Time to get out in real life today. We'll do a vlog, just talk off the top of my head, and I'll probably send all this to ChatGPT afterward and see what it thinks. It's July 14th, 2026 as I'm filming this, and I'm really grateful because it's a lovely day. I'm Jerry Banfield, just trying to get paid to exist, super relaxed after I just had a massage, walking at the park next to my house. We'll put out whatever title is the most clickbait out of everything I end up saying here, which I have no idea what that will be. I'm just trying to be authentic and get out of my usual routines today.
I'm really wondering: is there anything better than being this content creator? I swear I've been having the same thought for years, but I watched a Bobby O video today that got me going, because there's just so much to think about. I know a lot of you really enjoy my content, and then I start wondering about what I could possibly offer. I'm grateful that three people actually scheduled calls within the last 24 hours, so that's some validation. Then I'm like, oh, I hope I can make enough money by the end of the year to make this work. I don't know what I'm going to do if I can't, but I also have a history of making amazing things happen, of getting a lot of people to help me and being supported. I think most of us do. Most of us have a history of being supported, and life's on our side. If you want to be one of those people I talk to, you can schedule a call and join the Jerry Banfield Family.
I got a massage which was really relaxing, and I had a fantastic conversation during it. She asked what the best part of the massage was last week, and I said it was the conversation. The body work is beautiful, but the connection is its own thing that comes along in life. Suddenly I've met someone who seems to have so much compatibility with me, and we've got a date planned in a couple of days. More about that on Jerry Banfield Dating. It feels really good. I'm just navigating the emotions, focusing on gratitude.
Why I'm Still On YouTube
I really enjoy doing YouTube. I love YouTube. Sometimes it's hard to see how much crap there is on there, though, and it feels like having someone who's just real and authentic doesn't matter on YouTube. I was just talking to someone who's starting out, someone who quit doing everything to be a content creator. A lot of what I want to say is how bad it is out there. That's why I deleted everything last year. I deleted over a decade of work, because if I was just one of the people who would say anything to get paid, I could have more views and more money, but no soul. I'm not on YouTube to just make money. I'm on YouTube because I want to make a difference in someone's life.
I tried shooting this in 3K too, which I'm hoping is not a mistake, but we're going to experiment with that and see how it works out for all of us. Here's the question I keep circling: if I'm just going to base my business on talking to people, couldn't I just go around and offer people in person the same basic thing? I fooled around for nine months seeing if there was anything I could do locally. But I love creating content, I'm so good at it, and maybe someday it seems like authentic content is doing better than it used to. I'm grateful. I just did the statistics: I've gotten 1.2 million impressions, all for free on YouTube, in the last 90 days, with channels that are only 110 days old. That's pretty amazing, that YouTube is delivering that. Meanwhile the people making the nastiest titles they can think of about me, I'm not watching those. I don't care what you have to say about me. I'm very proud and happy where I am, and I'm excited for where I'm going.
I had a conversation today with a person who was talking about grieving the future they wanted to have, because they felt like they couldn't have it. I said there's no need to grieve something before it's completely impossible. Even so, I remember kind of doing that with my marriage a bit a couple of years ago, starting to grieve and think, this isn't going to be forever. But really, nothing's forever except me and you and who we really are underneath all this. That's forever, I guess. I swear, if I was just doing a prompt to ChatGPT, this would be more coherent, but it is cool to get out and film this outside.
Parenting, Video Games, And Time To Work
The kids are in the house playing video games right now. They love just playing video games at my house ever since they got them back. I asked them, is this all you want to do? Is this what you want out of hanging out at dad's house, just playing Roblox and Minecraft? Because I could sell the Xbox and the PlayStation 5, or I could just tell them they couldn't play. But to me, parenting is about helping your kids do what they want to do within reason. If the kids want to play video games, otherwise they'd be reading board games or comic books. I miss that, before we had all the video games, when we did more stuff together. The advantage is it gives me more time to work when they're here.
Turning A Decade Of Videos Into A Permanent Record
I took about 150 of my old videos from a few years ago, threw them into a folder, and let Claude run through all of them. It's going to turn all of those into blog posts on my website. That'll put me over a thousand blog posts. Google's now got 500 of them indexed. Now I'm getting like 500 impressions a day on Google search, and only about 10 clicks a day to my website, but what's nice is that it's a bit more evergreen. If anything, it may grow over time. And I really like having a more permanent record of all the videos I've done.
I did look back, and there's an amazing amount of videos I made that weren't relevant in crypto today. I don't want to make content that's so irrelevant over the long term. Real human experiences will always be relevant. A video like today's will be relevant as just a diary entry from my life, a real human experience among seven or eight billion other real human experiences. And what's cool is I'm even training a custom model on all my videos. So all these old videos, all the transcripts, will get added to that. You can have a model that's got all the old videos in it.
I looked back at some of my crypto reviews, and man, those were accurate. Some things are down, like people have talked junk about ICP, and I guess ICP is down a good bit too. But most of the other cryptos I reviewed just got destroyed from when I reviewed them to now. Still, I'm wondering: is there anything better I can offer than making videos, being available to call and text, and building a community? Or, as some people would say, being a cult leader. On my dating channel, one woman said that Gen Z girls only care if you're a YouTuber who's moderately or very successful. Well, I've got over a billion impressions, or views, whatever you want to call it, on my content online. I've been viral. I've got all the accolades: top 10 Udemy instructor, top 20 gaming, Facebook gaming partner. That's pretty successful. But all that stuff is so temporary. Do you remember who the most popular people were from 50 years ago? You probably don't know any of them. It's amazing how fast all this stuff fades, how quickly it's all just slipping through our fingers.
What Actually Endures
I want to make something a lot more enduring, and one of the most enduring things I've found in my life is talking to people. I feel like if I spent 25, 30, 40 hours a week talking to people, that's real value that's not replaceable by AI. Bobby O's video really got me thinking about the future. The plan seems to be, at some point, to get everybody just talking with AI, to cut the influencers out of the middle and shift everything over to AI, where people aren't even watching YouTube videos anymore. They're just talking straight to AI about everything. And AI is incredibly effective. If you use ChatGPT Pro, I've paid $200 a month for that, it's incredible what it can do. I'm going to start putting some of my videos like this through it and see what it thinks, because it sometimes comes up with unique angles. It's just got a lot of data to pull from.
I do find it frustrating showing up on YouTube a lot of the time, because it seems like junk gets rewarded massively. MrBeast's videos are just junk food for your mind. What do you learn from his videos, that people do anything for money? They are fun, they are laughter and entertainment. But I look through my feed and I swear, 10 years ago the YouTube feed was so much better. Now it's just junk video after junk video from professional junk people. Everything is over the top, clickbait, garbage. When you search for something now, it's hard to even find what you're searching for a lot of the time, because there's just so much sensational garbage piled on top of it.
So I ask, where can I show up, and where can I be useful in this? I'm so good at this environment. It seems like this is the best thing for me to do. And the haters never have ideas that are productive. These podcasters, is there any useful idea you have besides something dumb like "just get a job and give up on your life and your dating and your dreams"? One thing that motivates me every time people are criticizing is that it just makes me that much happier, that much more excited to see what's possible and to come out on the other side of it. What's funny is that whenever you're up and everybody wants your attention, everybody always wants things, and praises you, and attacks you too. But it's really amazing to see who's there when things are challenging. That's what's truly beautiful in life.
Proving what I'm capable of
I remember when I was a police officer back in 2009, and they were talking a bunch of junk about me. They were making fun of the idea that I couldn't get an attractive woman. And then I managed to hook up with one of the dispatchers, who was an absolute perfect 10 in my opinion. I couldn't imagine anything that could have been better about her appearance, at least. Personality, well, that's another story. But everybody was blown away. A lot of them didn't even believe it. Like, no, that didn't happen. I wrote a whole book, Officer Banfield, about that. And I remember all of them talking junk, and I thought, I'm going to show all of you what I can do. And I hope I inspire each of you to wonder what else you're capable of. Because the people who think I have limited capabilities, who want to criticize, only motivate me to show off even more.
I'm thinking that should turn into the best business I've ever had. My business in the past wasn't based on giving real value to real people. It was based on positioning myself as an authority and getting people in the door. I did good coaching in some areas, but it wasn't giving people the most value that could really transform your life. I've never bought a course from somebody that transformed my life. What did transform me was a few audiobooks, and they transformed my life because I put them into practice and found that they worked, like the book How Not to Die. I only found that one because it was recommended by my uncle, who's a doctor.
The truth is often very simple
The haters are just nuts on my carnivore diet trash video, which is another example of how the truth is often very simple. I loved what Bobby O said in his recent video: the truth is often very simple. And yet the strategy on YouTube and these other platforms is to bury the truth in a mountain of garbage. So finding someone like Bobby O, someone who's authentic and makes worthwhile content, is an absolute diamond in the rough. Most of the top content on YouTube is junk. Most of the top creators are totally compromised. I know because I've been high enough up to get the secret terms and conditions, the non-disclosure agreements, the things you can't talk about, and the extra reach.
That's one thing that makes doing YouTube a bit hard. If you're going to be raw and authentic and actually care about people, the algorithm and everything is stacked against you. Not completely, not 100%. But maybe that's just a story I'm telling myself. Maybe there's a perfect opportunity for me to be authentic, to monetize full time, and to have everything I want. Maybe something else will happen too. Who knows what'll happen.
What if it doesn't work out
I am afraid sometimes. What if this doesn't work out? I'm borrowing money and betting everything on YouTube, which has worked out well before. But what if it doesn't this time? Honestly, I hardly even consider the what-if-things-don't-work-out scenarios. Because the way I look at it, if it doesn't work out, you're going to be surprised, and that's going to be interesting. And sometimes things not working out in the short term work out better in the long term.
I had this experience when I was a police officer. I was getting really tired of it and burnt out, getting bored, but I could hardly see outside of it. I had so much fear. What if I quit? What if they fire me? What am I going to do if I'm not a police officer? And I had things I wanted to do, like go to grad school, which I ended up doing. I got my master's. I quit my Ph.D. when I found YouTube. It was funny. I was so stressed and afraid about the idea that being a police officer might not be what I do forever. And then the day after I quit was the biggest relief I think I've ever had in my whole life. All that stress fell away, all the court cases I had to go to for the people I arrested. Where I was, you basically prosecute the case yourself if it's a minor one, like a traffic ticket or a DUI, something the district attorney wasn't going to handle themselves, which was most of the things. Most arrests aren't things the district attorney gets involved in, only the bigger ones. For the regular misdemeanors, you're in court yourself against the defendant and potentially their attorney, with the judge. Man, I didn't realize how much stress I was carrying from all that, and the night shifts, until it all fell away.
So the way I look at it today is, sometimes the what-if-it-doesn't-work-out scenario is going to be interesting. It's going to be fine. You don't need to worry about it. But at the same time, I focus all my energy and effort on doing everything I can to make it work out. Then I know I've left nothing on the table. If I put out five videos a day on my channels, except for Jerry Banfield games, where I think just live streaming is the way to go, and it still doesn't work because none of the lonely people who follow me online are interested in paying to be less lonely and connect with me, then I'll figure something out.
Is there a better way than just videos?
I'm also wondering, is there a better way than just doing YouTube videos? I got one to two million impressions in the last 28 days. That's pretty good, about forty-something thousand impressions for free a day. But I could crank in a bunch more if I paid for Google ads. I could build specific landing pages and try all kinds of niche terms, broader terms, display ads, search ads, YouTube ad videos. Maybe it'd be better to advertise directly. I could just advertise for my membership and try to get out there. Somebody might be searching for a connection coach. I could do the research, and AI could help figure out what niche terms people are searching for, make a landing page quickly with my voice and AI, and potentially convert people off a cold ad straight into the membership.
With all the people already watching my videos, you'd think that would be more effective. But sometimes you don't know until you try. Sometimes somebody with a very specific search intent can come straight in. So I'm wondering if it'd be worthwhile to test that. I've been thinking about it, but it involves spending more money and more time that's not on creating content. At least with creating content, I know people spent five thousand hours, almost six thousand, watching my content in the last 28 days. That's a lot of time. I guess I'm pretty good at this, and that's only about 110 days on brand new YouTube channels.
The best version of me
I think the best version of my content in the future would be if I'm spending 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 hours a week talking to people who are in my group. The membership price is really just an intro offer to get the initial people in, and it will go up as more people join. But then I could be working 20 to 50 hours a week on calls, and that would be a real job too. That would add a massive amount of value to people's lives, and I imagine my content could take it up to the highest notch. If I'm talking to 20 to 100 people every week for 25 minutes each, I'm going to have some amazing insights. I'm going to know so many people's stories. I think that'd be the best version of me. If you want to be part of that, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and have a real, two-way relationship with me through these conversations.
I am relentless about going toward the best version of me. I think the best version of me is the one that's talking with as many people a week as possible, so that all of you could have two-way relationships with me in these videos. Then my content will really be at the best it could possibly be. And whoever watches it, watches it. I don't need to be concerned with who's not watching or who's watching other stuff. You can follow along with everything in my my Life playlist.
So that's where I'm at today. Maybe the Jerry Banfield channel will just be straight-up blogs like this from now on. I'd love to hear if that'd be better. I'm a little more relaxed walking around outside, it's a bit more interesting with a real background, and I'd love to hear from you directly. Appreciate you being here. See you tomorrow.