This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
As 2019 wrapped up and I moved into 2020, I was still desperate for a comeback. I was desperate to make money and just as desperate to cut expenses. Going into 2020, I made a simple decision: I would do what I knew how to do best. I would film online courses. I still had platforms where I could distribute them. I was still making some sales. I still had a large audience across my social media accounts. So I put my head down and went to work. Over the first few months of 2020, I filmed an absolute wave of courses. I recorded deep, five-hour-long courses on Adobe Creative Suite programs. I filmed courses on business and marketing. I created an entirely new batch of material and uploaded it to Uthena and other platforms.
In the short term, the sales were incredibly disappointing. At the same time, I was posting videos talking openly about how I had made money online in the past and about the massive debt I was now carrying. Almost nothing I was doing generated meaningful income, and that was crushing. Still, my expenses were lower, and the money that did come in at least helped slow the bleeding. My ex-wife liquidated her investments, and together we were able to get all the loans stabilized and stop borrowing more money through credit cards and cash advances. For the first time in a long while, it started to feel like there might be a path forward—that maybe, just maybe, we were going to survive this.
As 2020 began, the COVID situation erupted, and I remember feeling immediately that the whole thing was absolute bullshit. From the very start, my reaction wasn’t fear—it was anger and disbelief. I kept thinking, Why is nobody talking about how to be healthy instead of obsessing over being sick? To me, the entire narrative felt upside down, and I got toxic about it fast. I remember thinking people were acting stupid, blindly following fear instead of taking responsibility for their bodies and their lives. That mindset spilled right into my content.
I was already on TikTok back then, long before most people had even heard of it. What’s wild in hindsight is how clearly I can see that if my mindset had been rooted in abundance instead of desperation, I would have exploded on that platform. I had every opportunity. I even remember a guy in my paid partner group—people were paying $50 a month to be on calls with me—sending me TikTok when it was still called Musical.ly sometime around late 2018 or early 2019. He told me, Dude, this is going to be big. I watched these vertical videos with barely any views, dumb little clips, no obvious monetization, and I dismissed it instantly. I remember thinking, This is stupid. Who would use this shit? Looking back now, that’s almost comical.
The irony is that I was one of the earliest people on TikTok, before it even carried the TikTok name. I did get millions of views on there, but my mindset was completely wrong. I wasn’t in a place of abundance or clarity. I wasn’t capitalizing on the opportunity sitting right in front of me. Instead, I tested TikTok half-heartedly, posting sporadically without conviction. I put up one pandemic-related video about survival-type stuff—having a solar generator and things like that—and, unsurprisingly, it went nowhere. I was present, but I wasn’t committed.
When the lockdowns actually started, my response was immediate and absolute. Fuck that. I wasn’t complying. I didn’t care what the consequences were. I wasn’t going to stay home just because I was told to. I remember going to get a massage during the lockdowns when it was supposedly illegal. I drove over thinking, There is no way I’m sitting at home pretending this makes sense. I had met this massage therapist once at a studio earlier and had a strong intuitive nudge to get her number, just in case. At the time, it felt random, but it turned out to be perfect timing. As soon as the studios shut down, I already had her contact information.
She was struggling and really needed the money—massage was survival for her at that point. I was very grateful for her solid ninety-minute massage for only $100. She was also very grateful because hardly anyone was willing to book with her during the lockdowns, so I was one of the only clients she had.
We talked a lot during those sessions. Real conversations. Human conversations. And I remember leaving those massages feeling oddly proud of myself—not in a smug way, but in a grounded, embodied way. I felt like I was facing fear head-on instead of letting it dictate my behavior. I knew I was doing something I wasn’t “supposed” to do, and I didn’t care. In my mind, I wasn’t being reckless; I was refusing to live my life according to rules that felt dishonest and disconnected from reality. When I believe something is bullshit, I don’t comply quietly. That moment, that choice, reflected exactly where I was mentally and emotionally at the time—angry, defiant, exhausted, but still clinging to my sense of personal agency in a world that suddenly felt completely upside down.
I immediately started speaking out against what I saw as bullshit online, and I wound myself up in the process. Some of my most successful YouTube live streams during that time—the ones where people donated the most money—were the streams where I talked about health and went hard against the lockdowns. I ripped into them. I went off. I was furious, and I let it all out. Interestingly, the platforms didn’t even say anything to me about it because I kept my speech in code. But I ranted and raved about how stupid everyone was being, and looking back, I can see how that tone was probably part of the problem. I wasn’t just criticizing ideas; I was making people feel attacked.
I wrote posts on Facebook saying things like I was glad people were “returning to source” if they weren’t healthy enough to be here anymore. I framed it in this new-age, spiritual language, basically saying that if someone couldn’t survive a little virus, then maybe they didn’t need to be on the planet anymore and should go back home. I thought I was being profound. Some people were absolutely furious and Facebook made sure to show those posts to hundreds of thousands of people. One of my friends lost his grandmother during that time, and from his perspective, she died of COVID. From my perspective, I knew her personally. Her entire life revolved around being around people and staying active. She was in her eighties, and suddenly she was told to stay home, watch TV, and scroll on her phone. In my view, she lost her reason to live. She died because she didn’t want to live anymore. I didn’t see a virus killing her. I saw loneliness, isolation, and a sense of uselessness manifesting in her body. That’s how I saw it, even though others insisted on calling it COVID.
The same thing happened with an older relative of mine who had been declining for years and supposedly died of COVID as well. He stopped eating for weeks. Then he went to the hospital and “died of COVID.” To me, that was absurd. I saw a man who was tired of living, who was done, who was looking for a way out. From my perspective, he found one, and I believed doctors were incentivized to slap the COVID label on it. I thought it was insane how unquestioningly most people accepted that explanation.
What pushed me even further was running into nurses in real life. One nurse I met at a local clinic event told me she went to get tested for COVID, but the line was so long that she never even made it to the front. She went home. She told me she was later mailed a positive COVID test result—despite never being tested at all. Hearing that, I thought, Holy shit, this is an outright scam. To me, it looked like the entire thing was being used to see how far people could be controlled, how much authoritarianism could be pushed, and how easily fear could be weaponized.
All of that made me want to be online less, not more. As everyone else flooded onto the internet, I wanted out. After months of burning myself out filming courses, posting content, ranting on Facebook, and arguing with people, something started to shift. I could see that I had been too harsh. I realized that believing lies doesn’t make someone stupid. People were being tricked. They were being trapped. They were being lied to. Believing lies doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. It does mean discernment matters. It means cultivating truth in your life matters. If you’re dishonest, it’s easier for people to lie to you. If you blur the line between truth and falsehood in your own life, you lose your ability to detect it in others.
What I noticed about myself was that because I’m brutally honest, lies stand out to me. When someone lies, it feels wrong in my body, out of sync with who I am. That brutal honesty—while abrasive at times—gave me a kind of internal compass. At that point, though, instead of grounding into that clarity, I was still swinging it like a weapon online. And that only added to the exhaustion I already felt from everything else that had fallen apart.
I vented my frustration outward. I dumped it on other people. By May 2020, I was completely fried from everything online, and I hit a breaking point. I sold all my equipment. Everything. I had tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of gear, and I dumped it for maybe $5,000 or $6,000 total. I sold six monitors. I sold a Mac Pro I had paid around $10,000 for and let it go for $3,000. I sold all my cameras, microphones, audio gear, my Ableton Push 2, every keyboard—everything. People begged me not to do it. Everyone said the same thing: Don’t do this. Slow down. Take more time. I didn’t care. I was done with doing shit online. I said I was moving to in-person, and I meant it.
I committed fully to that decision. I started an in-person show called The Jerry Banfield Show and found a venue in June 2020 where I could host it live, in Florida, in person. While all of that was happening, I heard something that ended up changing everything. One of my friends mentioned disaster loans for businesses. A family member of mine had applied and gotten rejected because her business didn’t make much money. That’s when it clicked. Over the years, my business had made a lot of money. On paper, I qualified. I applied and ended up getting over $100,000 in disaster loans with 3.75% interest on 30-year terms. Those loans completely bailed me out of the financial disaster I had created.
Once the money came in, I shifted strategies immediately. All new income I made—whatever trickled in from courses and other remnants of the old system—went straight toward paying down existing loans. I stopped digging the hole deeper. The disaster loan money covered current expenses, and every dollar of earned income went toward cleanup. It took time for everything to stabilize, but for the first time in a long while, there was air again. There was room to breathe.
That summer, though, I was desperate to get out of what felt like collective insanity. While almost everyone else was locked down, glued to their phones and TVs, I felt disgusted watching people comply so easily. In my ex-wife’s family especially, it felt extreme to me. Her parents told us we couldn’t come over for Easter even though they lived nearby. Her sister lived nearby too and wouldn’t let us come over either. I ripped into them. I told them exactly how stupid I thought they were for believing all of it. My ex-wife handled it incredibly well, but this became another fracture in our marriage. It put her in a position where she felt like she had to choose between her family and me, because she was aligned with them on the lockdowns. She was angry that I ignored the rules entirely. I didn’t comply at any point. Not once.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.