On December 28, 2024, my 4,961st day as a full-time YouTuber, I sat down to make a little vlog about what's happened in the last day since I filmed the one yesterday. I think you'll enjoy getting to know the more personal side of me. I was just laughing because my mom's dog is staying over while she's on a trip to Boston, so I grabbed a picture of him for the background and put my face right over his wiener so we're not showing anything we shouldn't on camera.
Coming back around to Brandon Sanderson's Elantris
I started listening to Brandon Sanderson's Elantris a little while ago. My mom and one of my best friends from college really enjoy his books, and I've listened to a lot of sci-fi and fantasy in my day. I got really into things like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, but I hadn't listened to any fiction books in quite a while.
When I listened to the first three chapters of Elantris a couple of weeks ago, I thought, this is just more scarcity mindset, boring crap that I don't really need to take my time with. I want to explore worlds that are unexplored, hear ideas I've never heard before, see worlds that I've never seen. So I stopped after three chapters and put it down for a week or two. And then I kept thinking about the book. Now I'm reading it, now I'm into it, and now I like it. It's nice to have a different world to experience, even if it is kind of the same old scarcity-mindset stuff we do here on earth with a couple of little magic tweaks somewhere else. It's still interesting, and it's nice to get out of your usual mindset. I listen on double speed, so I really ripped through it. I think I'm about a third of the way in right now.
The crypto video I made about the ethics of crypto
I filmed a couple of crypto videos this morning. We're going to Legoland with the family on January 2, so I'd like to get ahead. I love putting a crypto video out every day, because the algorithm just loves having a new video every day. Two videos a day seems to be too much, and less than one a day isn't enough. A video a day is the sweet spot.
One of the 20-minute videos I recorded today was about the ethics of trading coins that I'm also promoting. I talked to my wife about this too. I looked at it and realized I could have made more than 500 ICP, well over $5,000, if I had bought maybe $1,000 of a meme coin on ICP that I then put a video out about. I recorded an interview that the guy paid $333 on jerrybanfield.com to do, which I'd share on my YouTube crypto channel, Jerry Banfield Crypto, and on my X account.
Even though that video didn't perform as well as my usual clickbait ICP videos, because it wasn't as much clickbait, the price absolutely shot up. If I had bought 100 ICP right when I filmed the video and sold it two days later when the video came out, I would have made around $5,000 in two days buying a meme coin that I knew was going to come out. In the past, I've bought stuff like Tagger, and I've filmed a crypto video on that in a lot more detail that's coming out on the 30th at 6 a.m. The title will be something like "my hardest challenge in crypto," because that's exactly what it is.
I knew I could have easily made that money, but I asked my wife, is it ethical? Not, is it ethical from everybody else's point of view. It certainly seems to be legal as far as I can see. If it was stocks, it wouldn't be, but crypto is not stocks. It's not regulated the way stocks are, so I very much could do that legally. It just doesn't feel right.
At the same time, I'm annoyed, because I could be putting $5,000 in my bank account today. I have 1,000 ICP liquid, so it's not a big deal to throw 100 into something, especially when there's a high probability you're going to make instant cash on it. I easily could have gotten my 100 back plus $5,000 in the bank, but it doesn't feel right.
In the past, I've bought into things just so I could pump them. At the time I didn't quite look at it that consciously, but with Tagger, I bought a bunch, hyped it up, and then a month later I was selling it. That feels bad. People get annoyed and unfollow me. So I keep coming up against the same question: how much is my reputation worth? If I just was that good at spotting things, or if someone was going to film a video with me, that'd be one thing. But it feels rigged when I can essentially make it happen myself.
So to me, the most honorable thing to do is to simply not buy anything on ICP, so I can cover everything fairly. I thought a lot about that today. Laura agreed. She said we don't need the money that bad, that it's better for me to think about my long-term reputation, and that it's not worth compromising it over some easy short-term money. She asked, how do you look at people who do things like that? Most people who do them keep them secret.
But I'm not a person who's comfortable keeping secrets. I used to keep a lot of secrets when I was an active alcoholic, and as a part of getting sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I cleared those secrets out. I feel clean because of that. To me, profiting off my own knowledge of my videos feels dirty. It feels like cheating, which is annoying, because some of you wouldn't view it as cheating at all. In fact, I got a message from one of my most dedicated community members saying I should have taken those easy profits. You knew you were doing that video, you've got debts to pay, you've got a family to feed, you should have just taken that easy money. But it doesn't feel right to profit off my own videos like that when people are already paying me to make them, when YouTube is already paying me, and when I've already got money coming in on open chat.
It comes down to what your morality is. For me, I'm the final judge. I have to live with my own decisions. If I feel good about the actions and behaviors I take, it doesn't matter as much what other people think. And if I feel bad about the behaviors I engage in, it also doesn't matter if other people agree with them or think they're okay. It comes down to my own judgment of what feels good and what doesn't, and I have to live with that judgment all the time. That was a big thing I was navigating today. If you want to follow how I think through this stuff in real time, I keep putting it out in my Money playlist.
Working Michael Saylor into an ICP video
I also filmed a video about what would happen if Michael Saylor got into Bitcoin in a certain way. I research topics on YouTube now. In the past, I just put up whatever titles I wanted, and I'd get annoyed later when I realized I could have found a clickbait title that worked to get five or ten times as many views, instead of feeling like some saint who refuses to use clickbait. So I looked it up and saw that a lot of the most clickbait videos right now mention Michael Saylor. I worked him into an ICP video with Bitcoin in the title, so we can hopefully pull some of these Bitcoin people over into ICP. You can see how I approach this kind of thing in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Paying my kids to learn how money works
We cleaned up Christmas today. Laura took the tree down, I got it in a bag, and I took the stuff out to the shed in the back. My son and daughter were motivated because of Legoland. They wanted to make some money beforehand so they'd have something to spend.
I pay them $20 an hour in three-minute increments, so if you work 15 minutes, you get five bucks. They both got to work. My daughter watered the garden. My son mowed the lawn. He's six years old, and he's got a push mower, not gas-powered, just pure kid power. I'll pay them to do anything that's safe for them to do and that they want to do: pick the poop up in the backyard, mow the grass with the hand mower, do weeding, water the plants, fold laundry. They ended up collectively making more than $20 this morning, and that I feel good about.
I don't feel good paying someone to come into my house to wash dishes and clean, but I do feel good paying my kids, because I want them to be able to have money and buy stuff. I also don't want to just give it to them all the time without them having to work. I want them to learn to work. My daughter was frustrated that she hadn't saved more money. My son has over a hundred dollars saved up at six years old, partly from work and partly from the five bucks he gets to go to bed at my bedtime once a week without being a pain about it.
My daughter was frustrated that she wasn't saving, and I told her this is a good time in your life to learn this. You haven't saved money because on so many of the days when there were things to do, there was laundry to fold, there was poop to pick up, there were plants to water, and you said you didn't want to do it. What you do every single day really matters with your money. She has so many stuffed animals, and she often spends her money the moment she gets it. I'm glad my kids can learn these lessons early. I didn't do much with money growing up, I just figured it out on my own, and for as long as I drank alcohol, I could never save any money.
The more money I make, the more I want to give away
For me, the more money I make, the more I just want to give more away. In my open chat last night, I gave away about $60 in my giveaways channel. There's a big community of people from Nigeria who hang out in my open chat, and some of them have made videos sharing how cool they thought it was that they joined and someone just gave them money, and that they saw other people getting given money too. It's different. You can scroll Facebook and Instagram for thousands of hours and nobody will give you anything. If you come hang out in my open chat, I gave out $60 last night.
In the past, I felt like I couldn't even do a giveaway unless it was at least $10 or $20 per person. But I realized that giving a dollar to 60 people is in a lot of ways much more meaningful than giving six people $10, because the biggest difference in the world is zero to one. Giving somebody in Nigeria a dollar, across a bunch of different people, is really cool. I took 20 or 30 minutes last night just talking to people in open chat and giving money away, because it feels good. The more money I get, the more I can do that, and I can also expense it as a marketing expense, since it's a promotional thing I do to get people to join.
Letting it out and feeling vulnerable
I've only gotten one violation on YouTube in 13 years and around 5,000 videos, so I'm doing pretty good following the community guidelines, which is why I'm being paranoid about my dog being front and center even though it probably doesn't matter.
I felt vulnerable after yesterday's video too. If you didn't watch the December 27th one, I was having a bit of a down day yesterday morning. I'm mostly having up days and I feel great most of the time, but I let it all out yesterday and I felt vulnerable afterwards. I think that's good, though, because I didn't say anything in there that was going to collapse my whole life or ruin my YouTube career. I just said the stuff I'm struggling with. It's better today, but I let it out, and I felt vulnerable afterwards.
That's a good thing. When you speak in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and share your story, you often feel really vulnerable afterwards, the same as when you open up to somebody. If you've chosen a safe place to do it, that vulnerability is a good feeling. This YouTube channel and X are a safe place for me to open up. I've been reading more of the X comments and replies lately to get material for my videos, and starting on the 29th I'm tagging more of the people I mention, so they can see who I'm talking about and the people themselves can see I talked about them.
Why I protect my sleep and refuse the grind
Yesterday I did a power yoga class, which was nice, and I already made a video after that. I took a nice walk with both dogs, my mom's dog and my dog, last night, then put him back in his crate across the street at his house. It looks like he got a good night of sleep, and we all slept good here. I got in bed a little after 10 and got up at 7:50, so I was in bed for nine-plus hours. That seems to work really well.
We often get in the habit of sleeping less as adults, but that's not necessarily because we need less sleep. This is the healthiest I've ever been in my whole life, and my body seems to love getting that time to rest. I could grind and hustle harder. I wish the days were 40 or 50 hours long, because I have so much I'd like to do, but it comes down to prioritizing what's important. I'd love to play some Age of Empires for five hours a day. Some things are just better not done at all if you can't have enough time to fully engage with them. And sleep is something you should never short, because you pay the price of cutting it, in everything from your health to your mood and mental well-being, which impacts your relationships with other people.
I've seen so many YouTubers giving advice about how hard they grind. They had a full-time job and then they'd get up in the middle of the night to upload their videos. And I'm like, bro, I don't want what you have. If that's what it takes to be a full-time YouTuber, I don't want it. I want three hours a day maximum, and that's for three videos on three channels. I don't want to be out here at 4 a.m. uploading videos. To me, that's chasing a short-term goal while sacrificing your long-term, in a lot of cases.
How I sacrificed my long-term viability for quick money before
It's the same thing as the $5,000 I could put in the bank today. If I do that over and over again, the way I have so many times in the past, I sacrifice my long-term viability for short-term profits.
I got hundreds of thousands of subscribers on my original Jerry Banfield channel, which is up as a music channel now, by selling Udemy courses. When I got banned from Udemy, I started selling courses off my website. I made millions of dollars selling those courses, but I really canceled myself in the long term, because I used all those videos as a means to sell courses instead of focusing on delivering value and building up an audience that loved me, that was engaged, and that I was actually providing value to.
Then in 2018 and 2019, I finally ran out of money and borrowed for an ambitious business project. I borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up Uthena.com, and now I'm looking at selling it for $10,000. We're talking with a buyer right now. I blew my finances up and was pretty financially minimal. I borrowed all the money I could get, I could barely make the minimum payments, and I cleaned out my wife's investments and all her savings just to bail me out. That was really hard for all of us. And how did that happen? Years before, I prioritized quick money and making sales over long-term viability.
I'm glad I don't do that with my health, but I've definitely done it with my work. So now I'm really excited to reflect on it. As a YouTuber, long-term viability is important to me. Over the last 13 years, YouTube has been the most stable platform, much more stable than Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, and it's rewarded me most accurately with views, ad revenue, and subscribers based on what I've contributed. If I had to do my whole business again, I'd make YouTube a priority from the very beginning. I might sell a course here and there, but I wouldn't compromise my whole YouTube channel by making videos with five-minute sales pitches at the start just to try to make sales. This is the kind of thing I get into in my YouTube Coaching playlist if you want to go deeper on it.
Leading by example instead of preaching
My underlying objective is that just watching my videos makes your life better, especially on a crypto channel. This is a video that's just real and raw, and I hope it's helpful in your daily life as a way to take inventory of yourself. Instead of preaching at you, I'm trying to lead by example. I examine my actions and how they're impacting other people, and I believe the more of us who do that, the better our world gets. Just think about how what you're doing today impacts other people. Would you want to be on the other end of being driven like that, talked to like that, or having money made off you like that?
So I'm glad today helped clarify my position even more. I don't want to make quick money swapping meme coins that I know are going to pump after I've been paid to do a video about them. I don't want to do that, because in the long term the audience stops trusting me and everything I say becomes meaningless. I don't want to go through that cycle again. I went through it multiple times, building up a huge audience on YouTube and watching it go to zero, building a huge audience on Facebook and then deleting it after being demonetized and horribly frustrated with the whole platform.
This is also why it's important to me to have a community that isn't only on YouTube, in case things change there or in case I want to focus on creating somewhere else. If you want me to see what you have to say, you're welcome to come join the family and keep the conversation going off-platform with me directly.
Music and testing my new vlogging setup
I made some ambient music last night. I hadn't made any the day before, and last night's came out awesome. Sometimes it doesn't come out as good, but that one did. I'd love to have a vlog, a crypto video, and a music video every single day. The trouble is I made last night's music too long. I should have split it into two videos, and then I could have a music video every day.
I also tested my vlogging setup today. My mom gave me a camera that's about $500 with a couple-hundred-dollar lens, and I got a lav microphone for it. When I go to Legoland, I'm going to try recording a vlog on location with it. Good luck uploading that thing from there, but we'll do the best we can with the internet they have. I want to try uploading some on-location vlogs and travel vlogs, so I'm going to give that a test. I tested the setup today and it works good. The camera looks great and the microphone sounds good. That covers everything going on today. Thank you for watching.