Jerry Banfield Gaming Stories: Why I Quit Being a Professional Gamer and Remembering the Highlights!

My friends, we're here today to remember Jerry Banfield at gaming. I'll tell you how I became a professional gamer and why I quit being a professional gamer. If you've never found me before and this is your first time reading, you'll get to relive some of the best stories. My experience being a pro gamer and live streamer with lots of success will be very helpful for you to perhaps live through your dreams out through me, to see if you really want to do them, and to understand what it's really like to live your dream of getting paid to play video games. Getting tons of people and attention and money for playing video games is not what you'd think. If you want to hear all the best stories, I'll go in to relive some of the highlights of my time gaming and some of the dark sides that you might be pretty surprised about.

All the videos and posts I make on my Jerry Banfield channel are meant to be evergreen, something you could come back to and get more out of. So I asked ChatGPT to give me some questions that you might want to know so that I have some topics ready to discuss. These are some of the questions I'll cover: why I started gaming; some of my memorable moments from playing League of Legends, which was one of the most watched games I played on YouTube; what are some of the biggest challenges I faced; how did I feel when my Call of Duty Zombies tutorials went viral; how I grew my audience on Facebook; what my favorite Warzone moments were; how my retro game videos went viral; and my experience being canceled for speaking out and setting an example that I thought was extremely helpful. I'm proud of everything I've done in my gaming career. I'll also describe how I transitioned into playing Gods Unchained, a crypto game on Twitch, and finally found a nice audience on Twitch. I'll tell you about the most rewarding parts of my gaming career, how I evolved creating different content, advice for professional gamers, why I quit gaming, family and friends' reactions, and more.

Why I Pursued Gaming In The First Place

So let's start off with why I initially pursued gaming as a professional gamer. Well, I played lots of video games as a kid and I loved it. I first played a straight-up Mario Brothers on Nintendo in the late 1980s, and I remember thinking how cool this was. Eventually my parents got me a Game Boy and I remember just grinding on that Game Boy, like Empire Strikes Back on Game Boy. I remember one day I played that six hours and I finally beat it. And it felt so good. It felt so good to conquer that challenge. I also liked that I could escape by playing video games when I might feel bad or bored. I would use video games as a way to go off into a new world, give my mind a challenge and something to dig into.

So as a kid, I played tons of video games, and I played outside and played lots of sports. But especially as a teenager, I started to get lonely. We moved to Ramstein. I went to school in Ramstein, Deutschland, or Germany. As a teenager, we lived in this apartment out with mostly Germans, a few American kids scattered here and there. And when I was a teenager, I started to get lonely, and I threw myself into video games. That was when there was Goldeneye, Turok on Nintendo 64, Duke Nukem on N64, Return of the Jedi, Donkey Kong, Super Mario, so many games. These games were hard, and I went through and just beat them completely and felt so satisfied. It was a time where my parents were often having a hard time and fighting, and I was not comfortable and not liking myself. Video games were my way to escape. I tried to quit video games many different times in my life, and I always came back to playing video games whenever I didn't know what else to do with myself, which is how I ended up eventually being a professional gamer.

Let's jump into being a professional gamer and why I quit that. Maybe I'll do a live stream in the future going into video game addiction and more of that big picture. But I titled this Jerry Banfield Gaming Stories and Why I Quit Being a Professional Gamer, so we'll focus on where I had this dream that I could be a content creator who played video games.

Eight Nukes In One Night

That started when I was on YouTube. I created a channel in 2011 and made a few videos. At the time I was playing lots of Call of Duty Zombies and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. One of my highlights, before I ever created content, was getting eight nukes in one night playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 — the original version, not this new version they launched recently. Back in 2009, I got Modern Warfare 2 right when it came out, and I dropped eight nukes in a single night, absolutely destroying lobbies. If you don't know, in Ground War you had 18-person lobbies, and those lobbies are just people swearing and going off and being nasty to each other. That was the pinnacle of my accomplishment in gaming in 2009 and 2010. To get a nuke, you had to get 25 kills in a row without dying. Some nights I would often get one or two nukes, but one night I worked up to eight. I remember one night I was drunk. I dropped three nukes drunk one night and was so proud of myself, like getting drunk and still owning those kids. In one game, my friends and I — three of us — had nukes in a single game. It was hard to get nukes, because if you got 25 kills in a row in team deathmatch, it was over at 75 total on nine-player teams, but usually you'd get them on domination.

So I played a lot of games with my friends, especially when I moved home with my parents. I just threw myself into gaming. I remember my dad always saying, "Boy, if you could just get paid to play those games, you'd have it made." Then, once I started a YouTube channel and a business online, at some point I started thinking, as I was watching other people's tutorials for games on YouTube, that maybe I could make YouTube video game tutorials as well.

Getting Sober Made It Possible

But as long as I was drinking, I knew I couldn't really do anything with gaming, because I couldn't even keep my own business decent back when I was gaming and drinking. And I knew I could never do something like live stream as long as I was drinking, because the stuff I'd say would be way too outrageous and get me canceled or banned — though it turns out I can do that sober too. I then got sober in 2014, and I've done an entire dedicated video to that, which is on my channel. If you struggle at all with alcoholism, or you'd just like to hear my story, I recommend watching that. It's called AA Speaker from Sad, Drunk to Happily Sober, 9 Years. I went two hours into how I got sober. So getting sober was a big part of me being able to be a professional gamer, because I could be at full capacity. I loved playing video games, and I always thought that if I could just do anything with my life all day, it'd be play video games.

So right around 2014 and 2015, I started just testing out doing little gaming videos here and there. I had uploaded some games of playing like Titanfall and Call of Duty. I just uploaded some random gaming videos. Hardly anybody watched any of them. I was also teaching on Udemy at the time. I was very interested in learning new skills I could teach and having fun doing it, which kind of coalesced into me wanting to figure out how to live stream games, so I could teach live streaming games and so I could actually have fun and play the games myself. At the time, I didn't see it as a serious way to earn money at all, because on Udemy I was making lots of money — tens of thousands of dollars a month on Udemy. I thought it'd be fun to learn how to stream video games and to do that as a hobby, and essentially use my gaming skills in my business and make it a part of my teaching.

So that's what I did in 2015 and 2016. I learned to live stream games online. Being sober, I got confident that my mouth wouldn't get too out of control during my gaming stuff. I started playing all these games and recording all my games. The first thing I did, I'd just record all my gameplay and then upload my highlights. At the time, I was not thinking very much about whether something's actually watchable or not. I'd just upload all kinds of random videos. I didn't even have a camera in most of my early ones, but I kept upgrading my setup. Eventually, I got my setup where I had a decent mic and a decent camera.

Search And Destroy And The Friends I Made

I filmed one of the first videos I was really proud filming. I was playing search and destroy. That was the main game mode I had played in Call of Duty at this point for close to 10 years. Search and destroy is teams of six, at least it was back when I used to play it. You do a two- or three-minute round where one team would have a bomb, and they would have two bomb sites to plant at. If one team was eliminated, the other team would win that round, and the first to win four rounds — so a maximum of seven total games — would win. I had struggled so much over the years to be a decent search and destroy team member, usually playing with people way better than me. And that's how I met a lot of my friends online whom I'd never met in person. I met them in random search and destroy lobbies. We would get in these lobbies and just start talking, and occasionally you'd find people you liked hanging out with. One of my friends from high school originally got me into playing Call of Duty search. And some of the people I met back when I was really lonely and living by myself and drinking all night ended up being my friends.

I played a lot of Call of Duty search and destroy all the way to 2015 and 2016, when Black Ops III came out. I played this one Call of Duty search and destroy game where I was almost never the person who'd carry the whole team. Our team, the game started off, oh, I went, oh — and two, meaning I died twice and didn't kill anybody in the game, which was pretty disappointing. And I was sick that day as well. I was just recording my gameplay.

The best game I ever played, and the video nobody watched

I remember saying on the video, "Okay, enough of this. I'm going to drop six kills next round." I don't know if I'd ever dropped six kills in a single round in all the years I'd been playing Call of Duty, but your words are powerful. The next round, my entire team got slaughtered. Not one of them got a single kill. And I killed every player on the other team and defused the bomb. I was just blown away. I'm like, "Did you hear? I said I was going to drop six kills this round and I did it." That was one of my favorite videos I've ever filmed, even after all the other stuff I did. It came out of so many years of wishing I was a better search and destroy player, and then finally getting my best game ever. I uploaded that on YouTube, and the video never even took off. It got a few thousand views.

Discovering League of Legends, and being terrible at it

My very first big success with gaming videos, when I started to take it seriously, came out of playing League of Legends with my friends. Whenever I wasn't playing Call of Duty, I was playing League of Legends with my friends. League of Legends is kind of a top-down, five-on-five strategy, tower-defense style game, like Warcraft 3 defense of the ancients. You have this little character you control, you click with your mouse and kill these minions and take down the enemy's towers. There are five champions on each team. You build your champion out and try to fight your way into the opponent's base.

For some reason, I've been very good at first person shooters since way, way back, since high school, when I was dropping 3.0 KDs on Counter-Strike, just laying out lobbies. And I've been very good at real time strategy games like Starcraft. I somehow popped up into Grandmaster in Starcraft. A new game would come out and I'd push straight into the highest rank. But League of Legends, for some reason, I was horrible at. Absolutely terrible. No matter how hard I would try, I sucked at League of Legends. My friends all wanted to play it, and it was pissing me off.

Hiring a coach and live streaming the session

So I got so desperate to get better at League of Legends that I hired a former professional League of Legends player who was offering coaching for some small fee, like 30 euros or 50 bucks at the time for an hour. I paid 50 bucks to this coach to coach me at League of Legends. And I figured I might as well film this. At the time I was just testing live streaming on YouTube. I live streamed League of Legends with this coach. He was on Skype with the most ghetto setup compared to what you can do today. He's on a Skype call, it's lagging seriously, and I'm live streaming on YouTube with almost no one watching, maybe one or two people watching during the live stream most of the time. He's chatting. Maybe a maximum of 50 or 100 views total for the whole hour-long live stream.

So I did this hour live stream, which was enough to play one game. I got Volibear as my champion. The coach talked me through building my champion. I played jungle. He talked me through better movement strategies. And I went off. I absolutely went off that game, and our team won. I thanked the coach, turned the video off, and I quit playing League of Legends right after that. This was in 2016, around March. I quit right after that video because I tried to play a few more times. I did another coaching call with him, but I lost and got wrecked, and the live stream didn't work. So right after that, I quit playing League of Legends. I'm like, "I suck. This is never going anywhere. There's no reason for me to do this. I'm going to play Call of Duty. I'm tired of playing League of Legends." My friends kind of didn't even want to play with me because I was so bad. So I quit.

The algorithm picks it up

Meanwhile, this video is just sitting there on YouTube. And after about two months, the YouTube algorithm picks this video up and just blows it up all over the place. I'd done a nice title on it. I called it something like, "Can a pro coach help me get out of bed?" It was a really creative title. Nobody had ever done it before, and it was a problem a lot of people wanted help with. This video went nuts.

Keep in mind that up to this time, I had never done any gaming thing on my channel that had gotten any watch time. My channel had some videos that were hacking tutorials and Udemy and business stuff, but I had almost no gaming audience. Most of the stuff I'd done had been Call of Duty. The YouTube algorithm picks this video up and puts it out all over. It was getting five or ten thousand views a day on some days. People are pouring in off that video wanting more League of Legends content.

Going all in on gaming

At this time I was mostly playing Call of Duty, and I'd started also live streaming on Facebook. I was one of the very first people in the world to live stream on Facebook Gaming. The day, the very day you could live stream on Facebook, I was playing Call of Duty Black Ops 3 on Facebook Gaming. My reach was destroying. I was live streaming Call of Duty and Battlefield on Facebook, and my posts were going out to like a half million people each. My posts were ripping. So at the time I wasn't paying much attention to YouTube for gaming, and then my YouTube video goes viral, and all of a sudden there are all these people on YouTube who want more League of Legends content.

At this same time I had just also gotten banned from Udemy, because Udemy didn't want to hear my opinions about what they were doing wrong. I'd gotten to be one of the top ten instructors and I had a huge following, and I was very publicly critical of them on several issues that they were sensitive about. So, long story short, Udemy banned me. And I had all this money, hundreds of thousands in sales that had come in and racked up in a bank. That's when finally I'm like, after all this journey of gaming, now I have a chance. I can be a professional gamer. So I decided to go all in on gaming. I'd live stream games every day. I started live streaming Call of Duty a lot on Facebook, and my videos were ripping. I was getting hundreds of viewers concurrently all the time. Sometimes it spiked up. I remember playing Call of Duty Zombies, Black Ops 3 Zombies on Zetsubou No Shima, first thing Sunday morning, and there were 700 people watching. My videos were just destroying on Facebook. I was not making any money at all, but I was getting massive reach. At the same time this League of Legends video went off, and I'm like, "I can do this. I can be a professional gamer for the first time."

The $10,000 computer and the multi-stream dream

So I went all in on gaming. I rented, actually rent-to-own, this $10,000 Mac Pro that could multi-stream using Wirecast. This was before there even was Restream. It could multi-stream to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and two others at the same time. I wanted to be on all these platforms, because I was getting huge reach on Facebook and huge reach on YouTube, and I'm like, "I might as well be on Twitch too." So I got this rent-to-own $10,000 computer, like a $300 a month payment for four years. I set it up using Wirecast, learned how to use Wirecast, made courses teaching how to use Wirecast, and started multi-streaming. I'm live on Facebook, before it even had Facebook Gaming. I'd play Call of Duty one day, League of Legends another day, get in and play Battlefield. There were a lot of people watching me game.

And I was really struggling to monetize it, because at the time live streaming games just was not a thing. Nobody donated. I tried membership programs. I tried Patreon. Nobody signed up for that. Everybody wanted to play with me, and everybody would complain when I wouldn't play with them, but nobody wanted to pay anything. It's still crazy to me to look at what we've got today, and how people take it so for granted that they'll throw five bucks at five different streamers on one platform or another, be a member, join their Patreon. That's crazy to me, because when I started this, nobody would pay. It just wasn't something people were used to doing. At the time I was becoming very frustrated with the lack of income. Even though I had huge reach, with so many people watching my gaming videos and so many people commenting, and my live streams for League of Legends snowballing, the money wasn't there.

What virality did to my coach

I hired the original coach for the video that went viral, and his Skype got blown up for coaching requests. He raised his rate from $50 an hour to over $300 an hour, and even initially refused to do another call with me at all, because he got blown up so much off the video going viral. The live stream originally showed his actual Skype on it, and everybody in League of Legends was hitting him up for coaching sessions. He got really pissed off at suddenly going viral after having this one call with me. I really wanted to work with him some more, but he wouldn't. So I ended up hiring this kid who was 18 and didn't have the presence that the other coach did, but he was really good at League of Legends. We did a bunch of live streams together. Some of the live streams with him ripped and got to 100,000 views themselves. The one with the first coach went to over 800,000 views.

And when I was on YouTube, again there were no memberships, no donations. There were viewers. Hundreds of viewers would just pour in. This is where I started to really experience the negative sides of being a professional gamer. There were so many nasty comments, and it hurt my feelings so much. It was crazy. Now, I'd had one-star reviews on Udemy. I'd had lots. I'd been banned from Udemy and seen all kinds of things. Most people mostly were supportive of me, but some people obviously were critical.

The trolls that came with gaming

In all the things I had done in my whole life, these gaming videos were bringing out the absolute most toxic jerks I had ever seen. I posted a picture of my daughter on my Facebook page, and somebody just destroyed it, talking about how ugly she was. She was a baby, and somebody posted this nasty comment about how ugly my daughter was, right there on my Facebook page. My wife got really hurt by that, and she told me, "I want you to keep us out of your social media stuff. I don't want you posting pictures of us. These people are so nasty." And gosh, this was only the beginning of what I was going to experience.

People hurt my feelings. The trolls. I would be doing these League of Legends streams constantly, and people would just pile on: "You suck at this game. Quit streaming. You're a loser. Good thing this coach is here, you should let him play for you. Kill yourself." Constantly. Constantly nasty, negative comments all the time. And I started to get pissed off in another way too. If I played League of Legends on YouTube, a ton of viewers would pour in and watch and watch. But if I played Call of Duty, almost nobody would come watch on YouTube. Then I would play Call of Duty or Battlefield on Facebook, and people would pour in on Facebook, but everybody would be whining that they wanted to get in my lobby and play with me.

I didn't want to play with them, because a lot of the time they were bad at the game and they complained, and it ruined the quality of my show. But I didn't know how to say no. If somebody ever actually gave five bucks, I felt like I had to get them in the lobby, and in every stream after that. So I would get these people in the stream who were just toxic and complaining. They gave me five bucks, maybe twenty bucks one time, and then they would just complain, and be bad at Zombies, and bring the whole vibe of the stream down.

Plenty of money, no patience

After just six months of being a professional gamer, I had spent and spent money. I even paid for some ads to try to promote my videos. I tried all these memberships to get people to sign up. The crazy thing, looking back, is that at the time I had plenty of money to just be conservative, not spend too much, take my sweet time, and play for years. I had made so much money on Udemy that I easily could have taken it easy, had fun playing video games for years, and gently and slowly monetized it. But I was massively impatient, because at the time I was also the primary income earner for the family. My wife was staying home with our daughter. When I was on Udemy, I was giving her five thousand dollars a month, plus paying all the bills and her student loans. I really liked making all that money.

After six months of gaming, despite having huge amounts of views, I got disgusted with the lack of income. At the time I was one of the top League of Legends streamers. I made the front page of Twitch one day on Call of Duty Zombies. I was the top gaming streamer on Facebook, because almost nobody else was streaming on Facebook back then. Sometimes my posts would go out to over a million people. If you look at the reach on them now, it was nuts how good it was. But I was also hurt by so many of the comments. Every name you could imagine being called, somebody would come in and say it. Every angle someone could criticize your gaming, every way you supposedly sucked at Zombies, they found it.

Right before I quit gaming, I made some tutorials on YouTube for Call of Duty that finally started to go off. I made this tutorial for the Revelations Zombies map in Black Ops 3, and it went off and got hundreds of thousands of views. It was finally giving me a Call of Duty audience on YouTube. So I was in a perfect position, right at the end of 2016, where I could multi-stream on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. There were so many people who watched. I had so much love and support. But it all wasn't good enough, because I wasn't making enough money, and I was very impatient to start making more.

How I got pulled into crypto

That is how I got into doing crypto all the time. What I saw was that I didn't really have enough time and attention to do both gaming and crypto, and crypto looked like I could make tons of money. It was 2016. I could see Bitcoin and some of these altcoins were really going to move. I was also trying to regiment myself and force myself to play League of Legends every day, because for some reason I cared about YouTube views more than anything else, and the YouTube views on League of Legends were so good. The Twitch and Facebook views were decent, but the YouTube views for League of Legends were just ripping, and the community was the most talkative and engaged on those videos. So I felt like I had to play League of Legends, and I set this mental thing up that I was going to play it every day on YouTube.

Right after I did that, I got so burnt out and disgusted with gaming that I quit playing video games. I remember taking a walk and thinking, what would my life be like without video games? I had not asked that question. I had just been playing straight for so long at that point, and I really wanted to know what my life would be like without gaming. So I got fully into crypto. I quit playing games. I started making music. For a year and a half, from the end of that year, I quit streaming games. I did one last League of Legends live stream on Christmas day that was no fun. Plenty of people watched. No money, no fun. I got so burnt out that I quit on Christmas day. I remember buying a bunch of crypto, buying a bunch of Dash, which was about to set up one of the first big things I did in crypto.

I quit playing games for a year and a half, and the entire time people relentlessly came asking: "Please do some more League of Legends videos. Please do some more Call of Duty videos. I miss you gaming." The entire year and a half, people were absolutely relentless. Please come back to gaming.

Blowing up in crypto, then the crash

I started making music, and I blew up in crypto. My crypto channel became one of the very top channels in crypto on YouTube. I was getting more views on my crypto videos than I was on my gaming videos, except for that one viral League of Legends one. My crypto videos were making huge amounts of money too. There were all kinds of people who wanted to sponsor me. I was making money through affiliate programs, and the money was just ripping from crypto. For the next year and a half, I focused on crypto and making music.

But then the crypto market came crashing down. I had gotten so high up in the crypto world that I saw all these insider secrets and how disgusting it is. It's paying for this and paying for that, and you make this money, and you cut me in. It's all this hierarchy where you have to do what you're told. I could see the inside and the lies and the filth, and I was disgusted with crypto. So I sold all my crypto, taking massive profits, loading up hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, paying off huge amounts of debt, continuing to be the primary wage earner for my family, and even getting my wife to invest in crypto and giving her thousands and thousands out of the crypto earnings too. And then, in 2018, the crypto market crashed.

I got disgusted with everything. My music streams on Twitch had, after a year and a half, finally built up to about five people who enjoyed watching me stream music, but I thought about how stupid that felt. Meanwhile, a year and a half after I quit gaming, I still knew so many people were asking me to game. I knew that if I went back to gaming, there would be a much bigger audience there. And Facebook launched their gaming program in 2018, and I got all fired up about gaming again, because I honestly didn't know what else to do with myself. My crypto content, my music content, everything else I was doing as a creator came crashing down due to my own impatience and quick-money mindset.

Diving back into gaming in 2018

In 2018 I said, "Alright, this is it. I'm going to be a professional gamer. Here's my chance. I know I'll have all these people. I have all this experience." And I dove back into being a professional gamer, right when Call of Duty Black Ops 4 came out and right after Facebook Gaming was launched. I was one of the top gamers on Facebook pretty quickly. I was playing Black Ops 4, and a lot of the people who had missed me gaming came rolling back in. My streams started growing. By this time, Facebook had actually built things in like supporters, where people pay five dollars a month, and I started having a lot of fun. I played my first battle royale ever in Call of Duty Black Ops 4, and I thought it was so much fun. I got into playing the battle royale, and the audience started building. The community started building. The support was there.

But again, the money issue was really pissing me off, because I had made so much money on Udemy and so much money in crypto, and all I did playing games was keep spending more than I was making every month. I was getting into this huge financial insecurity. Meanwhile, my Facebook gaming videos were doing great. We got up to 70 or 80 people on Facebook who were giving five dollars a month to support me, which was an absolute fantasy compared to 2016. Everything looked like it was working in my favor. My community was growing. I focused just on Call of Duty. My YouTube videos were getting watched. I was streaming on Facebook and gaming on Twitch. Externally, you'd think this was going great.

I did games for a year, from 2018 to 2019, and what happened was that after about a year, I got really pissed off at the lack of income again. And again, if I had just kept my expenses low and focused on having fun gaming and making a show worth watching, there was enough income. But I was trying to grow so fast. I was doing things like spending money on Facebook ads to promote my Facebook page and get more viewers. My initial anchoring bias had me all screwed up, because when I streamed gaming on Facebook in 2016, my posts were ripping and going out to hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of people on every stream. Now the engagement rate was pretty low.

But I had tons of viewers. And then when I came back, the viewership compared to where it was before was way less. And it all just didn't feel good enough for me. So that entire first run, from 2018 to 2019, it all just didn't feel good enough. But I did have lots of fun, and I'll hit some more of the high points.

Going viral, and getting knifed in front of a thousand people

My Facebook streams went off a few times, where there were just tons of people watching. And then embarrassing things would happen. For example, I was playing Call of Duty Black Ops 4. My stream went viral. There were over a thousand people watching. And my controller batteries died when we were in the final circle. I'm holding what I think was the best gun. I don't know if it was a ray gun, but it might have been a ray gun. My whole team's dead. I'm in a perfect position to go superhero. My controller dies. A thousand people watched me get knifed in the back. And the guy who kills me says he wonders if something happened with my controller, because I just sat there. I could hear the guy walk up to me, and he just beats me down and kills me.

The surprising thing with gaming was how much my feelings kept getting hurt. Because as good as it would feel to triumph, it was totally euphoric. It was euphoric to win that first Call of Duty Black Ops 4 Battle Royale game on PlayStation. I played all week and finally won my first game. And then on Xbox, I set up on the first day. I jumped on Xbox in the beta and I won on the first day, because I'd been playing on PlayStation all week and I was way better than everybody else. I almost immediately jumped in and won.

So there were some awesome, euphoric moments. There were a lot of euphoric moments, moments of playing together with a team of my viewers who were all supporting me, and we would just wreck a lobby. There were some really great moments, to be sure. I mostly focused on playing Call of Duty Battle Royale. I tried to play some other things, but I was frustrated that I couldn't really play anything besides Call of Duty Black Ops 4 in the Battle Royale mode. I'd play zombies and people would watch some, but people mostly wanted the Battle Royale all the time.

One of my best moments came when my entire team got killed. In this you'd have teams of four, a hundred people in a lobby. My whole team got killed, and I actually carried the team and won the game for them. There were multiple people shooting at me behind this rock, and I managed to take everybody out and win. It was such a beautiful, triumphant moment. And there were so many cool things that happened.

Innovating formats, costumes, and stand-up comedy

I tried these innovative formats on Facebook. I put my stream in a vertical format. I created and innovated so many things that worked for other people, that other people copied, that I did first. I put my stream in this vertical format, and my streams in this vertical format ripped, because it gave you this huge news feed impression. My streams were just ripping in this vertical format. Other people copied that and did it successfully themselves, and they used it even better than I did.

I had some fun times. I tried things like stand-up comedy. I put all these costumes on. I had a Batman costume, a Superman costume, an Iron Man costume. I was doing anything I could think of to try and increase my viewership and get more attention. But the sad thing was, underneath it, it all wasn't enough. And despite all of that, if you look from the outside, I had thousands and thousands of people watching every one of my live streams, often 100-plus viewers concurrently. I was playing with viewers. I was in a position for great success on Facebook gaming especially. My videos were getting watched on YouTube. People were following on Twitch. And again, I quit because of the money.

Self-sabotage and the lesson about making a good show

I'm going over my entire history gaming right now, and I'm just getting to the part around 2020. I'm amazed to recall how hard it was, and how I sabotaged myself, and how I was given so many opportunities in gaming that I really self-sabotaged and just threw away, chasing money. So in 2019 I quit gaming, even though there were so many people watching my Black Ops 4 streams who loved watching me. They loved watching me play solos.

One of the big lessons I learned is to focus on making a good show, first and foremost. Because I saw other people who focused on making sure they did a really good show, and they were good at saying no. All their viewers would want to play with them, and they'd be like, no, I'm playing solos. But I felt like I had to play with my viewers every day, because I felt like I wasn't making enough money and what I was doing was not good enough. I felt like I had to play with my viewers every day, and that if I wasn't playing with my viewers every day, I was never going to make it.

The problem was, it was not a very good show when I played with my viewers. So sure, the few people who'd get in my lobby would have fun, and some of them would often be toxic and do nothing but complain the whole game and bring the whole team down, and then I'd feel awkward and annoyed with them. The days I played solos, people loved watching me play solos. And then everybody would be asking to play with me, and I felt like I had to play with people. So again, I got myself into this position where I was doing too much, and it was all not good enough.

Uthena, and chasing money into debt

I started this website, which was my grand vision to make a whole bunch of money. And I could see I didn't have enough time to do gaming and Uthena. I thought Uthena would help me make a whole bunch of money, and gaming, in my mind, was just wasting my time and money. So again, in 2019, even though things were going in a great direction in my gaming, I quit again. And for an entire year, people begged me, please come back to gaming. Over and over again, people asked me to come back to gaming, and I said no for a year. In fact, I made multiple videos. I made a video when I quit gaming in 2016, and I made a video again when I quit gaming in 2019, explaining why.

And then 2020 came along. For my website, Uthena, I borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and spent all the money I had made on Udemy, which is so crazy now. If I had just saved my money and lived prudently, I easily could have been a professional gamer so much earlier, and had such a bigger audience. But my own impatience, cash, gotta make money today. And one thing that's hard when you do make huge amounts of money is that it can be easy to get big expenses with that. And when the money gets cut, it can be hard and slow to cut the expenses, as I found.

So by 2020, I got absolutely destroyed. I borrowed all this money on credit cards and business loans. I had managed to get my family collectively, including my wife's student loans and our house, into $650,000 in debt, with almost no income. And I was not very transparent about this with my wife, until I was at the point where I was borrowing money at 15-plus percent interest on credit cards, just to make minimum payments. And then I got clear with my wife, and she's like, you need to declare bankruptcy. She also decided she needed to get a job too.

Because our son at this time was a baby, he was like a year old. My wife had been freelancing a little bit, but she'd been mostly staying at home and relying on my income since we had our daughter in 2015. And I had said, you could be a stay-at-home mom, it's all good, stay at home, I'll make all the money. I even berated my wife for trying to make her own money at one point, even though she went to law school and she's an attorney. So my wife sets out to start making some real money, which then cuts into how much I can work too, because I just worked like crazy before this.

Burning out and selling the whole studio

But 2020 comes along, and I start grinding out online courses, getting desperate to try and make money. And I burn myself out to a degree I'd never been burned out with as a creator online before. I sold my entire studio. All of it. I had this beautiful six-monitor setup with the $10,000 computer I'd bought when I first started doing live streams for multi-streams. I sold everything. And that helped me get through financially. I sold it all.

And I started an in-person show in June 2020. Now, I know many of you would be like, why would you do an in-person show in June 2020? That was not the time to do an in-person show. I did an in-person show, and it was in Florida, so things were mostly going open normally. It wasn't like totally locked down like so many places were. I did a show at the gym that was just down the street from me. And there were actually like 20 or 30 people who showed up to my in-person show when I first started it. I then did this in-person show for a couple of months, and I said, I'm not doing anything online anymore. I'm tired of all this online crap. You're all being manipulated and ripped off with your time online. I hate being online.

I then finally crashed and burned completely. For the last couple of shows I scheduled, nobody showed up. It dwindled. Luckily there were like 30 people there from my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and some friends showed up and supported me. But the show wasn't that good. It was just me talking about myself most of the time. Which is fine if you can wash the dishes in the comfort of your own home, or walk the dog, or go to the gym, or drive in your car, like a lot of you do while listening. I did have some great gaming streams, and that's what we're talking about. So what worked well for me online did not work well in person. Because when you can have all this content online, you don't need to come in person and listen to someone lecture and talk about themselves.

So my in-person show finally crashed and burned after a couple of months. And then I'm sitting there in August 2020 feeling real stupid. I sold all my equipment.

Broke, broken, and asking for help

I did not want to get a real job. A fella has not worked a real job in a long time. I have not had a full-time job since 2010, when I was at the census, and that was a temporary job. I have not had a real full-time job since I was a police officer in 2009. I was not built for it. Everybody said I should just get a job, and I said nope. I would rather live in poverty than have a real job.

So in August 2020 I got really desperate. I felt absolutely broken and totally defeated, like everything I had done over the last four years had been one stupid decision after another. Like basically anything but what I did would have gone great. If I had just focused on gaming the whole time, I would have made it by then as a professional gamer. If I had just kept doing crypto, I would have made it just fine doing crypto. If I had just kept teaching, that would have worked too. I absolutely hated myself and everything I had done. I felt so stupid.

So I asked for help. I just got on Facebook Live and YouTube Live on my phone. By then people had stopped coming in person, and I had no idea what to do with myself. So I got on my YouTube channel and my Facebook page and said, guys, what do I do with myself? I have no idea what to do. I feel so stupid and so broken. And they said, why don't you play games again? Come back to gaming.

I said, I can't come back to gaming. I quit twice. I sold all my equipment. I have nothing. I do not have an Xbox or even a PC. I do not even have a computer at this point. I think all I had was an Apple laptop. I got rid of all my stuff. I said, guys, I don't have a computer, I don't have any gaming systems, I cannot come back to gaming. And they said, please, come on. We can't support you, we're locked in our houses, we don't have anything better to do. Please come back to gaming.

The trampoline vision

And I started to feel excited about gaming. I remember the day. I was jumping on my trampoline, and I had not played Call of Duty Warzone yet. This was one of the magical moments out of all my gaming experience. I remember imagining that I am jumping on my trampoline, getting myself into this really high, elevated state, and imagining that one day I could be a professional gamer. I imagined that even though it had not worked out through all the effort before, it was closer than it ever had been. And that if I could get really good at Call of Duty Warzone, I absolutely could make it.

At the time it seemed insane. I had not played any games in a year. I had not been that good at Blackout when I played it. But I had the vision that if I would just play some Warzone every day, and people were asking me to play Warzone, then this time I could do it. So I did.

The $600 ghetto PC and the Day One Xbox

I bought just a ghetto PC. I literally went on Facebook Marketplace and bought a PC that somebody had put together from junk parts for $600, because this was as broke as I had been in my whole life before. And I got one of my friends, who I had sent my Xbox to in the past, to send me my Xbox back. It was my Xbox One, my Day One Xbox One that I bought in like 2013. He sends me that Day One Xbox One back to me. So here I have got this $600 computer, and I buy some cheap webcam because I had sold all my webcams.

I tell you, I felt the epitome of stupidity at this point. I used to have a fancy hacker setup, a god-level gaming setup. And here I am in September 2020 with this $600 PC that can barely livestream and a Day One Xbox One that can barely run Call of Duty Warzone, and I'm streaming.

I start off playing some zombies to get myself back into it. I said, we don't need to jump into Warzone just yet, let me remember how to play games. So I jumped back into zombies. I got to like round 100 on one of the Black Ops 4 zombie maps, which was fun. And then I started playing Warzone. I remember when I first played Warzone, just getting my butt kicked. It was so hard. The map was so big. It was so overwhelming. But I knew it. I said, I know I can get really good at this. All I have to do is show up and keep learning and keep trying and let people teach me.

Going solo

So in September 2020 I just start playing Warzone, at a time when other people had been grinding it for six months. I just start playing, and I'm getting destroyed. I had a couple of the people who wanted me to come back to gaming play with me, but they were so toxic and complaining. I said, I'm never going to make it with these teammates. I have got to just play by myself. I can't keep having these annoying, toxic people dragging me down. I need to just play solos, because in solos I can control everything. It's all about me. And I'm kind of used to working solo. One of my strengths in terms of gaming is not playing with other people, it is doing it all myself.

So I learned from my previous experience gaming and from people-pleasing endlessly. I said, I need to put on a really good show for people. I can't just be letting these people who play games with me run it. Occasionally I can play with them, but I need to make a great show. I applied all the learning from before and I locked it down. I said, I'm going to make an awesome show. And I started playing Warzone every day. I said, if I just play Warzone every day, I know my brain will figure this out and get really good at it.

87 games to my first solo win

It took 87 games. Out of a 150-person, one-player-wins battle royale, it took me 87 games after a year not gaming. After 87 games I won my first Warzone solo game. That was one of my most euphoric moments in my whole professional gaming journey, that first Warzone solo game I won. I was streaming these on Facebook and on YouTube, and the audience built up rapidly with people confined in their houses and Facebook pushing livestreams to people, and people on YouTube.

Before I won that first game, I got second place at least five, maybe close to ten times. I started to get some strategies. After 87 games I won the first game, and then pretty quickly, maybe 30 or 40 games later, I won my second game. And then it started to just keep getting easier to win, and I started to develop more strategies.

Letting the haters rip

And then I realized I needed to stand out on Facebook gaming. I had to be clickbait. People were absolutely, disgustingly toxic, but I had this idea that if I wanted my streams to go viral, I needed to let all the haters chat. In almost everybody else's stream, if you came in and started talking crap about the streamer, they would ban you immediately or mute you. I let the haters rip me on my streams. I let the haters just destroy me. You suck at the game. You camper. My grandmother plays better than you. You've got kids locked in your basement. Every nasty thing, people just unloaded all their hatred on my livestreams.

And it went. I could see I was just missing one component. I realized I could make a really good show because my strategies were very effective. I learned how to win pretty quickly off strategy more than skill. The viewership was there, and I realized all I needed was to get this as clickable and watchable as possible. So I was just trying all these different ideas. I got some costumes like before.

The idea that made it blow up

One day I was seeing these girls just blow up on Facebook gaming, and they literally had a personality that was not interesting. The gameplay was not often that good, but they were a girl, and people would watch their stream and click on it just because they were a girl, including me. I said, I need to get something like that. So I was watching some of these girls who would stream in a tube top with their shoulders showing, so it looked like they weren't wearing anything, or they would put on bikinis, and I said, I need to get that kind of a vibe on my stream.

So I started streaming naked. I mean full on naked, but the camera was just from the shoulders up. I was literally naked in the studio. No undies, no shorts, no shirt, naked. And then my stream started to go viral.

When you combine my strategies, my vision with being a professional gamer was that I could bring love and positivity, all these spiritual teachings, to gamers, like I had needed when I was drunk and desperate and lonely. I could help people who were like I had been. I could help people awaken and get sober and have a better life. That was my vision, and it is very important to have a vision and a meaning behind what you are doing. That had been my vision the whole time I was streaming gaming, and in 2020 it was really needed. It wasn't needed as much in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, but it was really needed in 2020. People were in dark places, isolated in their houses, and what I had to offer, some spiritual hope and love, that message was really needed.

My Warzone playstyle was really toxic and effective, and I said, all I need is some clicks and clickbait and this thing is going to blow. And when I started streaming naked, my views absolutely rocketed. Everybody was seeing this dude. I was the first one to do this, and a bunch of dudes copied me. I would stream naked with my shoulders off, and everybody had to, they would see me streaming shirtless, click on the stream, and come in the chat and ask, why don't you have a shirt on? There were probably 50,000 people who did that. They saw me streaming shirtless.

What ended up happening is I eventually realized I could wear shorts and underwear. But my original idea was that if I showed up naked, I would also be really vulnerable and open. For weeks I streamed naked, and then I started to get paranoid that if the camera fell, we were all going to get a certain picture, and that was going to be it. So I started wearing shorts and underwear and I would stream shirtless. But then on Twitch you weren't allowed to have your male nipples out, so I started wearing this transparent tube top, because I was still multistreaming at this point. And then my Warzone streams on Facebook absolutely ripped.

Going viral on Christmas Day

I went hard viral on the algorithm on Christmas. Now think about what I'm about to say. I had quit gaming for a year. I started back in September 2020. By December 2020, three months later, I was the top Warzone streamer that was live on Christmas Day. My stream had something like two or three thousand people watching concurrently, and hundreds of thousands came through. The only reason I could do that is my previous experience over all the years and all the things I'd learned. I finally put all of those together. My titles were on point. My thumbnails were clickbait. My gameplay was toxic, and I allowed all of it. The haters would come in and complain, then their friends would come in and complain, then their friends would come in, and the comments got so toxic I often just felt disgusted after I got off the livestreams.

But I told everybody, right when I came back in September, that I wanted to be a professional gamer. I said I was desperate, I was broke, and I had no other ideas for what to do with my life. And people started dropping the fattest tips. After years of gaming with bigger audiences where almost nobody tipped, suddenly there were people dropping $200 tips. At the time I was making no money doing anything. I had something like $10,000 a month in debt payments that I had to ask my wife for. My wife cleaned out all of her investment accounts just to keep me making the minimum payments so I didn't default, and to keep my credit score alive so that I could potentially save my life if a program came along. And one did. The disaster loan program saved me completely in 2021. I was able to get out of all of my debt because of that government disaster program.

But at that point I was so broke and desperate, and I was very honest about it, that people were throwing huge tips in. I still have some of them. Somebody from Canada sent me a $100 Canadian bill in the mail. People started buying things from me. People gave me money to upgrade my camera and to upgrade my computer. I got a cheap used PlayStation for around $80 and tried playing on that, and I got a gaming PC that was barely good enough, but it worked better than the Xbox. The chat was insane. After many of those live streams, once I logged off, I felt so burnt out and depleted, like I'd been drained of all my energy, and I just hoped that it would help make other people's days better. There would often be thousands of nasty comments in that live stream. And if I played a live stream where I didn't win a game, I felt horrible. But it was amazing to watch how fast I grew.

The Juggernaut Easter egg

In December of 2020, or December or January of 2021, something amazing happened. They unleashed this juggernaut Easter egg. I usually played really campy and conservative, but when they released this Easter egg where you could get a juggernaut suit that came with a minigun and had something like 20 or 40 times the amount of normal health, and where killing somebody let you heal, that's when my content absolutely went insane. Most people didn't even take the time to learn stuff like this. I learned this Easter egg. I was watching all these other Facebook gamers and YouTube gamers, I watched how to do it, and I was one of the first people on Facebook gaming to stream this Easter egg all the time. I got disgustingly good at it. There were live streams where I'd win three, four, five Warzone solo games in a single stream. My gameplay with the juggernaut got to be unlike anybody else you were watching. I'd have this juggernaut suit half the time, and then I'd play aggressive and just rip lobbies.

People would absolutely curse me out with every nasty thing you can imagine. People started camping the entire Easter egg. I would get into a lobby and sometimes there would be five people camping me at every step of the game. I'd run into three people camping me in the beginning, they'd kill me, I'd come back and get in on another part, and there would be somebody in the subway who would kill me. I started having to delay my streams by 30-plus seconds just so I could get into lobbies where I wasn't getting camped. Sometimes people even figured out they would just queue repeatedly until they saw I got into a game. People were insane at how far they'd go to mess my stream up.

The god who ran me over with a truck

Then one day something happened. I was always prepared for amazing, unplanned moments to happen. I was again using the juggernaut, wrecking lobbies, and I was down to the final two with this other guy. I had full health. This guy ran me over and killed me with a truck. He blew a truck up on me and then shot me to finish me off. I didn't even know that was possible. A lot of people would have been totally toxic and nasty in that situation, but on my live stream I just praised this guy endlessly. I'm saying, oh my god, this dude is an absolute god, this guy is a god, he just wrecked me from full health, I've never seen anybody play that good. I went on and on like that for a minute, one to three minutes, talking about what a god this guy was.

What I didn't know is that guy was also a Facebook streamer. He was the top Mexican Facebook streamer in Call of Duty, one of the best Call of Duty players in Mexico, a professional gamer, which is why he'd been able to wreck me like nobody else ever had. This guy had 4,000 people watching his live stream, listening to me for one to three minutes talk about what a god he was. And his name was literally Deus Amir, and Deus means God. He raids me. Thousands of his viewers come over to follow me. That's where my live streams really hit their absolute peak in Call of Duty. Once his community all piled in, the algorithm was nuts. There were something like 300 to 1,000 people watching all the time when I was playing Call of Duty after that.

I kept telling people this is an example: if you're prepared to receive what you want, divine, perfectly orchestrated coincidences will happen to make that happen. At this point I started to be such a big deal that there were streams where people would give $700 or $800 in a single stream, which was more than I had made in a year of gaming with a way bigger audience in 2016. The amount of money that started coming in was nuts. I started upgrading all my equipment, getting a better camera, a better streaming PC, moving to a two-PC setup, upgrading everything, and paying off my debts.

How I lost half my algorithm

And then something bad happened on Facebook. I changed my Facebook page from the old format to the new page experience. I was generally wanting to try something new. It instantly cut my algorithm in half. Changing to the new page experience was the worst thing I ever did for my Facebook algorithm. It instantly cut my entire reach in half, and other people who changed had the exact same thing happen. I was so mad, and I didn't get over being that mad.

I had also tried playing some other games on Facebook. For a few months I had a lot of fun getting really good at Warzone, but I started to get bored showing up and playing Warzone every single day for three to five hours. This is one of the most shocking things about being a professional gamer. Back when I lived at home with my parents, I would grind Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for hours and hours every day and it never got boring. I'd just grind and play for hours and it was fun. I'd play some other games here and there. But I was shocked at how fast I got bored with Warzone after I got to the point of doing the Juggernaut Easter egg. They took the Juggernaut out, but they still had Specialist, and I would win games on almost every livestream.

To put that in perspective: if it was totally fair, based on the amount of time it takes to win a Warzone game and the number of players, it should take you anywhere from 30 to 70 hours of gameplay to win one single Warzone solo game. But I was winning on average every three to five hours, and I was getting top 10 about 50% of the time. I was in lobbies with some of the best players in the world. The guy who had the most wins in all of Warzone killed me in one of his lobbies. I ran into lots of other streamers in my lobbies. And I was running into cheaters too.

Cheaters and burnout

Cheaters absolutely annihilated me, because my whole strategy was about stealthy gameplay. My strategy countered these aggressive, really good players who weren't cheating. It countered their strategies really well, because I would hide, camp a corner, and put myself in positions that let me beat somebody who was way better at gun skill than me and way better at running in and clearing rooms. I would strategize in a way that they'd come up the zip line when I had got into position, and I'd kill them and they had no chance. Or I would get into a cargo truck and run them over. I played these really good strategies, but hackers could just annihilate me because they'd have wall hacks.

I also started to realize a lot of the other streamers on Facebook were cheating. I had some of the absolute best content out there for being a player of genuine skill, along with a few others like Stone Mountain. A lot of the other top Facebook creators were cheating. They were blatantly cheating. If you knew how the game worked, you could see it. It was amazing how I had a few months where learning Warzone gave me all this love and passion for what I was doing and it was so exciting, and it's amazing how quick that faded. I started to get really resentful and annoyed that these other people who were cheating and just ripping these lobbies up were getting way more views than me. People were saying my gameplay sucked compared to this cheater. These people had nasty personalities, talking crap the whole time, cheating, and wrecking me and the algorithm. At the same time my algorithm got cut in half by changing my Facebook page to the new experience, and when I tried playing a few other games that I really wanted to play, the algorithm just wouldn't even show those to anybody.

Trapped by the algorithm

I would have thousands, and sometimes ten to a hundred thousand views per livestream on Warzone. And then I'd try and play another game and the algorithm wouldn't show hardly anybody that I was even live. People would say, "Oh, you streamed? I didn't even know you were live today." Because the algorithm wanted a certain type of content, and if you didn't make that content it wouldn't show you at all. I remember being so annoyed. I'd have like three or four people watching when I played a different game besides Warzone, and I'm thinking, this sucks, I have to play Warzone or I get no reach. I have nothing. I'm like a slave at this point. Or, to put it a little less severely, just an employee. I have to play Warzone or I get nothing.

And then I'd play Warzone, and on the livestreams if I didn't win I would just feel horrible. I felt like I wasn't good enough and all the haters were right. A lot of times I would get off my livestream feeling like crap. What had been so exciting just a few months earlier, such a passion, was gone. It's the passion and the excitement that fueled all that growth, because a lot of the people who played games weren't passionate and weren't excited. They were just grinding and complaining and hacking and being really toxic, sometimes funny or really good at the game, but just personalities people could relate to. My passion and enthusiasm set me apart and got me growing, but when I started to get full of anger and resentment is when things went downhill.

After just a few months I started to really resent gaming on Facebook and started to feel trapped. Ironically, about that same time is when I got to finally be a Facebook partner. I had some glitch with my page, because I had an old page created in 2013, whereas probably 99 percent of the gaming pages had been created way after that. There was some glitch on my page. Most of the time people would have gotten invited to be a partner way earlier, but I was so annoyed Facebook wasn't making me a partner. And Hitman at the time, they were not allowing him to be a partner even though he was getting way more viewers than I was. I felt so resentful and annoyed that Facebook wouldn't give me a partner offer that I was ready to quit streaming on Facebook, and I started trying to move people over to Twitch and YouTube. All the unhappiness of the times I'd gamed before came back.

The partner contract nobody talks about

But then Facebook let me be a partner. People suggested I manually contact support and ask them to open my page to apply to the partner program. The support person told me in the email they couldn't do anything, but then the next day my page let me apply to be a Facebook partner. And I realized I got this crappiest little partner contract, no guaranteed income, a bunch of repulsive conditions. All kinds of subjects: not only could you not talk about some subjects, there were other subjects where you had to say exactly what Facebook wanted you to say. I wanted to be a partner so bad, and then I blatantly started violating the conditions from the very beginning, because there was some stuff on there that was incredibly disagreeable to me. But you couldn't be a partner unless you agreed to accept these terms.

I realized all of the top partners that had the biggest audiences on Facebook were being silenced on very important, very relevant, very hot topics. All of the partners were being silenced. This is where things really started to unravel. And this was long before I took the action of changing my race, which went crazy viral and then led to Facebook removing me from the partner program and demonetizing my page, calling it hate speech, even though that's clearly within the terms and conditions, and clearly not hate speech. Other people, including celebrity authors and best sellers and radio hosts like Charlemagne the God, called Facebook out for being incredibly hypocritical about that. Some black content creators were incredibly supportive, others were incredibly toxic, saying, "Look, Jerry, there's no reason he can't change his racial identification, it's within the law, it's legal."

But really, back in April 2021, like eight months, ten months before I changed my race, I was disgusted with Facebook. Disgusted to see the inside, to see the terms that were kept secret from the public. I'd had no idea that their very top streamers, the ones they watched, the ones they fed all this money to, were being silenced on some of the most important issues in the world at the time. Facebook was silencing all their top creators unanimously, and I refused to be silenced. I thought, you know what, I'm just going to take this partnership and I'm going to ride it while it lasts, and I'm going to run my mouth and say whatever I want to say, because I got my goal. If they take it away I don't even care. Screw them, if this is how it really works. I have nothing to lose. And ironically, I started to feel really free from there.

Charging $300 for a co-stream

Again, the money. I started to get annoyed with the money, and the lack of money I was making compared to these other creators who were cheating. I got resentful at my algorithm reach, and this is when I started really going nuts and being open about things. There were so many people who wanted to play with me that I thought, you know what, if you really want to play with me, put down the money. I had a huge audience still, even after being halved by the algorithm from the page change, and even after I got to be a partner. I had this huge audience and I was really tired of playing Warzone. So I started charging. I put this post out saying that if you pay $300 I will do a livestream with you for three hours playing Warzone, and I will promote your Facebook page. And that went viral. People were unbelievably toxic about it.

The first few people who bought the livestreams, they made way more money and got way more followers. It was an incredibly good deal. When I put this post out saying I was charging $300 for a co-stream, lots of other streamers were doing this on the down low. Lots of other streamers had these little back-end programs where if you asked about playing with them they'd tell you no, and then if you went into one of their groups and asked again, then somebody would tell you to send money over, you send them this much, and then they'll get you a spot on the livestream. I was just being open and transparent about what other people were doing secretly. And I made it very clear: the first few people who bought the livestream, people flooded onto their pages and dropped hundreds of dollars of donations and stars on them. They blew up. They got huge. They got a ton of value.

But even that was unsatisfying. And I was shocked that even though I was in the middle of my dream, I didn't like it. Being a professional gamer was sucking and I hated it, but I didn't see a way out, because this is my dream, this is what everybody expects me to do now. Even though for me it was often never good enough, you've got tens of thousands of people who are watching your videos every day and showing you to their friends and their family and supporting you. My supporter group got up into the hundreds of people. I didn't have anything else set up to make money either. It was the only thing I had going to make money, and once I got in the partner program I got some additional streams of income, and those started ripping too.

The most toxic my streams ever got

But with the paid co-streams, the toxicity in my streams went to the highest level it's ever been. Every other comment was somebody doing general character assassination: that all you care about is money, you're disgusting for offering these co-streams, you suck at playing the game, you don't play with any of your fans, you don't care about your community. I had a group of moderators who were all moderating, and then they all stabbed me in the back at the same time by quitting moderating and putting out all these posts and videos with all this criticism of me. They stopped watching, told all their friends to stop watching. It was miserable. It was shockingly miserable. I was surprised at how much I hated it.

Now, there were some days that I felt awesome. I would go on and win four games, and the chat would be more positive than usual, people would give me a bunch of money, and I'd feel like, you know what, that was okay today, that was fun. But I still felt drained at the end of the stream, like I needed to save all the energy I had in my entire life just to do my livestream. Whereas today I feel very full of energy all the time and nothing drains me like that. I even stopped taking my kids to the store sometimes during this time.

Then I got so pissed off at one point that I stopped playing Warzone, and I did this really toxic stream where I started calling out all these people on Facebook for what frauds they were, for being cheaters and fakes. I went off on a bunch of the top streamers on Facebook on this really toxic stream while I was playing SimCity. And then I quit playing Warzone for like a month, and of course everybody's pissed off.

Mythic in Magic, and still not free

I started playing Magic: The Gathering. This was, I guess, right before I started doing the paid co-streams. I started playing Magic: The Gathering and I got up into Mythic in a month, just playing every day, a game I hadn't played hardly at all since I was a kid. I got up into the very highest rank of Magic: The Gathering Arena within a month. The gaming skill is amazing. And I had all these visions of being a pro Magic player and getting out of playing Warzone. But I realized that if you're stuck playing Warzone or you're stuck playing Magic, it doesn't really matter. I don't want to show up and play a video game like it's a job, because it's not fun to play a video game like it's a job. I don't know what it is, but playing a video game for a job is just not fun. It's a whole different thing from playing it just to play it.

Meanwhile, my family is very accommodating. My wife makes sure to take the kids so I have time to stream every day. Then by the time we get to like June, July 2021, I am really burnt out on playing Warzone. I can't stand Warzone anymore. At that point I was making thousands of dollars a month from paid co-streams, the very week that burnt me out.

Playing with the pros ruined Warzone for me

There is a company that sells coaching and co-streams, and they have some of the best Warzone players in the world, although probably at least half of them cheat, at least back then. This company paid for four co-streams in one week, and I played with some of the very best Warzone players in the world. One of them was a leader in kills at one point. I played with him, and I am pretty sure he was hacking, but maybe not, and he carried the whole team. What I found surprisingly was that this was not more fun than what I was used to. I loved being the center of attention playing Warzone solos. When I am playing with these other people, I am just the ball getting dragged along for the ride. I think of Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys, just getting dragged along for the ride. Nobody even cares about me playing here, and these other players are so good that I just totally looked like I sucked by comparison. They played totally different, aggressive strategies, and all I did was go die, they bring me back, die, get the team spotted, get one kill, die.

The paid co-streams absolutely ruined Warzone for me even though I was making so much money doing them, and I was so confused. If you remember, I quit gaming twice because I was not making enough money, but here I was in the summer of 2021 getting lots of views and making lots of money. You would think from the outside it is all good, right? No. From the inside I was miserable. I felt it was never good enough, it was never enough money. For a week it would be good, but then I am not getting as many views as I got last week, HitmaN is getting way more views and way more money than me. It was never good enough.

Retro games destroyed the algorithm

That led me to start innovating. I got into retro games a little bit in 2021. I played GoldenEye one day and I noticed my GoldenEye live stream got all these views after I was live. Because I was absolutely disgusted with playing Warzone and I could not stand it anymore after less than a year of playing a lot of it, I tried playing some retro games, and those started to rip because hardly anybody else was playing retro games on Facebook at that time, especially nobody with an audience. I started playing these retro games and they destroyed in the algorithm. Not all of them, but most of my Warzone streams would not get watched that much while I was actually streaming. On these retro game streams there would be the usual amount of people watching live, but then some of them would get almost a million views after I was live. Things went to a whole other level with the retro game streams. I hit my record highs. I had a few months where I made more than $10,000 in a month, mostly off of Facebook ads.

I got so tired of the nasty comments, the endless nasty comments. People are amazed now, when I am doing my crypto streams, how I handle the critics. These little crypto critics are nothing. All they do is insult my investing intelligence, and I do not even have much of an ego for my investing intelligence. I had a massive gaming ego, and people insulted that so much. The criticisms that come now are like nothing. I have seen it, I have heard it a thousand times. At this point, say whatever you want. I think maybe we will cover whether I go back to gaming at the end to wrap up.

It is kind of like you doing martial arts as a hobby for fun, and after a while it felt like a job and did not feel like fun. I got really burnt out on playing Warzone, and I told everybody I am quitting Warzone, and I started playing these retro games.

Shutting up the haters

I got so tired of all the haters being nasty that I shut them up. I made my chat supporter only, and there was endless complaining about that. There were people who had stuck by me for quite a while through all kinds of stuff, and they went off, god forbid they have to pay $5 a month to comment in my live stream. Some of them had given me hundreds of dollars, but they were disgusted, how dare I ask for $5 a month in order to comment to keep all the haters out. I had moderators, and they would ban people and remove the comments, but I would still see them most of the time, so I would get my feelings hurt anyway. Lots of people who were banned would just use their fifth, sixth, eighth, or tenth account and come back on anyway. So I switched to supporter only chat, another move that pissed a bunch of people off.

A road trip and getting the fun back

I started doing these retro games. I was really burnt out in June 2021, I went on a week-long road trip with my family, and I came back and I started having fun gaming again. That was an awesome breakthrough. I played Duke Nukem 64, or Duke Nukem 3D. I had so much fun playing those. I played World War II Online, this game that I used to love and got banned from because I was in the high command and I did not like what everybody was doing, so I moved all the units into the training ground off the front line and they banned me for that. But I got another account on it and I played World War II Online. I played a bunch of these old games, NBA Jam, Super Star Wars, Super Mario, and these retro games started to just annihilate the algorithm. The amount of views and the money I was getting was absolutely insane. These retro game streams on average were pulling way more views than my Warzone streams. The craziest thing was I could do a retro game stream for an hour or two and it would get the same views that my streams on Warzone would need three, four, or five hours to earn.

For a while I was having a lot of fun. I went to the largest retro game store in Florida, like 15 minutes from my house, and I bought thousands and thousands of dollars of games from them. I bought all the retro systems. I had a Genesis, which I had never owned before. I had my Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and original Nintendo from being a kid. I bought a Switch, I got a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, I bought all that stuff, I bought a PlayStation 2 which I had not had forever. These retro game streams were just annihilating. For a few months I was happy. Facebook even featured me on the home page multiple times trying out new games and retro games. I was making so much money, and I was constantly always wanting to go higher and higher. It was never enough. I always wanted more views and even more money.

The friend, the coach, and GoldenEye

After the retro game streams, I had a friend over who had come to the Jerry Banfield show in person, a friend over to play GoldenEye. This guy was a real spiritual hippie type. I had hired him as a coach in 2020 when I had almost no money. I paid him a hundred dollars twice for an hour of coaching, and I still remember some of the stuff he talked about and how it helped me. My wife was outraged at me spending money for those two coachings with him, but it was really helpful, it opened my mind up, and I got into gaming a little bit again after that. I had this guy over to play GoldenEye, and when we played together that thing went out to millions of views on that livestream. People loved it, and I absolutely destroyed him at GoldenEye. The only time he beat me, I put his health up to like 20 times mine, and he finally beat me as I am spraying mags into him and he just three-shots me.

I was doing so well on Facebook gaming. I was at the peak, huge money and all kinds of views. Of course, the whole time people are begging me to play Warzone again. Please play Warzone, we like the retro games but play Warzone. So I started doing a few Warzone streams here and there. I mixed it up, some Warzone streams and some retro streams, and I finally opened the chat back up again.

Hiring a model, and my wife finally said yes

One of the funniest things I did is I realized that if I really wanted my livestreams to go off, what I needed instead of my kind of hippie-looking friend was to get a hot girl, like a model. If I could get a model to play with me on stream, I knew I would destroy this algorithm at a whole other level. So I put out a job opening on Facebook saying that I am hiring. I had asked my wife a bunch of times. She is very attractive and we have a great relationship, and I asked her so many times, please play with me on livestream, please. No, I am busy, I do not want to. She said no for the longest time. I had always wanted her to, but she never would do it. Finally I put this job post out on Facebook that I would pay $30 an hour for a model to come play. I maybe did not put it that specifically, but what I was looking for was a model, a very attractive girl, or maybe a really attractive dude, somebody really attractive and with a great personality to come play, and I would pay $30 an hour to play video games plus an ad revenue share.

There was a very attractive bartender who was also wanting to get into modeling locally, and within 24 hours she applied for the job. I am telling my wife, and I have an office in my backyard, so my wife is picturing these models, these bartenders and amateur models, coming over in her backyard to play video games. My wife finally gives in. She is like, okay, I will do one livestream with you a week, but you have to agree, no hiring people to come over and play with you. I am like, deal. So my wife and I start playing games together, and I loved doing that. Although sometimes we ran into trouble. She took all the pizzas on the team in one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. She did not know what she was doing, she was playing great, and she just kept stealing all the pizzas. I got pissed off, stop taking the pizzas, and she just kept getting all of them. Then we were really mad at each other, but silent about it, so we had a few uncomfortable streams. We played this one game where you are a little kid and your parents are...

Winning at Facebook gaming while dying inside

I was trying to get divorced, I was trying to keep my parents together, and Laura really didn't like that game we were playing, but we were playing together once a week and the livestreams with her were doing really well too. I was having fun gaming on Facebook. At the same time I was listening to a lot of conspiracy stuff, and I had this huge anger and resentment against Facebook about keeping all these creators silent. I was blatantly violating the terms of their agreement from the very beginning, because I felt like they had tricked me giving me this non-disclosure agreement. I was blatantly violating the terms the whole time and I was getting away with it. I was doing stand-up comedy with just crazy offensive jokes, because I was trying to help people laugh. People were struggling, and I thought, I want to help people laugh. People were getting really triggered with my stand-up comedy because I was pulling out some of the craziest stuff, and Facebook tolerated it. A bunch of people reported my page and said they were going to get me taken down. Facebook didn't do anything. I don't even know if they reviewed it, and I just continued trying to help people on Facebook every day.

The retro game videos were doing great, the videos with Laura were doing great, but there was a catch. If I didn't do some viral retro game or play Warzone, it fell apart. I had this game called Returnal that I really fell in love with on PlayStation 5, and it was really getting to piss me off that hardly anybody except the most dedicated people, like Michael and Lisa, would come by if I played Returnal. I just felt like such an employee. If I didn't play freaking Warzone or play retro games, I got nothing, and many of the retro games I played didn't work either. They didn't go off in the algorithm, people didn't like them, but the ones that did go off would get hundreds of thousands of views. In November 2021 I did a video showing how I made like $12,000 in a single month on Facebook gaming. The people from the Facebook research team scheduled a video call with me to ask how I was going off in the algorithm so hard. That's how well things were going on Facebook. It's real hard to get anybody from Facebook to provide a meaningful contact with you, and the research team scheduled a video call with me to talk about how I was doing so well in the algorithm.

Successful on the outside, trapped on the inside

Underneath all this I felt like what I was doing was really pointless. It was draining my energy. I really resented doing it and felt trapped, and on some level I was looking for a way out. But I told my followers that I'll never quit gaming again, and it felt wrong to me to quit gaming even though I wanted to, even though I was burnt out. There were times where I'd kind of protest the system and I'd just sit there and play Returnal and complain about the Facebook algorithm. I had people come follow me on Twitch. I was also the one who helped all the Facebook partners figure out that your partner agreement did not prevent you from streaming on other platforms, and in many cases it didn't even prevent you from multistreaming. If you just read the terms and conditions carefully, you just had to give Facebook what they asked for, and once you did that you could multistream.

So even though from the outside you would think things were going so good, on the inside I wasn't happy a lot of the time. I was full of anger and resentment, and it wasn't good enough. I was surprisingly unsatisfied so often. I felt like what I was doing was meaningless. I would play games that I loved, like Returnal, which I had so much fun playing, and it was like I shouldn't even have streamed at all. Because I'd play Returnal, then my next Warzone stream the algorithm would be less, the audience would be less, because so many people scrolled by my Returnal stream, and the Facebook algorithm would crap on me on my next stream and not show my posts to the people who wanted to watch Warzone. So my viewership often went down whenever I played anything I really wanted to play.

I know this sounds like spoiled problems, but that's the thing. When you're playing video games, it's not a real job, and it ruins it being a real job. So I got back into playing a bunch of Warzone when the Pacific Warzone came out. That was fun for a little while. On just my seventh game playing Warzone Pacific I managed to win, which I was really impressed with myself on. But again I got burned out playing Warzone, and I went back to just grinding out a bunch of Returnal and retro games, and my views often were just spiraling down. Even though I'd get featured on the homepage, my streams were going off lower, and I was getting continually more and more unhappy. I was continually sharing a lot of these conspiracy theories, which there's definitely some truth to lots of them. I'm not going to get into details of which ones and what they said, but I was sharing all kinds of stuff that I had agreed not to say on my Facebook partner agreement. I figured being a partner was very temporary anyway.

The idea that changed everything

Then one day in February 2022 I woke up, and it's like I'd pulled this idea out of the ether. This idea latched onto me and wanted to be out there in the world, and it could see I would instantly execute it. The idea was that if you can change all these other characteristics about yourself... and I'm going to intentionally not be specific about this, because being specific about this was part of the reason for all the hate on my race change. So I rationalized, and it made perfect sense to me, and this idea grabbed hold of me that I can change my race. That seemed like the most fun thing I could possibly do. It seemed like a dream come true. I'd never realized before that a race is a self-identified characteristic. That's how it's defined legally in the US anyway. It's self-identified, it's not something that is actually predefined. It is self-identified legally in the US. The idea caught in my head that morning, that you can change your race, and I thought, God, that would be so awesome.

In my head I pictured that this was just going to get celebrated. Wow, look how forward-thinking and woke Jerry is. Some people titled their videos "woke backfire," like in the euphoria of Jerry being woke, this is so great, we're all woke, I'm going to change my race, and then the music stops. Wait, hold up, would you say that's... no, that's not allowed. But I understood there would be some people who would think that I couldn't do that, so then I gave examples of how people change things, that to me seemed like stuff in a blatant, in-your-face way to do it. And that went viral like nothing I've ever done had gone viral. I look back and I'm proud of all the people who were there to support me. In the post I said I no longer wish to be identified or thought of as white or Caucasian. The race of my choice, I would like to be African American or Black, and that is the choice I make. Then I explained why. In a world where you can change this about yourself, then it makes perfect sense that I can change this about myself, which to me was simple logic to address the haters who would surely pop up.

The backlash and what it taught me

What happened was I got attacked. The logic that I used to explain another way people change things, people said I was hating in that context. Then the narrative that was put out there, that was corrupted by Facebook, was that I was trolling, that I wasn't really serious about changing my race, that I was making fun of this other group of people. That had not even crossed my mind as a possibility. It had not crossed my mind that was even possible. And yet all the haters and the people who were complaining and nasty, many of the other Facebook partners, were complaining to Facebook that Facebook needed to take me down. People were complaining on Twitter, and then Facebook took my partner away, demonetized me, took my post down, and said it was hate speech. To be fair, I had been violating all these things on the partner program for a long time. I'd gotten away with putting all these conspiracy theories out there, speaking directly in opposition to things I was told to keep my mouth shut about by the partner agreement. I'd been speaking blatantly and directly out against those that I saw Facebook pushing on people, and some part of me was really relieved to be free of this.

Here's what I hadn't ever thought of, that I could understand. I wanted to learn this and understand this. I thought it would be really exciting to try and understand what it's like to be Black. So on the day I changed my race, I was discriminated against for my skin color, and people were like, well, Jerry wanted to understand what it's like to be Black, so now he got what he asked for. And I thought, I really did get what I asked for, didn't I. I wanted to understand what it's like to get treated differently because of your skin color in a negative way, and wow, I sure got a lot of valuable understanding out of that.

At the same time, my wife felt betrayed, because I did not tell anybody I was going to do this before I did it publicly on Facebook. I knew people would try and talk me out of it. I knew people would try and talk sense into me and say, come on Jerry, be reasonable, look, you can't do that. And I thought, no, I want to do this, this is the most exciting, useful thing I can think to do. I'm proud that all the people who opened their minds that day, who could see through the control, the matrix of lies and artificial division the system puts on us to try and make us separate into all these false identifications beyond just being a human being and a divine soul, but to put people in all these protected categories and make people fight with each other. I'm proud that I helped people see through that, and that I helped promote the idea that it's legal to change your race. Anyone can do it, and there's nothing to stop you. I saw all kinds of other people talking about this. Millions of people thought about this. And yes, it destroyed my career as a professional gamer for the most part, and there was a lot of pain, and I initially made the exact right move.

Deleting everything and walking away from the control matrix

Right after they demonetized my page, I deleted my TikTok, I deleted all of it, and I said I'm done with this crap. I'm done with this artificial control matrix where you play the game they want you to play, you say what they want you to say, or they take your money away and make you look stupid. I was tired of feeding into this system of people being exploited and controlled and artificially divided and kept ignorant. I was tired of feeding into it, and I was done.

People thought I'd been banned from Facebook when really I deleted my own page, so it was shocking to me to see all the inaccurate news coverage. I was a police officer before, and I saw firsthand how things that I observed, or that other officers observed, were blatantly lied about in the media and in the news. But when I changed my race, the amount of inaccurate news coverage was shocking. The amount of things that were completely wrong that people said in their videos, and that hundreds of thousands of people watched, and all of the wrong word of mouth. People were going into other people's streams saying, "Did you find out Jerry's a racist?" and then other streamers would be like, "Hey, I heard Jerry's a racist." And it's like, I changed my race. That's the least racist thing you could do.

All these people who were giving me money and were really just trying to buddy up to me to get their audience, they started virtue signaling and blocking me. It was tragic to watch how much people shied away from authority making what was obviously a hypocritical and unfair decision, motivated by other people's hate and criticism and closed minds. It was really disappointing to see how many people from my own audience, who had spent hours and hours watching, just stopped watching.

The people who stuck by me made it all worth it

It was also really inspiring to see all the people who understood and were supportive. There were other Facebook streamers, like Chibata Mitch, who came into my stream and said, "I don't understand what people are so upset about, this is crazy." There were a lot, and I really appreciated all the black content creators especially, like Chibata Mitch and Murder Show and Charlamagne the God and so many others, King Dre Day, so many people saying, "Hey, I support you, welcome to the team, thank you for putting awareness out and trying to understand our experience. Thank you for not just staying in your zone or your lane, but thank you for trying to expand your mind so that you can better understand our life."

So many people were supportive, and I remember that, and that to me makes it all worth it. Seeing the people who stuck by you, and new people who followed me, who first heard about me and were really excited, like, "Hey, my brother, you're amazing, thank you for being willing to speak out." Because when you see other people speak out, it often encourages you to do the same. One of the more oppressed voices online is often black conservatives, because I got really into watching all these videos from black conservatives, which was something I'd never seen before. I expanded my mind and I learned so much, and I helped other people in doing that.

What I learned: show up where you can be yourself

A lot of people asked, "Do you have any regrets?" and I say no, I have no regrets. I do have some things I've learned. If you don't want to show up someplace, just stop showing up there, or delete it. I've also learned that if I'm going to show up somewhere, I do need to conscientiously try to abide by the terms and conditions. The way I've flaunted the terms and conditions in the past has been a symptom of me not really caring or respecting being where I'm at, which is why on YouTube now, there are some YouTube terms and conditions I very much disagree with. I think they're actively contributing to people being harmed and misinformed by certain conditions that they have.

What I see now, based on my experience being on Facebook and being demonetized, being banned from Udemy: if you're going to show up somewhere and you really care about and value showing up there, control how you're showing up, and if you don't want to be there, just don't show up there. It's that simple. If I had to go back again, I'd just delete my Facebook page immediately after being demonetized. Don't even bother doing anything on there ever again, and that's what I've done. I deleted my Facebook page, my Instagram, my TikTok, millions of followers, I just deleted all of it, because I don't want to show up there anymore.

On YouTube, I've appreciated that if I want to show up on YouTube and be consistent on YouTube, then the right thing to do is either follow the rules or go somewhere else. With that Facebook partner contract, I hated it from the very beginning, and my way of dealing with that was just disregarding it as much as I could get away with. That's not the right approach. That's like marrying someone and then being unfaithful to them because they're not the person you wanted to be with. You should either get divorced, or just don't marry them to start with. Show up somewhere where you can feel that you can really be yourself and be accepted, without having to lie and break rules just to feel like you're in the middle of your integrity.

The peak of the criticism, and a real wake-up call

That was one of the harder learning experiences I've been through. That was the peak, after the amount of criticism that came through. I've never, in all the stuff I've done online, I have never seen the sheer quantity of nasty comments as when I changed my race. This was shocking to me, because in my mind this was woke euphoria. That's what I thought it was: this is woke euphoria, we're having a better world, we're crossing boundaries, we're learning. It was a real wake-up call to see how people's closed minds and closed eyes and other people's hate, and to see the authorities backing that hate up.

One reason I've committed to YouTube is that YouTube, even though my channel was mass reported, all my channels were mass reported. Twitch took my channel down and actually put it back up and gave me an apology after it had been down 14 days, after Charlamagne the God made a video supporting me. He's a black celebrity, if you haven't heard of him, he's got a radio show, and the video with me on it has like a quarter million views on his channel. Twitch actually sent me an apology and said your channel was suspended in error, which is very unusual. And YouTube took no action at all.

That was a signal to me. If you're going to be a creator, you really need to think about which platform is going to really support you the most through all the different phases of your creativity. That's when I realized YouTube has really taken the best care of me over the long term. I've done all kinds of crazy stuff on YouTube, and I didn't pay as much, but I always was aware of the policies, I always tried to minimize my policy violations. But sometimes, when the policies really disgusted me, I just went against them as much as I could, and that recently caught up.

I edited all my video descriptions a few months ago, and I got a community guidelines violation for the first time in 12 years on YouTube, off a video I did two years ago in April 2021, when I was really pissed off at the Facebook partner terms. I was speaking out about all this stuff that I thought was wrong in the world, where people were being lied to and harmed and most people were being forced to be silent. I spoke out, and I helped a lot of people in that way. So I deleted all the videos, all the 4,000 videos I'd made on YouTube, to follow the rules. If I don't agree with the rules, leave. If the rules are that offensive, and I had to do it over again, what I've been thinking a lot about is where do I go from here.

Where I went from there

Let me tell you, I'll get to wrapping up by describing where I went from there. After I got demonetized on Facebook and I was suspended on Twitch for two weeks, I was in one of the hardest times I'd been in. I felt all this nasty energy being directed at me, and I felt all of it back. I did another livestream on Facebook the day after my first post was taken down. I was demonetized, and people gave hundreds of dollars, and some of the people supporting me were putting some bad stuff, some stuff against the firms, in the donations that were popping up on my screen. Some of the people who were feeling a bit held back themselves started to really let their crazy side out, and they put some comments that were totally inappropriate.

What do I do? I've got all these people watching, these inappropriate comments come up on my screen, some of them from my closest supporters and followers who'd been sticking with me when I'm feeling horrible about myself. I laugh at them, because it's so awkward. Then I get another post taken down for speech the next day again, and then I get my stream elements account banned for some of the messages people had sent, not anything I did. And then I was really lost. I'm thinking, what am I going to do with myself? I'd told people I'd never quit gaming, then I get everybody over onto this new YouTube gaming channel, and it's off to a decent start, but it's not monetized at all, and the viewership is just dead compared to Facebook.

Then I felt really lost for about a year, and I tried all kinds of different stuff. I tried multi-streaming. I created a new channel on YouTube, I deleted that channel and moved everybody to my main channel, I moved everybody over to Twitch. I'm really proud of everybody who followed through all that stuff. It's like, what the heck's Jerry doing today, which channel is Jerry on now? Oh, Jerry's on his YouTube. And I ended up continuing to lose more and more people through all those transitions, because there were thousands of people who made the transition over from Facebook to Twitch, and then my Twitch account gets suspended, so then I start a new YouTube channel, and like 500 people subbed pretty quick on that channel, then my Twitch account gets reinstated, so the YouTube channel notifications aren't landing the way they were.

Back to Twitch, and losing people every time I moved

Working, I moved back over to Twitch, and I kept losing people every time I moved. By July 2022, my best idea was that I was going to do a $100 every stream giveaway to try and get people to watch my stream. But then I'm playing Fallout 4 and people don't want to watch that. I'd made all this money on Facebook, over $100,000 in 2021, but by this time the money was starting to run low, and I didn't have anything else I was doing to make money, because for the whole last few years I'd done everything for gaming. My gaming streams, the audience compared to Facebook was dead, but there was a nice community of Twitch people who kept showing up. Several fellow streamers came on there to hang out, which was great. Then I stopped doing the giveaway, and the money kept running down on my bank account, but this time I was being much more conservative with my expenses. I'd learned from before.

I told my fans I would never quit gaming. I just kept streaming games, and I kept trying all these strategies. I played these retro games, I streamed Warzone, I was back and forth on Facebook, I was posting on Facebook to get people to YouTube, and the haters just kept coming in constantly. I stopped even reading comments on Facebook. I tried posting constantly on Facebook. I was all over the place. I was feeling really lost and angry and annoyed, feeling like a victim, like the world did me wrong, when really I can see what I contributed. I created a situation that Facebook had to do something about. It was either support me exposing the hypocrisy and the control matrix and go against all the pissed-off partners on there, or take me down and then kind of look stupid and have this controversy and get ripped by the other side for doing that. I put them in a tough position, to be fair, and I don't want to put platforms like that in a tough position again.

Fueling the very thing I was fighting

It's important to be considerate, to build my communities in places where I can have my discussions and focus. A lot of times the very thing you're trying to fight is the thing you're fueling, and by arguing and condemning the state of the world I thought I was doing good, but ironically I see now I was kind of contributing to the problem. I helped wake people up and expand people's minds, but at the same time I was getting aggravated and angry all the time. If you can't have serenity within, then whatever you have within is really what you're offering without.

The last hurrah: Gods Unchained

So here was the last hurrah of my gaming. This was at the end of 2022, and there were two times in 2022 when nobody would touch my content anymore. Remember, I was getting all kinds of opportunities on Facebook gaming, I was getting paid and featured to stream these games, and after changing my race and being demonetized, now nobody had anything for me. People gave a little bit initially, but the support runs dry. Ninety percent of the community falls off, at least in transitioning across all these platforms, which is actually pretty good — ten percent stayed. This one crypto game, Gods Unchained, sponsored me twice in 2022. They have a token, and they paid hundreds of dollars for me to play their game on Twitch and upload the video to YouTube.

The first time I played the game I thought, this is not that impressive. It's like a Hearthstone rip-off, and it was annoying to sign up. I thought, it's not a big deal. The second time I played the game, I noticed that I was getting way more viewers on my Twitch than anything else. So my last hurrah as a professional gamer was this game called Gods Unchained, which was a crypto game, and I ended up finally settling on gaming on Twitch because the notifications just weren't working on YouTube. The algorithm is too hard to crack into on YouTube, at least with playing. I was having some success on YouTube, but I was not up for grinding from zero again there. On Twitch I started to see some fast success with Gods Unchained. There was a live, hungry audience there who would watch the streams.

Turning my stream into a watch-to-earn

It's a play-to-earn crypto game, so there were all these people watching Gods Unchained streams trying to learn how to play and get better at the game so they could earn money playing it. With my marketing experience, I thought, what I'll do is make my stream like a watch-to-earn, and I'll give away money every time I win a game. So I started giving away these Gods tokens every time I won a game, and my Twitch stream went off. I hit my all-time highs in viewership on Twitch.

At the same time, I had also gotten back into cryptocurrency, because I realized I was running out of money. I was borrowing money constantly from my wife just to pay my bills, and this was with keeping my expenses pretty low. I literally was just making nothing in 2022. After making over a hundred grand in 2021 profit, I made like ten or twenty thousand in 2022. I got back into crypto because I remember saying a bunch of times that if I really wanted to make some money, I'd get back into crypto. Now I had this crypto channel that was crushing it on YouTube, which I started in 2022, and at the same time I got into Gods Unchained, and I thought that was a perfect pair. I'd play this crypto game on Twitch and do these crypto videos on YouTube. It was a match made in heaven, I thought.

So starting at the end of 2022, I began streaming Gods Unchained like four hours a day on Twitch, giving away crypto and doing these crypto videos, and I took off. I got to be one of the top two Gods Unchained streamers on Twitch. There may be fifty or a hundred Gods Unchained streamers, and with all the stuff I knew about gaming and streaming, plus my personality and my giveaways, I rocketed straight to the top. I got to be a huge deal.

How the addiction sabotaged me

And it even sabotaged me. I was going to help my mother move in November. I started, I guess, in October, and played for a couple of months, October and November, and I got physically sick because I was so addicted and hyped up to playing Gods Unchained. I didn't want to stop playing Gods Unchained and streaming on Twitch for a week to go help my mother move. Well, once I got sick, that was the last time I've gotten sick, which has been awesome. It's been over a year now. I've had days with a little bit less energy than usual, a little tiny sensation in one part of the body or another, I strained a little bit in my back, but I have not had one day since then that I've been laid out. I love how healthy I am and how much energy I have. In my experience, gaming drained my energy so much that I would get sick sometimes.

With Gods Unchained, to me this was my chance to make it as a pro gamer again. After everything that went down on Facebook, here I was again, and just by playing Gods Unchained I was getting all these followers on Twitch. There were plenty of money opportunities in Gods Unchained because it's a crypto coin, and being one of the very top streamers, I'd certainly be able to get paid to stream. I thought, here we go, I've arrived, here's my chance again. For a couple of months I felt real grateful. I liked the game much more than Warzone because it was a card game, so much more mind and strategy. I bought a collection of cards, close to ten thousand dollars. I dumped all the rest of the money I had in the bank into buying these Gods Unchained cards, and I had a really great stream. I had all the cards, and this was kind of a pay-to-win game, so I was winning because I had five-hundred-dollar cards and three-thousand-dollar decks. I was balling, and I was giving away money. My stream was popping. I got to be one of the top Gods Unchained streamers.

It still wasn't good enough

So what do you think happened? You can imagine what happened. I'm playing Gods Unchained for six hours on a Saturday while my family's off doing stuff, while my mom, who moved in next door, wants to hang out with me, and I'm grinding Gods Unchained for six hours on a Saturday, getting all kinds of views and comments and new followers. It's like I'm right back to where I was before. It's not good enough. And this time it's not anybody else, it's not the money — there was lots more support playing Gods Unchained than anything else I'd ever done on Twitch, but it was still a relatively small amount of money, a few hundred dollars, which, being reasonable with my expenses, I could have done. But this time I could finally see the full truth: you're wasting your time. You're encouraging all these people to watch you play video games.

And I just kept playing Gods Unchained, and I would get euphorically high when I would win these close games, and my videos were getting an audience on YouTube, and I was featured on this website, and everything was going great, but I kept feeling like this is not it. At this time I knew, from making it on Facebook, that this feeling is telling you there's a better thing for you to be doing with your time. This is not satisfying you because there's something better you could be doing to help people. This isn't helping people. You're wasting people's time. I kept doing these streams and thinking, there's got to be something better I can offer to the world than me wrecking people. I got into the top ranked division in Gods Unchained, and I kept thinking, there's got to be something better I can do for people. This is not what I'm meant to do. I can do this, but this is not my zone of genius. This is not the best I have to offer. I kept feeling like this gaming is a waste of my time and it's meaningless, I'm wasting people's time, there's got to be a better thing for me to do.

Gaming doesn't work well for having a family

I realized that with being a gaming streamer, you've got to put the hours in, and being a gaming streamer is not something that works well for having a family. My wife had gotten a great full-time job, which I had helped co-manifest for her, and it's absolutely aligned. My wife got her first full-time job since 2014 or 2015, and she started two weeks before I changed my race. So do the math.

Sacrificing my gaming on purpose

On some level this was very calculated. I told myself, okay, I don't need to make money off of my gaming anymore. I looked at it like I sacrificed myself on behalf of opening other people's minds and having a teachable moment. At that point I basically had four or five hours a day, and if I devoted all of that to live streaming I didn't have time to even hardly see my mother. I was pouring all my time and energy into this God's Unchained game. I was researching it and I was getting great at it, but at the same time I was taking energy away from everything else, away from my family, away from my mother, away from my AA meetings, away from my yoga practice. It was sucking the energy out of my life. I was losing money doing it. And even though I once again had another professional gamer opportunity right in my hands, it wasn't good enough.

This time, instead of being horribly toxic, I just quit. Think about how I'd left other platforms. I'd been on Udemy, and when I got tired of Udemy I got so toxic that they banned me. On Facebook I got so controversial that they felt they had to shut me up. On Steam I sold everything and destroyed things that way. With God's Unchained I simply quit. I made a video saying I quit, that I didn't have time to do this, and I focused on making my crypto videos.

The big thing pushing me to quit God's Unchained was that I was borrowing money from my wife to buy God's Unchained cards, which I did not feel good about, and neither did she. I kept thinking, if this game doesn't do well I'm going to get destroyed financially. So I quit gaming at the end of 2022 to focus on finances. For about three months I got my brand new crypto channel ripping in the algorithm and I made something like ten grand from selling courses, ad revenue, and calls.

Quitting, coming back, and quitting again

Then I jumped back into God's Unchained, bought all the cards again, and started streaming again. A bunch of people who missed me were so happy to see me back, but they said, please never ever quit again, we missed you so much, we can't handle you quitting again. I went all in for another month on God's Unchained, and the same nagging thought wouldn't leave me alone: you're wasting your time. You are pouring all this very valuable creative energy that could really help people and change people's lives and lift people up, and you're throwing it into God's Unchained where it's almost all being wasted. You have dedicated followers who love hearing your stories, but they can hardly hear your stories and get your experience, because you're just playing this game and talking about the game most of the time, because you want the most views and want to make some money off the game. And if you don't talk about the game, people stop watching.

So after another month or so I quit God's Unchained again. This time people were not having it. They were disgusted with me quitting again. Done following you, unfollowing immediately.

Hitting my gaming bottom on Warzone

The last thing I did with game streaming, out of sheer desperation and being in a sad state of mind, was jump on and play Call of Duty Warzone Solos on Facebook. At some point I got good at Warzone 2, and I grinded it for a couple of months. I think it was 2023. I grinded Warzone 2 until I won it a few times. I'd been streaming mostly on YouTube and Twitch, but I had refused to stream on Facebook for like a year after being demonetized and dealing with all the haters. And the last thing I did with my game streaming, I went live trying to stream Warzone on Facebook, and lots of people showed up and were really happy to see me. The violations that had been put on my page for my posts in February were long gone, but at some point I'd uploaded a reel that had part of my own livestream clipped into it, and it stuck this content flag on my Facebook page, "limited originality of content," which blocked me from getting monetized. They wouldn't allow me to be in the Facebook gaming program anymore. So in the sad state of being completely demonetized on Facebook, I popped on and did a livestream there.

That was kind of like hitting my ultimate bottom in gaming. I felt so pathetic, like, really, the best thing you can think to do today with your valuable time is to go live playing Warzone solos on Facebook? Really? And it was as if life was trying to encourage me to see that message. My streaming setup was dropping frames, which, when you do what I do and have so much time with the equipment, triggered me so hard. It was hard to even watch. I logged off feeling like an absolute idiot and a loser. Seriously, you quit God's Unchained and now you're going to stream Warzone?

The desire to make music again

At the same time I had this huge desire bursting within me to make music again, which did not make any reasonable sense. Back in 2017 and 2018 I made all this music, people listened to it, but there was never any money in it. My kids loved it, and it was some of their favorite songs. Still, I had this desire bursting in me to play music, even though I could clearly see: you don't have time to make music and play games and create crypto content. You have a limited amount of time and you need to focus it carefully. As long as you play video games, you can't do anything else besides maybe run your crypto channel.

For me, playing video games halfway is not satisfying. Many of you have asked, are you going to come back to gaming again? It's not fun for me to just play a game once a month, because all that does is like having the first drink, which is exactly why I'm sober nine and a half years. I'd quit drinking all these times, and then I'd rationalize that I could have a beer, or get drunk one night. But inevitably that one night would lead me to wanting to get drunk and have a beer every night. Just one beer was too many, just one liquor drink was too many, and then drinking all night or as often as I wanted was never enough. Gaming has been like that for me. Playing a little bit of a game is just enough to make me wish I had more time to play it.

I definitely still think about gaming and miss it sometimes. But I think about some of the girls I used to date before, and I realize I'm very happy with my wife, and I can't be with my wife and be with somebody else. I love doing live streams like this even if fewer people watch. It's a much more meaningful experience, a purely given labor of love from the heart. This is good for me to talk through. I love the videos and live streams I'm doing, I love that my mind is learning how to make music, and I love listening to the music I make. I've had so much fun making music, and there's endless learning in it. I've even hit roadblocks and struggled with it.

Giving people the best of what I've got

You know what I really loved about gaming? Learning a new game and mastering a new game. That was the most fun to me. I loved learning and mastering Warzone. But grinding a game I've already mastered and triumphing repeatedly over people is empty, it's not fun. And with gaming I hated that I always wished I had more time. If I could just stream eight hours a day and take three hours a day to grind out videos, then I could really do it right. But with a wife and kids and a yoga practice and going to AA and having a mother I see every day and a wife who works full time, where we split up taking care of the kids, the best I can do for gaming, the most I have to give, is what I was giving in 2020, 2021, and 2022, which is like three or four hours a day on average. That's everything I've got.

This live stream, though, is something somebody could listen to ten years from now and it could be useful. What I noticed with my gaming videos is that people weren't watching them right when I made them, and most of the time they weren't getting watched at all. As a content creator I hate making stuff where, if you don't watch it today, people just aren't ever going to watch it. Sure, there were a few of you going back through and watching the old gaming streams, but I want to make things that last. I was born in '84, and I'm looking at what I want to do with the next thirty to sixty years of my life. I want to make sure I take the best of what I have to give and give the best of what I've got to people.

The best of what I've got is my creativity, my stories, and my knowledge about crypto investing. These are things that really can help people in a huge way. My crypto channel has blown up because I'm a fresh voice in crypto. I really care about my viewers' success investing, and I care about giving my viewers the simplest research based on what I've done and cutting through the confusion. My crypto videos have helped a bunch of people make a lot of money recently, and they've helped a bunch of people get out of bad investments. Helping people not ruin their lives financially is really valuable. Helping people get good at Warzone or God's Unchained is such a waste of time. If there was nobody else doing that, maybe it would be valuable, but there are all kinds of people who have been more dedicated to gaming than I have, who are more worthy of people watching them. Sure, people loved my Warzone streams, but there are people who are better at the game to watch, people who've grinded so much longer and done so much more. They are more worthy of getting viewers. What I'm really happy to see is how I'm awakening in terms of thinking about the bigger picture and my part in it. Just because I can get people to watch me do almost anything, is that the best thing for the community?

What Is Best for the Collective

It is not best for the collective for me to play video games. There are other people who would appreciate the viewers so much more than me, people whose real passion is to be a professional gamer. For them it is not a means to an end. They love doing it, and that is why some of them are so huge. I think about someone like Murder Show, and the reason he is enormous on YouTube playing Warzone and Call of Duty is that he has grinded five, six, maybe even seven or eight years at this point. He deserves to have people watch him. He did streams when nobody watched. He has kept showing up through anything else that has happened in his life. He does eight, ten hour streams on YouTube, for better or worse. If you want to do gaming, you need to be able to put huge amounts of time into it, and that is practical if you live at home. I do not know exactly what Murder Show's situation is, I believe he has a wife, but when I lived at home with my parents, that was a great time where I could have streamed eight hours a day, edited videos, and still had time to hang out with my parents and go to the gym, because I was not doing anything else besides that.

It is important to consider both what is joyous for me and what is worth making. My mind loves to learn and my mind loves to be challenged, and learning to play music does both. I am going to do lots more music live streams on this channel. I have been struggling to put together an entire way I can make a whole live stream that is the most joyous for me, because I want to make stuff that is worth watching 10, 20, 30 years in the future. If I make music, that could be worth it. I listen to music that was made 10, 20, 30, sometimes 40 or even 50 years ago. I want this Jerry Banfield channel to only make stuff that is worth watching years from now. My crypto channel can carry more timely content, but on this channel, the biggest mistake I have made is making content that is not evergreen, stuff that quickly goes out of date, that quickly gets old, like gaming videos. Who wants to watch me play Call of Duty Warzone for five hours in 2021? Sure, maybe a few of you do, but are you really going to sit through and listen to that the whole time?

Where I Wasted the Most Time

My journey with gaming has taught me there is a time and a place for things in your life. I have looked back on my whole life and asked where some of the biggest areas are that I wasted time, and gaming is right at the top: tens of thousands of hours playing video games. Now sure, I had fun streaming, I learned a lot, and I would not take it back, although I would love to see what my life would look like if I had never played video games. If I had instead learned to play music, or gotten into building things the way my son loves building things, I would love to see what my life would look like. What else would I have done? I would have had so much more time. In my experience, video games sabotaged so much of my life. Maybe one day I will do a live stream just talking about all the things that went wrong in my life, like dating, because of video games. I will do one in the future about my entire history of video game addiction, where we will talk more about the addictive component of video games.

Michael, I really appreciate your support, and I am thinking of people like you and Lisa. You all have watched so many hours of my live streams, but I want to create stuff you could just put on in the background and listen to the whole way through, and have it be really worth your time. The gaming videos are so hard to make worth someone's time, and I have been leaning into what I can do that is genuinely worth someone's time. Storytelling is worth someone's time. I love listening to people tell stories about their lives. I was thinking about what I really needed to get onto YouTube, and I realized I really needed to get the story of my history with gaming, from wanting to be a professional gamer and dreaming about it, to achieving the dream and the goal, and then finding out how disappointing it all was, and all the ups and downs and struggles in between. I think I have covered those pretty well here. This is something that 10 years from now I might want to listen back to, just to remember, or something other people can point to when they ask, hey, you used to play video games? Yeah, go watch my Jerry Banfield gaming story over on my Games playlist.

Wrapping Up

So it is time to wrap up here. The average view on this has been 12 minutes across 156 views, and it has been so nice to see so many of you. Michael, Lee, Rivissy Gaming, Evan, Jose, Todd King, Dray Day, Martian, so nice to see some of you. Some of you have supported me over from my crypto channel. Some of you, like King Dray Day, found me in the middle of all that controversy and supported me. Michael has been there through everything, on all the different platforms, and Kung Fu Classics has been following since 2000. Kung Fu Classics has been through me quitting gaming every single time. I have thought a lot about whether I should just delete this channel and start fresh or not, but all I really need to do is focus on creating, on giving the best that I have to give in a way that can be useful indefinitely. I know I cannot do that with gaming. Sure, it is technically possible, but at this point I have experimented, and almost everything has not worked.

So this is worth my time today, and I hope it has been worth your time. If you have listened to this much of it, I hope it has been worth your time. I hope this has shared a lot of what I have learned about life, and that it can help you in your life, because the reason I show up online is to help you, to lift you up, and to help you navigate this game of life a little bit easier. By sharing my experience in a straightforward, no distraction format, I hope I will always remember these lessons and not get tempted back into gaming in the future, because my mind definitely gives me some euphoric recalls of the best moments. But if you look at what I am doing today, I really love what I am doing today. There are no donations, no money, I have gotten nothing from doing this. A few ads have played, which maybe will give me a dollar or something. 157 views, way less than so many gaming streams, but I feel like I have done something so much more useful than a lot of what I was doing on those gaming streams, and I feel like I have wasted a lot less of people's time. Sure, I was giving out some good vibes on some of those gaming streams, but you had to sit through hours of gunshot sounds and me screaming at the game. This, to me, is a pure experience. This has been really good for me, and I hope it has been really good for you. I love each of you.