I'm Jerry Banfield, and this is my raw, unfiltered life on July 18th, 2026. Yesterday's video, titled "I Cried After Our First Date," got a big positive response, and I appreciate that. I want to respond to some of the comments on it and tell you everything that's happened since then.
Am I Coming On Too Strong?
One of the comments I just read said that I'm coming on too strong — like I just met this woman five days ago and I'm so in love. I understand that's a valid point of view. At the same time, my woman is the center of my world. And for a woman like the one I went out with, the one I'm dating now — she said she wants a guy that's a best friend. That is a center-of-my-world kind of woman, a woman that wants a lot of attention. And that's what I have to give. I'm not the kind of guy that's very casual, no big deal. I'm a heavy, lots-of-attention kind of guy. But at the same time, I'm like a puppy: I'll give you a whole bunch of love and play with you and give you so much joy — but if you leave me home by myself, I might chew up the couch and your shoes and a few other things. All of us have our ups and downs. And I've realized that if I'm not coming on strong, I'm being inauthentic, because I'm just not the kind of guy who's going to be pretty casual.
I know a guy who told me his girlfriend hadn't texted him for two weeks, and she didn't seem to appreciate him reaching out. He was just there whenever she felt like having him. I asked him, "How's that going?" He said, "Yeah, I haven't heard from her in a couple weeks. Don't know what's going on with her." To me, if you haven't talked to me in a week, I've broken up and left. But I'll also reach out first, too. I'm realizing that's a conversation I need to have with the woman I'm dating: I do well on attention, and I hate the silent treatment. Of course, with my ex, the silent treatment was her whole family's method of operation. Rather than talk about feelings, everyone would go around pretending everything was fine while gritting their teeth and not talking about it — which is miserable.
With all that in mind, I missed the woman I'm dating a little bit over the last 24 hours, because she was working all day yesterday, making good money, and at the same time not available. But she did reach out and send some messages. At one point she sent like six messages in a row, and I loved that. I thrive on attention.
I Thrive on Attention — Even the Negative Kind
That's why I do well as a content creator. Some people say, "Oh, I'd hate to have people watch my videos and not like them." Me? I don't care — I'll take all the people who don't like my content. I read the comments on my Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews videos: "You don't know what you're talking about, you're an idiot for being in ICP, the price is down," and everything else. I would rather deal with 30 of those comments and have the thousands of views. I'll take the negative attention if I can get all the rest of the attention. I'll take people making videos reacting to my content — for a lot of people, that would be a nightmare. I'll take all the negative attention as long as I get the positive attention, too. That makes me a good content creator. I think when a lot of you are thinking about posting videos and uploading, you're thinking, "Oh, I'd really hate to get the negative, and I don't need that much attention." When I'm uploading, I'm just hungry for attention: "Oh, they're going to like this. Oh, they're going to like that. Yeah, this will get some views." All I'm thinking is: feed me with attention. And at the same time, I'm sharing with the purpose of helping your life.
Why Would You Pay to Talk to Me?
One person commented and asked, "Why would I pay to talk to you and get your advice on my life when you're figuring your own life out?" First off, if all of us are honest, all of us are always figuring our life out. I know a lot of people present themselves and act like they've got everything figured out and they're an expert. But often, those people will suddenly have a diagnosis, or something will suddenly blow up in one area of their life — and it turns out that's because they had this thing that wasn't figured out and they were suppressing it, not being honest about it, or keeping it secret. Then all of a sudden, boom, the whole thing goes off. Not with me. I'm very honestly presenting how I'm figuring out my life in real time. And I have some things figured out pretty well in life, clearly.
My calls are mostly for me to give you attention. That's what my calls are about. If you thrive on attention, if you've spent a bunch of time watching my videos, my calls are mainly about me listening to you. You can tell me if you want something different, if you want me to talk more. But with most of the people who talk to me for twenty-five minutes, I'll talk maybe five minutes and they'll talk maybe twenty. And if you want an hour or two straight with me — if you just need somebody to notice you — you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and just book the 30-minute calls back to back.
Rethinking My Business: One Main Offer
A big thing I did in the last 24 hours was once again assess my business system, because now I've got a lot of people listening to me, and I feel like I don't need to put so much time into the dating and finding a woman. It's actually much easier for me mentally to say, okay, I have one woman to pay attention to — I don't have to be thinking about all these other possibilities. So I obsessed yesterday about my business. I thought, we've got to be cranking in more money than this. Yesterday I was grateful somebody paid for a one-on-one call with me, and I went through and did a video on my YouTube coach channel talking about all the things I'm thinking. I realized the one-on-one calls need to be my gateway primary offer. For all of you who are giving me all this attention, the best thing I can do is offer to pay attention to you back. If I'm going to receive money in the context of doing something, that should be it: guaranteed attention, guaranteed time you can have with me. I love paying attention to other people. I love getting paid to listen to you. I don't offer therapy or anything — and what's nice is I don't try to fix you or tell you what to do.
You can also join my membership over on Skool — you can join my community there, which includes a one-on-one call with me every month, plus you can DM me and post in the community. I'd been trying to sell that monthly membership all week, and one person did buy it. But then two people somehow found my email online and asked, "Where's your one-on-one call link? I couldn't find it." That was a clear sign: the one-on-one calls should be my main thing. I'm not offering four calls a month in my Skool community anymore — though I will honor the guy who joined with that offer, and he gets to have his extra calls because he joined when I promised that. What I see is that most of you would rather pay once than commit to paying, even if it's the same price and you get more. I put a lot of thought into that yesterday. I need one single main offer across all my videos, and that offer should ideally monetize me full time from there.
When there's a lot of traffic, I should be able to make something on it — some days I might make five hundred or a thousand dollars, like if ICP pumps one day and five or ten people schedule a call, or if one of my dating videos or vlog videos goes off. I may get a whole bunch of calls at once, and then other times I have no calls, and that's okay. I love talking to you all, because to make better videos for you, I need to get to know you better. My calls are all about me getting to know you. They're not about me fixing you, and I don't provide therapy or medical advice or any of that. I lead by example, and if you want my thoughts on something, I'll share my experience in a particular area with you. Like the guy I talked with yesterday — he talked most of the time. And sometimes you have questions you're tired of me not answering, and you can ask me specific questions, too.
I'm really grateful. I feel that after so much searching this year, I've got — at least for the moment — a very comfortable place where life seems to be pretty figured out. And I was thinking about the woman I'm dating all day yesterday. That's what's nice: I know there are some women out there who treasure that level of attention, who love that a man would be focusing so much on them.
My Kids' Play and an Awkward Reunion
I went to my kids' play yesterday. They did a theater camp for two weeks, and they had their play. I got there and found myself laughing at the awkwardness of the broken family, so to speak. I see my ex's sister there, and I'm thinking, I haven't seen her in like a year, and I didn't get along that great with her to begin with. Nope, not going over there and talking to her — no thanks. So I sat on the opposite side of the room, because her daughter's in the same camp. Then my ex gets there, and I wondered if she'd sit with her sister — but she comes over and sits with me. I thought, this is so interesting. Why did you sit with me, your ex-husband, instead of your sister? She said, "Well, she's got a bunch of people over there already." And then I said, "All right, look, I am dating someone" — just for transparency, and because she's dating someone also. It was funny watching her emotional reaction, because she had expressed so much desire for me to find someone, and both of us thought I'd be dating somebody before her.
Then she went out and dated someone — just the first guy off a dating app she met. I guess she's still dating him. But she doesn't want to talk to me about anything anymore, which I understand, given how these videos go. At the same time, she said, "I'm happy for you, and I really hope it keeps going well. That said, I mostly just want to talk about the kids." She thinks that distance, that space, would be good for us. I'm not on the same page with that, but I'm willing to accept it. We've had 15 years of our lives together — I don't see why we wouldn't talk about more stuff. But she seems to be afraid of getting into these emotional areas. She was the one who would do the silent treatment and pull away, who liked to be so private about her life — which shows you why we're not compatible.
I like to be very public, because of the kind of world I want to live in. I've come to believe that if all of us could just honestly share our lives the way I do, almost all the problems in the world would be solved — and some of the new problems we'd have would be very interesting to me. The privacy and hiding and trying to keep things from people is what screws up our lives so much. If we all just talked about our lives, we'd see how the things we're doing are impacting each other.
It was interesting, because you could tell she seemed to feel bad about it, which is so irrational to some degree. It's like: okay, you've been dating someone for months, and you said you wanted me to find someone. But at the same time, she was also so obviously happy for me. She definitely got a bit emotional. And yes — I was really happy about it. I'm happy to tell people I have someone I'm dating. I'm really excited about that, because again, the woman I'm dating is the center of my world, and that's the kind of guy I am. Maybe it's because my mom worked all the time and I was home with my dad, so attention from a woman was so precious. My mom was home with me the first year when I was a baby, and then she was working the rest of the time. However you want to diagnose my psychology — it works for me.
Recovery Without Fear
Yesterday I walked a few miles instead of going to yoga or anything. I thought about going to an AA meeting too, but I wasn't feeling it. And I'm glad that I'm not going to AA meetings out of fear anymore. For years, I went to AA out of fear — the fear that if I stopped going to meetings, I was going to drink. I'm here to serve humanity, and there are lots of ways to serve humanity. AA has felt a bit inefficient to me at a lot of times, but I'm still going to meetings, and I'm still talking to another alcoholic every day — in my experience, that's an important part of my life. My sponsee reached out to me yesterday, which was nice, and I spent about an hour talking to another alcoholic, and I called my sponsor yesterday. So that was all good.
The Gaming Video Experiment
I keep struggling to figure out what I'm going to do with my gaming videos. I almost did a livestream yesterday. But I want to do some gaming vlogs and advertise them. Sometimes I think our biggest opportunities are the areas where we're most full of resistance. So I intend to start cranking out some gaming videos, and then I want to advertise them. I just want to try it — let's see what happens if I put a million views with YouTube ads on a gaming channel. It's just a little experiment for fun.
Cleaning House and Reverse Osmosis Water
I woke up this morning after a nice night of sleep, which was great. And I cleaned the hell out of my house, because I don't know when I'll be having the woman I'm dating over. I hadn't cleaned the tub in six months here, so I figured, let me go ahead and clean that tub. So I cleaned the tub. I also got my reverse osmosis countertop water machine out, which is so nice. I had installed under-the-sink reverse osmosis at my ex's house, and I've really been missing having my own. So now I've got one right on the counter, and it's cool — it tells you what it takes out. The water coming in had about 500 particles per million, and the water coming out had only about 12, which is amazing. What's funny is that the little water filter attached to my kitchen sink — the one that was here when I moved in — was actually coming up as having more particles in it than the water out of the bathtub. So I just fill the tank up in the bathtub, put the tank in, and it filters the water through and puts the drain water back in the tank. You dump that, and then you get about a half gallon of water that's reverse osmosis filtered and remineralized. It's so good.
The way I figure it, the best thing to do — and this is just my own approach — is that I go to hot yoga and I sweat it out, and while some people are all about detoxifying, in my experience, if you can toxify your body less in the first place, that's going to be better than toxifying it and then detoxifying it. There's this one woman at yoga all the time — I swear she and I are on the same schedule. I go to all different classes, and she's always there. I asked her, "Do you just come to every class?" She said, "No, I usually just go to one a day." I'm like, then why are you always at the one I go to? She's always talking about how much she's getting drunk. The other day she said, "I love day drinking" — and she's at least ten years older than me. And then she talks about detox. The way I see it, if you didn't dump all that alcohol in your body, you wouldn't have to detox your body so much. So that was fun.
Grateful and Not Spinning Stories
It was raining a lot yesterday, and I have a tennis date scheduled this morning, but I don't think we're going to get to play tennis. I'm just happy for anything I can do with her. And I'm really grateful. I just feel so full of love, and I'm being very proactive. My mind has tried to come up with little stories — I woke up this morning and it started trying to spin some bullshit, and I said, nope, you're not spinning any bullshit. I'm opening my heart, I'm loving, I'm being very grateful for exactly where life's at today, and we're not spinning bullshit. That's where I'm at. I did forget to read some of the Bible yesterday — maybe I'll read some this morning. And if you want to follow this whole story as it keeps unfolding, every one of these videos is on my Dating playlist.
I really appreciate your love and support here. On our calls, I'm there primarily to listen. And if you want to film a video with me — if you want to get on Zoom and record it together — you can schedule a one-on-one call with me for that as well. There's a number you can text me at after you schedule; just text me and say, "Hey, I want to use our call to film a video together." Super easy.
I appreciate all your love and support on these vlogs.