Here is where I stand on the three March 2025 entries in this hub, written on March 6, March 9 and March 11. I think a daily recording is one of the best ways to write an autobiography, and I want to be able to hear these days ten years from now the way I would listen to someone else's life. The food question that comes up most in these posts has a clear answer for me: the best results come from having no junk food in the house at all. If the kids want a cookie, they can eat one somewhere else. Our home should be a place where anything you reach for is good for you.
The first entry, my diary from March 6, was a packed day. I got my teeth cleaned at 9:30, filmed a crypto video, recorded a 45-minute sponsored interview, picked up the kids from school, and played tennis for the first time at the Racquet Club. The highlight was a ball of light with a cloud around it crossing the sky at about 6:30 p.m. while we all stood on the court and watched. I said it might have been a UFO, and nobody wanted to talk about it. For me it was the third object like that I have seen, which is remarkable, because I never saw one growing up even though I lived around air bases.
The food argument lives in the March 9 vlog. I took the kids to Whole Foods, came home with cookies and a donut, and the house turned into a whiny, fighting mess over sugar. I had already tried both extremes. About a year earlier I threw out the junk food and ruined a whole day for Laura. Later I tried the opposite for months, stuffing the house with junk on the theory that scarcity was the problem, and the kids ate it constantly. Neither worked for me. The kids are at healthy weights, so this is not really about weight. It is about opportunity cost and habits: when junk is in the house, that is what everyone eats, and they stop reaching for the fruit and vegetables that are right there.
The March 11 entry, my life post from that day, was a different kind of day. Laura was in Tampa for an employment conference, so I took the kids to school myself. At my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting the chairperson called on me first, and I shared about staying sober and how much easier life is sober. What I keep coming back to from that meeting is that people have answers. If I find the people who know what I want to know and ask them, I usually get what I need. I took a noon hot yoga flow, ate a $7 veggie burrito I had bought the day before, and finally started my taxes, which I had been putting off for a month. Last year at this time they were already done.
That is the honest core of the month. The early entries are about getting through a full schedule and finding something to enjoy in an ordinary day. The March 9 entry is me trying to settle the sugar question at home, and the March 11 entry is me facing the things that are harder to settle: my drinking history, the taxes, and the business behind the videos. Across all three, the common thread is that I keep asking people for what I need, from the AA room to my own kids, and I keep writing it down so I can check it later.
Below this opening you will find a contents list and then the three full posts, newest first, exactly as I recorded them. If you want the wider story, my Alcoholics Anonymous page pulls together the sobriety threads from many years, and if the UFO part caught your attention, my page on aliens and secret space programs covers what I have seen and what I think about it. For what came after March, see the June and July 2026 vlogs.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Daily Vlog March 9, 2025: Junk Food, Grilling, and AA (June 17, 2026)
- My Diary, March 6, 2025: Tennis, Kids, and a UFO (June 17, 2026)
- My Life, March 11, 2025: Sobriety, Hot Yoga, and Taxes (June 17, 2026)
Daily Vlog March 9, 2025: Junk Food, Grilling, and AA
From my video published June 17, 2026.
This is March 9th, 2025 with Jerry Banfield, and this is my daily vlog. In my opinion, this is a great way to write an autobiography. It was the daylight savings time change last night, which my mom says is her least favorite day of the year because you get an hour less of sleep. I'm grateful the kids still slept in until 7:30, and we got up a little before 8.
A trip to Whole Foods and a lesson in sugar
I needed to get some groceries, so I took the kids to Whole Foods. I go there with them and we buy tons of healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables, and then we get to the bakery and they're like, "I want a cookie." So I get each of them a cookie, then I get Laura a donut, and I head home. It's so cute, too: I let each of them get their own little cart, so they each push their cart and we split up loading all the groceries into them. Then they each go to their own self-checkout line and I help both of them with it. It ends up being about $170 total.
I get home and we give Laura the donut, and the kids start eating their cookies. I don't need anything for myself. I figure I can just share. These are big cookies, so I could have a bite here and there. Well, then Jack's complaining that I've taken too big of a bite off his Easter bunny cookie, and meanwhile he takes gigantic bites off of Laura's donut. She gets upset. And I'm just sitting there thinking, why? Why did I do this again? Why do we have all this sugar crap in the house?
It's not even about weight. The kids are very healthy weights. It's the opportunity cost. You bring stuff like this home and then that's all they want to eat. Whereas yesterday, Jack ate several apples in a row, but that was only because they'd run out of ice cream cones and icies to eat. When you have this junk in the house, they'll eat that instead. Now, it's not a huge deal, they're very healthy, but at the same time it's an opportunity to learn and to stop. Why not just say no cookies, no donuts, we don't need any of that stuff? We've got fruit, we've got vegetables, we've got nuts, we've got lots of stuff to eat at home. You don't need a cookie.
In the past, I've gone back and forth on this a bunch of times. We're not going to buy all this sugar crap, this processed food with no nutritional value, outside of the fact that if you were starving, sure, a cookie might help you not starve. But we're not starving. And there's a chance to eat foods that are nutritious, like fruits and vegetables, which the kids love eating, unless you bring the junk around, in which case they prioritize the junk. They're not thinking the way I'm thinking. I look at the food differently, but even they suck me into it, and then we get to have all this junk in the house and I get into the habit of eating it. After every meal I feel like I need a double-stuffed Oreo to wash it down, or a piece of candy or an ice cream cone. Maybe not after breakfast, but sometimes even then.
The Kevin Hart concert and a gentler approach
We've done this before. About a year ago, Laura and I were going to see Kevin Hart one day, and I came in after a similar morning experience and said, "We need to throw out all the junk food in the house. I'm tired of it." I threw out some stuff that Laura thought was hers, and she got all offended. It was a pissy day all the way through the Kevin Hart concert. Laura hadn't even eaten by 4 p.m. that day. It was insane. So this time I didn't want to repeat that same outcome, just a bit more gentle.
I said, "Can we just, we're the parents, can we stop bringing this junk food into the house?" Junk food being ultra-processed food that has almost no nutrition. If the kids eat it somewhere else, that's fine. But our home should be a place of safety in the sense of food, where anything you reach for is good for you, and anything you eat a lot of is good for you, has nutrition, and is filling. The problem I see with all these cookies is that they have almost no useful nutrition and they're not that filling, but they do fill the kids just enough that they won't eat as many fruits and vegetables. They spoil your taste buds for the good stuff. They're set up to give you this instant rush when you eat them, but on the back end, when you're digesting, you're not getting all the good stuff your body could get.
This is especially true when you eat mostly a whole-plant diet. My brother changed to eating vegetarian, but he just ate all these processed foods without much nutrition, and he got really thin and then broke his hip skateboarding. He wasn't getting enough good stuff in his body doing that. In my experience, it's easier to get some of the things your body needs eating meat, so when you're eating a whole-plant diet you need to make sure you're really eating whole plants. A couple of beans will have as much protein as a steak, and if you combine that with other fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains, you're going to get great nutrition. You're going to be full, you're going to feel good, and you're going to look good. But if you're eating a bunch of processed junk, you're not getting hardly any nutrition.
So we had this conversation much more gently than the year before. We've been through this several times, and the kids are like, "Oh, this again." I'm like, "Yeah, this again, because look what you guys did. I bought you these cookies and Laura this donut, and I came home and everybody's pissy." Maybe Madeline wasn't as pissy over it, but the whole household had this negative, whiny, fighting environment over this food that's being treated like it's so scarce.
Now, I've listened to some stuff that says the opposite, that you should just stuff your house with junk food as a kind of reverse psychology. The theory is that people go crazy over it because they think it's so scarce. I did that. I was not happy with the results. You know what the kids do if you stuff the house with junk food? They eat it constantly. They'll go from potato chips to ice cream cones to icies. There's almost no limit to the amount of junk food they'll eat when you stuff the house with it. We did this for months, just to try it, and I was not happy with the results. It seems the best results come from no junk food in the house at all. If you want to eat it somewhere else, fine, but we're not going to keep it in the house. This is our place where we can reach for anything.
I talked to my mom about that, and she's like, "Well, that's not a problem for me." And I'm like, "Mom, your teeth are all falling out because all you do is eat sugar." My mom has more junk food in the house than anybody I know. She eats less nutritious food than anybody in my inner circle whose diet I know. It's like she's delusional, absolutely delusional, to think she doesn't have a problem. In my view she is absolutely addicted to sugar, and that's almost all she eats. I think she only eats maybe one thing a day that's not candy, cake, ice cream, icies, or cookies. That's all she eats, and her teeth are just rotting away because she has sugar on them all the time.
Lunch on the grill and a crypto call
Beyond that, I had a call at 12:30, which was great. I had a nice big lunch first. We got the grill out, the little Weber barbecue, fired the coals up, and cooked a package of organic grass-fed hot dogs for the family. Then I cooked a couple of four-packs of vegan dogs for myself, toasted the buns in the toaster oven, and we had a nice hot dog lunch for everybody. The kids both ate real hot dogs along with Laura, and as lean as they are, I'm happy for them to have some meat. They're so lean at this point that I wouldn't want them to lose any more weight. I'd rather them gain weight than lose it right now, and if you want to gain weight, eating meat is one of the easiest ways to do it. So I've actually switched a lot on that. I used to try to feed the kids whole-plant as much as possible, but now they literally don't even want as much meat as they could eat. I never try to force them to eat meat, or anything, generally.
After lunch, I went in and had a call with a guy who paid $300 to talk to me for an hour about Internet Computer Protocol. It's amazing how similar so many of these calls are. He had a lot of money on a crypto exchange spread across a bunch of different altcoins. ICP was the top one in this case, but this guy even had altcoins he didn't even like in his portfolio, thousands of dollars of them. So I made a video on my crypto channel today called the most important crypto video you'll ever watch. Obviously, most people don't seem to think it's that important, but it has the basic takeaways from that call in it.
Meanwhile, Laura took the kids to Vertical Ventures during my call. I jumped on and did my live stream, cranked out some crypto videos, crypto reviews, and an autobiography. Then everybody got back home. The kids went to play with the neighbor across the street, which is great. I'm glad they've got somebody who likes to play outside, and getting them off their tablets has really helped them value playing outside more. I washed up the kitchen a bit and packed up to go to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
An AA meeting and two people I love
I get there and the topic is the steps. I can't always go through with that, because the steps kind of seem like a lot, but really it comes down to drinking, using drugs, and ruining your life with addiction. That stuff takes a lot of energy, and I'm glad I'm not doing any of it today. I shared my experience, basically what I just said here, and I've got lots more AA videos I'm putting up on the Jerry Banfield Experience channel.
Then I talked to a bunch of people afterward. The last conversation I had was with a guy I've known for years in AA. It's helped me a lot to learn from some of his faults, and he's inspired me to make music, for example, and to be more considerate with my wife. I talked to him and a new girl afterward. She's got a little less than a year sober, and she's helped me see the value of my work. She enjoys it, she loves how joyful I am, and she said she wants to be that joyful. She actually listens to my AA music that I did on Spotify and some of my other music, and I even named one of my songs after her. I had a nice talk with the three of them.
Then I could tell they wanted to talk without me, so I left with the two of them talking to each other, looking pretty cozy. I like both of them. The guy is someone I say "I love you" to; I feel pretty close with him, and I gave him a hug and said, "I love you, man." I gave her a hug right afterward, and she said, "Oh, I appreciate your music so much," and I said, "I love you, too," and she said, "That's nice." I appreciate both of them and get along with them. I'm closer with them than most people in the meetings. So I saw how the two of them were talking, and I thought, if they're going to hook up or something, I hope this goes well. A lot of hookups in AA don't go so well, but some of them do; people end up dating and having happy marriages and families, and it works out really well. The way they were talking to each other, it looked to me like that's where it's headed. Something's going to go down, and I hope everyone has a nice time and not a bad time, and I hope it doesn't end with me not getting to see either of them anymore because they stop coming to this meeting. We'll see what happens.
I got home, called my mom, walked the dog, and managed to get in bed before 11 o'clock, even after the time change and everything. If you enjoy these daily entries, you can find more of them in my Life playlist.
My Diary, March 6, 2025: Tennis, Kids, and a UFO
From my video published June 17, 2026.
Here's my diary from March 6th, 2025, and it was a busy day. Full schedule. I got up first thing in the morning, which is really the only option, you either get up or you don't, and the schedule was packed today. It started off the way it usually does, getting the kids up and ready for school. Then I had to stop and think, what did I actually do this morning? Oh, right, my teeth cleaning. I got my teeth cleaned at 9:30 with the same hygienist I had a few months ago, had a nice conversation with her, and it was awesome. My teeth look beautiful. They're basically the same as they were 25 years ago. I saw the dentist, got my teeth cleaned, and I was out of the office in less than an hour, which is great.
A full morning of filming
I wasn't sure I'd have time to do much else this morning, like film videos and get ready, but I did. I filmed a nice crypto video today that hit just right in the algorithm again, with some clickbait like "crypto has changed forever." It's a little sad that this stuff works, but it does. So I got that out and got a couple of other videos uploaded.
Then I had a paid sponsored video scheduled at 1 p.m. I tried to play the game a little beforehand, it's a crypto game on ICP, so I checked out the game, did all my OpenChat stuff, and thought about whether I wanted to submit DAO proposals or not. I decided I had enough to do, so no. I recorded the interview with a guy from the team. We had an hour to talk and recorded a nice 45-minute video. I spent the first 15 minutes warming up and figuring out what we were going to talk about, then recorded for 45 minutes. I uploaded that one later, because at 2 p.m. I was going straight to pick up both my kids and my niece from school.
The smooth ride home
They were so cooperative and played without fighting, which is really nice. My son and my daughter sometimes go at it. One time I pulled off the road right after I got off the interstate and had to physically separate them because they were pulling each other's hair and punching each other. So I really appreciate a smooth ride home from school. It helps to have my daughter up in the front seat with me, too. My niece is in the same grade as my son, so they get along pretty well now. They used to fight and make each other cry all the time, so it's so nice that they all get along better.
They came home and played hide and seek. I had the idea to get my son and my niece into the laundry hamper, which is an awesome hiding spot, one of the ones that closes. My daughter was counting, and I said, "Come on, guys, I'll show you a super secret cool spot." So I got them both into the hamper. My daughter checked the rest of the house, then opened the laundry hamper and they popped up like whack-a-moles. That was pretty cool.
Then my niece's mom came to pick her up, and Laura was getting ready to go out with her friends for an after-wedding dinner celebration. So there was a lot of getting all the kids situated. I washed tons of dishes as usual. Maybe one day for a video background I'll put up a picture of my kitchen sink full of dishes, because I wash a lot of dishes. But I also don't want to pay someone else to come wash my dishes. I could film more videos and pay somebody else 20 bucks an hour to wash my dishes, or go out to eat, or order some food, but I just wash my own dishes. It's a good boost for humility to wash the dishes.
Running the kids down the street
I ran the kids down the street today. Madeline wanted to run down the street, and my son wanted to run down the alley. My daughter's nine, so I respect that she wants a little independence, but I also want a little more accountability, in case some creeper in a van pulls up or something. So I gave her a walkie talkie. I was only about a hundred yards away from her in the alley. She ran down the street to her grandparents' house, Laura's parents' house, and I went down the alley with my son on our walkie talkies. It was fun. I got them dropped off there, and I'm grateful my mother-in-law was going to take Madeline to piano while my father-in-law hung out with Jack at the house.
This set me up to play tennis for the first time at the tennis camp at 6 p.m. at the Racquet Club. I usually drive even though it's a half mile, but today I just walked, and I planned to run a mile on the way home, especially since I didn't get to do any yoga or anything else. I figured tennis plus a one-mile run and a little walk should be a nice amount of exercise for the day. It was a little cold, but I'm not putting on long sleeves and long pants to play tennis and get sweaty. I'd rather be a little cold. So I walked the half mile there, grabbed my tennis bag, and called my sponsor on the way, and we had a nice call.
Two courts, two coaches
I got there and there were two courts with two coaches. One coach is a former professional tennis player, and from what I've heard he has a private, invite-only clinic. The way he recruits for it is that during the coaching clinics he watches how the guys are playing and picks out the best of them to invite to his private clinic afterward. Some of the guys use the coaching that's included with Racquet Club membership as a kind of warm-up clinic. So that coach had nine guys on one court with him.
Then there was a girl coach, and me plus three of the other guys who aren't so serious about tennis, not caring much about impressing the other coach or getting invited to his camp, all played on the court with her. The four of us were just cutting up and laughing and hitting one crappy shot after another. Occasionally somebody played some decent tennis for a minute, and then right back to crappy shots. We were all laughing and having a good time.
The ball of light
Then something really cool happened. We were in the middle of our games and the coach said, "What's that?" We all turned around and there was this thing that looked like a ball of light. This was broad daylight, around 6:30 p.m., still light out. There was a ball of light with a cloud around it, moving across the sky. I thought, what the heck is that? It didn't look like a meteor, because a meteor would have a tail, a cloud of stuff behind it, and this had no tail. It looked like it was going somewhere, kind of like a plane or a helicopter, but it had a cloud around it, a cloud you could partly see through, so you could see the ball of light or metal in the middle. The sun might have been reflecting off it. It was just a ball with a cloud around it. It was the weirdest thing.
I've seen a couple of balls of light at night, which I intentionally made happen, those were by myself when I was walking the dog at like 10 at night, and those were like orbs or ships that I intentionally contacted. But this was different. This was straight up a UFO, in the middle of a cloud, just going across the sky. The cloud eventually dissipated, but the object in the middle continued to look the same and kept going across the sky at the same speed. Then it started heading toward where the trees would block our view, so we went back to playing tennis. But all of us just stood there and watched it for a full minute. We were like, what is that? That's not a plane or a helicopter with a cloud around it. That's some weird stuff up there in the sky, and it was really cool.
I said, "I think that might have been a UFO or some kind of flying craft like that." But nobody wanted to talk about it more. Everybody just wanted to get back to tennis. For me, that was the third object like that I've seen, which feels remarkable because I'd never seen one growing up, even though I lived on air bases and my mom was in the military. I was on and around a lot of air bases and saw plenty of planes and military craft flying, but that's now three things I've seen that I'd put in the category of unidentified, not anything that flies normally in the sky. That really made my day.
The run home and a tennis throwback
After tennis, I ran home, which was kind of awkward with my little tennis bag slung over my shoulder. I dropped the bag off, then ran to Laura's parents' house, which ended up being 0.98 miles. So I did this awkward little bit more of a run right in front of their house to round it out. I got my one-mile run in nine minutes, thirty seconds, even though it didn't feel very good. My leg was a little stiff, it was cold, Florida cold, so I was chilly.
Then I picked up the kids, put them to bed, and watched some more Andre Agassi versus Pete Sampras matches. This one was from 1990, so we threw it back to when Agassi had his long hair and was 20 years old. While Laura was out, I got another couple of videos uploaded, took my bath, came home, and went to bed. If you enjoy these kinds of behind-the-scenes days, I share a lot more about how I work and live in my YouTube Coaching playlist. Another great day, and I'm happy to log it down for my autobiography.
My Life, March 11, 2025: Sobriety, Hot Yoga, and Taxes
From my video published June 17, 2026.
This is my life, March 11th, 2025, here with me, Jerry Banfield. Laura is at an employment conference in Tampa today, so I am taking the kids to school myself this morning and getting them ready, which was nice. We got them out the door, their lunches packed, fed, and dropped them off at school. Then I am right back home to start filming some crypto videos and my autobiography. I want to start the taxes this morning, but I end up not having time. I don't even get all that I want done on my live stream. I got about three videos filmed, but I want more. I'll do the taxes later.
A meeting, popcorn style
I go to meet my sponsor at my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and the chairperson runs it as a popcorn, get-called-on meeting. He tells me he's going to call on me first. I like being special and getting a little extra attention, but at the same time it's a little awkward. It's kind of funny. So he calls on me, and the topic is about, it's funny, it's hard to even remember what the topic was about, or exactly what I shared, even though this is less than 24 hours later. But I shared my experience, strength, and hope around staying sober and talked about how much easier life is sober. Oh yeah, the topic was about doing God's will, or good orderly direction. For me, when I was drinking, it was bad, disorderly direction.
What I've learned is that people have answers. People know about things I want to know about. If I just find the people who know what I want to know and ask them to tell me, I get what I want. In Alcoholics Anonymous, I ask people how to stay sober. When I was upset with my wife, I'd ask how to feel better. When I was anxious, I asked what to do about anxiety. I didn't take every suggestion, but I consistently ask people for feedback all the time now, and I get a lot of options because of that. Sometimes I talk a little too much, and sometimes there are problems because of that, but that's okay. We all have our different personality types. There are downsides to being a private person who keeps things to themselves a lot, but there are upsides to that too.
Hot yoga and a $7 burrito
I see my sponsor at the meeting, then I leave a little bit early so I can make the hot yoga class on time. I don't usually do hot yoga, but today I'm really feeling it. So I leave a few minutes early and drive over to the yoga studio. They only have hot noon yoga right now at Body Electric on Tuesdays, so I go over there and do the hot yoga flow. One of the friends from AA, who I've known for years since she's been sober, is there to do hot yoga too, which is great. So I catch up with her, put my mat down next to hers, and have a great class. The hot flow is not too intense, which is nice. I feel like I got just the right amount of sweat and the right amount of workout, but didn't push it too hard, which is great.
So I leave the hot flow, go home, hydrate up, and have a burrito that I bought for $7 from Whole Foods yesterday, a veggie fajita kind of thing. It's really good. I could probably make that at home a lot cheaper, but it's faster, so you've got to balance fast versus cheap. I really enjoyed that burrito for lunch. So good.
Cranking out videos and finally starting the taxes
I record a couple more videos. Thankfully, Laura's sister is going to pick the kids up today, so I don't have to take another hour to go pick them up after taking an hour to drop them off earlier. So I crank out a couple of videos. I didn't finish the music video or the autobiography for yesterday in time, so I record both of those off stream. If I just have a video or two to record, that's no big deal. Usually when I'm on stream I like to film at least three, maybe five or six videos on Twitch, and if I need a quick video or two off stream, it's easy.
Then I finally get into the taxes, which I've been meaning to start for a month. Last year at this time, in February, I had the taxes done. This time I've just been trying to keep up with my videos and deal with hurricane restoration stuff in the house, taking the kids to school, yoga, tennis. So I put a couple of good hours into the taxes today, which is nice. Laura made one of the highest amounts she's ever made, and I haven't even started mine. Mine is the one that takes more time. I need to put together so many different things from all my business expenses and income, which is not that hard this year, but then the crypto stuff adds a lot of complexity. That's the main place I'm going to need to use brainpower on the taxes. Fortunately, at this point it's just putting in W-2s and that kind of thing, which is pretty straightforward.
I'm really impressed. The company I'm doing my taxes with now has partners, and you can just put in your W-2 information and it pulls it automatically. I was a little freaked out at first, like, how do they know all this? But you put in your employer ID number and the amount you got paid and your name, and I guess it just fills the rest in because the employer already uploaded it on the other end. So I work on that.
The kids' spring concert
Tonight we're going to a concert for the kids, the spring concert, instead of doing Jack's hip hop dance and Laura's Pilates class. So we go to the hip hop concert, and it's super cute. There's this kid on stage just getting it, shaking it, moving it, and the people behind me are commenting on everything. "Oh, look at that boy." I'm just laughing. I'm laughing so much. They're cracking me up. I'm grateful I can have so much fun watching a kid's concert. Twenty years ago, that would have been awful and boring, but I guess I'm not in my early 20s anymore. I enjoy different things today, which is great.
I remember when I was at the police department, I was talking a bunch of junk at breakfast, and they said, "Banfield, you are going to change so much." Y'all were right. Not that any of them are watching my autobiography. Not that anyone watches my autobiography, but this is good for me to do, so I do it, and it's nice. I'd love to, 10 years from now, be able to go back and hear what exactly I did on March 11, 2025. I imagine I'll go listen back to all these and it'll be like experiencing someone else's life. I think all of us should do this. In my experience, this is one of the best ways we can use technology like this, to help us remember stuff we learned before. If you're curious what these daily recordings look like, I keep them in my Life playlist.
After the kids' concert, we get home and put the kids to bed. I managed to wash a bunch of dishes, as usual today, and I take the dog for a later walk so I can go to bed earlier. I go visit my mom for about 10 minutes before I go to bed. I leave my mom's house at 11:11, and I'm in bed like five minutes later. I don't usually stay up that late, but I'm getting up at seven the next morning, so I think that'll be enough sleep. Another lovely day. Really enjoyed it.