paid Online Was My Marriage I tried to be honest about how much of the distraction was mine: for years I was home in body and gone in spirit. The rest of that part of my life is on my divorce page.
In June 2025 I deleted the channels, the followers, the videos and the passive income. What Internet Fame Really Cost Me covers the rest of the bill, including a swatting, death threats and tens of thousands of hateful comments. The people who kept me steady through all of it were the ones I could sit across from, and that is the part of my life that never depended on a follower count. My Alcoholics Anonymous page covers that side.
I want to be honest about where I am, because this page would be dishonest without it. In Going All In on YouTube, written on July 31, 2026, I said I was going all in on YouTube again, with six channels, a couple thousand dollars a month and a goal of ten thousand a month. A conversation with a man selling on TikTok and the same old numbers pulled me back in. It is the same pattern this whole page is about, which is why I left that post at the top.
The twelve posts below run newest first, from 2025 journal entries to 2026 memoir excerpts. Start at the bottom for the whole arc.
If you are holding a coin, a channel or a business built on attention and want a second opinion from someone who has lived inside that machine, you can book a personal video review with me.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Going All In on YouTube (July 31, 2026)
- The Year Udemy Banned Me and Set Me Free (June 21, 2026)
- Winning Online While My Marriage Unraveled (June 21, 2026)
Going All In on YouTube
From my video published July 31, 2026.
I'm Jerry Banfield. It's July 31st, 2026. I'm a full-time YouTuber, and this is the daily vlog I do to communicate real, raw, authentic living. I'm a role model — I'm trying to live a life here and share and show others how to do it. So here's what's happened in the last 24 hours. Who would find any of this interesting if you haven't known me? I think it is interesting.
Going All In on YouTube
I realized in the last 24 hours that I need to just go all in on YouTube. The idea of me trying to do business locally is a bit unrealistic. I know what I'm doing on YouTube. I've been praying about it — please guide me on my work — because I want to make a full-time income, like ten-plus thousand a month, doing what I do. I'm grateful that I'm up to maybe a couple thousand a month right now, from zero in just two months, with six YouTube channels I started four months ago.
The TikTok Seller Conversation
One of the best things that happened in the last 24 hours was an amazing conversation with a guy I ran into at a meeting. He's going through a divorce himself and struggling, but one thing he said in his share is that he got a call from his divorce attorney while he was on camera. I thought, I'm going to have to talk to him afterwards about that. Same as when I picked that woman up at yoga a few weeks ago — anytime I hear anybody talking about content creation, I've got to figure out what's going on there.
So I talked to this guy after the meeting and asked, what do you do on camera? He says he sells stuff on TikTok. You sell stuff on TikTok? He tells me exactly how he does it. He's making a fortune doing it, and he puts in a lot of work doing the livestreams too. I told him I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself, and he said TikTok and YouTube are where it's at — you've got to be able to find something to do on YouTube, you're in the right place already. We ended up talking about all kinds of different games and stuff that he sold before, and when I brought up Magic: The Gathering Arena, he said, dude, Magic: The Gathering Arena is so popular, there's so much money you can make around that game. Really? Because I love playing Magic: The Gathering. I played as a kid. I got to Mythic. And right now, out of my six YouTube channels, my gaming channel is the weak spot. All the other channels are growing pretty consistently, and if the gaming channel could pull in an audience, that might be critical mass. So I left thinking, thank you for the guidance — YouTube is exactly what I need to be doing.
The Numbers Behind My Setup
Behind me in my vlogs is a $10,000-plus YouTube setup. My light alone is several hundred dollars. Claude Code runs a $200-a-month AI workflow on my videos in the background, and my spreadsheet shows I've uploaded 371 videos since May 18th. I've averaged five videos a day, even going on vacation, even changing my strategy to livestreams. I've averaged 73 minutes of content a day — that's 90 hours of content I've uploaded since May 18th, with OBS running right there in my studio. Almost nobody gets this kind of a setup. With this kind of setup, I know I can make at least 10 grand a month. And at this point it's like, okay, what do I need to do to get there? Just keep grinding out YouTube videos. You went from zero to 2,000 a month. There's no reason you can't go from two to three, three to four, four to five, five to six, six to seven, seven to ten. There's no reason you can't just grind out videos and make a full-time living on YouTube.
I'm really grateful for that realization. All I need to do is go back to cranking out six videos a day. I will eventually get some sponsorships — I do need to put my business email in all my channels — and everything should escalate. Right now I only have two monetized channels, and they bring in $500 a month in ad revenue. What happens when I get three, four, five, six monetized channels and they start bringing in $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month in ad revenue?
The Jerry Banfield Family
I made the Jerry Banfield Family super affordable so that anyone can easily join. In there you can talk, you can post to everybody else who's in there, you can introduce yourself, you can DM me, and I'm putting my own courses and video archives up in there. If you want to support me, if you want a direct connection, if you want me to read your comments, that's the place to do it. And if you want a one-on-one call a month, you can upgrade, or if you want a one-on-one call every week, you can upgrade in there. So I've got a nice business system set up right now. And if the ICP price would ever kick off, I'm so set — I'm already in the right position. All I need to do is keep grinding out content and stay focused, which most of the last few months I have done. But in the last week I started getting distracted. I've had this idea that there are these big opportunities for me locally, but I've got to say that's unrealistic. Most local stuff comes from face-to-face networking and in-person connections, and I have very little of that. I don't enjoy doing that a whole bunch either. I'm good at all this tech stuff, so we're going to keep doing that.
Back on Hinge
I also rejoined Hinge yesterday. I know, cringe, but I'm going to keep doing that, and I am going to document it on my Jerry Banfield dating channel. Look — Hinge day one, just rejoined, here's my profile, here's my strategy, let's see how long it is before I either meet someone or delete it. I was thinking about the woman I went out with from yoga that I got all excited about — she was on Hinge also, and she had some guy cancel a date on her. And I know on Hinge, if you send roses, that is a pretty easy way to get attention from a woman. I think I've made my best Hinge profile, and you can be the judge of that on Jerry Banfield dating.
I've also decided I don't need to put these vlogs out a full two weeks behind. So I'm going to start cranking out the ones I've filmed every day. There should still be a few days' delay on the vlog, in case I get a little embarrassed that I filmed a video crying — we're just going to censor that one. I don't have to put out every single moment of my life. One guy was messaging me saying, well, your YouTube makes it hard, because women are going to be able to see everything going on with you. And this is important: if I'm going to date a woman, she needs to be comfortable with what I do on YouTube. That was one of the big points of friction while I got divorced. My ex hated my very public life, that I would put everything out there. She hated being a part of that. Now, many women will feel the same way, but some women will be very happy to have that kind of lifestyle, where we live a transparent life. I want a woman who would film videos with me and be a part of my vlogs and film dating videos with me. Maybe play a game with me or something. Maybe hop on the crypto channel once a month. I want a woman who will cooperate with my YouTube channel, who is proud of what I do, and who is happy to support me with that. So I'm not going to try to hide or minimize my YouTube. On Hinge, I put that I'm a YouTuber in my description. My shirts have my name on them — it says Jerry Banfield. Who knows?
I've also been thinking about the woman at yoga. She's pulled away. Maybe she'll come back, maybe not. It doesn't matter that much, because what matters is I keep getting out there and making an effort myself. I picked my friend up from the airport yesterday and had a nice conversation with him, and I was listening to some of his videos. I decided I'm going to watch some more of Andrew Tate's course — and I don't agree with a significant portion of it — but I'm feeling really grateful, like I'm getting back to what I know, what I already learned about dating. The woman who was supposed to come over today canceled. She first rescheduled, and then she said, oh, I'm not feeling good, can I reschedule? I'm just going to leave that. For me, if you're canceling or rescheduling, I'm going to figure you're not interested, and I'm just going to withdraw any attention from there. If she wants to try again sometime later, cool. But I really don't like canceling or rescheduling — to me, that indicates you're unstable, that you can't commit to the things you say you're going to do. And with the woman from yoga, the queen, I should have immediately pulled back a hundred percent when she canceled that date — just been like, I'm out — and maybe then she decides she misses me and then she's pursuing after that. But I'm grateful for all these lessons I've learned.
Be Careful Who You Listen To
I'm grateful for all of you watching and supporting. That said, if you want to talk with me or share your opinions with me, you've got to be a member of the Family, because the YouTube comments have been too damaging to me over the years. Negative little amounts of feedback are so toxic that I can read nine positive comments and one negative comment sticks. Who's posting these comments? I don't know if the comments are from bots. I don't know if the comments are from some miserable, lonely person. I don't need to hear that.
I know it's really important in life to be careful who you listen to, and random people commenting on my videos are not who I need to listen to. I need to listen to people who have something invested in me, who care about what I'm doing, who want to support me, for whom my videos make a difference. I got some really nice messages on Skool yesterday from a guy saying my videos have made such a big difference in his life. That's what I need to hear. I don't need to hear from somebody who's just out there, coming over from some other video, wanting to talk a bunch of junk. So be careful who you listen to in life. My goal with all that I create is to be a person worth listening to, if you want to have a life that's satisfying, that's fun, that's authentic, that's full of joy.
I'll keep you updated with everything on my Life playlist. I'm also shortening things up — if I go over 10 minutes on a video, I'll be back with another video. It's time to wrap it up, because if I'm going to do six videos a day, I probably shouldn't be putting out more than 60 minutes a day of content right now, and I've been averaging 73 minutes a day. It seems the number one thing I can do to grow all my channels is crank one video a day out on every single channel. If I want to make 10 grand a month on YouTube, then if I put six videos a day out for the next six months, that'll be a little less than a thousand videos. That gives me pretty high confidence there's going to be a lot of reach and discovery. So we're going to wrap this up. Hope to see you on tomorrow's vlog.
The Year Udemy Banned Me and Set Me Free
Originally published June 21, 2026.
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.
By 2016, I was at the absolute peak of making money online. That year alone, I earned close to a quarter million dollars in profit and roughly $1,000,000 in total sales. On Udemy specifically, I had one month where I made $80,000 and another where I pulled in around $90,000. I felt untouchable. I was obsessed with becoming the number one instructor on the platform, and I had systems running everywhere to make that happen. I was spending hundreds of dollars a day on Google Ads, running affiliate remarketing links that funneled massive amounts of traffic into my courses. If someone bought any course on Udemy after clicking my link, I got paid. The machine was humming, and I was feeding it constantly.
I was also paying people well. I had a friend on a $5,000-per-month retainer helping me manage my Udemy presence and work on his websites tied into my ecosystem. Technically, his work more than paid for itself, and when I looked at it honestly, he was probably earning somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour helping me. Some people later told me I should have saved more or paid down debt, but that’s never been how I operate. When I’m blessed, I hook my friends up. That’s the kind of guy I am. I also brought in another Xbox friend and had just started paying him $5,000 a month to help with my Google Ads. That arrangement was literally in its first week when everything blew up.
It was the middle of June 2016. My ex-wife and I had just moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, into a house we rented near her parents. I remember the timing vividly because the chaos hit right in the middle of what should have been an exciting transition. A friend who worked with me on my courses—he had been helping me on Udemy for over a year—called me sounding panicked. He said something had happened to my Udemy profile. I opened the email and saw that Udemy had banned me outright for what they called policy violations. Reading it felt surreal.
One of the violations claimed that some of my reviews looked sketchy and appeared to come from sources like Fiverr, as if I had paid for them. Even according to their own statistics, it was less than ten percent of my reviews. What had actually happened was obvious to anyone paying attention: I had given out hundreds of thousands of free coupons to my courses. Some of those coupons ended up on sites like Fiverr, where people were reselling access to free courses. People took the courses for free, left reviews, and somehow that became evidence against me.
The second violation was labeled “improper co-instructor relationships.” They claimed that co-instructors complained I had been added to their courses and then used those courses to promote my own. I knew exactly which instructor reported me. What made it even more absurd was that after the ban, she reached out saying she felt terrible and wanted to help me get back on Udemy. It reminded me of the kind of people in Alcoholics Anonymous who joke about stealing your wallet and then helping you look for it. I was sitting there thinking, seriously—you did this, and now you want to undo it?
She had been pissed because I took her three-hour digital marketing course and added three more hours of video, turning it into a six-hour course. I doubled the material and made it worth buying. Then I sent a promotional announcement that included all of my courses, which she decided was unfair. That complaint was a major factor in Udemy banning me. The whole thing was ridiculous. If anyone else had done the same thing, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I wasn’t just anyone. I was the biggest personality on the platform, and I had the loudest mouth.
Right before the ban, I had publicly gone after Udemy on YouTube and on their own platform for making a policy change that forced instructors to sell courses for no less than $10. I thought it was a stupid move, and I said so very loudly and very publicly. I’m almost certain that video—and the broader criticism I made of them—was the final straw. They decided they’d had enough of me and were ready to shut my big mouth for good.
Ironically, while I hated losing the income from Udemy, I genuinely loved the freedom it gave me. Even with the ban hanging over everything, 2016 turned into a year of exploration. I wandered into all kinds of new territory—crypto, gaming, and other experiments that had nothing to do with online courses. That was also the year I published several of my original books online. Without courses to anchor my identity or income, I figured I might as well test new formats and see what stuck. Looking back now, if I had the chance to do it over, I might skip most of what I did back then and just write books while building a local, in-person business. Of course, if I had taken the sensible route, the story you’re about to hear would be far less interesting.
One of the experiments I ran in 2016 involved League of Legends. Out of probably a hundred random ideas I tested that year, this one was almost accidental. I was absolutely terrible at the game. It’s a shitty game in my opinion, and I still don’t understand how it became so popular. That said, all my friends were playing it. I wanted to play with them, and more importantly, I wanted to stop sucking. So I tried something simple: I paid a retired professional League of Legends player who was working as a coach. He charged thirty euros an hour. We got on Skype, I screen-shared my gameplay, and he coached me live. This was 2016—way ahead of the curve. Hardly anyone was doing anything like this at the time. I still believe in getting real-time feedback from someone who has been there, so if you want that kind of direct input on whatever you’re building, you can schedule a private call with me.
I took it a step further and live streamed the entire thing on YouTube. I titled the stream, Can a Pro Coach Help Me Get Out of Bronze in League of Legends?—which, in hindsight, was an absolutely brilliant title. When the stream actually happened, nothing special occurred. It was just me and the coach. I played a single game with him because League games take forever, I won that one match, and then I wrapped the stream. I hired him again for another session afterward, but for whatever reason I didn’t even manage to get that one live on YouTube. At the time, it all felt forgettable. Hardly anyone watched while I was live.
Around then, I was testing live streaming everywhere—Twitch, YouTube, Facebook—throwing gameplay online and seeing what happened. There was absolutely no money in gaming at that point. No donations, no memberships, no stars. Twitch might have had subscribers, but I sure as hell wasn’t getting any. There were sometimes decent view counts, but there was no income attached to any of it. I did that League of Legends coaching stream in the spring of 2016 and completely forgot about it.
Then one day, while obsessively checking my YouTube analytics like I always did, I noticed something strange. That old live stream had broken out. It was suddenly pulling in tens of thousands of views per day and generating hundreds of thousands of impressions daily. YouTube was pushing it all over the League of Legends community. I remember staring at the numbers thinking, What the hell is happening? The beginning of the video was awkward as hell—me going live while the coach and I were still getting connected on Skype, five or ten minutes of clumsy small talk before the game even started. And yet YouTube was blasting this out to everyone interested in League of Legends.
The title was doing heavy lifting, and the average watch time was massive. That combination made the algorithm fall in love with it. One live stream that almost nobody watched in real time ended up delivering me a huge League of Legends audience. For the deeper version of my internet career, all of that is laid out in I Was Famous on the Internet, and I don’t need to repeat it here. I’m telling this League of Legends story because it sets up what comes next perfectly.
At the same time, 2016 turned into a breakout year for my health. After a full year of tracking calories and actually following through, I had my weight down to 190 pounds. I was incredibly proud of the physical shape I was in. The last time I had been anywhere near that weight was years earlier, when I had lived with my parents for a year and followed a strict routine: eating during the day, not eating after dinner except for the popcorn with my mom, staying up late, going to the gym consistently, and not drinking. I had gotten into great shape back then, and six years later I was back there again. I was doing personal training, I felt strong, lean, and confident, and everything in my body felt like it was clicking into place. Physically, I felt fantastic.
Right in the middle of all of this, we made a major personal change. At the time, we were living in the Sarasota area, technically in Bradenton near the Sarasota airport. My ex-wife and her family kept dropping subtle hints about how nice it would be to live in St. Petersburg now that we had a baby. Our daughter, my daughter, was six months old at the beginning of 2016 and turned one in August. Everyone seemed to really want us closer so they could see her more often. My ex-wife wouldn’t have to drive as much, and for family dinners we wouldn’t all have to do a two-hour round trip from Sarasota. It was framed as convenience, connection, and family time, and over months it slowly worked its way into my head.
I remember standing in the shower one day, thinking it would actually be a brilliant idea for us to move to St. Petersburg. At the time, we were living in an amazing house—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge living room, a screened-in lanai, a pool in the backyard, a fully fenced yard, and a big, beautiful corner lot in the front. We paid $168,000 for it. Technically, the city address was Sarasota, and the house itself was absolutely perfect. Meanwhile, St. Pete was significantly more expensive. To get anything comparable, we would have needed to pay at least $50,000 to $100,000 more, easily.
I came out of the shower and told my ex-wife that we should move to St. Petersburg, presenting it like it was my idea. Almost immediately afterward, it hit me what had happened. It felt like I’d been on the receiving end of some Inception-level manipulation. If you’ve seen Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio, the entire premise is planting ideas in someone’s mind in such a subtle way that they believe it was their own thought. That’s exactly what it felt like. I realized how smooth my ex-wife and her family were about it. In my family, people would have argued it directly—laid out the logic, explained why it made sense, and debated it openly. My ex-wife’s family did the opposite. They let the idea bloom quietly until I thought I had discovered it myself.
Looking back, it makes perfect sense why they did it that way. If they had tried to push the move directly, I probably would have resisted hard. I had a very solid life in Sarasota. I had my Alcoholics Anonymous group where I got sober and where I was deeply connected to people. I had my personal training setup, my massage therapist, my routines, and a house I genuinely loved. The mortgage was cheap, and everything felt stable and dialed in. Moving to St. Petersburg meant disrupting all of that.
Years later, my ex-wife and I still wonder what would have happened if we had stayed in Sarasota. Financially, staying in that house would have been an incredibly smart decision. The mortgage we ended up with later was more than double what that house cost, for a smaller place with no pool. That choice had long-term consequences, and I’ll come back to that later.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Winning Online While My Marriage Unraveled
Originally published June 21, 2026.
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.
At the same time, my personal life was getting complicated in ways I didn’t expect. I met this absolutely stunning woman in Alcoholics Anonymous, and she really liked me, largely because of my sobriety and how solid I was in it. I developed a real crush on her, the kind that actually scared me. I was talking to my friends about it, asking what the hell was going on in my head. I started thinking things I’d never seriously thought before, like maybe I wanted to leave my ex-wife and be with this woman instead. I found myself thinking, This is who I want to be with. I don’t want to be with my ex-wife anymore.
That realization hit me hard. I felt horrible about it. I didn’t understand what was happening because this hadn’t happened before. I’d been with my ex-wife for ten years at that point. Sure, over the years there had been moments of attraction, some light flirting, occasional energy with other women, but nothing like this. I’d never felt genuinely sad that I wasn’t single, or wished I could be with someone else. Now I did. And all of it—Warzone, the gaming addiction, the success, the pressure—wrapped together into one tangled mess. Video games became the easiest way to escape that feeling. I buried myself in streaming instead of talking to my ex-wife about what was going on inside me, and the crush sat there unspoken, quietly eating away at me, leaving me frustrated, conflicted, and increasingly disconnected from my real life.
I kept asking myself why my marriage wasn’t something I felt that excited about anymore. I remembered a time when I felt like I worshipped my ex-wife, when being with her felt grounding and obvious. But after the financial disaster, the differences we had around the kids, and then the deeper I fell back into video games, it felt like we slowly started drifting apart. By 2021, once I was fully immersed in gaming again and everything around COVID had created such a deep divide between me and her family, it became clear that we weren’t on the same page anymore. The distance kept widening. My ex-wife later said that having a crush is usually a symptom of a problem in the marriage, not just a personal failure of the person who has the crush. I think she was right. It wasn’t just me. Something had already shifted between us. Her excitement about me had faded, and then this other woman showed up and that energy was suddenly there again. It felt intoxicating. It felt alive. If you have ever felt that quiet drift in your own marriage and want people who will not flinch when you talk about it honestly, you can schedule a private call with me and work through it alongside me and others who have been on the call.
I remember the first time I met her at an AA meeting. There were probably thirty or more people there, sitting outside. I saw this drop-dead gorgeous woman, and without hesitation I walked straight over and put my chair next to hers. When it was my turn to share, I shared the most euphoric, polished, magnetic version of myself I could summon. Right after the meeting ended, I asked for her phone number and got it. I started texting her and coordinating meetings, and we kept running into each other again and again. Eventually she told me she was concerned that something might be developing between us that shouldn’t be, and she didn’t want to go down that road. I told her not to worry, that I was monogamous, that I was just being friendly. We hugged. We told each other we loved each other. There was a lot of emotion there, and it was very real. But afterward, I felt disgusting. I felt like I had lied to her.
If I had been honest, the truth would have sounded very different. The truth would have been that I wasn’t happy in my marriage anymore, that I was thinking about divorce, and that part of me wanted her to be my next wife. That was the truth underneath everything. But I didn’t feel allowed to say it. I didn’t even feel allowed to fully think it. It felt forbidden, like something that couldn’t be real or valid. All of this was happening in the background while, on the surface, my life looked wildly successful. Online, people either saw a guy streaming shirtless and acting unhinged or they saw success. They saw massive view counts, big money, influence. People wanted what I had on Facebook Gaming. There were months where I made $10,000, like when the GoldenEye and NBA Jam streams hit back to back. From the outside, it looked like I was winning.
Inside, my marriage was quietly unraveling, and I had no idea what to do about it or how to be honest about what I was feeling. Instead of facing it, I escaped. Most days I was either playing video games or watching other people play Warzone. I stayed glued to everything happening in the ecosystem so I wouldn’t miss a trend or a strategy, so nobody else would figure something out before I did. Hours and hours disappeared that way. All of my energy and attention went into gaming—testing new games, experimenting with Twitch and YouTube, trying to move people across platforms, trying to stay on top. You’d think it would have been enough. In many ways, 2021 really did feel like the peak. I had more attention and views than ever before. I’d finally made it. I felt incredible about myself at times.
At the same time, I also felt like absolute shit. There were moments when all the nasty comments felt true, when I believed the people telling me I was a loser or a shitty parent. I often wasn’t present with my kids because my mind was somewhere else entirely, thinking about streams, algorithms, games, and growth. I was split in half—on top of the world and quietly miserable—unable to reconcile the success everyone saw with the life that was slipping through my fingers right in front of me. If you are living that same split—winning on the outside while something quietly slips away at home—I offer a space to talk it through when you schedule a one-on-one call with me.
I also got my kids onto tablets during this period. My ex-wife was the one who bought them, but the reality is that the kids were soon spending an hour or two a day on their tablets, every day. They started watching YouTube Kids heavily, playing games, watching videos, watching movies, and slowly spending more and more of their time on screens. Looking back, the shift in how I showed up as a parent is obvious. There was a time when I was much more active with my kids, when I’d go to the park and play with them, be fully engaged, running around, present. By this point, that had changed. I was still around them physically, but a lot of that time was spent doing chores—washing dishes, cleaning up, handling household tasks—while my ex-wife worked. She had ramped up her freelancing by then, and financially things were improving fast. In 2021 alone, I made over $100,000 again in my business, and my ex-wife brought in solid money too. After everything we’d been through, our finances completely turned around within a couple of years, and from the outside it looked like we were finally back on a strong, positive track.
As I leaned harder into retro games in 2021, I started doing presentations showing people exactly how I was making more than $10,000 a month on Facebook Gaming. I shared my analytics, my stats, my strategies, laid it all out. What I noticed, though, was a huge disconnect between what I was doing and what other people could realistically replicate. I had a verified blue checkmark next to my name. I had millions of followers. I had a partner badge. I had years of deep digital marketing experience. Most people had none of that. I could show them the process, but when they tried to copy it, it didn’t work. They’d stream GoldenEye and get a few hundred views. I’d play the same games and pull hundreds of thousands of views. And I just kept doing it again and again. The success kept replicating for me with retro games in a way it didn’t for almost anyone else.
I went all in. I hit retro game stores and dropped thousands of dollars multiple times, buying hundreds and hundreds of old games. I scoured eBay and bought obscure titles—Harry Potter on GameCube, Top Gun on NES, all kinds of random shit. I played StarCraft. I went back and played literally a hundred different games. I started thinking of my live streams less as live events and more as videos that just happened to be recorded live. I’d do the stream, but most of the views would come afterward. I played the Family Guy video game on Xbox and that one blew up. I started wearing clothes again for some of the streams, getting into outfits, leaning into characters. My creativity was going wild.
At the same time, I started blatantly violating the non-disclosure agreement. I could feel myself crossing lines, and I didn’t really care anymore. I had reached a point where I felt untouchable. I kept looking at that partner badge, knowing it was temporary, knowing it could disappear at any time, and that actually made me less cautious, not more. I knew it wouldn’t last forever. And I also knew that there was no way I was going to sit there quietly and be a good little boy just to preserve some badge. If I had a platform and an audience, it felt pointless if I couldn’t say what I actually wanted to say. So I ran my mouth on my live streams. I pushed boundaries. I spoke openly. I stopped pretending. And even though part of me knew I was playing with fire, another part of me felt like that honesty was the only thing that made any of it worth doing at all.
I started pushing into stand-up comedy in a way that took things to an entirely different level, and it pissed people off more than anything I’d done up to that point. I was listening constantly to stand-up comics and conspiracy content, and I’d developed this belief that one of the most powerful spiritual skills a person could have was the ability to laugh at anything. If you could find humor even in the darkest, most horrific places, then nothing really had power over you anymore. That idea obsessed me. I wanted to test it. I wanted to see how far it could go.
I deliberately went looking for the darkest material imaginable, not because I supported it or believed in it, but because I wanted to see if humor could exist even there. I became focused on the act of transmutation itself—taking something unspeakably heavy and flipping it into laughter as a way of reclaiming psychological power. Some of the jokes crossed into territory I won’t recreate here, blending shock humor with imagery drawn from one of the darkest moments in human history.
What mattered to me wasn’t the specific joke. It was the fact that I felt I had crossed some internal boundary and proven something to myself. I felt proud that I’d found a way—at least in my own mind—to laugh in a place where laughter felt forbidden. To me, that felt like spiritual sovereignty. Other people did not see it that way.
Some people went absolutely nuclear. They were threatening to report my page, telling me I was going to lose my partner status, saying I’d get banned, saying they were coming after me. I’d already heard rumors by that point about how Facebook actually worked at the upper levels—that once you crossed a certain threshold, your account was no longer subject to automated enforcement. Regular accounts could be taken down by mass reporting, often by bots. Enough reports and the system would just nuke the page. But once you reached a certain status, that stopped working. At that level, only manual intervention mattered. A human being had to decide to take action. In mob terms, you were a made man.
That was my account. People reported me constantly, and nothing happened. The reports just bounced off. I talked outrageous amounts of shit. I pushed boundaries relentlessly. I even did live streams where I blatantly violated the non-disclosure agreement—saying the exact opposite of what I’d been explicitly told not to say. And nothing happened. No warnings. No strikes. No consequences. None of the other partners snitched on me. Nobody at Facebook manually intervened. And all the people who were furious enough to report me were powerless to do anything about it. I said whatever I wanted, and the platform just kept amplifying me. At that point, I felt untouchable.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
What Internet Fame Really Cost Me
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
You are about to experience my unforgettable journey being famous online. I made it to the top — millions of followers, billions of views, money pouring in, and audiences most people only dream about. You will love hearing what internet fame really feels like and how anyone can achieve the results I did.
How famous was I on the internet? I reached hundreds of millions of people spread across every country on earth. The content I created was seen billions of times. I built fifteen YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I had a verified Facebook page with millions of followers. On Udemy, I made millions of dollars in sales teaching Facebook marketing, hacking, YouTube, Google Ads, entrepreneurship, and more. There were months I cleared ninety thousand dollars in profit and many years where I pulled in six figures working from home with no employees. I had millions of views across TikTok, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitch. From the outside, it looked like I had achieved everything people chase: freedom, money, influence, recognition.
But what looked like freedom felt like a prison where I did frequent time in solitary confinement. Every click, subscriber, and dollar came at the cost of my peace, my family, my health, and my integrity. I was chained to algorithms that didn’t care about me. I was constantly afraid of being demonetized, banned, or simply forgotten. Audiences vanished overnight, not just because platforms pulled the plug, but because algorithms shifted or I burned out and walked away.
My journey started at the bottom with no connections or money. I created my first YouTube channel in 2011 and struggled for years just to earn a profit. My first real taste of success came on Udemy, where I climbed into the top ten instructors in the world and made millions of dollars teaching online courses. After Udemy banned me for fabricated policy violations, I pivoted to YouTube, where a single League of Legends live stream went viral.
When I burned out and quit gaming, I became one of the first crypto YouTubers. After the crypto market crashed in 2018, I went all in on a bold business idea that had me in a bankruptcy attorney’s office a year later. In 2020, I sold off my entire studio and started an in person show here in St. Petersburg, Florida because I was so tired of online crap. A couple months later when the chairs were all empty, I went back to Facebook Gaming, where I became one of the top 20 partners in 2021.
Each time, I reinvented myself and thought I had finally cracked the code. Then, the same thing happened: the money, the views, the attention, the joy, and/or the fun slipped away. Sometimes it was sudden — a ban or a demonetization. Other times it was slow — the grind of burnout, the exhaustion of chasing numbers, the dread of waking up to do something I hated.
At the height of my popularity, my life was far from glamorous. My family relationships were strained. We were swatted after parents at my daughter’s school read my blog and made up an insane story. I received death threats, tens of thousands of hateful comments, and more that I’ve been asked not to share here. The price of being famous online wasn’t just my own sanity — it was my safety and the well-being of the people I loved most.
Through it all, I convinced myself I was helping people. I thought I was inspiring, teaching, and making a difference. But the reality was harder to face: most of my viewers weren’t being helped by me. They were being drained, just like I was. They weren’t learning life-changing skills or finding true connection; they were stuck on their phones, wasting hours of their lives watching me waste hours of mine.
The real breakthrough came in June 2025 when I deleted everything — the channels, the followers, the videos, the passive income. Overnight, I went from being “famous on the internet” to just another human trying to figure out who I am. That’s when I finally found freedom. If you are ready to step out of that machine and into something real, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll start building a life you don't need to escape from.
This book is my confession, my warning, and my gift. It’s for content creators chasing the dream, but also for anyone who watches — because you deserve to know what it looks like on the inside of the machine that eats your attention every day.
Are you ready to step inside the world of internet fame and see why it’s nothing like what you imagine?
The Hidden Cost of Online Fame
Before I continue talking about me for hours in this book, I want you to know that I am interested in your feedback and your story too! You can schedule a time to talk with me in person at jerrybanfield.com. I am available to help you get a book like this written, unplug from screen addiction as I have, explore new ideas for your life, and/or answer all the questions you have after reading this!
Now that you know how to connect with me, the first thing I need to share about my journey of being famous online is the hidden cost you don’t see. When I’m coaching people in person about how to expand their business and grow their income, this always comes up first. The hidden cost you don’t see when you start uploading videos is that, in many cases, the more time and energy you invest, the less of a return you get.
When you’re new, the algorithms sometimes give you a bigger boost to hook you. A fresh account on YouTube or Instagram, even with just a handful of followers, can suddenly take off because the system favors newness and helps you reach a niche audience. At first it looks like you’ve found the secret. Yet the longer you stay at it, the more you notice diminishing returns. The bigger your following grows, the harder it becomes to create content that truly satisfies people while aligning with what’s joyful for you. Followers get burned out, your reach drops, and the cycle becomes exhausting.
As if that wasn’t enough, more people than ever seem to be deleting everything as I have. For example, I don’t watch TV. I don’t listen to music unless I’m in a yoga class where someone else is playing it. I don’t have subscriptions to any streaming platforms. I don’t play video games. I don’t scroll on media platforms. I don’t watch or pay any attention to the news. This means that if you’re creating anything online besides a Kindle book, you cannot reach me.
This leads me to question who is still spending an hour or more every day scrolling Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? What I see online now are mostly people who are lonely, angry, anxious, depressed, aggravated, broke, closed-minded, or just mentally unraveling. The more time they put into these platforms, the more dysfunctional they seem to become.
Meanwhile, the more functional you get in your own life, the easier it is to see that spending endless hours online isn’t a good use of time. That doesn’t mean every tool is useless. I use ChatGPT myself to turn transcripts I dictate into book drafts. Google Maps can be an incredibly valuable tool for local businesses. The problem isn’t with using online tools in a practical way. The danger comes when you treat media platforms as your main source of leads, or when you chase the dream that you can become a content creator and live off passive income.
It's All a Mirage
Are you wondering why what I’m saying seems to conflict with what you’ve heard so often from others who have encouraged you to dream of being a content creator? I sold that vision to millions of people myself. Unfortunately, the content creator dream is incredibly profitable to sell for insiders but generally drains everyone else. For example, one system often pitched to earn passive income online is selling a video course which is the number one way I earned my millions. The fantasy is that you can just upload a few videos, get a funnel going, and then go away while you watch the money roll in. What I noticed, though, was shocking. While a few of my students were able to replicate my results, the majority of students didn’t even watch the courses they purchased from me. That baffled me more than anything else I have ever seen online! Most people who buy online courses don’t actually watch them, regardless of the subject or the cost!
That is how effective the trap is. Selling online courses is relatively easy because people get excited at the moment of purchase. When they click “buy,” they believe they are committing to change, that they will watch the course, learn something new, and transform their life. I know this because I have been in that position myself. I once bought a course for $299, fully intending to learn something valuable. It was about influencer marketing, and after watching it, I realized the content was no better than what I had already gotten for free on YouTube. Not one piece of information in that course was truly useful to me. I had been tricked by a bunch of smoothly written long form sales letters and my own feelings of inadequacy. I did not ask for a refund because that would require admitting that I was a fool or playing the victim.
In my experience, that is the unfortunate reality: the majority of online courses being sold are not useful. They are packaged dreams, profitable promises that rarely deliver anything meaningful. Almost everyone selling you these courses knows this and they keep taking your money anyway. The majority of the internet operates this way. What often looks impressive from a distance turns out to be a mirage when you get up close.
Junk Food for the Mind
Most of the content online that people consume is, at best, the equivalent of junk food. It gives the temporary feeling of connection, productivity, or learning, yet what it really does is fill a void that would have been better met by genuine human interaction or reading a book. The constant intake of videos, games, music, and movies feels harmless and even enjoyable at the beginning, but over time, the dysfunction in the mind becomes clearer unless you are so insane you cannot see it yourself.
I saw this most clearly in my children. They began scrolling YouTube Kids at a few years old, alongside playing video games and watching movies. What I observed was unsettling. The more time they spent on their devices, the more I noticed signs of addiction. As an alcoholic with sobriety dating back to April 22, 2014, and as someone who has struggled with many behavioral addictions like gambling and gaming, I recognize the patterns, and I could not ignore the similarities in what I saw in my children. They were hooked on their devices and missing real life. Sure, they laughed and had fun in moments but the withdrawal afterward was never worth it. If you see those same patterns in yourself or someone you love, you can book a private call with me and we'll talk honestly about unplugging — I'll share what worked for me and listen to what you are facing.
My son, especially, showed the signs. He thrives on physical movement and play, yet after sitting and watching videos, he often had emotional breakdowns. He became irritable, picked fights, or started screaming right after the screen time ended. It was clear he was not getting what his body or mind truly needed, yet he kept returning to the videos anyway. That was the essence of addiction staring me in the face.
The Trap of Tablets and the Power of Books
Before my son started watching videos on a regular basis around the age of two, he was extremely physical and creative. He would spend an hour in the yard with his dump trucks and loaders, moving dirt and rocks around, fully immersed in imaginative play. Once we introduced tablets—at first, only in small amounts—things quickly started to change.
Same story with my daughter. When she was five, I remember arranging for her to have a playdate when she was in preschool the year before kindergarten. A neighbor’s daughter, who was in second grade, came over to play with her. At this time in 2020, it was difficult to find any family willing to do playdates, as most people were gripped by fear of something they could not see which was communicated to them primarily through all major media platforms. This family was one of the few exceptions, and their daughter showed up cheerful and eager to play. Yet when she arrived, my daughter was restless because it was the time of day she usually watched her tablet. She struggled to engage with her new friend because the tablet had conditioned her to expect stimulation on demand. Playing with another child could not compete with the instant gratification of YouTube Kids. I remember my frustration, looking at her and thinking, “Here is a real person, here to play with you, and all you want is your tablet.” I was even more confused because she had really enjoyed playing with this friend at her house just the week before. The only key difference was having access to her tablet at our house.
When I zoom out from that moment, I see the larger pattern across humanity. We all have real opportunities in front of us—friends, partners, vibrant lives we could live—and yet many of us are choosing instead to sit behind screens and watch other people live fake lives. That is the trap you don’t see when you are focused on marketing your business or chasing passive income online. As content creators, the work often comes down to doing whatever it takes to keep someone else staring at a screen.
Yes, I realize I am writing a book right now, and books can also be considered “content.” Still, I feel a different energy around books. Some of the most profound self-education and learning I have done in my life has come through reading books. To me, books are sacred, a time-tested way to communicate knowledge. While books and online content share similarities, there are important differences.
Books are tangible. You can hold them in your hands if you choose to. They are rarely so stimulating that you would consistently avoid real life just to read them. Of course, people occasionally stay home to finish a book instead of going out, but books generally strike a balance. They give you new ideas, transport you into other places, and teach you something, without overwhelming your senses in a way that creates dependency.
Another major difference is that books are self-contained and free from distractions. When I hand you a book, or when you listen to an audiobook, you enter a fixed experience with a beginning and an end. You know how long it is. There are no ads breaking your attention, no infinite rabbit holes. The message comes through clearly, directly from me to you.
This is in stark contrast to platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, etc. which offer practically infinite experiences. The content itself is designed to be sensational, hyper-stimulating, and continuous. While a most of us would easily put down a book to spend time with someone in real life, many of us struggle to put down a screen or forget about it once we are off.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
I Had Millions of Followers and Almost No Real Friends
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
The Dark Side of Influence
I hope I have not shown my actions in the light of some hero coming to save us all. If anything, what I’m doing now is an attempt to address and compensate for the things I’ve done before. I’ve been the guy who spent millions of dollars online, investing mostly in impersonal ways with people I didn’t know. Mostly, I come to you as a bad example, someone showing what not to do. For over a decade, I was the person who encouraged millions of people to pour their lives into the internet, to chase business through platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
I showed people how much money I was making online and encouraged them to join me. Entire generations of creators spun out from that example—people teaching courses, promoting passive income, launching channels—many of them learned from someone who learned from someone who had learned from me. Tracing it back, so much of what you see online today has roots in my early work. I was one of the first popular crypto YouTubers in the world. My first Bitcoin video was in 2014, long before most people even knew what crypto was. I had tens of millions of views on my crypto videos. Many of the crypto YouTubers people watch today used to watch me before they started their own channels.
It has taken years of leveling up my consciousness just to stop obsessing over how much money I could make online and start asking what kind of world I want to live in, what kind of neighbors I want to have. When I think of people as neighbors, it changes everything. Many content creators treat their audiences as sheep, suckers to be exploited. At the end, I tried to approach my videos as if I were sharing with an actual neighbor. I want neighbors who were wealthy, who have no need to steal from me. If the neighbors who are broke and been ripped off by scams, they might become desperate enough to try to take from me. If we thought of all people on this planet as our brothers and sisters, as our neighbors, we’d naturally become more mindful and compassionate with one another. That neighborly circle is exactly what I'm trying to build now, and you're welcome to be part of it — you can book a private call with me and we'll start treating each other like real neighbors.
The problem is that the internet is a place where compassion is difficult. The whole environment is designed to be impersonal. When you interact online, you can’t really see the other person. You might get a profile picture, but half of those aren’t even current—some are old photos, others are just random images with no connection to who the person actually is. When I thought I was sharing self-help ideas online, trying to change lives, I eventually realized I wasn’t really connecting with anyone.
I’ve had millions of people watch me but only met a few hundred in person. What I noticed is that it’s hard for me to connect, or even feel anything, for someone I haven’t met face to face. I remember flying to Portugal for Steemfest in 2017. That crypto conference was a gathering hosted by Steemit Inc when I was invested heavily in Steem and most of the people there knew me. When some of them saw mw, they were so excited, saying, “Oh my God, Jerry, it’s so nice to meet you in person!” They gave me these best friend vibes because they knew so much about me from my videos, yet I knew almost nothing about them.
From the outside, you might think that’s a dream come true—to have people all over the world come up to you, love you, worship you, want pictures with you. In reality, it was a bad experience. It felt weird, unnatural. People would rush up saying, “Jerry, I love you, you’re the best,” and inside I was thinking, Who are you? What’s your name? What have you actually seen of me? My mind was spinning, almost like I had a traumatic brain injury with thoughts like: You should know this person. They’re clearly your best friend. Why don’t you remember them? What’s wrong with you?
What looked like admiration on the outside felt disturbing on the inside. It didn’t feel like love. It felt like something was off, like something in the relationship was deeply unnatural.
Artificial Connections
Being recognized from videos can be flattering sometimes. I remember once in an AA meeting; two beautiful girls I did not know were ecstatic to see me there because they knew me from TikTok. They had watched my “I’m Black Day 30” race change video and they treated me like I was some kind of celebrity walking into the room. They invited me to sit next to them and were so excited to get to know me for real.
Yes, that was flattering. But it also felt wrong. Would they have reacted that way if they hadn’t seen those videos? As a married man with a beautiful wife, children, and a home, was it healthy for me to be sitting next to women ten years younger who were overly excited about me because of something I posted online? It felt unnatural, as if I had tricked them into thinking I was more important or more worthy of attention than the other people in the room.
At an AA meeting, I want attention only for what I share there, not because someone saw my face on the internet. Before that happened, I fantasized about women noticing me like that. Yet when it actually happened, it was awkward. I found myself thinking, You don’t even know me. Why do you like me so much? You haven’t heard me share. You don’t know anything about my sobriety. You’ve never spoken with me in person before. The whole thing left me conflicted—flattered on the surface, but with a sadness underneath.
After a month or two, the effect wore off. They stopped coming to the meeting, and I stopped seeing them. Suddenly, I was overly sad about losing a connection that was shallow to begin with. If they had never seen me online, I would have just gone to that meeting like any other, had the normal experience of being another anonymous member, and gone back to my home group with gratitude. They probably would not have talked to me. Instead, I found myself attending meetings I didn’t even like, just because those two girls were there. That’s what artificial connections through content creation do—they distract us from what is natural.
Life is healthiest when there are real, two-way interactions, when you know someone and they know you. That’s the biggest problem with the internet. As a content creator, it’s nearly impossible to have those two-way connections. Without them, you can’t truly know your audience. I remember countless days where I felt lost, frustrated, even angry with my viewers. I’d put out a video I thought they’d love, only to see them hate it. Then I’d put out something I felt embarrassed by, and they’d love it. Or I’d grind out endless Warzone streams I hated making, only to watch them flock to it. It made me resent the very people supporting me, because it never felt like I knew them or they knew me.
I tried bridging the gap with one-on-one calls. Some people paid over $300 for an hour on Zoom with me. A few of those conversations were enjoyable, but many were the opposite. People would book time just to have me screen share and click through simple tasks for them in navigating ICP, things they could have watched a tutorial for or asked someone local about. It got to the point where it wasn’t worth the money. I didn’t want to spend hours doing the most boring tasks imaginable for strangers who were obsessed with me.
Even though I could earn as much as $1,000 an hour for calls, I stopped offering them because I felt so drained after many of them. Worse than that, I realized I was a bad influence. Just like the mother I mentioned before, who spent hours watching my streams instead of being with her family and ended up divorced, some of these people were pouring money and energy into me instead of living their own lives. Some clients were spending all the disposable income they had sit on Zoom with me instead of investing that time with their community or family.
Then, when those people eventually moved on, got a life, and stopped watching my streams, I felt guilty and sad. They’d given me so much in tips and calls, yet when they returned to their own real-world lives, I felt abandoned. The whole online system is backwards. Instead of encouraging real relationships and genuine community, it thrives on creating artificial connections that look exciting but leave everyone emptier in the end. That’s why I only am available for conversations in person at jerrybanfield.com today and do not accept Zoom call requests.
The Power of Real Conversations
The world I imagine as ideal is one where we live conscious of being part of a larger whole, and to do that, we need strong connections with people in person. We need to have conversations where we really hear each other. I remember reading a book about a study where researchers wanted to see if people with completely opposing views could gather and find some common ground. They brought people together with complete opposite views on gun ownership and tested different mediums.
Online, in places like Facebook groups or discussion forums, it was nearly impossible for people to make progress. The text-based communication wasn’t enough to create connection. Instead, people resorted to political rhetoric, attacks, and insults. Even moderators and rules didn’t help much.
But when they brought these polarized together in person, everything shifted. When people could sit face to face, when they had a chance to really speak and be heard, compassion started to emerge. It didn’t mean anyone instantly changed their political views, but it did mean they could understand the other side.
I remember two stories from that study. One woman shared that she had been assaulted, and she believed that if she’d had a gun, it wouldn’t have happened. Afterward, she bought a gun and carried it everywhere, because to her, a gun meant safety and protection. Meanwhile, another woman shared that a family member of hers had been murdered with a gun, and in her heart, if guns hadn’t been available, her loved one might still be alive.
Neither of these women changed their stance immediately, but they began to see the humanity in each other. The woman who carried a gun could look at the other and think, She sees guns as something that killed her family. And the woman whose family member was murdered could look at the other and think, She sees guns as the only thing that keeps her safe. While they didn’t go home ready to swap sides, they were able to open a more compassionate conversation—one that considered the whole picture.
That’s what we need more of: people coming together in person to share real experiences. Online fights often center around issues that probably don’t need to be argued about in the first place. Many of the polarizing topics we see constantly pushed in the media are distractions.
This hit me personally when I went on a road trip with family members that are very loving in their actions. They show up, they’re kind, they don’t pick fights. In many ways, they embody what you would expect from caring family. Yet during that entire week-long trip, not one of them asked me a single question about myself. This was right after I had deleted everything online and made a huge life change, yet nobody asked, How are you doing? What’s new with you? What’s been going on in your life? If you're craving that kind of genuine, two-way conversation yourself, I make real time for it these days — you can set up a call with me and I'll actually ask about your life.
The reason, as I see it, is that my online work and my more sensational opinions over the years offended them. I suspect they felt that many of the political stances they had adopted were things I probably disagreed with or wouldn’t support. Rather than risk an argument or bring up something that might create tension, they chose silence.
So I spent a week in person with people I love, yet it felt like we weren’t connecting at all. There was this underlying tension, the kind that comes from people being physically together but emotionally guarded. They didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so they didn’t say much of anything. That silence, to me, felt heavier than any argument could have.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Online Made Me Care About Things That Don't Matter
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Sensationalism vs. Real Life
What I’ve observed with some of my family members is that instead of creating real conversations with genuine connection, they’ll sometimes bring up these sensational topics they’ve been manipulated into watching online. Rather than asking something simple like, How are you or talking about health, relationships, or anything relevant to our actual lives, they’ll toss out some extreme issue they picked up from a video, a podcast, or the news cycle. Immediately, that creates tension in the air. It starts with a question like, What do you think about this issue? or a statement like, I don’t think that should be allowed.
These sensationalized topics don’t make sense in real conversations between family members. They’re often fringe ideas that have no bearing on daily life, yet they become the centerpiece of discussion because that’s what the media serves up. I’m not giving specifics here because specifics are where people get triggered and start over-identifying with the issue, missing the broader pattern.
Though, if I use an example from my own life, my race change is the perfect case. Would I have ever changed my race if I wasn’t an online content creator? In real life, would anybody have cared if I quietly identified as Black? I could have walked around in my community feeling Black, checked “Black” on the census, and nobody would have noticed. In real life, it wouldn’t have made sense to announce it. I wouldn’t have gone into AA meetings shouting, I’m Black now, everyone. I wouldn’t have shown up at yoga in a T-shirt that said, I’m Black now. People would have just been confused, and if anyone did get offended, it would only be because of what they’d absorbed from online culture.
Meanwhile, my race change went viral online. That single decision brought me more attention than anything else I had ever done. Millions of views and endless conversation all because online thrives on the sensational. Offline, there would have been no benefit. It would have just seemed ridiculous. That’s the difference. Online, things that make no sense in real life can become the most valuable currency for attention.
Even years later, I still get asked in person, Are you still Black? Recently, when I applied to massage school, I faced that question in a very different way—on the race section of the application. I put “two or more races.” Why? Because in real life, when someone sees me, they see what looks like an obvious White person. If I had put Black on the application, it would only create confusion. People would think, You don’t look like you have any Black ancestry. And I thought about it carefully. I do identify primarily with Black, but I also must respect other people’s perspectives. Unless someone has seen my videos online, 99% of people are going to look at me and see White.
That’s how real life grounds us. It encourages more respect for the perspectives of others. When I made the race change online, I was as sensational and dramatic as I could be about it. I loudly rejected being identified as White or Caucasian. That played into the internet’s economy of outrage and attention. Offline, though, it makes more sense to simply say I identify with two or more races. Nobody questions it. Nobody cares which races I mean. They just accept it. He looks White, he identifies with something else too, nothing interesting here. Let’s move on.
That’s the big difference. Online, you can make people care about things that don’t matter in real life. It’s one of the great manipulations. And the solution is to stop taking that bait. Stop letting sensational political issues, the ones that make no sense in everyday conversation, dominate your mind. For me, the only way to guarantee I avoid the bait is to stop scrolling and delete the accounts. Now that I am not consuming that noise and grounded in real life, I am free to have conversations that actually matter with the people who matter. Finally, I feel safe, because I’m not worried that every interaction is going to turn into an argument about something absurdly sensational. Incredibly, when my friends and family now bring up the insanity they see online, I am no longer upset at them or upset at whatever they are talking about. Now that those grounded, real conversations are the best part of my days, I want to help you get there too — you can set up a call with me and we’ll have conversations that actually matter on our call.
What Now?
Now that I’ve covered what I see as the most important concepts—being a sovereign being, avoiding groupthink online, building real connections in person, the lessons of my own life as a bad example, and the difference between real conversations and online sensationalism—the next thing to look at is the practical side. People always want to know, What are you going to do for money now that you’ve left YouTube, crypto, and the online platforms?
That question has come up more than any other when I talk to friends and family. For more than a decade, I earned my living online, and I have almost nothing else besides that currently. Naturally, people want to know, How are you going to survive now?
My answer is simple: I’m going to do what’s joyful and listen to what’s needed in my local community. The mistake I made in 2020, when I tried to unplug, was that I only followed what was joyful for me. I didn’t listen enough to what people actually needed and wanted. In 2024, I dabbled with stepping away, but I didn’t give it enough time and I didn’t truly commit. This time, the difference is that I’ve committed.
I’ve discovered how much I love creating books. Last weekend, I dictated four or five hours into this memoir. I love the process of narrating, transcribing, and shaping my thoughts into something physical. I love seeing words laid out on a page instead of buried inside a video where my face, background, and images can become distractions. There’s a purity to words on a page that excites me. Holding a physical book in my hand and being able to give that to someone is one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.
I’ve already seen how magical opportunities come from being open in this direction. For example, while I’ve had many skills massage therapists could have valued for over 11 years—marketing, websites, life coaching—I never once exchanged services for a massage. I just paid out of pocket, every time. But as soon as I opened my mind to looking at what those around me needed, I began exchanging my marketing and coaching services for massage. The last two massages I received, I didn’t pay anything for because I bartered my coaching and marketing skills. The massage I have scheduled for tomorrow, I already provided the website in exchange.
Finding Real Opportunities
I love creating books and while they do not make any money currently, I could get royalties indefinitely from this book that I’m writing today. I also imagine that my books will connect me with opportunities that would have been hard to predict logically such as coaching, clients to tutor in my book creation workflow, seniors interested in creating a book as a legacy project, speaking opportunities, and whatever else I can do to help. I’m imagining that having readers like you book a time to speak with me in person at jerrybanfield.com will provide the opportunity to fully monetize what I do in time.
Last year, I had the perfect opportunity to earn a lot of money in my local community but I was to distracted online to see it. Hurricanes ripped through St. Petersburg, leaving trash everywhere. For months, people were being gouged, paying companies thousands of dollars to haul debris. Meanwhile, most trash disposal is simple: all you need is a truck and about $20 to $50 to pay at the dump. The rest is pure labor. I estimated that some of the guys who stepped into this gap were making $300 to $500 an hour because demand was so high and supply so low.
If I had quit the internet last year and been paying attention, I would have remembered that back in 2022, I hauled 15,000 pounds of my mother’s storage trash to the dump myself in a U-Haul. I did most of it alone, with just a couple of guys helping for about 5,000 pounds. I had already proven to myself that I could handle the work. If I had been present instead of distracted with online nonsense, I could have seized that opportunity—offering fair rates, saving my neighbors money, and still making hundreds of dollars an hour.
Around the same time, there was a huge need for fence repair. People were paying thousands of dollars for jobs that were relatively simple. I fixed my own fence with a $100 hammer drill from Home Depot, plus $50 in lumber and screws. That saved me $1,000 right there. Then I fixed family members’ fences, which were in much worse shape. In less than a week of work, I saved them $5,000 to $6,000. It struck me then that I could have easily expanded this. No license, no permit needed—just tools, time, and a little skill. I could have gone around repairing fences in my neighborhood and made $10,000 to $20,000.
If I’d been fully present instead of focused online, I could have made $30,000 to $50,000 between October and December of 2024 just from hauling trash and repairing fences. That would have been enough to pay my part of the bills for the entire year and write books that I could give away the rest of the year. How many other opportunities did I miss like this last year? How many more will I see this year?
The question I want to offer back is this: What kinds of things do you not know about because you’re distracted online? Most people I talk to want a clear blueprint or formula. They want step-by-step instructions, but that way of thinking blocks you. The more you rely on the internet for ideas, the more you limit what your mind can see. When you’re taking in endless information about how to make money one way, you stop noticing all the other opportunities all around you to make a living without depending on these online platforms.
Work, Money, and Real-World Connection
Speaking of work and money, which is one of the biggest reasons people get lured into using these platforms, I want to go deeper into how this might relate to you. For me, the kinds of questions I imagine you all will want more details on are: What local jobs or businesses thrive without internet marketing? How do I transition from online work into something real-world and face-to-face? How do I network in my local community if I am starting completely from scratch? These are the questions I live with, and I intend to share how I approach them. If you're trying to make that leap from online work to something real and face-to-face yourself, I'd be glad to think it through with you — you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll map out your own path together on our call.
The place I started was simply by looking around at what I already needed and trying out some new things I thought I might enjoy. I explored being a yoga instructor. I experimented with the different ways I could turn tennis or massage into work including enrolling for two weeks in massage school before dropping out. In my book Author in St. Petersburg, I go through, day by day, the exact process I used to strip down my life and figure out what to do next.
Everywhere I look, I see help needed in local businesses. In-person work is where the scarcity is. There are massive shortages across trades: electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, contractors, massage therapists, etc. None of these can be replaced with AI. The more advanced AI applications become, especially as tools like ChatGPT get better at generating video and content directly, the less need there will be for human creators online. Many creators are already being bought out or scaling themselves through AI, which only accelerates this. From my perspective, the future of the internet is continuing to degrade from where it already is today, which makes this a great time to exit. At the same time, the future of in-person work feels brighter.
Massage, according to statistics I’ve seen, is projected to grow much faster than most industries. There is no substitute for hands-on healing, physical touch, and real connection. The lonelier people become, the more addicted they are to their screens, the more they will recognize that massage is one of the easiest ways to drop back into the body and feel a true connection with another person. Trades, too—building, plumbing, electric, HVAC, contracting—are all in rising demand. Fewer people are doing them because so many are chasing after internet work instead.
When I unplugged from the internet, I started meeting everyone who would sit down with me for tea, yoga, or a game of tennis. I sought out the people I was genuinely excited to see. I asked everyone, everywhere, what they thought I should do with myself. That process of asking, listening, and connecting gave me both the direction and the opportunities to rebuild a real-world life.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
I Traded a Decade for Numbers, and I Have No Regrets
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Unplugging, Support, and Redefining Success
I navigated other personal challenges while I was a content creator, and it was difficult. I didn’t have enough real-life support. As soon as my ex-wife and I talked about divorce, I started reaching out to all kinds of friends and family. Because I didn’t have videos to obsess over, I had time yesterday to talk to people in person and on the phone for more than six hours plus attend an AA meeting. Those conversations gave me valuable insights about how to move forward with love and joy, how to handle a divorce with gratitude, and how to do it in a way that is nice. I heard so many people’s experiences. Hearing from someone you know face-to-face, someone whose phone number you have, is so different from watching a video about somebody’s divorce on the internet. With a video, you don’t know the rest of the person, you can’t ask questions. It’s hard to navigate life when you don’t have a strong support network. I’m glad I had a few months to prepare my local support network to help me through this divorce.
I imagine if I hadn’t deleted everything, my ex-wife would have eventually asked for a divorce. She had been trying for years, but as long as she could tell I didn’t want it and wouldn’t cooperate, she only mentioned it in moments of high upset. I always pushed it aside because I felt like I couldn’t handle being a content creator and getting divorced at the same time. I didn’t have the bandwidth. That’s the sneaky thing: the internet saps your bandwidth. Watching all these platforms reduces the bandwidth you have to deal with real life. I imagine if I was still making videos while trying to navigate a divorce, I’d be struggling so much more.
Today, I’m not struggling much. I cried the day after we decided to get divorced—on and off all day, for hours, until my eyes hurt. Today I feel restored to sanity and reborn. Without media platforms as a coping mechanism, I’ve realized how many people use them to tolerate jobs, marriages, and family situations that would otherwise feel unacceptable. Without those platforms, they might make life changes instead of staying stuck. Unfortunately, other addictions—alcohol, drugs, overeating, misuse of plant medicines, unnecessary mind-altering prescriptions—go hand in hand with media platforms. If you had a strong support network and weren’t lonely, you might not need those things. If loneliness is what keeps you reaching for a screen, you can book a private call with me and we’ll build the kind of real-life support that makes those escapes a lot less necessary.
I’ve been a bad example for years, missing real life and not being present because I was obsessed with everything online. What many people saw as success—millions of dollars online, tons of followers—to me looks like failure. Everything I got wasn’t worth what I gave up. What I gave up were years that could have been a happier marriage, years spent distracted and avoiding problems, years of stunted maturity, years dealing with relentless criticism and hatred from strangers online that I’ll never meet—people who, if they met me in person, likely wouldn’t have acted that way. I traded a decade of my life for what now feels like nothing.
Still, I hope this book helps some of you learn from my experience. And at the same time, I have no regrets. I’m happy with where I am today. While I sometimes wonder what life would have looked like if I had taken a different path, from where I stand now, I wouldn’t go back and change anything. What I will not do is continue living the way I have been.
Some might argue this book is just another form of media, but there’s a big difference. I can create books like this without being distracted. I can read books without feeling consumed by the need to meet the author and make them part of my life. I can hear someone’s story in a book without developing lust or unhealthy attachment, because books aren’t sensational in the way media platforms are. For me, they don’t trigger that experience. With my own books, most people who read them so far actually know me and have my phone number. And if you don’t, it’s on jerrybanfield.com.
Apparently, I was famous enough that even after months of not uploading videos, somebody went to jerrybanfield.com, used the phone number posted at the top, and texted me saying, “I have your address, you fucking scammer.” I thought about replying that when I move out after the divorce, I’d send them my new address, but instead I just deleted the message and blocked them. By comparison, I haven’t gotten a message like that in a decade from anyone I’ve met in real life. Meeting people in person has been nothing but supportive and loving.
I appreciate your time reading this book. If you’re in the St. Petersburg, Florida area, I’d love to meet you in person, hear your thoughts, hear your story, maybe speak at an event you’re hosting, or do deeper work together if coaching interests you. If you enjoyed this book, know that I’m writing one or two new books every month right now. My hope is that for decades to come, you’ll always have something new from me to read.
If you want to hear more about my exact journey through divorce, I’ll have a new book about that soon in the journal entries that follow Author in St. Petersburg. If you want to see the days of my life leading up to this moment and writing this book, read Author in St. Petersburg and see if you can spot the signs of what was to come. If you want to hear my complete recovery story in addiction, read Speaker Meeting 2017, which tells, in graphic and unflinching honesty, about my alcoholism, sex addiction, video games, food, money, and the early years of recovery. I recommend listening to that on Audible. If you want to hear about my time as a police officer in South Carolina, read or listen to Officer Banfield. You can always see my newest books in the order I’ve published them on jerrybanfield.com and schedule a time to talk with me in person for the best experience.
Thank you very much for reading this. I hope it added value to your life without distracting you!
Sincerely,
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
The Highest Price I Paid Online Was My Marriage
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
The Highest Cost
As I dictate this, it is September 28, 2025 and I’m doing what I hope is the final first draft edit before publishing on October 8, 2025. Two weeks ago, my ex-wife, my ex-wife, and I agreed that we are going to get divorced. Our marriage has been less than the full joy we are capable of for years. We have both been trying so hard to make ourselves fit together, but the reality is we have grown apart. Sobriety and education have changed me into someone very different than the man she started dating. Motherhood has changed her too, and now we are no longer aligned in the most important areas of our lives.
I want more children; she does not. I have an abundant mindset with money, where most of what comes in, I give away or spend quickly. She has a mindset of saving and working. The books I write feel far too personal and vulnerable for her, and she has made it clear she does not want to be featured in them going forward which is unavoidable if we are married. Even in health, we are far apart. I told her I will be writing a book soon on my views, and she admitted she fears getting sick because I have made it clear I am not interested in taking care of someone who is sick. I see illness as something people create for themselves, and that terrifies her. I love having sex every day and have been neglecting our romance for years which has left us consistently frustrated in the bedroom.
My ex-wife told me she knows there is a woman out there who would be very turned on by me, who would love to be my partner, and that it is unfair to both of us to keep going like this. She loves the friendship we share, she loves the kind of parent I am, and she loves raising our kids together. Yet she wants someone else to enjoy me as a husband, and I want that too. Meanwhile, she wants to be single for a while and discover who she really is without trying to fit herself to be with someone else.
As I finish this book, what I keep thinking is: how long did everything I did on the internet distract me from what was happening in my marriage? I know I was unhappy as far back as 2018, when my ex-wife said she did not want any more kids after having our daughter my daughter and our son my son. That was enough for her. She wanted to get her life back and not just be a stay-at-home mom forever—she wanted a career again.
When I made $100,000+ in profit on Facebook in 2021, she really enjoyed that time because I was paying the bills again after years of financial insecurity. Back in 2019 and 2020, after my overly ambitious business venture destroyed our finances, she became deeply committed to her work. Since then, she has mostly carried the stress of being our primary income provider. Meanwhile, over the last three years, I have been consistently emotionally unfaithful to her—getting crushes on girls I barely knew, being more thoughtful about them than I was with her.
I always showed up for the marriage in practical ways. I helped take care of the house and the children. I mowed the lawn, took the cars for service, and maintained my life to fit in with her schedule for the kids. Yet how often was I absent-minded? How often did I neglect romance with my ex-wife while imagining what it would be like to be with another woman? How much did I resent her for not wanting more children and for not supporting my work?
A week ago, I wrote her a letter laying out my wrongs in our marriage. I told her I would do whatever it took to make things better. I said I would admit I was wrong and completely change my life if it meant we could stay together. She said she did not want to be in a relationship where someone had to be wrong and change themselves that much. She told me we both deserve relationships where we are appreciated as we are. She said it is not fair to be with someone under the premise that they must change. I agree with her. I told her I would love to have an amicable divorce, one where we help each other through the process, love each other through it, and show people what that looks like. I want to show our kids a bigger picture of life with more people to love and places we are welcome.
You might wonder why I am writing about this here, in a book about being famous on the internet. The answer is simple: where I am today, and what has happened in my marriage, is completely tied up with everything I did online.
How Distraction Erodes Love
One of the biggest pain points in our marriage for my ex-wife has always been finances and money. Because of my focus over the last decade on being a content creator, I put myself in a position where things were very unstable. And when you have a wife and family, living in an environment that unstable is stressful for everyone. Especially today, you might think it sounds outdated to say this, but many women are still deeply turned on and appreciative of a man who can consistently produce income—someone who doesn’t leave them in financial insecurity, someone they can trust to provide. Even though my ex-wife likes having a career and would not want to admit it, she was far more turned on and much happier during the years when I was consistently providing income through Udemy and crypto.
Between 2015 and 2018, I paid all the bills, gave her thousands of dollars every month, and she could depend on me. She has hated our finances in the years since then, when things have been so unstable. I ask myself: what if I had worked and focused my life offline instead? I would have enjoyed much more stability. Sure, things can happen in local in-person work too, but on average, life online as a content creator tends to be much more unstable. If I had chosen to work on being a local author, coach, and speaker a decade ago, my income probably would have been incredibly stable over these years. It would have created opportunities, connections, and real value. If I had done that instead of chasing everything online, it’s possible we might not be getting divorced today. If you’re weighing what a more grounded, offline life could actually look like for you, I’d love for you to set up a call with me so we can map out that kind of stability, choosing real life over the screen.
At the same time, it’s also possible that if I had truly been paying attention, we would have divorced sooner. Doing all this stuff online was shockingly distracting. Even though I often only spent three or four hours a day, seven days a week, making and uploading videos, mentally I was totally consumed. I was constantly obsessed, always thinking about it. Today I wonder if my ex-wife and I might have gotten divorced five or six years ago, back when she made it clear she didn’t want more kids and I made it clear I did. If I had been fully present, maybe we would have separated then, and both of us could have had those years to move on—me to start a family with someone else, her to find someone better suited to her or to be single—rather than staying stuck in a marriage we struggled to keep alive.
All the time I spent online also made me less compassionate and less empathetic toward others. The online environment promotes selfishness, self-centeredness, and doing whatever it takes to get what you want. Being with people in person, on the other hand, generally encourages empathy, compassion, and consideration. I think about how selfish I have been about intimacy in my marriage with my ex-wife. It’s perfectly reasonable that I wanted intimacy to be a regular, enjoyable part of our relationship, but the way I went about it with her was not compassionate or reasonable. I pressured her, I made my frustration her problem, and I wasn’t fair to her about it. That kind of selfishness makes sense in someone shaped by years online, where it’s all about getting what you want, but it has no place in a loving marriage.
I remember a year ago, when I was trying to quit Marvel Snap, thinking to myself that the game was a convenient way to avoid my marriage and the discomfort I felt in it. If I quit Marvel Snap, I would have to face just how unhappy I really was in my marriage. When I finally did face it, my online work was still distracting me so much that it was difficult to keep my attention on what truly mattered. The biggest barrier to deleting all my accounts online was the knowledge that I would no longer get away with ignoring my marriage.
Marriage, Work, and the Loneliness of Creation
On the surface, I loved the idea of staying married and being one of those couples who had been together for 50 years, pointing to that as proof of success. But the reality is that both of us were struggling for years to keep the marriage joyful. That said, from the outside we often looked like we were having lots of fun and from the inside our life generally felt happy most days. We absolutely made the best of our marriage, and I don’t regret that. What I’m saying, though, is that the online environment was so distracting that I spent years in a marriage where I wasn’t fully present. I was very often withdrawn, obsessed with my work, either talking to my ex-wife about how great things were going and all my new ideas, or complaining about how awful things were and how unfair it all was. My ex-wife got tired of hearing about my work a decade ago, and she has endured ten straight years of listening to me go on and on about it.
One of the reasons I gave for not wanting to stay married was that I wanted someone who would support my work. With the way I write books now, along with coaching and speaking, I think it would be much easier for a partner to support me. But as a content creator, it’s very difficult for someone to give that support because the work is so volatile and sensational if you’re going to be successful, or else it is so consuming if you’re struggling just to pay the bills.
I’ve noticed that my life seems very typical of full-time online content creators. I know a guy who became incredibly successful teaching courses on Udemy, making tens of thousands of dollars a month. I coached him, I showed him how to do what I did, and now his Udemy earnings have surpassed mine. He managed it without controversy, without being over the top the way I often was, and by consistently applying the essential strategies I taught him. For almost a decade, he has poured effort into his courses, and now he earns an incredible passive income every month on Udemy that he barely has to work for.
Yet in all that time, he has made very little space for dating. Yes, he has dated here and there, had a girlfriend now and then, but he even tolerated having a long-distance girlfriend he didn’t see for a year or two because he was so distracted with his work. The relationship just wasn’t a priority. It didn’t matter to him much whether he had a girlfriend or not. That is crazy to me, because now that I’m getting divorced, one of my first priorities is to start dating again. I love having a girlfriend and am very excited to see who the next one will be.
And yet all the time people spend on media platforms—and all the time I have spent on them—has distracted me from being present in my relationships. Within a month of deleting those platforms, I started writing letters to people in my life. I wrote to my in-laws to share honestly about where my ex-wife and I were in our marriage. I wrote to my brother to explain why I wasn’t going to come to his wedding. I wrote to my sisters about the pink elephant in the room of our father and my experiences with him, along with my journey of getting sober. These are things I might have done years earlier if I hadn’t been so consumed by being online.
Of course, you could argue that any career could have the same effect. You might say I could have been a doctor or a lawyer and been just as consumed by my work. That’s true. But the difference is that with those fields, you know what you’re getting into. It’s obvious that they are all-consuming, and you must be intentional about separating work from personal life. With content creation, you don’t realize how consuming it is until you are in it. You imagine you’ll just upload a few videos, earn some income, sell a course or two, and it won’t be a big deal. Maybe some people can manage it that way, but what I see with most people is that either it ends up being a total waste of their time, or they would have been much better off focusing on real life and real relationships.
Even if you do reach financial success, it costs the exact freedom you thought online income would provide. You become locked into the numbers, distracted far more than you ever thought possible. Looking back, I think if I had really been paying attention, my ex-wife and I probably would have divorced years ago. But I was so consumed with content creation that I didn’t have the time or mental space to fully face my marriage. At most, I had moments of getting upset, arguing, demanding more sex, or telling my ex-wife I had yet another business idea that this time, I promised, would be different. If you recognize yourself staying too busy to face something at home, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we’ll talk through what your work might be helping you avoid.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
How Chasing Fame Cost Me My Marriage
Originally published September 28, 2025.
This is my journal entry from September 28, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.
I got a fantastic night of sleep last night, which I’m so grateful for after two nights of being so upset and staying up late. The rest was exactly what I needed. I woke up feeling clearheaded for the first time in days. I’m also thankful a friend canceled tennis yesterday—the rain made it impossible anyway—because I don’t think I could’ve played with how exhausted I was.
This morning, I feel different. Lighter. Centered. Whatever happens with my ex-wife, I’m finally able to think clearly about it. I don’t know exactly what our future looks like, but I feel optimistic. I’m committed to listening to her and being on the same page, whatever that page turns out to be.
We had a nice morning with the kids. Then, around 8:30 a.m., her mom came to pick them up. Once the house was quiet, my ex-wife and I sat on the bed and talked for about an hour. She was very clear, calm, and grounded. She said, “I want a divorce. I don’t want to keep living in a relationship where one or both of us has to be wrong. I think we’ll both be happier going forward.” I told her I agreed. Hearing her say it so plainly somehow made it feel peaceful.
Yesterday, I’d been beating myself up about a message I sent to that separated mom I mentioned before—the one I texted and left a voice memo for. She never responded all day, and by the time I went to bed, I felt so guilty. The older guy in AA, the one I talked to for an hour and a half, told me, “She’s probably going to feel like you’re coming on to her. Women are going to see you differently now that you’re single. When you were married, you were safe—they could talk to you freely. But now, it’s complicated.”
That stuck with me. I felt embarrassed and ashamed, realizing that message might have seemed inappropriate. If my ex-wife and I had decided to stay together, that message would’ve been completely out of line. I also felt rejected, since she hadn’t replied.
But when I woke up this morning, I saw her response—sent right after I’d gone to sleep. She wrote that she’d had her kids all weekend and had been out all day, so she hadn’t seen my message right away. She told me she was sorry to hear what I’m going through and that she understands how difficult this process can be. She shared a little about her own separation and said that she and her ex are also working on having love and kindness in their separation, the way my ex-wife and I are trying to. She said her schedule is busy but that she’s sure we’ll get to chat sometime.
Reading that made me feel so good—just knowing someone else understands, that I’m not crazy for trying to approach this with love. It reminded me how important connection is during a transition like this. It helped me feel supported going into my next talk with my ex-wife. If you're walking through a hard transition of your own and want to talk to someone who actually understands, you can book a private call with me and find that same kind of connection.
When we sat down together again, we went deeper into it: Is there any point in trying to save our marriage? Haven’t we done everything we can? Wouldn’t we both be happier divorced? After another long, honest talk, we both came to the same conclusion—yes, divorce is the right path.
My ex-wife said, “That letter you gave me yesterday was beautiful. I really appreciate it. But I don’t want you to be wrong anymore. And I don’t see how we can stay married without one of us having to be wrong.” She said, “I want you to be with a woman who wants all the sex you want, who wants kids with you, who thinks your ideas about health and work and money are inspiring. You deserve to be with someone who’s turned on by all those things. If I met a woman like that, I’d try to connect you with her myself. I’d help you find her if I could. I just know I’m not that woman for you.”
Her words left me stunned. They were so selfless and kind. I told her I want the same for her—that I want her to be with a man who truly appreciates her and turns her on, someone who brings out her best. I admitted I haven’t done that for a long time, and that’s part of why I felt so heartbroken yesterday.
Even though there’s sadness underneath it all, today feels different. There’s relief in finally being honest, in finally agreeing on something so big without anger or blame. We’re ending our marriage, but doing it with love.
One thing I wrote in the letter to my ex-wife was that, while I’ve always been physically faithful, I haven’t been emotionally present with her for a long time. For at least four years, I’ve been getting crushes on other women, fantasizing about them, or focusing on how my ex-wife could be different—how she could be “better.” It feels liberating to finally admit that out loud. Because yes, we’ve shared many good times together. We’ve had laughter, joy, vacations, and plenty of sex—mostly satisfying for me, and often for her too. But as beautiful as so much of our relationship has been, it’s time to acknowledge that we’ve been forcing it for years. We’ve been trying to make something work that doesn’t fit anymore. Letting go feels like a deep exhale, a release I didn’t realize I’d been holding in my chest for so long.
I’m so glad I wrote that letter yesterday and faced that truth. It felt like the last key piece of resistance standing between us and peace. My ex-wife said she was touched that I was willing to be “wrong” in the letter—telling her I’d change whatever she wanted, that I’d do anything to make it work—but she saw right through it. She said, “That’s not going to work, is it? If I took you up on that offer, you’d end up being a martyr. You’d twist yourself into something you’re not, and you’d end up hating me for it. I don’t want to wait until we hate each other to get a divorce. I think this is a good time to do this.”
She even said she’d love to be part of that future—she’d love to babysit our kids and be part of my new family, for her kids and mine to play together. It was one of the kindest, most generous things she’s ever said to me.
We clarified again that we’re not going to have sex anymore, that we’re both free to be with other people. We agreed to wait another week before telling the kids, just to give ourselves more time to adjust.
After that talk, I went to the 10 a.m. yoga class at my yoga studio. My yoga instructor led it. There was a beautiful girl practicing right in front of me, and I caught myself smiling—not in lust, but in simple joy. It hit me that I’m going to have so many new experiences with women, and that spark of aliveness is coming back. The spark my ex-wife and I shared early in our marriage will return with someone new. And that excites me. I want my ex-wife to find that spark again too, with someone who suits her better. It feels out of reach for us now, but for someone else, I know it will be effortless.
After yoga, I went home and cooked beef stroganoff. It’s one of my favorite meals from childhood—something my dad used to make—and it felt comforting to prepare it on a day like this. I cooked slowly, taking about an hour and a half, grounding myself in the process.
While I cooked, I made phone calls. I wanted to talk to as many people as possible about what’s happening—to get different perspectives, to process everything out loud, to let people know I could use their support. I called my sister and a friend, but neither answered. Then I reached another friend who had time to talk for about forty minutes. She’s been through a similar divorce and shared her story with honesty and kindness. It helped so much. If you're carrying something heavy and need to say it all out loud to someone who's been there, you can set up a call with me and we'll talk it through.
I realized how differently I listen now compared to when she was going through her separation. Back then, I judged her more. I supported her, but deep down I thought, They could’ve made it work, or They shouldn’t have gotten together in the first place. I see now how blind that was. Life isn’t supposed to look one way. There’s no single “right” relationship model. The belief that you’re supposed to marry once, stay together forever, and die side by side—it’s absurd. Where did I even get that idea? I don’t remember ever choosing it.
By the time I finished cooking and hung up the phone, I felt peaceful again. I sat down and ate my stroganoff alone in the quiet house, feeling both grounded and grateful. Change is happening fast, but for the first time in a long time, it feels right.
My ex-wife and the kids came home for a couple of hours in the afternoon. She went to take a nap while I played with the kids and cleaned up the kitchen. We played Uno No Mercy, laughing and teasing each other, and it felt good to have that kind of lighthearted time together. For all the heaviness of this week, moments like that with my children remind me how much joy still exists right here in the middle of change.
After we finished playing, my ex-wife took the kids to Michael’s and Target. I considered going with them since I needed a chip holder for my new AA meeting, but something inside me said not to. It didn’t feel right. I realized that giving my ex-wife and the kids some space is the healthiest thing I can do right now. We’ve been spending a lot of time together lately, and even though it’s been mostly positive, I think it’s better if we’re not out in public as a family while we’re still figuring everything out. We haven’t told the kids yet, and keeping that boundary makes it easier for everyone.
I was especially glad I stayed home because almost as soon as they left, my sister called. We ended up talking for over an hour, and it was one of the best conversations we’ve had. She’s been through a divorce herself, so she understands the emotional process and how complicated it can be. She’s done incredible work staying friends with her ex-husband and co-parenting their children peacefully. She was immediately supportive—of me, of my ex-wife, and of the way we’re handling things.
She reminded me that in our family, we “keep the exes.” She said everyone loves my ex-wife and would be happy to see her anytime. That touched me deeply. It’s such a comfort to know that my ex-wife will still be loved and included by my family.
We also talked about the letter I sent her and our other sister a couple of weeks ago. She said she appreciated it overall, especially that I had the courage to address the “pink elephant” in the room—our relationship with our father. The only feedback she offered was about the tone. She and our other sister, who are both from Dad’s first marriage, have already worked through much of their grief and feelings about his passing, while my letter may have come across as if they hadn’t. She pointed out that my tone felt more like something written to a younger sibling rather than two women older and more experienced than I am.
I completely understood. After I sent the letter, I actually felt awkward about that exact thing. I realized I might not have given enough credit to their maturity or the work they’ve already done to make peace with Dad’s memory. Hearing her clarification helped ease that discomfort.
I told her how much I appreciated her openness and explained that my intention in writing about Dad was to bring us closer—to acknowledge our shared history and how it’s shaped us. Our father had an earlier family before ours. He was married to their mother years before he met my mom. He traveled constantly after that, living around the world, and barely maintained a relationship with my sisters. By the time he died, they hadn’t spoken to him in years.
I wanted to write about my experience forgiving him for the pain and anger I carried from my own childhood, and how long it took me to understand his behavior and let it go. I hoped that by sharing my process, they might find it helpful or at least feel more connected to me. Even though their experiences with him were very different, I thought it might give us a sense of what we all had in common: the same father, the same longing to understand him, and to make peace with the past.
My sister appreciated that and said the letter helped her see me more clearly, too. I shared much more in that letter about myself, my marriage, my life—things I hadn’t discussed with them before. Writing it put me in a place where they could support me through this divorce with real understanding.
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked how we should let our other sister know about the divorce. She doesn’t like to talk on the phone much, and I didn’t want to make it awkward by sending a text or a voice message. We agreed that the sister I spoke with today would tell her in person. That way, she can deliver the message gently, answer questions, and create a real moment of connection rather than something abrupt or impersonal.
By the time we hung up, I felt grateful—grateful for my sister’s love, her perspective, and the healing that’s happening within our family. Talking to her made me feel steadier, like I’m not going through all this alone.
After talking to my sister, I called my aunt—my dad’s youngest sister. She sounded sad when I told her about the divorce and asked gently if we had thought of everything, if we had truly tried everything we could to stay together. She reminded me that many people in our family, including her parents, had stayed together no matter what. Her dad—my grandfather—stayed with her mom until the day he died, and then my grandmother passed not long after.
Listening to her brought up an old image of what marriage used to mean to me: permanence, endurance, duty. But that no longer feels like truth for my life. I told her that to me, marriage is something that has to be chosen every single day—it’s not a default. I don’t see it as till death do us part anymore. It’s more like, I choose to be here today because this is where I want to be. And if that stops being true—if we’ve done all we can and staying becomes self-betrayal—then it’s time to move on.
I told her if get married again, I’ll be clear from the start that to me, marriage is day-by-day, not a lifelong contract of obligation. I don’t want to stay with someone out of fear, habit, or duty. I want it to be a conscious choice we both keep making.
After talking with my aunt, I called my mom to set up a time to see her, then spent a few hours working on my books. I love that work. Even with everything changing, writing still feels like the most natural thing I can do—it’s grounding, clarifying, and joyful.
While I worked, I also started thinking about the next big step: where I’ll live. This morning I’d sent a voice message to the neighbor across the street, asking if I could rent her house. It’s been empty for about a year, and I felt such a strong pull toward it. I told her in a three-minute message how perfect it would be—that I’m getting divorced and there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather live. The location couldn’t be better.
She wrote back later saying that once she gets the house fixed up, the rent would be fairly high, and she eventually plans to sell when the market improves. I told her that sounded great—I’d love to rent it.
Just hearing that possibility gave me a surge of motivation and clarity. I realized that finding my own place is the first priority. Once I have a home of my own, everything else—dating, working, building community, expanding my family—will flow more easily from there. If building a well-rounded life like that is what you're after, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we'll map it out — a life you don't need to escape from.
If the house across the street doesn’t work out, I’ll simply widen the circle. I’ll look for the next closest house, and then the next, until I find something nearby. I’m certain I’ll find a home within walking distance of my ex-wife’s house and my mom’s. That way, I can stay closely involved in my kids’ lives, help my mom as she gets older, and build my next chapter right in the same neighborhood.
My mind has been racing with possibilities, thinking about how to manifest this. Right now, I’m making close to zero income. To afford that rent plus utilities, groceries, and basic expenses, I’ll need around $5,000–$6,000 a month after taxes—which means earning closer to $8,000–$10,000 before taxes just to stay afloat.
The numbers sound daunting, but I don’t feel fear. It actually excites me. Having that clear target gives me direction. It feels like the universe is saying, Here’s your next challenge. Step up.
What’s amazing about my view on money—and what aggravates my ex-wife endlessly—is how differently I see it from her. I believe in thinking about what I want, putting it out into the universe, and trusting that my mind will figure out how to make it happen. My ex-wife, on the other hand, prefers to be practical—apply for jobs, make spreadsheets, plan for every contingency. That’s just not me. My philosophy is simple: I want $10,000 a month doing something I love—figure it out. And already, my mind is spinning up ideas.
After talking with a friend yesterday, I started imagining a 28-day digital detox live-in program where people could stay with me, disconnect from technology, and work through life transformations. They’d pay thousands of dollars a month for the experience, and I could host two or three guests in a four-bedroom house. They’d participate in yoga, meditation, walks, writing, coaching, and silence—everything I’ve built my life around. That idea came to me within just a few hours of setting the intention, and it’s only the beginning. I can’t wait to see what else my mind creates now that it has a clear mission.
Later in the evening, my ex-wife and the kids got home. I said goodbye to them before heading to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where my sponsor was speaking. My sponsee was there too, so it felt like the perfect time to tell my sponsee about the divorce. But the meeting ran twenty minutes longer than usual, and I didn’t want to miss saying goodnight to the kids, so we only had about five minutes to talk. When I told him, he said he was sick to his stomach hearing about it. I appreciated his honesty, but I didn’t feel that way.
I told him I actually feel excited. Yes, there’s grief, sadness, and loss, but I’m not overwhelmed by them. I’m prepared for another crying day if it comes—I’ll grab a t-shirt and a handkerchief and let it all flow through me. But I don’t feel any self-pity, guilt, or shame. To me, those are the emotions that make divorce miserable. My goal is to go through this process without judgment, without regret. And if any of those feelings come up, I’ll let them move through me and out of me, the same way I did on Saturday when I cried and purged for hours. That release made me feel so clean afterward.
My sponsor gave a short, heartfelt talk, and I felt proud to be there. I gave both him and my sponsee copies of Author in St. Petersburg. When I got home, I said goodnight to the kids, then talked with my mom once they were in bed.
She said something that made me laugh—she said it felt like a complete 180, that just yesterday I was talking about doing anything to save my marriage, and today I’m talking confidently about divorce. I told her I don’t think it’s a good idea to fight for something that isn’t worth saving. This marriage has run its course. My ex-wife and I can still love each other, co-parent, and be part of each other’s lives forever through the kids, but we don’t need to be married to do that.
“This isn’t 1920,” I told her. “my ex-wife will be fine without me. She’ll probably be happier.” And I meant it. I think this divorce will give her exactly what she’s needed for years—the space to grow in ways that have been impossible with me constantly demanding things from her, whether it was sex, attention, or financial support.
I told my mom that this separation isn’t sudden—it’s something we’ve been putting off for years. We just weren’t ready to admit it until now. I even remembered a conversation my ex-wife and I had about a year and a half ago. We’d been arguing, as usual, about sex, more kids, and money. Out of frustration, she said, “Why don’t you just get a new girlfriend? I’ll move into the house next door.” That house has since been torn down, but I still remember it vividly.
She said, “You can stay here with your new girlfriend and have your new family.” And the truth is, I’d been fantasizing about that exact scenario for days before she said it. But at the time, I thought honesty was the wrong choice. So I told her, “No, we should fight for our marriage. This family is enough for me. I don’t need more kids. I don’t need to deal with another woman.”
Looking back now, I can see how dishonest that was. What I really wanted to say was, Yes, I would love that. I would love for us both to have our own lives, our own homes, to raise our kids together but separately. I want new love, new energy, new kids. I thought saying that would be wrong. I thought it would make me a bad person. But today, I know it would’ve just been honest.
If I’d agreed with her then, we might have saved each other a lot of struggle. But maybe this was how it had to unfold—one step at a time.
You know, from the outside, we were happy enough—and that’s the thing most people see. They look at us and say, “You two seem fine. You don’t fight much, you don’t yell. Why would you get divorced?” And they’re right, in a surface-level way. We weren’t screaming at each other. Even when things were bad, we usually spoke calmly, in even tones. The nastiness showed up more subtly—passive-aggressive comments, long silences, quiet resentment. There was no chaos, no big scandal, just a steady erosion of closeness.
We did so many good things together. We took the kids on a three-week road trip this summer—one week first, then another two weeks later—and we had plenty of laughs, photos, and family memories. From the outside, it looked like a perfectly happy marriage. Too happy to end. That’s what makes this decision so hard for people to understand.
But to me, this is exactly when to end it—before it turns toxic, before bitterness replaces kindness. A lot of people wait until things get ugly before they finally let go. I want to let go while we still care for each other, while there’s still respect and peace.
Looking back, I see it so clearly now. A year and a half ago, when my ex-wife suggested we split up, I was too buried in my online work to handle it. If I’d been truly present back then, I would’ve said, “Yes, I agree. That’s what I want too. I’d love for you to have your space, your own house, your finances separate from mine. I’d love to have my own life and start fresh with someone new.” But at the time, I felt like I couldn’t deal with both a divorce and my online business—it was too much chaos at once. So instead of being honest, I buried myself deeper in my content. I told myself I couldn’t afford to face the truth yet. I clung to the illusion that things were “good enough.”
Now that I’ve shut down the online stuff, I finally have the time—and the emotional space—to deal with real life. I wrote the final chapter today of I Was Famous on the Internet, and I titled it “The Highest Cost.” It’s about exactly this: how years of being consumed by the internet kept me from being present in my own life. All those hours, all that obsession, cost me the chance to either build a better marriage or end it gracefully years ago.
When I was chasing followers and fame, my marriage was collateral damage. If I’d been more grounded, more focused in person instead of online, I might have agreed with my ex-wife when she first suggested splitting up. But I wasn’t capable of that honesty then. I was too distracted, too exhausted, too warped by the constant need to produce, post, and perform. That distraction didn’t just steal my marriage—it stole my ability to even see what was happening. If you sense something quietly slipping while you're buried in your own screen, I'd love to help you see it clearly — you can schedule a private call with me to talk through your situation with me.
It’s ironic, because you’d expect this kind of burnout from a doctor, a lawyer, a police officer—someone with an obviously consuming job. When you marry someone in one of those fields, you know upfront that their time and energy are going to be swallowed by their work. But with a content creator, it doesn’t look that way. You’d think someone working from home, uploading videos and live streaming, would have endless time for family.
That’s the deception of it. Physically, I was there all the time. But mentally, I was miles away—always chasing views, engagement, performance metrics, the next idea. The work was invisible, but it consumed me completely. And that’s what made it so hard to notice.
It’s strange to say, but the quietness of that distraction—the fact that I was home while it was happening—might have made it even more damaging than if I’d been working seventy-hour weeks somewhere else. Because at least then, everyone would have known what was happening. Instead, I was home in body but gone in spirit. And now, I’m finally back.
I’m really grateful to be dictating books like this now and to be doing it with full presence. Writing in this way doesn’t distract me like making videos used to. There’s no instant gratification with a book. No likes, no comments, no algorithm to chase. Nobody’s even likely to read this for at least a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two. Most people who eventually read it might not do so for years. And that’s exactly what makes it meaningful.
Dictating allows me to slow down, to think clearly, to be in my own experience instead of constantly reacting to an audience. It’s a kind of meditation. The stillness of it, the patience it requires, is what heals me. You don’t realize how much constant stimulation warps your mind until you step away from it. Once you do, the difference is enormous—like being underwater for years and suddenly taking your first deep breath of air.
I went to bed tonight feeling deeply grateful. After a couple of intense days filled with sadness, anxiety, and uncertainty, it’s amazing how calm and clear I feel now. I’ve noticed this pattern in myself: when I have a “bad” day—when I’m heavy with grief, fear, or anger—I can almost guarantee that a euphoric, peaceful day will follow. Emotions move like waves; when they crash low, the next swell is already forming.
I found a healthy outlet for release today, something that hasn’t happened since the hurricanes last year. I laughed thinking about it, calling it a “helpful tool,” but the truth is, it is one. It’s a way to release tension, to move energy, to manifest. During the hurricanes, that kind of release kept me sane. I was home alone while my ex-wife and the kids were evacuated in Orlando, and all I could do was clean, write, and take care of the house. I couldn’t go to yoga or do any of my usual routines, so it became the simplest, healthiest way to release stress and flood my body with good chemicals.
It feels the same way now—like a cleansing. I’m amazed by how much energy has been freed up through this decision to get divorced. My ex-wife said she feels it too. She told me she finally has space to figure out who she is without me taking up so much emotional room. She wants to rediscover herself outside of being a wife and a mother, and I love that for her.
I told her I feel grounded and certain of who I am—maybe for the first time in my life. I know what I want now. I want to expand the family, to build a new life filled with love, honesty, and excitement. And I want to find a woman who feels lit up by who I am and what I do, someone whose energy meets mine with joy and curiosity. It’s strange to say it after such a hard week, but tonight I feel alive again—clean, open, ready for whatever’s next.
Energized
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
Why I'm Done Chasing the Content Grind
Originally published August 24, 2025.
This is my journal entry from August 24, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.
This morning began with preparations for my daughter’s birthday party. Instead of waking up with joy, I noticed irritation stirring in me, more than usual. I realized what I needed was vigorous exercise, and I suspected my ex-wife might need it too. She hadn’t worked out in a few days, and with a big, potentially stressful day of hosting ahead, she was carrying that irritable edge as well. I encouraged her as gently as I could to go for a run. At first, she looked angry, which is typical for her when exercising early in the morning. Yet she came back grateful, noticeably lighter. I didn’t take her initial reaction personally. Often in life we resist exactly what we need most.
Seeing her go reminded me that I needed to run too. I’m grateful I did. I clocked a nine-minute, ten-second mile, even though I hadn’t run in four months. That result excites me because I intend to be able to run a mile at a similar pace for the rest of my life. If I stay consistent, there’s no reason I can’t.
Then came the question of where to hold the party: at the tennis club pool, as planned, or at home. The forecast warned of a 50–60% chance of rain right during party time, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. I said we should just go for it. If we had to bail out midway and move home, so be it. Why let fear of storms cancel something we’d already paid for? By 11:20, the weather was holding nicely.
Another decision was food. Instead of ordering pizza, I suggested we buy frozen ones from the store and bake them. My ex-wife found a buy-one-get-one deal and came home with four pizzas for $16. As I write this, I’m waiting for the pepperoni to cool before bringing them to the pool.
Last night I pushed I Was Famous on the Internet past 100,000 words. Today I used ChatGPT to cut redundancy and trim away repeated stories. That brought it down to about 60,000 words, and I feel relieved. So many of those words came from long, rambling transcripts of one- and two-hour live streams. Yet those same transcripts held gems—great stories worth keeping. Most of those remain. What’s gone is the irrelevant chatter and endless circles of the same idea.
The process feels like a Fourth Step in Alcoholics Anonymous: a searching and fearless moral inventory. Only this time, it’s deeper than any Fourth Step I’ve ever done. My book lays bare the patterns of my business. Looking back over a decade of videos, I see the instability and unsustainability baked into everything I was doing. After Udemy banned me, I spent years grasping for footing—bouncing between gaming, live streaming, and whatever platform seemed promising at the time. My business was built on shaky ground.
I no longer judge myself as simply unstable. I can see the truth more clearly now: consistency is very hard when your environment is constantly shifting and when you lack any local support. That contrast stands out because in the rest of my life I’ve been remarkably consistent. For eleven years I’ve gone to at least five AA meetings a week, no matter what. I’ve shown up through marriage struggles, parenting stress, and even periods where I had no time to exercise. My ex-wife and I have stayed consistently close for fourteen years. I’ve kept my health in good condition for a decade. I’ve rarely taken more than a month off from creating content. The only area plagued by inconsistency has been my business. If showing up consistently is hard when you’re doing it alone, you can set up a call with me—together on our call we’ll build a rhythm you can actually keep.
Now, though, I feel like I finally have a foundation that can last: writing books and practicing massage. Both are timeless. No matter how the world changes in the next thirty to fifty years, people will still want stories and healing touch. In fact, demand may grow. That excites me.
I sent a voice memo to a friend who’s six months into his YouTube journey. Last I checked, he had just over a thousand subscribers. He’s grinding out three clips a day now, pouring money into editors and equipment, and not making a cent. I told him plainly: I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and it’s not sustainable. Even if you blow up, the grind doesn’t end—it just traps you indefinitely. The whole foundation is shaky.
I once saw a video titled Content Creation is the New 9 to 5, and it’s true. Except it’s worse—more unstable than any 9 to 5 could ever be. At least with a job, your paycheck is usually steady. With content creation, you can lose everything overnight and often get nothing in the beginning, middle, and/or end.
Books feel different. Books are evergreen. Once a book is published and set up properly, it lives forever. There’s no pressure to grind out something “timely.” I only want to write timeless books. Going through my archive of thousands of videos, I see how little of it lasts. Only a fraction—maybe 500 to 1,000 videos out of about 10,000—carry any evergreen quality, mostly when they tell real stories from my life. That realization fuels my excitement to keep converting transcripts into books. I Was Famous on the Internet could be read decades from now, and it would still matter. These diary entries will endure too, capturing my lived experience at a particular point in time. If someone reads one book and enjoys it, they might want to keep following along through the rest of them. That’s the kind of foundation I want—timeless, not disposable.
Last night, another idea struck me: price my massages at the very top of the market. I thought about offering a two-hour “coaching massage” package for $456.78. It’s a fun number, and it would make mine the highest-priced massage in town. Ninety minutes of massage combined with a conversation feels worth it. That way I could literally do one massage a day and make a great income. For those I want to serve who can’t afford that, I could offer discount codes. Therapists I want to exchange with wouldn’t pay at all. Clients with money could pay full price. I love the flexibility of that model: keep the value high, but offer exceptions when it makes sense.
That’s enough for now. Today I feel grateful—grateful for my health, my book’s progress, the chance to celebrate my daughter’s birthday, and the clarity of a long-term plan that finally feels sustainable.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.
A Decade Online and Little to Show for It
Originally published August 22, 2025.
This is my journal entry from August 22, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.
Today I set up my office once again, this time in the master bedroom. Over the years my workspace has moved more times than I can count. It began in the second bedroom of an apartment when I started my business in 2011, then shifted to a dedicated office in Sarasota from 2013 to 2014. After that, I worked out of an extra bedroom in Sarasota until 2016, followed by two years in the master bedroom of our next house. From 2018 to 2024, I operated out of a shed in the backyard. Eventually, I moved into the walk-in closet of this house, which I jokingly called the “cloffice,” where I stayed for about a year before returning now to the bedroom once more. I’m not sure why I feel the need to recount my entire office history, but each shift tells a story of reinvention and survival.
The current setup has my stand-up desk, three monitors, and my streaming PC—the weaker of the two machines I used to own. I sold my gaming PC for just $300, which feels criminally low in hindsight, though I wanted someone else to get some use out of it. This streaming PC is nearly worthless today, but it works well enough for what matters most: narrating audiobooks and transcribing my old videos for turning them into books. I spent hours arranging, testing, and adjusting everything until it was right. It takes a peculiar skill set to envision how all these wires, monitors, and machines fit together, and I’m proud that it came out smoothly. I hope this is the last studio I’ll have to set up for a long time.
As I reviewed my old videos, I realized I have enough transcripts to create at least four or five books. That’s encouraging, yet also disappointing when I consider the thousands of hours and close to ten thousand videos I produced over the last decade. To think all that work may only yield a handful of books is sobering. At the same time, books endure in a way videos never do. They strip out the clutter and capture only the most valuable ideas. Looking back, if I had focused on writing books from the start instead of chasing online trends, I might have built a more stable career and a stronger presence in my community. The online success was exhilarating at times—earning nearly $100,000 in a single month, enjoying years with hundreds of thousands in profit—but today I have little to show for it. Now I’m left with a few hundred videos I can pull transcripts from and a couple of courses, hoping to carve books out of them.
The real lesson is about vision. For years I lacked a long-term outlook. I was simply surviving online—posting six times a day, experimenting with gaming, quitting, deleting channels, starting again, doing promotions like “Your Video Here with Jerry Banfield,” which brought in a little money but offered no lasting value. That’s how the online world seduces you: quick bursts of sales, instant validation, the dopamine rush of course revenue flowing in overnight. Yet a decade later, most of it is irrelevant. The majority of my tutorials and topical content no longer serve anyone. I don’t want to repeat that cycle.
What still feels valuable are the timeless videos—storytelling, AA talks, and book reviews. For example, my “AA Speaker Meeting: Celebrating Seven Years Sober” from 2021 and “Top 33 Health Books” video from 2024 still hold substance. Those can become evergreen books. I can create collections of reviews, like one focused entirely on health or another on conspiracy titles, or even a book summarizing the ones I found transformative. I recorded countless diary entries as well, which can flow naturally into memoir-style collections. I even made videos like “Healthy Coping Mechanisms for Men Facing Intimacy Disorders,” essentially a candid exploration of sex addiction, though the title was one I didn’t want to use on YouTube. Material like that could evolve into books on AA recovery, intimacy struggles, or personal growth.
This excites me because when I imagine seeing someone in person who’s struggling, I can hand them a book instead of trying to push a video link. That feels natural. Books are easier for family and friends to process than endless hours of video online. I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to authors like Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle, and when you really connect with a writer, you want to read everything they’ve written. I believe some people will do that with me.
For the first time in years, I have a vision that makes sense. It’s beautifully simple: write books and give massages, weaving coaching into the bodywork. All I need to do now is go to massage school, finish a couple of books beforehand, and then, once school is done, continue transforming my library of videos into dozens of books as well as dictating new ones. Long-term vision is everything.
This realization extends beyond my career. In my marriage, I often approached things with the same survival mindset I brought to online work. Today I recognize the importance of building character, addressing problems directly, and fostering gratitude in the present moment so my ex-wife and I can enjoy a lasting, fulfilling relationship. Whether it’s marriage, career, or personal growth, the same principle applies: focus on actions today that will set me up for success thirty years from now. For me, that means embracing the path of writing books and doing massage work rooted in connection and service. It feels like the right foundation for the life I want to live. If you're staring at your own years of survival-mode hustle and want help mapping a longer-term vision, you can schedule a private call with me and we'll think it through together.
I began the day as usual by taking the kids to school, though soon that routine will shift once I start massage school. From there, I headed to the tennis club to play doubles with the Friday morning group I used to see regularly. I had stopped playing with them last year because doubles cut into both my 9 a.m. yoga class and the 10 a.m. AA meeting, and I had been focusing more on singles. Today, though, one of the guys texted to say they would have to cancel unless I joined, so I agreed.
The lineup was one man close to my age and two older gentlemen, both in their seventies or eighties. We split the older players between teams and played two sets. Watching men in their eighth decade of life still able to move around the court and sometimes outplay me is inspiring. Still, I was frustrated with myself in the first set. Despite countless hours of coaching, practice, and hitting tens of thousands of balls since playing with them, I still managed to lose. I’m easily the most athletic and fit of the group, yet I made an embarrassing number of unforced errors. The one bright spot was my serve, which stayed consistent, and we regularly won the games I served. My partner, unfortunately, once double-faulted his way through an entire game, which didn’t help.
What bothered me most wasn’t just losing—it was being frustrated that I was frustrated. I caught myself thinking, “Come on, you’re out here to have fun. This is amateur tennis. Haven’t we gone through this enough times? When will you finally reach a place of calm acceptance?” I tried to refocus on the positives. In the second set, I was paired with the stronger of the two older men, and though the other side took an early lead, we fought back. I pushed hard at the end, and we won the set. My favorite moment came when I sprinted nearly a full circle around the court to retrieve a lob, then charged forward to crush a hard cross-court winner. Everyone applauded the effort, and I felt proud of that point.
The whole session felt less like competition and more like group therapy. Each of us wrestled with that inner critic whispering that we weren’t good enough. Both older men cursed their faulty play, while the younger man shook his head and groaned at his own errors. We laughed, cursed, and encouraged one another through the frustration. Tennis became a support group disguised as a game.
Afterwards I considered going to an AA meeting, since I didn’t go yesterday and I aim for at least five meetings a week. In the past week I had already attended several in a row, and I’ll probably go every day for the next five as well. Instead of heading to a meeting, I felt drawn to finish setting up my newest studio dedicated to writing and narrating books. My ex-wife had already cleared space so I could move in my standing desk and equipment. As soon as I started reconnecting everything, I realized how much joy that brought me. I’m grateful that I often ask myself what would feel most joyful in the moment—and then allow myself to do it.
I’m excited that these diaries are nearing completion because they will mark the true beginning of my journey as an author here in St. Petersburg. Years from now, I’ll be glad to have them, because what I regret most about the past decade is not keeping a daily record. Instead of making countless videos teaching people what to do or selling courses, I wish I had simply kept a diary or vlog every day. At least then I’d have a body of work worth looking back on, not just promotional clutter.
Now, when I reread these entries years from today, I’ll see what I’ve remembered and what I’ve forgotten, what lessons I’ve mastered and what challenges I’m still wrestling with. Just recently I watched a video from 2017 of myself describing how quitting video games was the hardest addiction of all. Yet a few months ago I pawned my consoles again, and in the years between I bought and sold them several more times. That cycle alone is proof of why long-term thinking is crucial.
If there’s one message I hope these diaries communicate, it’s to think as far ahead as possible. At the same time, life demands balance. It isn’t about postponing happiness until decades later but about living fully in the present while laying foundations for the future. Some might say, “What if I don’t have much time left?” Then at least spend today doing something that leaves a lasting impact—something that helps others long after you’re gone.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.