On December 23, 2024, I woke up and had a Larabar and Christmas cookies for breakfast. Delicious. My dog decided to grab one off the table while I was eating, first thing in the morning, and I don't play that. She jumped up on the table and grabbed a Christmas cookie. I grabbed her neck while she grabbed it, yanked the cookie out of her mouth, and then ate the rest of the cookie after she'd had the whole thing in her mouth.
I remembered my mom is a vet, and she says how dogs' mouths are cleaner than people's. And I thought, you know what? This is just to make a point. This is to make a point that you're not going to slobber on my cookie. My dad used to say that his dad, who grew up in a family of five kids in the 50s, would lick one of the pork chops so other people didn't want it. And I'm like, you are not doing that with my Christmas cookies. What's funny is it's not like it was my first cookie or anything. It was like my third or fourth cookie. But I figure if you eat stuff like cookies first thing in the morning, your body just burns the energy off. You don't get fat. But if you put those cookies away at night, you're getting fat.
$100 overnight and a community off YouTube
I came to my open chat today, which is like a Discord or a Telegram, and checked my messages. There were more than 20 direct messages. I'm like, can we put these in the chat, people, and not just DM me about stuff that I'm happy to see? I made $100 overnight on somebody new joining one of my channels in open chat, which is awesome, and I split that with one other guy. I'm so grateful that after so many years on YouTube, I finally got an application that can build the community off of YouTube. That's really effective, both for bringing in a free community and then for paid upgrades. If you want to be part of that, you can join me and the rest of the family.
Today I was wondering what kind of video I wanted to film, probably just a short little one. Yesterday I did a two-hour Internet Computer Protocol stream on my Jerry Banfield crypto channel. There were 200 viewers most of the time, about 2,000 in total, and tens of thousands of people saw the stream while it was live. And I'm glad that's enough.
One of my biggest struggles as a content creator over the years is feeling like where I'm at is enough, and actually enjoying what I'm doing, feeling like what I'm doing is useful. One of the hardest things with video games was feeling like what I was doing was useful, although making people laugh is useful, and teaching people something they learn to want to use is useful. With my crypto videos, I know I'm doing something useful, because I'm helping people get out of all these other vaporware garbage coins and get into something real. I'm just sharing what I'm doing myself. It's not like I'm out here pitching things that I'm not holding. I have ICP. I've got like $50,000 of it, and that's my whole portfolio. So I'm just out here telling people what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. It feels good. If you want to see exactly where that's gone, I broke down my entire crypto portfolio of 6,511 ICP in another post.
How quickly a life disappears
Today I'm planning to go play tennis at about 10am, a couple of hours from now. I think I'll go to yoga first to stretch and to see the community there. And it's amazing how quickly your life disappears. I'm trying to remember what I even did yesterday. You really do only have this moment. Like, 80 percent of yesterday is already forgotten.
I did go shoot basketball yesterday, which was nice. I made 33 three-pointers in about 30 minutes, which is a bit slower than I've been doing lately. We also baked Christmas cookies at my house, vegan ones with flaxseed instead of egg, which is awesome, because then you can eat the dough while you're making it. My mom came over and we decorated the cookies. I made a single batch, so there weren't so many cookies, which was nice, because it was faster and the cleanup was easier.
Sometimes you just need to wait
And the kids fought. My son got all upset because the first tray had 11 cookies. My daughter decorated several with my mom, and then my son was counting the cookies on his tray, getting all upset, because he didn't know if there'd be 11. And there ended up being 12 cookies. I'm like, see, sometimes you just need to wait, and you're literally going to get exactly what you want. All the fuss and all the crap beforehand: if you literally just wait, life is going to give you a good deal. So much suffering could be avoided. I've seen it repeatedly in my personal life, and I'm glad I'm better at waiting now. I'm better at waiting and trusting that life is going to give me exactly what I want. All I need to do sometimes is wait.
Like Internet Computer Protocol. So many people are all pissed off and frustrated with the price. I'm like, y'all, just wait. All you need to do is go out with your life, have fun, enjoy your day-to-day life, and wait. And this is going to give you all the money you want. I feel extremely wealthy with all the Internet Computer I have today, and seeing where that's going, I feel so blessed. The universe keeps giving me these opportunities: Bitcoin 10 years ago, Ethereum eight years ago, repeatedly giving me opportunity after opportunity. And I'm glad I have the patience today to actually receive the opportunity. That's the whole reason I keep saying no one is selling ICP now, and I talk through all of it in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Why I still wash my own dishes
I did so many dishes yesterday. I must have done an hour and a half, two hours of dishes, between cleaning up the kitchen from the day before, making the Christmas cookies, cleaning up the Christmas cookies, and there's still more dishes to do. My kids said, "Dad, grownups don't get bored." I'm like, do you think I like washing all these dishes? Do you think I'm just having the time of my life washing these dishes?
I feel satisfied washing the dishes, because if I don't do it, then that falls to Laura. And if Laura doesn't do it, we're going to have a disgusting house, or we're going to be using paper plates all the time, which is wasteful. So it's satisfying to do what needs to be done. And I like how I do the dishes better than anybody else. Everybody else in the house, whether it's Laura or the kids, always leaves stuff. There's oil on the dishes, there's food on the dishes. When I wash the dishes, they're clean. So I wash them, even if it takes an hour, hour and a half.
Sure, I have enough money where I could pay somebody to wash my dishes for me. But I hate having somebody do things that I should be doing for myself. It's gross to think about. I could pay somebody probably $20 an hour to come wash my dishes for me. And some people say, well, it would make sense for you and your time: you pay somebody $20 an hour to wash your dishes, then you could do a call for $300.
What an AA meeting reminded me about getting sober
I went to my AA meeting last night, and the guy who brought the topic led it with me. I chaired the meeting and he brought the topic, which was great because he doesn't share a lot and a lot of people don't know him as well. He did a great topic, and we all talked about it. I remembered how my wife getting ready to leave me was what motivated me to get sober. But I didn't try to get sober as much for her as I realized I wasn't going to be able to live without her, not because of her herself, but because if I were to push her away with my drinking and be all alone again, I would feel like an utter failure, and I couldn't stand to live like that. So I really got sober for me, because I couldn't stand to live my life the way I was living it anymore. My wife leaving was a good external trigger to be like, oh, this is something I really need to do something about. This is really bad.
What valuable work really means
At the meeting, I talked to a guy who is paying a girl who's like a tantra therapist to satisfy his needs for his man parts. She was charging him like $300-something an hour, and it sounded like he was enjoying that. I'm glad, because to me, if you're having joy in what you're doing in life, and it's not hurting anybody else, and in fact it's helping somebody else also, that's ideal. If you're doing something and it's hurting somebody else, or it's not bringing you joy, there's probably a way to do that with joy.
So I was thinking on the way home, man, this girl has to advertise her services on these adult websites, strip it all down, and she gets the same amount of money for what she does as I do doing a Zoom call in my house. I was going to say God is good, but I set this up. I've got it really nice. I love that people pay $300-plus an hour to talk with me for an hour, and I do valuable work. The last guy who paid me, I helped him sell $30,000 or $40,000 of his crypto into ICP, get it off the exchange, and get it locked up, so he gets out of these garbage coins, gets into one that's good, and then locks it up to reap those rewards long term. That's a valuable service. There aren't a lot of people in the world who could have helped you do that. If that's the move you want to make too, I wrote about why I'd sell Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, and SOL for ICP before it's too late.
But I was thinking on the way home, this is crazy. I remember when I was making less than $20 an hour. I was making $20,000 a year working full time as a correction officer, which actually came out closer to $10 an hour, because you multiply 40 hours times 50 weeks once you account for sick days and vacation. So I was working about 2,000 hours a year for $20,000 a year, risking my life as a correction officer. Then I finally got up to close to $20 an hour as a police officer, risking my life on the streets. And it's amazing that today I make about 15 times that much in the comfort of my home, having a call with people. If you want that kind of call, you can get one when you come join the family.
I think that kind of abundance is available to all of us, all of us. But it comes from first feeling like I love what I'm doing, I have enough, and asking, how can I serve? How can I help others? It's not like doing one form of work is better than the other. As a police officer, I did feel really satisfied, and as a correction officer, I knew I was doing valuable work. Now, I hated, especially as a correction officer, how little I got paid for it. But I knew I was doing something that was valuable.
Feeling useful as a YouTuber
As a YouTuber, lots of times I haven't felt like I'm really doing anything valuable. But now I do. What's tricky as a YouTuber is you can make videos that get you views and make you money, but those videos can essentially just be junk food for people who are watching addictively and wasting their time. I think the videos I'm doing right now, my crypto videos especially, are videos that are really transforming people's wealth. Time will tell how that turns out.
And I love doing these videos. These videos are so therapeutic. They're so fun. They're so real and raw, and I would love to just watch pretty much anyone making a video like this, talking about their life, sharing what they're doing. I wish everybody would just make this same kind of YouTube channel where it's like, just tell me about your life. Tell me what you're doing, and be real, and cover what's interesting about your life.
The patio I refuse to pay someone to build
Yesterday I went to Lowe's with my mother-in-law and the kids first thing in the morning. She came over and needed a ride, and I'm like, hey, let's go. I started buying the stuff for the patio out in the backyard. My wife has wanted a patio for like a year, and this is another one of those things: I don't want to pay somebody to do something that I want to do, but actually making time to do it has been a little tricky. I did make time to fix the fence and clean the house up after the hurricanes, but then I dove back into my work. So I'm going to make time. Winter in Florida is a great time to knock this patio out. It's not so hot. It's going to be hours and hours of digging, putting down gravel and sand, leveling it, and then putting down all the blocks for it. I don't want to pay somebody thousands of dollars to do something that would be good for me to do.
Now, I told my wife I could probably do our roof. The materials for a new metal roof for our house would cost four or five thousand dollars. I'm like, I could just buy all those materials and rip the old roof off. She's like, no, I think we should pay twenty thousand dollars for somebody else to do this whole roof for us. And they're on the roof right now, putting some finishing touches on it. There are some things that are better not to do yourself. My in-laws did their own floor, and that floor was bumpy. Now they're getting a nice floor put down. A roof is something that's worth paying extra money to have done by people who do roofs, so the roof doesn't leak or blow off during a hurricane. You don't want to find out your do-it-yourself roof blows off during the hurricane; then you should have just had it done right in the first place. But a patio in the backyard is low stakes. The worst thing is you could twist your ankle or fall down because it's not straight, which I guess you want to avoid. But I'll make it straight out there. We're going to smooth it out and pound it down. I'm going to do that.
So this is the interesting stuff. I'm trying to remember what's happened since my last vlog. It's Monday, so I did one on Saturday, and I can barely remember anything about that right now. This is my life. I love filming these, and I wish these were the videos I'd filmed the whole time I was on YouTube. So sometimes the best you can do is say, well, I wish I'd done this before, so I'm going to make sure I keep doing it today. If you want to come along, you can keep watching more of my life in my Life playlist.