I'm Jerry Banfield, and this is my July 16, 2026 vlog as a full-time YouTuber. I have no idea what I'll title this — I'll put the most clickbait crap I can on it, whatever turns out to be the most interesting part. So, what's alive for me right now? I'm recording this in the morning on July 16, 2026, and I'm talking about yesterday.
One of the cool things I did yesterday: I built an entire game with AI from scratch. It's kind of like Vampire Survivors, you can play it for free, and it's really cool. I had so much fun playing it yesterday, and I couldn't last longer than six minutes on it. What else can't you last longer than six minutes on? I'm also filming this vlog back in the studio today. It's just so much easier and faster, and the video comes out better.
A Date Tonight and an Open Heart
I have a date planned seven or eight hours from now, and I'm just so filled up with excitement. I feel so vulnerable. I texted her this morning a couple of hours ago, I haven't heard back yet, and I'm just having fun dating. This is exhilarating. It's fun. It feels scary, but dating has mostly just been stressful since I got divorced at the beginning of the year, and I'm so grateful there is fun and there is joy in it now. Which is funny, because on my Jerry Banfield Dating channel I just did a video on Sunday asking, is anybody having fun dating? I realized this process should be fun.
What makes dating fun is when I open my heart — and yes, I risk getting hurt. My mom says, "I just don't want to see you get hurt." And my answer is, well, I don't want to see me go through life without loving. It's hard for me to text women if I don't have some emotion behind it. I've had such a great text conversation over the last almost seventy-two hours with this woman I've met, and we had so much fun texting yesterday. She even got invited to do some work and earned some good money yesterday, and she needed to adjust her schedule for today. I'm glad I called her when she asked about that. I told her, all right, cool — so you can see me at night instead of during the afternoon, and that's fine. Man, it just feels so exhilarating.
At the same time, I feel a little out of control, a little wild. I remember this is how dating felt as a teenager too, but I'm grateful now that it's been a couple of decades since I was a teenager. The same feelings are there, but they don't overwhelm me so much. My logical mind and my grounded life take me through the day without totally losing it.
Add Me to Your Contacts
I'm so grateful for YouTube. One of my members saw that I just raised the price of my membership and started offering one-on-one calls every week — twenty-five minutes a week — and he messaged me on Skool and said, can we just exchange numbers? Can I add you as a contact and just talk to you when you're available? And I realized that's a great thing to do. Instead of depending on Zoom, it makes the whole relationship more organic. So I said sure, I added him as a contact, and I gave him my phone number. Right now I've blocked all the time off today for the date, so it doesn't look like there's any availability if you try to schedule a call with me — but I do have time, and I'm pretty flexible.
That was a nice realization: anybody who wants to add me to the contacts on your phone and be able to just call me, what you can do is join my community and then send me a DM in there saying, here's my phone number — can you add me to your contacts? Then you can just send me a text like, hey, are you available to talk today? Or, when's your first availability today for a call? It can be a little less formal, we can talk on the phone and have more organic conversations, and you can add me to your life as a contact — as someone you can call and someone you can talk to — which I think is super valuable.
I feel very vulnerable with my business right now. Man, I really want this to work. And with the woman I have a date with later, the biggest area of insecurity for me right now is my finances, which are out there for everybody to see. Like I've talked about openly: I'm Jerry Banfield, I'm 42, I'm a single dad, and my net worth is negative $200,000. Well, our country has a big, huge debt too, and we're doing all right. At least there's room for improvement. And while I have debt, I also have assets. I have a lot to offer, and the debt is just one of my liabilities. I'm also very kind and understanding. Yesterday, when she asked to adjust our plans, she was afraid I'd be upset. I told her, look, 99 percent of the time I'm going to be kind and understanding, and the 1 percent of the time when I'm not, I will always make amends for it.
I feel so good opening my heart and offering it. At the same time, I feel so vulnerable — like I'm out on the battlefield running around and I could get shot. But it's not actually the battlefield. It's not going to be over if I get hurt. And it's great validation: however it works out with this woman, this process is what I need to be able to do.
Building My Own Apps and Games with AI
Yesterday was also really inspiring on the technology side. A blockchain pal messaged me about his shorts and Opus Clip. So I made my own version of Opus Clip with Claude — I already pay $200 a month for Claude, so I just built my own version of that tool right on my computer. Honestly, the shorts didn't come out that well. It was kind of awkwardly moving my face around trying to keep it centered, and the AI didn't do a very good job picking the most interesting hook — it basically cranked out a bunch of boring shorts. But I'm amazed at what I built with AI, and it didn't even take that much of my usage. It's incredible what you can build with this.
Another thing I made is kind of like a little Minecraft-Roblox game called Island Spark Hunt. And then there's the one that's like a Vampire Survivors clone. I just cranked all of those out, and it was pretty easy.
How I Plan to Grow the Family
I've been wondering: what am I going to do to get more people to join the Family? Should I stick to organic traffic? Should I start paying for Google ads? This morning I woke up and realized my ideal audience is probably YouTubers, because you can talk to me about YouTube — that's a clear area where people need help. And YouTubers are pretty easy to reach because they have channels. So I'm thinking I might do some influencer marketing.
But I realized step one is to have all my organic content — all my videos, every day — scheduled well in advance before I try to go for anything paid. It doesn't make sense to spend money on outreach when I'm already getting tens of thousands of impressions a day — anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 impressions daily. That means my videos, thumbnails, and titles are showing 30,000 to 60,000 times a day, which adds up to about 1.2 million times in the last 28 days. So step one is to just keep pumping that organic message out there, because that's the most likely way somebody is going to want to join the Family. And really, if one to three people a week join and most people stay, that's going to be a full-time income.
Helping a Friend Quit His Job and Start Living
A friend called me yesterday. A month ago, I encouraged him to quit his job. He's in his mid-twenties, and the job felt safe, but it felt like it was holding his whole life back. He put in his two weeks a couple of weeks ago and quit. Before that, I sat with him for an hour and a half one night in person, and he asked me, why are you telling me this? Why are you taking this time to help me? I said, because other people took their time to help me like this, and it really changed my life. I told him, it looks like right now the biggest thing you need to do is quit your job and get out there and explore. You don't like your job. You're tired of it. You're just keeping it because you're scared. Quit that job and then explore.
So he called me last night and said, dude, I'm working and I'm having so much fun. He's trying different day jobs — he worked with another friend, and then with a couple of other friends doing different kinds of work — and he said, I feel like I'm really living my life now. I told him, I'm so proud of you. That's huge. That's huge that you've done that.
I also told him where I just met this woman — at yoga — and he said, I'm going to start going there. I said, you need to go there. He's a good-looking guy in his mid-twenties, and he could easily meet a woman there and end up with a girlfriend, which is something he's missing right now. It's been years since he's had a girlfriend. I told him, just show up there, be the usual nice guy you are, and put out that good, loving energy. Like I talked about in my dating video on how I attract a woman and encourage a woman to approach me without saying anything — he may have a woman approach him. He can literally just go there and practice.
He also said, I want to be a yoga teacher. I told him, you're definitely going to have a girlfriend doing that. I've thought about doing yoga teacher training myself, even though I don't want to teach yoga classes. I tried leading a yoga session when I was in massage school, and here's the thing: I'm good at doing yoga — maybe I'm great at doing yoga — but I'm not great at leading a yoga class. There's a whole different mindset to it. I could learn how to do it, but it's just kind of boring to me. I'm not as enthusiastic about combining my speech with my body. I'm very intellectual. Some of you say I think too much; I say some of you don't think enough. I think and use my mind to try to make sense of the world around me and understand what's happening, and it allows me to see clearly a lot of the time — to see through a bunch of deception and lies.
Speaking of deception, I also watched Bobby O's video destroying the BitTensor TAO guy. And man — Bobby was willing to debate, but this guy doesn't want to debate him.
Lying on Stage and Getting Celebrated for It
From what I can see, the BitTensor TAO guy is getting up on stage and lying to people. Almost everything he says is a lie or a misdirection. Everything is kept utterly simple to avoid any of the details, because the details don't look very pretty. He makes these giant claims — that BitTensor TAO is the third major innovation after the internet and Bitcoin, that it's like Google — even though it has nothing in common with Google. The BitTensor subnets can leave whenever they want to, which is nothing like YouTube, which can't just leave Google whenever it feels like it. My God, this is crazy. How much of our world is people getting up on stage, blatantly lying, and then getting paid and celebrated for doing it?
A New Direction for My YouTube Coach Channel
Yesterday I also got an idea for my Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach channel. What can I do on that channel that will be better than just making YouTube coaching videos that people don't watch? What I need to do is review other creators. The YouTube Coach channel is a great channel for videos talking about what other people are doing on YouTube — one channel where I don't have to talk about myself the whole time. That would be a great channel to attract the creators themselves, attract their audiences, attract other YouTubers by showing creators as case studies, bring people into the Family, and also help you discover new creators. Because what's crazy is that it's actually kind of hard to discover creators on YouTube. YouTube pushes the same kinds of creators at you all the time.
It feels like an absolute honor that YouTube has shown my videos around the platform 1.2 million times in the last month, because it shows other people's videos around so much more. It feels like such an honor that I can even get into the algorithm at all. And I have faith that everything is going to work out financially.
What I Think About All Day
I do obsess. I think all day about three things: this woman I have a date planned with later, my YouTube channel, and taking care of my kids. That's all I think about, all day, every day. I'm very focused, and most of my biggest thinking goes toward YouTube, although this woman has taken over a lot of my attention. I even set my own little ringtone and text tone for her on my phone, because I'm tired of hearing the default one and getting my hopes up. I got a couple of texts this morning, and I was all excited — and then I looked and thought, why are you messaging me this morning, man? Come on now.
I don't want to dime anybody out in particular, but there's one guy who always messages me asking for stuff, and his life is always a disaster. I already helped him out, and he won't do anything to get his life together. He always needs help because he's always destroying his own life. Step one in life: you've got to stop destroying your own life, man. I don't want to help someone who's ruining their own life with alcohol and drugs and then just being an asshole all the time to everybody who helps them. The logical thing in that environment is to stay away.
Four Nights with the Kids
I had a nice time with the kids yesterday. They came home from camp, played video games, and we went to my daughter's basketball camp, where my mom was. Then my mom came over and played Exploding Kittens with us, as usual. It was nice to have four nights in a row with the kids — that's the most nights in a row I've had in quite a while. And I'm going to take them on a trip to Michigan, my first trip with them without my ex.
I'm just really grateful for where my life's at. I'm really grateful for living open-hearted, because it's so hard to do things in life when you're closed-hearted. At the same time, it makes perfect sense that when you get open-hearted and get punished for it over and over again, being defensive, trying to protect yourself, and withdrawing start to make a lot of sense. But that also makes life thoroughly miserable, because you shut out all the love. I've just felt so great since I met this woman on Monday, and it feels like opening my heart for her has also translated into opening my heart with my kids more, with my mom more, and in my community more. I just pray that I can keep my heart open no matter what happens in each aspect of my life — no matter how much money I make or how things go with this woman.
I also just got a date scheduled through a matchmaking service with another woman who looks really compatible. For a while it seemed like there was so much scarcity, and now there are options. But I don't care about options. I just want one amazing person — someone to have an awesome team with. And as for all the haters talking about how bad Jerry Banfield Dating is, and all the people hating on me about how I'm wrong about ICP — I can't control that. What I do have is a lot more influence over whether I have a great dating life and what I do in my business.
Let's See What Tomorrow Brings
One guy messaged me last night who has followed me for a decade. He said, remember, you've done some amazing things over the last ten years, and you're going to do that again. I told him, thank you — that's really nice. He sent me ten messages full of ideas. If you want to be able to send me messages like that, join the Jerry Banfield Family. I'd love to get a closer connection with you, so I can get to know you and not be in my own head so much, and so I can help you expand your life — and so you actually have a content creator you follow who knows you instead of just talking at you.
So this is my vlog for today, and if you want more of my thinking on growing a channel like this, you'll find it in my YouTube Coaching playlist. Let's see what happens, and let's see what I've got to say tomorrow.