Jerry Banfield October 2026 Vlogs: Debt, Dating and Reviews

Short version: I'm roughly $200,000 in debt, I'm less stressed about it than you'd expect, and I've landed on a service I think I can actually sell. The October 2026 vlogs are the day-by-day record of how I got from a call experiment that flopped to a personal video review I'm now pricing at about $100. Here is where I stand and how I got here.

The debt is real. On October 10 I put my credit card balance at about $90,000 and the total with a business loan at over $200,000, and most of it I borrowed this year to keep a business running. On October 2 I said I got into this debt on purpose, because I want to document the way out in public, the same way I talk about my sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous.

The earliest of the four entries, October 2, is the low point of the calls experiment. Nobody had bought a call, and I was looking for one product that could pay the debt off. What I took from that day is that I always have another idea, and the next one had to be something people would actually pay for.

By October 8 the mood had turned hard. My meme coin, Jerry on Robinhood, had fallen to a $60,000 market cap after peaking near $160,000 on September 22, the day I launched it. That was also the day hackers got into my Google account and then my MetaMask wallet, and they sold about $13,000 of the coin. I filed a report with the FBI, which I did not want to do and which left me feeling stupid.

The same entry is where I changed what I'm selling. The gold satin shirt, the shirt I wore when I met the queen, and the VidSummit shirt were marked down. Anything that didn't sell would go into limited collectible mystery boxes, roughly ten at a time. The public business dashboard I opened that day showed $4,633 in sales across 33 paid orders, with an average order of $140.

The October 10 vlog is the most personal of the four. It covers an AA meeting, time with my kids, and a run that ran straight into a woman I had decided to stop chasing. I told her I had been dating her as two different people, and that I want to be friends with women first. The same day I talked for about an hour with a woman in South Africa who found me through Who Are These Podcasts, and then spent an hour and a half on Ashley Cummings' live stream.

The turn came in the October 13 vlog. In the days before, I had paid YouTube consultant Devin Nash $200 for a review of all six of my channels. He emailed back a refund, saying my situation was too much for a review like that. I was disappointed, and then I noticed why it had worked on me in the first place: I had handed him $200 more easily than anyone I had watched all year, because I wanted him to personally look at my situation.

So I'm offering personal video reviews. You send me something: a YouTube video, an unlisted video, a voice memo about a dating situation, a business question, or a video you plan to post. I give it 20 total minutes of my time. A 10-minute video gets a 10-minute reply at normal speed. A 20-minute recording I'll listen to at double speed and answer with a roughly 10-minute video. The price I'm aiming for is about $100, and I'm valuing my time at $300 an hour.

I'm not calling it expert advice. I describe it as peer review, one YouTuber reacting to another, and the clear limits are the point. A review with a fixed 20 minutes is bounded, unlike the open-ended calls. Whether it sells is the test, and I said in that entry that the orders would be the first real sign.

Read together, the four entries show my view moving from "I need one offer" to "I need one clear offer with boundaries." The money pressure, the search for a product that sells, the dating and friendships, and the gratitude I keep returning to all run through every day. Below this opening you will find each October 2026 vlog in full, newest first: October 13, October 10, October 8, and October 2.

If you have a channel, a dating situation, or a business question you'd like an honest reaction to, you can order a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

October 13, 2026 Vlog

From my video published October 13, 2026.

The one thing that might pay off $90,000

It's October 13, 2026 at 2:22 PM. This is my vlog for my real, raw, authentic life as a single dad, full-time YouTube creator, and a guy who's a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt. I think I found a solution to pay off $90,000 in credit card debt. Lots of times in life we think we need quantity. We think we need a bunch of things. But I have the feeling that I just need to offer one single thing, one single service, and then put that in every single one of my videos. That will be my path to paying everything off. Lots of times in our lives, if we can figure out the one thing we can do that is valuable, it makes everything easier. I started heading this direction when I wrote about going from a scattered business to one offering, and today I think I finally found the one. So let me explain how I had this epiphany, exactly what it is, and how it can be here to help you. I hope this will be useful, especially if you're wondering what you're going to do with your life.

Lots of times what we really need to do is just take some time to sit and think, to take some time to look at our situation. A lot of us today are never bored, but we don't have any time to sit and think. So yesterday I did something very unusual. I woke up at 8:30 in the morning. I had gotten a massage the day before, so it was a lazy day and I slept in. I normally get up at about 7 with the kids when they're here, but they weren't here, so I got up at 8:30. I had my usual peanut butter Larabar, one banana, and a pack of the seaweed snacks. And I said to myself: I want to figure out the one thing I'm going to offer in my business that will make everything else I'm offering unnecessary. I need to find the one thing I do in my business that is easiest for me to give value to other people with, and that I should talk about in every single one of my six YouTube channels.

So I decided to go back to bed and just think about that. I was still feeling pretty relaxed, so I did something very unusual and got back in bed at about 9 in the morning. I just lay there and tried to get as relaxed as possible and think as deeply as possible. Some people might call this meditating or focusing. I just tried to think and put my whole brain on solving this one problem. Because if you can solve this one problem, you're going to have so much money, and that's literally all you need to do.

Devin Nash refunded my $200

The day before, I had paid a guy named Devin Nash, and I did a video about it on my Jerry Banfield for Creators channel. You can read the full story in Devin Nash Refuses My YouTube Consulting Payment. Devin puts himself out there as a content creator consultant and signals authority that he's worked with all these brands and big names, which he probably has. He offers a service where, for $150, you pay him on PayPal and email him your YouTube channel, and he'll take a look at it and give you a 15-minute video review. If you pay $200, he'll give you a priority review within 24 hours. So I sent him $200 on PayPal. I sent him all six of my YouTube channels, and I was excited to see what he thought. He's been on YouTube since 2012. I've been on YouTube since 2011. I was excited to see what a guy who to me is a peer, somebody with a similar level of expertise to mine, would think of what I'm doing.

And I felt very rejected and disappointed when, yesterday morning, or it might have been the day before, but right before this day of thinking, he sent me an email refunding my money and saying I had too much going on. He thought someone like me would need thousands of dollars spent in consulting, and that my situation was just too much. I was very disappointed that he sent me an email refunding my money and calling it too hard. He refused to even take a look at it. Plus he said something like, oh, I don't want to get somebody further into debt.

The way I see it, debt is a tool. It's funny to go around thinking of debt as something moral. Debt can be a very valuable tool to leverage, to give yourself incredible opportunities, like what I'm doing to springboard myself into a business. I was full-time on YouTube for a long time until I deleted everything last year to try and save my marriage, and then got divorced anyway. I shared that whole chapter in After 14 Years and 10,000 Videos, I'm Deleting My Last Channel. Debt has allowed me to springboard myself into a position where I've got 1.5 million views on YouTube, over 11 million impressions, plus around a million more views on all the other platforms, starting from zero. I broke down those numbers in I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. So I know a lot about content creation. It's given me an amazing story. And debt has been a tool that allowed me to borrow so I can set up a business that will print money, way more money than I could make just going to work somewhere.

Everything I've tried to sell this year

But the thing is, I've got to isolate what I can do for you that you will value, that you will want, that you will buy. And I've been struggling to figure that out. I've been testing. For example, the gold satin shirt I keep wearing is for sale at jerrybanfield.com for $234. It's the shirt I've worn on a ton of videos. It's a smaller medium men's, and it's a shirt you could have hanging up in your house, or you could wear it yourself, and you'd think, Jerry wore this shirt. It would have some emotional value to you to have a physical thing that Jerry wore. I've put it in a bunch of videos, and I've got it on right now as I write this. But nobody's bought it yet. Nobody's bought any of the stuff.

I've tried so many different offers this year, and they've all flopped. People ruined my eBay auctions with fake bids. I tried offering one-on-one calls, and I'm grateful one person bought a call for $350 for an hour, but then they actually canceled the call and haven't followed up about rescheduling. I sold other calls for $96 for 30 minutes, but that was not efficient with my time. In many cases there was a better way to do things.

And I realized that usually, if you can find what you yourself are willing to throw money out for, that's something to offer. I reflected that my experience with Devin Nash showed me something: I threw $200 at this guy very easily. Now, I normally watch all kinds of YouTubers giving advice about YouTube, and they don't get anything out of me. I reflected on all the stuff I've spent money on with individual creators this year, and Devin Nash made the easiest $200 off me. Out of everybody I've watched, he had to work for it less than anybody else. I've sent $100 super chats out to people. I've sent a bunch of $20 super chats. But in most cases I watched them a lot longer, got to know them a lot longer, and they did a lot more for me. Devin Nash got $200 out of me easier than anybody else.

So I reverse engineered that. Why did it work on me? It's because I wanted him to personally look at my situation and give me feedback.

Then I reflected that one of the easiest things I sold all year was Cameos. I used to have my Cameo set to $25, and you could send me a few sentences and ask me to make a personalized video for you. I did about five of those, and I got five-star reviews on four of them. The last one didn't leave a review, but I consistently got five-star reviews, and people were consistently happy. The problem with that was it was too shallow. Sending a happy birthday message, or sending me just two or three sentences, is not really enough, in a lot of cases, for me to give at my full capacity.

Same offer, clear boundaries

So with Devin rejecting me, I realized I should be offering the same thing he's offering, except mine needs to have clear boundaries. I think the problem with him is he figured, maybe out of some perfectionism, that if he can't give this guy the perfect solution, the absolute best advice ever, then he doesn't even want to do it. Whereas my point of view is that just sharing a point of view can be helpful. And his service doesn't have super clear boundaries on it. He says he'll film a 15-minute video, but I imagine in his mind he wants to take about five minutes to look at your YouTube channel and then tell you to get better titles and thumbnails, or maybe something a little better than that. He wants to do a quick look at your channel, and it needs to be an easy situation for him to take five minutes to look at it and then give some advice. Whereas with mine, clearly five minutes was not going to work.

One offer for every channel

So I realized I need to offer the same kind of service, but I need to have very clear boundaries on mine, because I want to be able to help somebody like me. There are so many other YouTubers out there who could use me looking at what they're doing. And I have a broad audience that isn't just YouTubers: many of you are in crypto, gaming, online business, marketing, and dating. What I realized is that ideally I want to offer one thing to every single channel. Whether you're watching Internet Computer Protocol videos, dating videos, YouTube for Creators videos, gaming videos, or vlogs, I want you to be able to have one single thing across all those channels that makes sense.

And I realized what I do best is make videos. That's what's made me millions of dollars online. That's what's made me millions of new views this year. I've made tens of thousands of dollars starting from scratch, and I can't tell you how much of an outlier that is. It's very abnormal for somebody to start one channel and get it monetized immediately, let alone start six and get four of them monetized, and then get millions of views. That is very abnormal. You're talking the top 1 percent of all the people who've ever tried on YouTube. I wrote about why that track record matters in Why I'm the Right YouTube Coach for Experienced Creators.

And yet, with a call, I was thinking the call is the best experience, but a call is too much commitment. And for the price, ideally it'd be under a hundred dollars. Some people came into my chat talking all this stupid stuff about me, just so much negativity. The way I see it, I have very valuable skills that people have paid a lot for in the past. It's up to me to figure out how to make those skills easily accessible and to charge for them in a format that provides a lot of value.

What a personalized video review is

I think the best thing I can do is offer a personalized video review where you send me something to review. It could be almost anything. And I will take 20 total minutes of my time. That means if you send me a 10-minute video to watch, and I don't put it on double speed, I'll make a 10-minute video reply. Or you can send me a 20-minute video to watch, I'll put it on double speed, and then I'll make a 10-minute video reply. Or you can send me a video to watch and I'll do a 20-minute live reaction to it. Or I'll just record. For example, let's say you're a YouTuber, somebody just like me, and you make the same kind of request I made to Devin Nash. Instead of saying, whoa, I can't handle that, what I would do is look at your email, hit record, and give live impressions as I'm looking at everything, so you could see and hear me speak my evaluations. I'd say, all right, look at this first channel. Why is there no website here? Where's the offer? I don't see the offer. Nice, you got a lot of views on this. Why haven't you done more videos like this? Why are you publishing one video a week instead of more often? That last one is a question I've been asking for years, going all the way back to New YouTubers: Publish One Video a Day to Win Long-Term. I would immediately fire off rapid-fire thoughts and fire a video back.

And the best part is I could do that about crypto, about dating, about gaming, about any online business you're running, about personal life questions, live streaming, money, debt. If you say, here's my debt situation, how would you manage to be at peace or relaxed in this situation, I can answer that from my own experience. I've realized what you could really use is some personalized attention. I want you all to have a chance to share your exact situation with me, because I'm stuck making videos that are less personal when I'm talking to more of you at once. But the beauty is, if I have one single thing and one single person to look at, I can make a video that's ultra specific.

So I've got this new service. You could send me one of your YouTube videos and have me react to it. You could make an unlisted video on YouTube talking about your dating situation and get my feedback. You could send a video you want to post and have me react to it. And then you could do whatever you want with the video I send back, because I never go after people for copyright or anything. I think this is the best idea I've had so far for what I have to offer. And ultimately, the money coming in on my website will be the number one sign of whether that's accurate or not.

Ten times the value you paid

What I love is how endlessly I just keep trying. But I do give up on things quickly if they don't work. I tested the calls, and they didn't work to generate sales. And then there are the haters who say, you're a scammer. A scammer is when somebody fakes offering you something and then doesn't provide it. I'm obsessed with how I can offer you something that gives you 10 times the value of what you paid for it. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm imagining some of you could go to jerrybanfield.com/review, pay for a review, and you would get a thousand-plus dollars back in value, whatever that looks like for you.

Let me give an example. I can't stand all these people offering these dumb coaching programs with an "apply here" button. I will never apply for one of those garbage programs. I don't even watch creators who offer that crap, because it's so exploitive. I shared one experience with paid YouTube coaching in I Tried vidIQ YouTube Coaching—Here's Why I'd Never Pay Again, and I described what I actually wanted in I Built the YouTube Coaching Offer I Could Never Find. This review, to me, is what's valuable. It's like sending a message to ChatGPT, except you know me, you know how I think, and then you get that applied to your situation.

A peer, not an expert

So let's use an example with a dating situation instead of YouTube. Most of the Cameos people sent me were actually about dating. They wanted to ask my thoughts on different dating situations. So let's say you want my specific thoughts on your dating situation. What's beautiful about offering a review is I don't need to be an expert. So many people think, unless someone is an expert at something, or unless I go to the very biggest guy with the most views, I don't even care about that feedback. What I've found is, think about academic research. Peer review, review by somebody who is your equal, is the highest review standard in academic research. That means someone on your level. And that's what I love. My service is not here to be an expert. It is a peer. Even if you think you're just as good at dating as me, I can have a point of view that will be unexpected and helpful. That's why my service is set up so that another YouTuber at a similar level to me would just be interested to see what I have to say about their channel, about their business.

So here's the dating example. You have a dating situation and you want me to make a video back to you talking about it. You go to jerrybanfield.com/review and pay for the review. Then you send an email to review@jerrybanfield.com. You could write out the entire email for me to read. Or you could just grab your phone, start recording a voice memo, and talk for 10 minutes about your dating situation. You could even talk for 20 minutes. Then you email that to review@jerrybanfield.com. What I'll do is hop on my computer, take whatever you've sent me, process it, and react to it in a video.

You can send up to 20 minutes, as long as I can understand you. If you've got a pretty straightforward speaking voice, I can probably listen to you on double speed. If you've got a thick accent, don't expect me to listen on double speed, because I might have to do 1.5 speed or normal speed. But if you've got a pretty standard American or UK accent, I can usually put you on double speed. So you can send me a 20-minute unlisted YouTube video or a 20-minute audio message, I'll put it on double speed, I'll listen to everything, and then I'll hit record. I'll make a personalized 10-minute video for you and send it. I'll email you back and say, boom, I listened to everything you had to say, and here are the thoughts that came up.

Why I say cold approach is for losers

And that could be worth a fortune. Just my thoughts alone could stop you from buying some stupid dating coaching service from some supposed expert who's going to teach you a garbage skill you probably shouldn't even learn. Cold approach, for example. I can't stand these guys out here teaching cold approach. In my opinion, cold approach is for losers. I know because I tried it. When you're walking up to some woman and giving her a compliment on her appearance, it indicates that you're a loser, because if you weren't a loser, you'd have women as friends. You'd have other people to talk to. You wouldn't need to go act like that and disturb a random person who doesn't want to be disturbed and has headphones in. I've had to try some of these things myself. I'm glad I didn't get fooled into buying cold approach coaching from a bunch of these predatory dudes who are preying on lonely guys and trying to teach them a skill that just proves they're a loser by even doing it. Warm approach and social circles, that's what I believe in. Maybe matchmaking. We'll see. I'm going to test the rest of that out. That's the way to go.

Big decisions, personal messages, and reactions

So if you have something, some big purchase you're thinking about, or some big decision, just having my thoughts on it could be massively helpful. Or you might just want to send me a video saying, hey Jerry, I've watched you for 10 years, I'd like you to get to know me, and here's a video of me. I'd just love to send a video back commenting on it, responding to your story or to a personal message you've given me. That's what's so cool: this format is very open. You might be a content creator yourself, and you want me to watch a video you've made and react to it. Somebody like the Barry Janfield Show has said he has a video he wants me to watch. This is the perfect service for that. You send me the video, I'll watch it, I'll react to it, and I'll send you a video back.

And I love that I can do this across all the different kinds of content I create. For example, somebody who watches my gaming videos could ask for a personalized video on what I think of their gaming channel, or what I think of their gameplay. Or you could say, hey, I want you to try playing this video game for 20 minutes and see if you like it and give me your feedback, or make a video of you playing this new game. It's so open.

The time math on $100,000 in 100 days

And when I do the time math on this, I set a goal to make a hundred thousand dollars in the next hundred days, and this is something that could make me a thousand dollars a day in three or four hours of work. Then I could be delivering tens of thousands of dollars a day back to people in value. I've been doing this kind of per-hour math for years, as in Maximize YouTube Views Generated per Hour of Time.

The baseline behind this is that so many people today have fewer and fewer people to talk to. People are at record lows when it comes to having friendships, and especially people who spend their time online tend to have fewer friendships, fewer people you feel like you can really talk to. I figure one of the big things with watching my videos is that I would hope you feel I'm someone you could talk to, or someone whose opinion you'd be interested in when it comes to your exact life situation.

And the beautiful thing is, being there to review whatever you send me will also help me be more understanding of exactly who my audience is. For example, if all I got were gaming channels asking me to review their channels all the time, I'd have a better understanding: oh, a lot of people with gaming channels are watching my Jerry Banfield for Creators channel, so I should do some more content specifically for gaming channels. Or in crypto, if everybody hates meme coins, for example, then maybe I shouldn't be showing my meme coins in every one of my crypto videos. That'll be a valuable opportunity for me to learn and to get to know you as an audience better.

Crank up the time for bigger projects

What's nice with this too is that if you do have a big project you want me to put some serious thought into, you can crank up the time at checkout. For example, if you had six YouTube channels like me, or you wanted me to audit your online business, or you wanted to send me your web traffic for your business along with videos to watch. If you're a business that's making millions of dollars a year and you think, okay, this guy knows a lot about online marketing and content creation, maybe we're wasting some time, maybe we could save some money, then this sets it up where a business could say, look, we're going to give you a thousand dollars, Jerry, and we want you to take three hours to really look at our business, watch the videos we're making, look at our sales funnel, look at all of it, and then send us a very detailed video with very specific things like where we're wasting money and how we can rebuild with AI. For example, I've had a one-on-one call with a business that wanted to rebuild their infrastructure on ICP with Claude. So that's something you could take off with one personalized video.

What's nice is this sets itself up for repeat customers too. Maybe you have a dating question you send me and I fire a video back. Then maybe you have a business question you want to ask about. And then maybe after that you start a YouTube channel and you want me to review your YouTube channel. I wanted something that would have repeat customers also.

And some of you who have your own YouTube channels, including some of these channels that clowned on me and want me to do a video specifically for them: I'm not going to go on their show. Instead of dropping a super chat or asking me to show up and go on their show, which I'm not going to do because it's much more valuable for me to just record videos on my own, what they could do is say, here, we're going to give you 100 bucks, here's a 10-minute clip, give us your reaction. Then they play my entire reaction on the show, post my clip, rip my clip. Somebody could even set me up with some stupid question, get my reaction to it, and then make fun of it. That would expand my mind. Obviously, if anybody asks some really crazy stuff, I can just do what Devin Nash did and refund it and say, no, I'm not going to respond to this crazy stuff. But I'm interested to see if this works. I'm optimistic.

I give up on ideas, not on evolving

I hope what I've shared shows how I think. After all the things I've tried, so many different things, like selling the shirt I keep wearing until it sells on jerrybanfield.com, because somebody is probably going to pay $234 for it, you should see how I don't just give up. I may give up on an individual idea, but I continue evolving. I continue testing. I continue until I find the one thing I need to sell. And this looks like the most promising thing I've offered, because this is what I want. I would love to find 10 YouTubers who had this exact same service, and I would pay every single one of them. I'd pay all of them to look at my YouTube channels. I might pay all of them for an hour. That's three thousand dollars. I might charge three thousand dollars to my business credit card and pay all of them for an hour to look at my channels and give me feedback, because then I'd put all of that together and see anything I was missing.

The one thing it looks like I've been missing is that I just need to be doing videos. I know I've gone back and forth on live streaming so much. I once told small YouTubers to stop making videos and go live for 30 minutes instead. But the more I go live, the super chats just die, which is the trap I described in Being a YouTuber and Twitch Streamer SUCKS Unless You Do THIS. And in the time I take to live stream, I could do what I did today. I filmed four videos today, and this is the fifth. Let me look at the exact time so I have exact numbers. I started filming videos today after I got my kids up, took them to school, and went to yoga class. The first video was finished at 12:01 PM. It is now 2:47 PM, and this is the fifth video I filmed. That's two and a half hours; call it three. So I filmed five videos in three hours. Plus, I've uploaded the rest of them and got them published or scheduled. In three hours. It often takes me three hours to do one live stream.

Now, I'm obsessed with this. I know some of you might think I'm not good with money. But I'm calculating all the time. Once I get the right offer, all the rest of my money is just going to go nuts, because all I'm missing right now is the right offer. I have everything else in position. And I'd love to think this is the right offer. If it is, my money is just going to print from here. I'm setting everything up based on how much per hour my time is worth. This values my time at $300 an hour, and it gives potentially thousands and thousands of dollars back in value in exchange for about a hundred dollars paid. That to me is a good formula for everyone.

And if I look at it honestly: am I going to do a three-hour live stream, and how many reviews or super chats am I going to sell right now? It looks like if I sit here and film five videos, those videos should have the chance to make a lot more in sales, especially over the long term. They should have a chance to make a lot more money than sitting there doing super chats. And my live streams are not watchable. So I may still occasionally do a live stream, but everything just looks like videos, videos, videos, videos. That's the strategy I laid out in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear. And I want to shorten these vlogs up too, because I don't really need to do a vlog this long, 30 minutes every day, especially since I'm filming videos on other subjects. So I'm going to wrap the vlogs up earlier. You can follow along with every day of this in my Daily Vlogs playlist.

This is the day I launched my review service. I hope some of you have been waiting for me to offer something like this and have something for me to look at. I'm very excited to see your orders. I appreciate you being a part of this journey, and I hope to be looking at whatever you'd like me to review soon.

October 10, 2026 Vlog

From my video published October 10, 2026.

I Just Cried, So It's a Great Time to Write This

I just cried, so I think this is a great time to share a vlog on October 10th, 2026, and to see if I can sell this gold satin shirt on my website. This has been such a magical day. To me, when I feel a level of power, a true level of power, it will bring you to tears because it's just so humbling. It's so amazing to see that. It makes me feel so grateful.

All right, now let me tell you all what happened today, because this has been just an amazing day. Should I give some teasers? I ran into the queen again today, literally, and I did a live stream with Ashley Cummings on her channel, which was awesome. She didn't put that I was in the title or anything, so you can just look for the one she did today. I also talked to the woman in South Africa for an hour.

$200,000 in Debt and Not Stressed

What's so amazing about where I'm at today is that I have 90 grand in credit card debt, and a couple of hundred thousand total. All of that, I borrowed this year. I have a few hundred thousand total with the 90 grand plus the business loan, so I have over $200,000 in debt. My financial position looks like it's either on the edge of a breakout or an absolute collapse. So many people would look at my situation and think how horrible this is. You would imagine a person in my situation would be stressed and scared, and I'm not. Not only that, I just cried with gratitude at how beautiful and amazing the world is. You could argue I'm on the upside of manic or bipolar right now, but let me tell you how this whole day unfolded in chronological order.

The Troll Who Pretended to Live in My Neighborhood

I did a live stream last night, and someone I now think was pretending that they lived in my neighborhood was, I believe, just trolling me. I was banning all the trolls on my live stream last night, so some of them were getting smarter and thinking, I'm gonna come in and say a bunch of nice things to him and pretend like I live in his neighborhood, and then I'm gonna slowly start turning on him where everything's just criticism. I'm like, that's actually masterful. That's really masterful. I respect brilliance and creativity.

Now, maybe it could have been somebody who lives in my neighborhood, but I don't picture most people living in this neighborhood sitting on their phone trying to talk to me about how rich they are and all this stuff. If that was a real person, then I hope I run into him. Not in a weird way. I hope I can meet someone who actually does live in my neighborhood and have that conversation, but more than likely it was a troll.

This troll was trying to tell me that I am not financially successful. I am. They were saying they're financially successful, they've got a degree, they've made money, and they have this house in my neighborhood, which I think they're pretending about. They said that I'm not going to be able to afford to live here soon. And I'm like, you don't know the power. I'll talk about that in a minute. I've been living in this neighborhood all year, so I can afford to live here because I've made all the payments that I'm obligated to make, and I pay them, so I clearly can afford it. But this person was saying you're not successful.

So I named the title of the live stream last night after that, because that's one of the main things everybody's going to see too: I'm $90,000 in debt, and I am financially successful. That's how I roll. It's the same thing that happened when a guy shouted that my life is in shambles. You want to play games? Okay. I've got the mic. I've got the followers. And your message, I'm going to put out the opposite of it, and that's what's going to go out to tens of thousands of people on YouTube: my message, from the present position I'm in now. That's why I was crying. This feels magical, what's happening in my life right now. And I'm so excited to see which direction the money comes in from. I'm ready to receive, and this is going to tie back into the dating amazingly.

An AA Meeting, Snuggles, and Feeling the Money in the Air

So I woke up this morning with a new look in my eye. I went to an AA meeting right away, and I had a nice chat with one of the women after the meeting. We talked about sponsorship, and I'm like, I don't have one, but I'm looking, but I'm not looking to just jump into anything. I'm not looking to just hop into any kind of sponsorship relationship, because it's just like dating. It can be easier to get a sponsor in AA than to get rid of one. This woman had such a nice, validating conversation with me. She was there with her husband, and I went home feeling very grateful for that meeting.

Then my kids came over right after that. I got snuggles. I worked on my work. And I was like, I'm not sure where the money's going to come from, but I can feel it coming in the air tonight. I can feel the money coming. And I love where I'm at today in my life.

Material Abundance Without Appreciation Is True Poverty

To me, that is the wealthiest place you can get in your life. There are so many people with big bank balances and big houses and big cars, and they hate where their life is. That's poverty. When you have so much material abundance that you hate where your life is, that's true poverty. That's failure. That, to me, is the highest level of failure: having so much abundance and not appreciating it.

And I know what that's like. I got myself into a much worse financial position than now in 2019, and it started with me having so much. A beautiful wife, two healthy, beautiful, amazing children, an extremely supportive family, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit, working at home, paying for everything for my family, discovering I had a new sister, having successful relationships. I had everything. In 2018, my life was so abundant. And yet, probably from being online, I felt like it wasn't enough. I needed more followers. I had made more money in 2016, and I felt like 2018's hundred and some thousand dollars in profit wasn't enough. I felt like I'd failed.

Never mind that I gave my wife all kinds of money. She didn't have to work. She could just take care of the kids, and I helped out taking care of the kids, and I was going to AA. I was giving thousands of dollars away to homeless people, and I was giving a bunch to my fans all the time. And never mind all that, I still felt like poverty. This is not enough. All of this is not enough. I need a second wife, and I need to double my income, and I need way more followers. That's so crazy. But then I manifested scarcity after that from that feeling. So today I just feel like I love where my life is, and I am incredibly successful. And I'm so excited to see what happens.

My Matchmaker Set Me Up, and My Head Went Straight to the Worst Case

Today, I don't know what was going on with the universe. I read this email from my matchmaker, and I didn't even realize at first that she had set me up with a woman who looks on paper like an incredible match. Now, she's trying to sell me on the date, so I'll go on it, because that's what counts as her work being done. And I get that. She's trying to sell the woman on going out with me too, because that's how she gets paid. But at the same time, my matchmaker also wants to be able to take credit for putting two people together. She personally wants it and is hoping for it to work, and professionally, it makes sense.

So the woman's in her 20s, and the profile looks incredible. And in my head this morning, I'm already trying to go out with this woman while figuring there's no way this is going to work, figuring out what I should say on a date where I know there's almost no chance. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I'm so wrong about that. I should be going out with this woman within the next week. And it's funny, because I don't even think of it as a date. I'm just going to literally meet this woman. And I'm like, there's almost no chance she's going to be happy with who I am and I'm going to be happy with who she is. I'm already assuming the worst, figuring that she's not going to want to talk to me. My mind is just going downhill. I'm having this dumb conversation in my head on a date that hasn't happened, and I'm like, this is so pointless. What are you doing? It's exactly the pattern I wrote about in I Expected Her to Reject Me. Then I Made It Happen.

Baseball With My Son and a Peaceful Day With the Kids

So I went to work. I uploaded at least 50, maybe more, Shorts. I spent time with the kids, and I played video games with them. I took my son to the park and threw the baseball with him. And it's amazing: in just a few months, this kid could hardly hit a baseball, and his catching was off. His throwing has always been awesome, but he missed a lot of catches. In just three months, my eight-year-old son playing baseball a few times a week, his throwing and catching is incredible. It's only a little bit behind mine. This kid has gotten so much better, so much faster. And I was just praying, like, son, I can't believe how amazing you are at this. I'm throwing him balls from like 20 yards away and he's consistently catching them. I'm just like, wow. And he's launching these balls at me. I'm just so proud and so grateful for my son.

And I snuggle with my kids and they play, and I make them kale chips, and they have boiled peanuts, and their mom comes over. I was thinking I should talk to her about other parts of my life. And it's like, no, you don't need to. You don't need to update your ex unless there are significant new developments, which there are not. And she already made that clear, so honor that. I'm like, okay, fine. So I was just having such a peaceful day with my kids. And I'm glad that when my ex walks in the house, it's nice to have her here. It's not awkward. It doesn't feel bad.

In fact, I almost instinctively gave her a hug and a kiss the other day. I was going to say it's weird, but it isn't. It makes sense. We were together 15 years. That was the first time in a while, though, that I had that automatic reflex and had to manually cancel the routine. I'm like, whoa, easy, buddy. Y'all split up a year ago. Easy. She's got a new boyfriend. And he doesn't need to know.

The Woman in South Africa Who Found Me Through Who Are These Podcasts

So after the kids left, I look at the clock and I'm like, okay, the woman I've been talking to for the last few days, we've talked about an hour every day, and she's in South Africa. She is so sweet, so beautiful, so affirming. And she seems very interested in me. I am so curious and interested in her. And I'm appreciating it, like, man, I wish she didn't live in South Africa. That's a long, long way away from me. But at the same time, it's forcing me to do exactly what I said I wanted to do. It means I need to just focus on being friends and really investigate her personality.

This is a real woman. We're having video chats. So this is not like some of y'all on the live stream were saying, oh, it's some scammer. I've had enough hours talking to her this week to know this is a real woman, who found me through Who Are These Podcasts. Then she got to a point where she was only watching me on Who Are These Podcasts, so she figured she should just watch my videos directly. And she knows so many things I've said. She said today, we could manufacture some drama if you want. And I'm like, no, it's not worth it. I'd rather just have things go smooth with you. I don't want to manufacture any drama.

Squeezing In a Run Before the Call

But I've got to back up for a minute. I had the kids, the kids left, I looked at my watch, and she said she was going to take a shower and then she'd be ready to talk to me. I'm like, great, I have time to go for a run right now. This is the best time I'm going to have to go for a run all day. I was already a little sweaty from going to the park with my son. This week I did yoga and another workout class and tennis, so I hadn't been on a run in a few days. I'm like, awesome, let me go for this run right now, and then I'll be perfectly timed where I can talk to her. Then I was supposed to be on Ashley Cummings' stream starting a couple of hours after that. Then I had a call with another YouTuber for another hour. So I was like, great, I'm going to get my exercise now. I don't want to run too late, so it's the last chance to exercise.

The Queen Shirt, the VidSummit Shirt

So I get out there and I go for my run, and I'm on my first lap. I was hurt by the last interaction I'd had with the woman I've called the queen. She has that nickname because I told her she was my queen, and it's just stuck at this point. I've told the queen stories before, so you may already know the history. And the shirt I was wearing when I met her is on my website also, though apparently it's worth much more to me than it is to anyone else, which I get. But picture having that hanging up in your closet. That's Jerry's shirt. That's the queen shirt. That's the VidSummit shirt. That's something that would have some emotional meaning. If I watched someone, I would love to have one of deadmau5's shirts that had emotional significance. I'd pay probably several thousand more in debt to have a shirt from deadmau5 and have it posted up on the wall, like, hey, that's what Joel was wearing when he first made that song. If he had the shirt he wore when he made a song, I'd pay thousands for that. So I'm doing what I can out here.

Running Into the Queen When I Wasn't in the Mood

So I'm on my first lap and I'm thinking, there's no way I'm going to see the queen today. I'm not in the mood right now. I'm hurt that she ignored or didn't respond to my message, which at this point had been several weeks, and she hadn't responded to my last message either. I'm just like, I'm not in the mood to see her right now. And there's no way at this random time on a Saturday that she's going to be out here.

I had that thought, and two minutes later, guys, if you don't realize how magical life is, even when it doesn't feel like magic, that's just contrast. Two minutes later, I'm running and I see this woman wearing a hat, and I'm like, oh, here's an attractive woman in a hat. As I get close to her, only a few feet away, I'm like, oh, that's her. And she hollers out at me, like, hey! And I literally was like, not right now. So I just did this little half-hearted wave at her. I didn't recognize her until the last minute, and then I'm like, all right, just do something. So I did a half-hearted wave.

I'm still hurt. Not as much about her behavior, even. I don't feel the way I did before, either. I had such big heartfelt energy and excitement and love for her, and I've tried to do everything with my head to shut that down and to cut all those cords so that I'm more available for other women, and I'm not holding on to someone who doesn't seem to be holding on to me. I laid that out in I'm Done Investing Emotionally in Women Who Don't Invest in Me. So I've intentionally had my head going, look, listen, stop. Let go of her, open your heart to other women, let her go. And so I see her and I'm like, I have a time schedule, and it felt like such a contrast, because she seemed happy to see me. And I'm like, I'm not happy to see you right now. I'm hurt. I don't want to deal with this. I'd rather just move on. And at this point, it just feels like we're going to rub salt in the wound here.

Leaving Her Hanging on the High Five

So I'm running around again, and I'm like, I should probably just take a different route, because I'm probably going to run by her again at this rate. I keep running and I come around the opposite side, like 180 degrees from where we were, and this time she's hollering at me and I see her hat. I'm like, oh no. What? And I'm like, maybe I'll say hi this time. I had a whole half lap, like three quarters of a mile, to think about this. And then she tries to high five me. She sticks her hand out to try and high five me, and she's all excited. But again, I'm still feeling hurt. I'm like, really? You don't want to respond to my text message, but you're going to react this positively to seeing me in person? It feels fake. But maybe it's not fake. Maybe she didn't feel the same way about my voice memo saying I'd be happy to be friends with her and suggesting a couple of things we could do, and so she didn't respond to it. I'm just like, this feels fake. Really? You're just happy to see me, but you don't want to respond to my messages? I was just feeling like, come on, this is ridiculous.

So she tried to high five me when I was running by and I just did my little wave again. And she turns around and she's like, oh, you're going to leave me hanging? And I turned and looked at her and I just kept running, because I'm like, yeah, I'm going to leave you hanging. You left my message unresponded to for two and a half weeks. Yes, I am going to leave you hanging.

But then I've got a whole other lap, and I'm like, man, I really should dip right now. I'm going to run into her again at this rate. And I'm all in my head. One of the nice things about exercising is that you can get out of your head sometimes, but I'm in my head going, man, I want to do better than this. This is an opportunity. Make the most of it. Don't waste it. You don't want to feel bad later. So I'm like, all right, fine. I'm going to be friendly next time. If she stops, I'm going to be friendly and I'm just going to own it. And then I'm like, maybe she'll just run off to her house and I won't have to see her again.

"I Just Realized I Didn't Respond to Your Message"

So I'm running up right by her again at about the last spot I would have seen her, because this was my last lap. I'd done almost three miles at this point. And this time she was trying to not be overly enthusiastic. So I stopped running and I walked up to her and I said, hey, and I think I gave her a high five or something. And then she's like, oh, I just realized I didn't respond to your message. And in my head I'm like, what's your problem? Are you kidding me? Seriously? Really? You just now realized? Come on. She's like, I've been so busy. And in my head it's, no, just tell me to my face. Just tell me, look, you don't matter. All right. You don't matter. I've got other stuff that's more important to me. You don't matter. That's why I didn't respond to you. You don't matter. I don't care about you. I have other things that are more important to do. That was the narrative in my head, at least.

So then she was trying to tell me that maybe her feelings were hurt by my lukewarm reaction. It's just crazy. Can't we all just be nice to each other? Apparently not. I'm trying to lead by example, and it's not so easy sometimes, is it? So she's like, I need to run. And I'm like, look, I'll run some more with you. Let's go. So we run and walk for about another mile together. And it's funny, because the last time I was so happy to see her and I really wanted to see her again. This time I have almost no enthusiasm. My heart is shut. It feels like an effort to talk to her. I'd already decided, as I wrote in I Was Wrong: Men Should Stop Chasing Sooner, to stop chasing. And I'm like, my God, is this what she felt like?

Is This How She Felt?

After that video I sent her, and after me getting needy and really wanting her attention and getting hurt, is this how she felt? Did she feel the same way, hurt? She probably did. She probably felt hurt by my behavior, and then she saw my message. Last time I saw her, I said, I'm sorry for the way I acted, and I won't do that again. I said I'd be patient. I wasn't, and I can't help but think maybe I'm doing it again now. This is the trap I described in You Can't Find Love While Trying Not to Get Hurt.

But at least I told her, look, the last discussion with you was helpful for me in realizing I need to be friends with women first. I tried to date you basically as two different people. In my twenties, there was one guy who was dating: the guy who wanted to hook up as fast as possible. That was the guy. There was no care for being friends or any of that. It was, I want to get in bed with a woman as soon as possible. I'm just trying to get laid. And then maybe if I really enjoy that, I'll have a relationship so I can have that as often as possible. That was my thinking in my twenties, and I owned it. Women who weren't on that frequency were totally repulsed by me, and women who were on that frequency were very turned on. So it worked, in its way.

But when I was trying to date the queen, I was dating on two different frequencies, where half of me was still in that old world, and half of me was in this new open-hearted place: I want to fall in love. I want to get to know a woman slowly. I want to really research a woman and make sure our personalities are aligned. So it was tough, because I felt so much about her, and it revealed this split. Half of me wanted to be patient and be a friend and take things slow. But the other half of me was like, as soon as things slow down for a minute and she says she needs space and cancels the date, I'm out. I'm pulling back, and I'm trying to make it her fault through my needy, harsh behavior. I apologized for that. I went through a lot of these patterns in everything I was doing wrong on 20+ dates after my divorce. So I told her, you helped me see that I was dating as two people, because that's how I used to be. But now I want to be friends with women first. I don't want to jump into anything. And thank you for helping me see that.

She Needs a New Place, and I Know the Perfect One

Then we talked some more, and she's like, yeah, I need to be out of the place I'm living, I need to find a new place. And I was just like, oh no. She was obviously not asking about moving in with me or anything. Ashley asked me later, do you think she was being friendly because she wanted to move in with you? I'm like, no way. But I realized I do know a place pretty close by that would be perfect for her, at least in my mind. And my first thought was, dude, don't tell her about that place, because then you're going to see her even more often. So, of course, I told her about it. And I'm just like, universe, what are you doing with this? This is ridiculous right now. But I know the owner of the place, and the queen's looking for a place to live soon, and the owner is looking for somebody to rent, and it should just be perfect. So I'm like, all right, I guess I'll make this connection.

Then she was ready to say goodbye, and I was too. Last time she'd given me this big, sweaty, nice hug, but this time she seemed a little more standoffish. I gave her a hug anyway, and then I thought I should have just walked off, because I saw that she was a little standoffish and awkward. Maybe she was surprised that I wasn't very enthusiastic to see her, because every other time I've been so excited to see her, and I'm sure she could read that I was unenthusiastic. Then I went back home and sent her the information, and I sent the owner of the place the information so they could connect. And I was like, what is happening right now? This is just crazy.

An Hour and Ten Minutes That Flew By

Then I talked to the woman from South Africa for an hour right after that, as soon as I got home, and this woman just has an amazing personality. She's so validating. She thinks I'm hilarious. I think she's funny. We talked for an hour and ten minutes, and it just flew by, to the point where she's yawning and lying down. I'm like, all right, it's 11:30 your time, and she always gets up at seven, she said. So it's like, all right, it's time for you to go to bed, I'll let you go. I talked to her about running into the queen, and it was nice. When I hung up the phone, I was like, this conversation with this woman in South Africa is how communicating with somebody should feel. This feels so good. I felt so open-hearted and excited to communicate with her.

And she likes dark comedy, just like I do. If anything, I think she can go darker than me. I think she's had quite a bit rougher life in South Africa than I have over here. So I'm like, wow. For once. My ex did not like my dark humor. She'd had an extremely sheltered life, and my dark humor, from being a police officer and my parents being in the military and all the comedy I'd watched and all the dudes I'd hung out with, was offensive to her. She didn't want to hear my dark jokes, ever. And the queen is probably a lot more like my ex in that respect. So I had such a great conversation with this woman in South Africa, and I'm like, wow, that's so wild.

An Hour and a Half on Ashley Cummings' Live Stream

Then I let her go so I could shower and get ready to go on Ashley Cummings' live stream on her channel. I had an amazing hour and a half discussion with Ashley and her friend, RN, which were his initials on there. Ashley teared up a little bit during the live stream. I almost did too. We talked about family stuff and dating and making money. It was such a great conversation. And it's nice, because I can actually say Ashley's name since she's a public figure also, and you can watch the live stream with us. It was a beautiful live stream.

Ashley had asked, hey, you want to come on my stream today? I'd love for you to join. And at first I'm like, I need to film videos, I've got calls, and I didn't even realize I was going to spend like 30 minutes talking with the queen today also. I was like, I don't know. But I can't just do Ashley Cummings' live stream for five minutes, so I ended up being on there an hour and a half, because the conversation was awesome. Ashley's so smart, so affirming. She's like, I love you, Jerry. And I'm like, I love you too, Ashley Cummings. And I was like, wow, I haven't heard a woman say that in a long time, besides my mother. And my mother absolutely counts. Speaking of which, I hope I have time to call my mother tonight, because I didn't last night, did I? Is it Saturday already? No, I talked to her Thursday. Then I'm like, wait, no, my friends Lindsay and Angela tell me they love me also. So I'm like, man, these women who are friends and tell you they love you and are so affirming, it's so good for my heart.

Supernatural

So I got off the live stream with Ashley, and I just felt so good. I had a quick Larabar, and I got ready to do this vlog, and I put on "Supernatural" by Kesha, because that was in my head. And I just cried. I'm like, dude, your life is supernatural. This is incredible. Do you understand how miraculous what's happening in your life is? From most people's point of view, you look crazy, delusional, whatever. Who Are These Podcasts said lately that it's my latest psychological breakdown or whatever. From my point of view, I am absolutely in love with my life right now. This is one of the most beautiful times I've ever had in my life, of learning, of growth, of connecting with people, of building up from scratch on YouTube.

Paying Devin Nash $200 for a Channel Review

Speaking of that, I also paid a guy named Devin Nash. He's a YouTuber and content creator. I paid him $200 today and sent him all six of my channels and the analytics for them. In exchange, he's going to make a 15-minute video review, which I hope I can post, and give his advice. I asked him, look, I'm not sure what to focus on. Is there something I can do to make more money, like sell this gold satin shirt? Or is there a product? Should I build one channel? Should I go off YouTube? I don't know. There are so many opportunities, but I'm having a hard time hitting one that's really proving it's the way.

My meme coins, for example, have been rough. The price on them has dropped, and I'm grateful there are some of you in the chat who are holding Jerry on Robinhood and JBBJ on ICP. This is obviously not financial advice, because I'm holding thousands of dollars of these coins also, and I have less than 10 percent of the supply on them. I'm just sitting on it. So I reached out to this guy for help. I'm like, look, whatever you think, I'd like to hear it. And I want to reach out to some more people for advice, people who know the world I'm in, who have gotten a lot of views online and are in this space as full-time creators. I want that perspective. Random people in the chat talking trash, I appreciate the advice and the suggestions. At the same time, though, I do want an expert opinion too, someone who's got as much experience as me to look at what I'm doing. So I emailed and asked Devin Nash for help.

I'm like, let me drop $200 for this, because his help could be worth thousands of dollars, or it might not be worth anything, but I'm excited to see what he says.

Genius or Insane?

So then I walked up to start my vlog, listening to "Supernatural" by Kesha, and I just cried, because I felt this power. I feel this sense of almost being like a baby that's just being held and taken care of by my parents, that everything's okay. Because sometimes I wonder, am I a genius, or am I seriously insane and delusional? I recognize most of you would think one or the other. I guess a lot of you who watch me are probably thinking genius and inspiration, but to the average person, I'm not a genius. To the average person, I look nuts. This guy's just borrowing everything he can on credit cards to go for his dream of being a YouTuber, which he already accomplished, but he deleted everything to go for it again. And he's trying to date so hard, and he's spent tens of thousands of dollars on it, as I shared when I spent $10,000 on dating to help build my business. He fell in love with a woman, and it just ended up being so much hurt. Even though the first week with the queen was so amazing, and the most incredible date of my life was in it, that was the best week I've had all year, and the worst week I've had all year was the next two weeks. That was rough, as she pulled away.

Look at the Beautiful Day You Just Had With Three Different Women

When I was getting ready to do this vlog, it's like, look how magical your life is. You ran into the queen again. You talked with her again. Then you had a woman from South Africa have an awesome call with you, affirm you, and pay attention to you for an hour and ten minutes, a woman who loves your videos, who is clearly attracted to you, and you're attracted to her. Then you went on Ashley Cummings' live stream. She said she loves you, and you had a great time and laughed. For all that I've struggled so much with women this year, and felt like women were the other at various points, it's like, look at the beautiful day you just had with three different women. All women that I'd potentially be happy to be with. And then there's this other woman in her 20s that you're set up to match with next week. Look how abundant the universe is. I feel so held.

Then the thought after that is, well, what about my money? And it's like, look what just happened.

The Clarity Ashley Helped Me Find: Just Be Friends With Women

In the last few weeks, Ashley was a big part of this, with the stream we did on my Jerry Banfield dating channel and the calls and the audio messages and the phone calls we've had. I feel like Ashley was a big part of helping me get clarity. Look, be friends with women. Just love women, be friends with women, and open your heart. And if there's a woman who is friends with you and falls in love with you, then be open to that. That's all you need to do: be friends with women, love women, hang out with women, but essentially forget about dating women and just enjoy being around and spending time with women. Let whoever's going to be the next wife and mother of my kids pick you. Let her fall in love with you slowly, because that's what's going to work well for her, to fall in love with you slowly, and let her desire you. Let her make her desire known to you. And then if you feel the same way, let that happen. That'll be the most beautiful experience you could have. It fits what I wrote in The Right Person Makes You Want to Give, Not Take. So that was a few weeks ago.

The Sunday in Michigan When I Cried for Hours

And then it's like, remember all this pain you've had dating all year. That day, Sunday, when I was with my kids in Michigan, where I realized that this beautiful thing that had started with the queen was over, that she'd pulled away, she'd run from me, she wasn't available, and that it wasn't going to work. I was so devastated. I felt like I was dragging my body around like a heavy weight all day. It was rough. My aunt was concerned, but I just did stuff with the kids. I cried for hours. The kids snuggled up and hugged me. And then I took the kids out to lunch. I took the kids to mini golf and the batting cage and go-karts, and I'm like, it doesn't matter how I feel. I'm going to take my kids to have fun.

That's what I love about myself. I have big feelings, but my big feelings do not stop me from doing the next right thing, from going out and taking care of my kids, creating content, taking care of my body and my mind. No matter what's happening in my life, no matter how I feel about it, I do the next right thing.

My Daughter, My Ex, and How Fast Things Happen When You're Open

And what felt so miraculous is, look at the beautiful day you had with your daughter, too, from the point of view of the day you had with women. Your daughter came over and was so happy to see you. So happy that I ordered her this stuffed animal she wanted. And she snuggled with me on the couch and talked to me. I showed her a picture of the woman from South Africa and she's like, oh, she's so cute. She's so pretty. And then my ex-wife was there, and she was just relaxed today. I'm glad I have such a relaxed relationship with my ex, even though there are such big emotions and so much history there. She can just hang out, and it feels good. Then right after that, you got to see the queen again and talk with her again. Right after that, the one from South Africa. Look at the beautiful day you had and see how amazing that is, and see that you prayed for all these women in your life.

Two days before I met the queen, I shouted out loud in my house, please, I can't do this without you anymore. I need you, please. And then I met the queen two days later. When that was so rough, I struggled for a few months, but then I set a clear intention. I want some of these women who watch me, even just one, I want one woman who watches me to take an interest in me. And literally, Ashley was in my inbox within hours of that thought. It helped me so much with the conversations we had. Then this woman from South Africa showed up right after that. Look how fast things can happen when you're open, when you open your heart to them.

"Nice to See You Again," and Why I'm Not Replying

Then I'm thinking, okay, I'm done with the queen. That's it. There's nothing else that's going to happen. She said she still sees my videos. I don't know if she watches them, but she sees that I'm publishing them. And then I sent her the information right before this, and she texted me, nice to see you again. What do y'all think I'm going to do? What do y'all think I'm going to say right now? I haven't replied. It was nice. I appreciated that she said nice to see me again, and I'm happy to get that message for sure. But at this point, I'm going to be the one to not follow up, because I think that ship has sailed. Obviously there's part of me that would still love to be with her, that has deep emotions buried under some hurt. Maybe I can have some forgiveness, and maybe I'm scared to feel any kind of feelings for her again. And at the same time, I'm going to open my heart to whichever woman wants it the most. That's who can have it. I'm going to open my heart to whichever woman wants it the most.

I'm extremely grateful for all the possibilities today. At this rate, I could have a great date off the matchmaking too, which is not even going to be a date. It's just meeting a person I don't even know, and we're going to talk, maybe. So that's what brought me to tears. When you feel that sense that who I am and the biggest power are not separate, like my desires that I've cried out for, it's amazing, if I'll open my heart and adjust what I do, how fast things can happen. Based on what I've seen with dating, which has been pretty rough most of this year, right now I feel so held and so supported by women. It's amazing. Even just that the queen was open to talking with me and hanging out with me today felt good, even though I could barely receive it. And it's nice that when I sent her the info she said thank you very much, and then the one extra message, nice to see you today. Thank you. That was nice.

But at this point, if I reply, I'm going to open a can of worms on my end. What am I going to say? Nice to see you too. And then am I going to be waiting for her to reply? I already learned once that waiting on texts didn't make me more attractive, and I don't want to get back into watching my phone. At this point, her message could easily be the conclusion. I don't need to say anything else. And I don't want to get more emotionally invested in a woman who seems, at least from her own words, to not have any space to emotionally invest in me. So I feel like I'm doing a good job on that right now. And I'm really excited to talk to my friend about YouTube.

Why I'm Telling You My Story

I'm telling you my story because I don't know your story, but I love hearing other people's real, raw stories of their lives. And I hope that by hearing my story, you can find what's magic and beautiful in your life today. And that no matter what other people think about your life, you can see your life as something beautiful that you treasure right now. Only you can make that decision. That's what I'm intending to lead by example on: that I am absolutely, extremely grateful that everything is exactly where it is today. To me, that's the absolute wealthiest you can be. The happiest you can be is to say, thank you very much for exactly how everything is right now. And at the same time, to realize I have created everything the way it is right now. Man, that's beautiful. But on another level, it feels like I'm just a baby getting carried around and things are happening around me.

And there was another woman that I liked, and I wanted to date her, and she said she just wanted to be friends.

Two Women Within a Minute of Each Other

About a minute before I ran into the queen, this woman ran by me. I don't know if she recognized me or not, or if she was just focused, but she didn't acknowledge me at all, and I didn't acknowledge her. Then she ran by me again, and this time I was sure it was her, but I didn't say anything, and she didn't say anything. So I'm like, this is so crazy right now. The odds of literally two women, one I did date for a few weeks, and another one I was interested in dating who said she wanted to be friends, after which I mostly left her alone and avoided the usual context I was seeing her in, both of them going by me within a minute or two of each other. And then the woman from South Africa is talking to me on Ashley's stream. This is amazing. I'm grateful for it, and I'm excited to see where we go from here.

Relax, the Dating's Handled

I just have this feeling with the dating, like, look, relax. The dating's handled. You do need to speak your truth. You do need to share. You do need to adjust. But once I put myself in the right position with the dating, and I feel like I'm in just the right position and mindset with it now, that was the hard part. I value women as friends, and Ashley, the woman from South Africa, and even the queen were all able to help me feel very validated and loved and seen and supported by women, which is awesome, because I already feel that with men. I wrote about loving dating in 2026 back in July, and this is a deeper version of that same feeling.

And it's like, look what I gave you a taste of today. Now you can be sure that you're going to have a dating life you're really excited about. This is me talking to what some of you would call God or my higher self or whatever, and it's like, if I can do this with women, I'm going to dump all the money on you too. You ready for it? Are you ready for all that money? Because once you get that money, you're not going to be able to have the honest clickbait title that you're $90,000 in credit card debt. What are you going to title your videos then, when that's gone? I've already admitted that my dating failures make me money, and the debt titles work the same way. So enjoy this part of the journey. This is the top of the roller coaster. Maybe it's starting to go down. I don't know, but enjoy the journey, because really, life is about the journey. Enjoy it.

Do Y'all Want to Buy a Shirt?

I just have a feeling that you all, collectively, could dump hundreds of thousands of dollars on me, and from my view it would be fairly effortless for you to do it. So there's nothing to be afraid of. There's nothing to worry about. I do need to try out different businesses and ask for help and ask for advice and see, do y'all want to buy a shirt? What do y'all want to buy?

So thank you. That's incredible. I love you each. I hope I've shared that, yeah, I'm up and I'm down sometimes, but when you read a day like this one, it's communicated to you. If you want more days like this, they're all in my Daily Vlogs playlist. So I love you. Thank you for being here today.

And if you want this exact shirt, there's only one of them, and whoever buys it first gets it. I'm interested to see, is this thing going to sell or not? We'll see what happens. Ashley said she wants it for Halloween. She's going to go as Jerry Banfield for Halloween if none of y'all buy it. So, she said, hopefully nobody will buy it before Halloween.

October 8, 2026 Vlog

From my video published October 8, 2026.

I'm Jerry Banfield. This is a real, raw, authentic day. Dang, how many times do I have to say that? This is a day in my life as a full-time creator who is 220-some thousand dollars in debt and desperate for money, and I've just filed a report with the FBI. Wow, I already don't like how I've started this off. Maybe I should just delete it. But I have had some breakthroughs in the last 24 hours that I'm really happy to share here with you, because I literally went to bed crying, just feeling so defeated and frustrated. And yet, to me, that's where breakthroughs happen. That's where we get smarter, where we learn something. Our pain should be like putting an iron in the fire, where it comes out red hot and ready to bend. That's what I felt like last night.

In fact, the more pain I felt emotionally as I thought about all the nights my wife and I spent watching TV and movies on the couch, snuggled up, the worse it got. I'm single and have been celibate for a year now. I got divorced last year, and she's got a new boyfriend she's doing all of that with. I just felt agony. Then I looked at my financial situation and thought, I need to make tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the year, or I'm going to need some kind of other miracle, or I'm going to have to move out and just be desperate. And that's disgusting. So I was like, come on, you can do this. Who do I need to pray to? Jesus? Jesus, Satan, Muhammad, Buddha, Shiva, whoever, just tell me who I need to pray to. Myself? Fine, I'll just affirm that you've got this, bro. What do I need to do? You figure it out. All right, figure it out.

So I had a few breakthroughs yesterday in the middle of this pain, and I share this stuff here. I would rather not share this with you. All right, I'd rather not. It doesn't make me feel the greatest or look the best. I'd rather keep a lot of this stuff to myself. But I've come to believe that my story is the one thing nobody else can make, so here it is.

The meme coin, the hackers, and the FBI report

One thing that triggered my frustration is that my meme coin, Jerry on Robinhood, tanked to a $60,000 market cap after hitting as high as $160,000. That high was on September 22nd, the day I launched it. It was also the day hackers compromised my Google account. I didn't realize that I had been a lazy boy and had signed up for a new MetaMask account with my Google account. I didn't realize that was the one loophole left after I closed the rest of them. So the hackers had my MetaMask account, and they rugged my coin. They sold $13,000 of it. Well, it was $20,000 in my wallet, and when they rugged it down, they got $13,000 out of it.

So yesterday I made a report to the FBI, which basically dragged me through the mud again. Some people are like, well, why haven't you submitted this report? Why haven't you contacted the FBI when they sold $20,000? Why haven't you reported that they took $20,000 from you and rugged the coin? Why? I'll tell you why. Because I didn't want to drag myself through the mud on it again, which is exactly what I had to do in order to make the report. And I felt like crap afterwards. I'm like, you are such an idiot, man. How did you let these dumb scammers get you on a Teams call and take control of your computer while they say they need to grab a thumbnail? You're a dummy. Come on, man. That was so stupid. How did you let them do that? My coin would probably have been into the millions of dollars by now. And the guys who stole it only got $13,000 and something, maybe $14,000, out of it.

At least, looking at the information I gave to the FBI, it does destroy the narrative of all the people saying, you rugged your own coin. Look, I put $5,000 into it. I wouldn't have rugged the whole coin to get $13,000 out a couple of hours later. That would have been $8,000 profit. I don't care about $8,000 profit enough to destroy, to sabotage, or to make it so much more difficult to get my meme coin back to where it was.

Why I'm not allowing hate on my streams anymore

I got all riled up and fired up yesterday, too, because I did two live streams, and especially on the second one, there were so many haters. The problem is negative energy. I'm sensitive. It's so toxic. One of the things I generally do well is avoid listening to so many of these people who are just lonely and dysfunctional, where all they want to do is call names and talk trash all the time. And thriving, to me, does not usually happen with a bunch of name calling and trash talking. This is the environment that I think stops most average people from going anywhere, because you're surrounded by people who just talk trash and call names and drag you down. If you want to do well, like I've done well, then you've got to stop with all these people who drag you down. You've got to do anything to get away from them. And at the same time, I want to be there and connect with my community.

So, yeah, yesterday's vlog felt like a total failure. I showed up all excited to go live and connect with my audience, and then what happened? You get one jerk after another coming along who just wants to talk trash, take me down, and call names. So I retitled it to "I'm not allowing this on stream again." I realized I need to do my vlogs by just recording them, so that nobody interrupts me. Those of you who like to watch would prefer that I not be interrupted and distracted constantly by people chatting. Then, once or twice a week, I'll do a long live stream. I'll schedule it as far in advance as I can so you know when it is, and I'll just sit there and talk to the community. Because most of you are not watching live streams after I'm done being live, since you figure you missed it.

That's how I've grown my channel. I also did a deep analysis with YouTube, and it looks like videos like this have been the thing I've done that has really helped grow my channels, whereas doing live streams deepens them. I'm going to talk more about that on the creators channel. It's kind of amazing, all the insights I've had.

Sitting with the shame of the FBI report

But yesterday I experienced the highest amount of emotional pain I've had in a while. Just feeling stupid, especially with that FBI report. It's like, what kind of an idiot who's been in crypto for 12 years has to sit here and submit a report to the FBI that scammers managed to get into his Google account, steal $20,000 of his crypto, and wreck his coin? I try to be nice and loving with myself. But just putting myself on that page and submitting the info, I was like, oh, I hate that I'm doing this right now. I hate that I have to do this. I hate that this happened. It's funny, I kind of dodged some of the emotional pain at the time it happened. But yesterday I had to sit there and face it. And I'm like, okay, I'm set up to make sure that doesn't happen again. And I'm persisting on my coin.

In fact, one of the brilliant takeaways from yesterday is that sometimes what looks bad is good. When my meme coin first got rugged, I had 20 percent of the supply, which was worth $20,000 plus, and they stole all of it. Now I've got a lousy 5 percent of the supply. And I've already lost another $1,000 or so from the price tanking because somebody sold the coin. Yesterday, somebody sold $4,000 of it. At first I'm like, this sucks. Who did that? But then I thought, oh, now I could actually buy more of it cheaper. This is good. In fact, I wish everybody would sell it so that I could buy back as much as I had before. Then I could promote it like crazy from there. It's funny, the same thing that looks bad is actually good. I can buy it cheaper now. People who are getting in early can get a better deal. And obviously this isn't financial advice. I'm just talking about my own experience with a meme coin that I launched.

Cranking out videos, Shorts, and a better way to sell memorabilia

Then I had several more insights. I realized I need to just crank out videos like this. I need to keep putting out Shorts, and the Shorts need to be clipped from videos like this. Then I had more realizations after that. I figured out a way that I'm going to start consistently selling Jerry Banfield memorabilia in a fun format. I think I'm going to do something like Jerry Banfield collector's boxes, something that makes it more fun and more reasonable to pay a higher price. I'm reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow, and I'm like, I need to offer products that people are really enthusiastic to buy, that are fun, that are not just a couple of hundred dollars for a shirt or whatever.

With that in mind, though, I've marked down the Queen shirt. This is the shirt I wore when I first met the Queen. And this other one is the shirt I wore when I arrived at VidSummit and on the first full day of the conference. I've marked down all the collectible stuff for the time being. Anything that doesn't sell, I'm going to handle like this shirt, which I also marked down. So many of you want things like autographed books and shirts, and I want to make it fun, not something boring like "go buy this T-shirt for twenty dollars." I want it to be a real unboxing experience. So I'm going to start selling Jerry Banfield collectible boxes.

So if you want to grab the Queen shirt, or anything like the gold satin shirt, grab it before I put it in a box where you won't be guaranteed to get it. I've lowered the price on pretty much everything in my store, and anything that doesn't sell on my website, I'm going to turn into mystery boxes. I'll make it very clear. I'm going to show every single thing that could be in any of the boxes. You'll know exactly what's possible, but you'll only be able to buy one box, and there will only be something like 10 boxes. Every month I'm going to try this. I'm going to have Jerry Banfield mystery boxes, and they'll have autographed books. They'll have all kinds of fun stuff.

I'm thinking I'm going to buy an Ableton Push 3 and make some new music, so the boxes could have my music in a certain format in there too. The collectible boxes will be a cool experience, where you can buy one and it's all done personally by me, with collectible stuff in it. I ordered some coins, which apparently are going to take a month to get here, but I ordered them. So I'm going to make some fun, very limited edition boxes for something like 10 people that I'll start selling every month. Then on stream every month, I'll be like, hey, this will be in the next collection of mystery boxes. I may put some stuff up individually and then throw anything that doesn't sell into the mystery boxes. Or I'll just put all of it in the mystery boxes. That was a really cool breakthrough.

I want you to go to my website and buy stuff, because that's the bottom of the funnel. The top of the funnel is free videos, live streaming is the middle, and then for the really serious fans, there's stuff you can buy. I especially want to offer stuff you can have in person.

Every thumbnail should show something you can buy

I also realized something about my thumbnails. I've been wondering what the heck to do with them. I've got my titles in a decent place, but I feel like my thumbnails have just been getting wasted on random images and AI-generated stuff. Every single one of my thumbnails should be showing off something you can buy on my website. When I had those eBay auctions up, people bid everything up to 20-some thousand dollars, and the auctions all ended up being fake. Well, the auctions were real, but people made fake bids that they had no intention of ever paying, and they confirmed that via message. It was exciting and then quite disappointing, and it was painful. What it led me to see is that I should always be sending people to my website, and that's where I should be making my real money.

I have a new dashboard now, a public business dashboard, showing that I've made $4,633 in sales across 33 paid orders. The average order is $140, there have been 23 different buyers, 32 items sold, and there are 10 products for sale right now. That's where the majority of the money should be coming in, because I can sell shirts. I can sell mystery boxes. I can sell courses. I can sell comedy. I can sell games. I have a game called Meme Coin Dynasty, and it's awesome. It's a fun little game. If you click on Shop at the top of the page and then click on the Meme Coin Dynasty game, you can buy it with crypto, and it's fun. There's a leaderboard to see how high up you can get. Right now Max Resist is number one on the leaderboard with his Max Resist coin. I don't know how the heck he got it up to 11 million dollars. When I played it, I could barely get to a hundred and some thousand. The last time I played, I just got crushed trying to play my own little game.

Maximizing my funnel and making lives members-only

So what I see is that I need to focus on maximizing my business funnel. The top of the funnel needs to offer amazing free content, like I'd like to think this is. The middle of the funnel should be interactive lives. And I think I'm going to make my lives members-only. That way, people who are generous will have a clear avenue to give gift memberships to everybody who's not a member. If I make the chat open or just moderated, trolls can easily come in and get that first nasty comment in all the time, which, on some days, bothers me. Other days it doesn't bother me so much. But I think the days when I'm more heartfelt and really able to connect with you are the days the criticism and constant trash talking get to me.

And look, yesterday I was like, forget constructive feedback. Almost nobody in life wants constructive feedback. Maybe many of us should be more open to constructive feedback, but I've gotten enough constructive feedback at this point. And here's the thing. I don't want constructive feedback unless I asked for it. If I didn't ask you to give me constructive feedback, I am not interested in hearing it. I assume the women I've dated are not interested in me telling them they should lose weight, or get sober, or maybe get a better attitude about kids. They're not interested in that feedback. What I've noticed is that if you try to give constructive feedback to people who aren't asking for it, it's not constructive. You're being a jerk. And I've been a jerk a lot of times.

The warm lead I ruined with six texts and unsolicited feedback

My friend connected me with one of her friends. She's a single parent, an attractive woman who is very single. She doesn't have dudes lined up like you would think. People talk about how women have endless options, but she doesn't have dudes lined up. She's been going back to a guy she's broken up with over and over, like six, seven, eight times, and her love life is not going well. She doesn't use dating apps. She doesn't even want to participate in that, which I understand, since I've written about how the apps are a bad deal anyway. This was a warm lead. All I probably had to do was say, hi, I'm Jerry Banfield, and then literally do nothing. She might not have texted me for a week or two. But at some point she might have reached out and said, hey, let's go for coffee.

What did I do instead? I sent her six text messages over the course of a week. She sent one back. And then I sent constructive feedback. Did she ask for constructive feedback? No. Is me giving her constructive feedback a good look for a guy she might want to date? No. I've never once given a woman constructive feedback before being intimate with her and had that go well. Ever. In my 20s, I knew you don't say anything that might hurt a woman's feelings. Absolutely no constructive feedback before you've slept together. Come on, man. But at the time I was thinking, well, I'm just going to give this to her. It's not constructive feedback if someone is not interested in that kind of point of view. I thought I'd learned my lesson about texting when I wrote about how waiting to text was wrong, but it turns out over-texting and then critiquing her is just as bad.

I've had a number of women this year go the same way. There was another one, a woman in her early 20s I went out with. I tried to give her some constructive feedback and never heard from her again. This is a woman I had ghosted, and she reached back out, and she was pretty interested. We'd been out on a bunch of dates. The thing that killed it was constructive feedback. It's the same pattern I described when one comment ended a date I was really into. So I am not interested in constructive feedback. I'm not interested in criticism. I'm not interested in name calling. I'm not interested in hate. Now, if somebody else wants to do that somewhere else, that's fine. But in my community, when I'm interacting with my fans, I'm trying to only interact with those of you who are supporting me and who love what I do. I don't want you to have to deal with these other jerks in the community either.

What makes someone a jerk, and why it's on me to find where I fit

I'd say someone's being a jerk if you show up somewhere, see everybody's trying to do one thing, and you try to do something else there. Man, this is going to make me look bad with Alcoholics Anonymous with what I'm about to say, and I realize that. But that's why there are some AA meetings I don't go to anymore. They just want this culty stuff, and I don't fit in there. I could fit in there, but I don't want to fit in there. I don't feel it's needed. Ideally, when groups of us gather together as people, we're trying to help each other and work together. When one person is out there trying to do their own thing and not considering everybody else, it just makes everything more difficult.

At the AA meetings I go to where everybody's trying to share and talk the same way, I get up there and say the opposite. That didn't get me any new sponsees. That made enemies of people who had seen me in other meetings and were happy with what I was sharing there, because what I shared at those other meetings was fitting in. But then I go to this one meeting and share, and it's upsetting people. And some of those people who got upset at that meeting are now upset when they see me at other meetings, even though they weren't having a problem with what I said at the other meetings. So that's why it's on me. If I go somewhere and I don't fit in, I need to go somewhere else and find places I fit in, where the groups of people are working together to achieve the same goals I am.

And I see it as the community leader. It's up to me to say, look, if you're not here to support me and cheer me on, then get out of here. Or watch, but keep your mouth shut. If you're not here to support me and cheer me on, I'm not interested in what you have to say. I don't care what you think. If you think I'm a bad father, or an idiot for getting into debt, or you think I rug pulled my meme coin, I don't care what you think if you don't agree with me and support me, or if you don't want to play with me.

Why jokes don't land over text

And I know it's hard sometimes. Is it hard right now? Not right now. But I realize some people are trying to play around and talk trash on a live stream and be fun. The challenge is that doesn't translate well over text. It's tough. This is why I prefer to send audio messages when I communicate with people, because it's much easier to make a joke via audio. Just sending text is risky. I sent one girl a text about her criminal history. I made a joke: did you get back, or did you get locked up? She didn't respond. She probably didn't think it was funny that I joked about her getting arrested again when she's already got felony charges she's dealing with. If I'd made that joke over audio or on a phone call, it probably still wouldn't have hit well, but it would have had a better chance of being seen as me just playing. Whereas via text message, it's easy to not receive the intention clearly.

It's the same on my stream. Some people are just trying to play around and joke and talk trash to make it fun. But it's hard to tell that from just a few words on a screen versus somebody who's incredibly antisocial and all they do all day is go talk trash in live streams. It's hard to tell the two of those apart. So, yeah, yesterday I got in a real negative space. But what did I do? I took my kids out to dinner.

I spent the evening with my mom and my kids, just because. Some of you think, oh, you can't have emotions, you're too emotional. Having emotions is fine. The key is that I have a wide range of emotions. You can call that whatever you want. But I still get stuff done and do what I need to do no matter how I feel. I take my kids out to dinner when I'm in a bad mood. I just submitted a report to the FBI about what a dummy I am. Or what a victim I was. Either one. Or what a generous person I am, that I just opened my MetaMask wallet to some random group of people and said, here, take my stuff. You could look at it that way, that I was really generous. I just let anybody steal my MetaMask wallet and rug my coin, and now I'll have to do a bunch of work to bring it back to where it was.

The woman in the produce aisle

This has been really helpful with dating, too. I went to the store last night, and there was this beautiful woman. I walked by, and my silly self, I didn't even need to buy anything, but I go back over that way to the produce aisle. But then I feel so much like garbage that I don't even try to look at her. I literally just look away and pretend like I'm shopping. It's like, all right, either just don't even go that way, or just walk by and say hi at least.

And then I realized something else, something I've probably contributed a lot to my dating problems. One thing my ex loved, when we met, was how much I wanted her. I lusted after her. I desired her so bad. And most of these women I've gone out with this year, I have not felt that. I'm like, nah, you're too heavy. You're too dumb. You're too inconsistent. I've been very condescending with many of the women I went out with, even attractive, smart women making great money. I'm like, you're too boring. Your jokes are stupid. You tell a story that should take 2 minutes in 20. I realized I have not been desiring most of the women I went out with this year. The problem with having had such an attractive wife for so long is that if a woman isn't just beautiful, I hardly feel anything. I'm like, whatever. I don't feel much desire.

The guy who accepts most women versus me rejecting most of them

I had a talk with someone who is consistently sleeping with women he meets online on the first date. I was trying to understand, and one thing he told me is, look, I accept most women. I'm very accepting. A woman's overweight? That's fine. A woman's got a bad attitude? That's fine. A woman didn't show up for her kids? That's fine. A woman drinks too much? That's fine. A woman doesn't have a high school diploma? That's fine. I'm like, jeez. And I took inventory of myself and realized I don't accept most women. I very quickly reject most women, at least in terms of what I will desire. It's a big part of why average men are doing so well out there while I sit here single.

Even with the Queen, whose shirt is up here, as soon as she canceled that date, if I'd been honest, I would have just said, it's over. You just canceled this date, last minute, for no reason, because you're in your head and you're a disaster. I'm finished. This is messed up and I'm out of here. That's what I would have said if I'd been really honest. Instead, I circled the drain and tried to make her reject me, so that I could feel bad about it, and I acted desperate and whiny. I told the whole story in the post where I expected her to reject me and then made it happen. But I knew it was over with her as soon as she canceled that date, because of me being intolerant. She canceled one date, and I'm out. You know?

Women feel it when you don't desire them

I had a humbling realization last night. It's like, dude, you are not desiring the vast majority of women you've been out with, and they know that. I think one thing that turns a lot of women on, and a guy with much more experience than me said this exact thing, is feeling your desire for her. That makes her feel good. It makes her feel wanted. That makes her feel the desire back for you. Lots of times, women are not lusting after men first. Sometimes they are, but it seems like usually it's the man who is lusting really hard, and then the woman, if she's open to it, gets turned on by that. Wow, this guy really wants me. She feels chosen. She feels desired. And most of the women I've been out with, even though so many of them were attractive, I find it difficult to desire, because as soon as the crazy stuff starts happening, my desire drops. "Oh, I go on these plant medicine retreats." My desire was up here, and then you told me how dependent you are on plant medicine, and my desire is way down here now. That didn't used to happen. Women could be crazy as anything, and if they were still hot, I'd be like, let's go. But not now.

Why I need to be friends with women first

This is why I need to be friends with women. I talked about this on my dating stream recently, where I said I realized that my dating problems have been of my own making. The live stream was called "I finally understand why dating hasn't worked for me in 2026." I'm not going to repeat all of it here, but I encourage you to watch that one if you'd like the full story on what I've learned. It builds on everything I listed in the post about my 20-plus dates after divorce and what I was doing wrong.

What I've learned is this. First off, I'm the type of guy who needs to be friends with women, because I'm way too superficial, way too quick to reject a woman, way too intolerant of ordinary character defects that women have, and way too uninterested if a woman's not attractive. At this point, I'm entitled. I'm like, if I don't find you way more attractive than average, you are below me. The only way it's going to happen is if the woman totally simps up to me and just constantly desires me, affirms me, messages me, and is really crazy for me. That's the only shot she has if she's a regular-looking woman, because I'm not doing anything. I am not that interested if you're a regular-looking woman. I would rather be celibate than get interested in an average-looking woman. I know that sounds bad, but let's be honest. That's what's been happening all year. There are several women I went out with who were pretty into me, who were giving me compliments, who wanted dates with me, and I was just like, you're not hot enough, plain and simple. And they could feel that I wasn't desiring them the way I was desiring my ex. They could feel that they didn't mean that much to me.

That's why I need to become friends with women. When I become friends with a woman, and I'm not immediately looking for this woman to be perfect, then there's a chance for me to love her as a person and kind of overlook a lot of other things. It's funny, at this point my dating life makes complete sense. I've been trying to just hook up with women, but I haven't been able to maintain it. I've been going at it saying I want a wife, but then I've been using these old hookup ways of thinking. I haven't been friends with women. I've been very intolerant of so many things I think of as character defects or incompatibilities. I've been very critical and offered all kinds of unsolicited constructive feedback. Like this one woman I met, a decade younger than me, beautiful, great job, wants kids. She talked about her plant medicine journeys and how much she was struggling with scrolling, and I said something like, I'm not there, I don't know if we should have met. And then afterwards I was like, oh no, I should have let that go.

I've been more superficial than any woman has been with me

It's funny, I feel like women have been superficial with me, but I've got to say I've certainly been more superficial with them. My desire drops very easily to a dangerously low level. It's like, maybe I should be consistently texting women and trying to meet up and do stuff, but I very quickly go from high desire to no desire for a woman. I'm not that thirsty, which is funny because I talk so much about dating and I've spent so much money on it, as I laid out in the post about spending $10,000 on dating. But when you compare me to a lot of these other dudes, I'm not that thirsty. I will just do things myself rather than deal with a woman who's crazy or a woman who's not attractive enough for my ridiculous standards after being married to and with a very attractive woman for 15 years.

There was this one woman I saw, and I literally saw her legs and I'm like, I'm out. Nope. Done. Can't see her again. No desire for her. It's gone. I look back and I'm like, Jesus, man. Some of you probably would have been perfectly fine with her. The guy I was talking to who's meeting women online all the time wouldn't give two hoots about this woman's legs. But I literally saw her legs and I'm like, nope, I'm done. I can't look at that. I deserve better than that. Geez, man.

And then I remembered some of these gorgeous women, my now ex-wife and a couple of these women who were friends that I then got crushes on. I was kind of in this state of spiritual experience. I'm not going to name their names here, but I was naming names. I want one of them. That's the kind of woman I want. You see how beautiful all those women were? I don't want anything else besides that. That's what I want. You did it before, now do it again. I'm not interested in anything besides that. Don't waste my time with any woman besides that. Because it's funny, if a woman's really attractive, I will feel an immediate, high sense of desire. But for almost anything besides that, nope.

It used to be that almost any woman would turn me on. Y'all should have seen some of the women I went home with in my 20s. Geez. A few drinks, and it's like that song, if I have one more drink, I'm going home with about anybody. Y'all tell me, oh, you should try big, beautiful women. I'm like, I have. When I was 19, I'd go home with a big girl, no problem. I went home with a few big girls.

Especially after 10 or 12 liquor drinks, I'd go home with any kind of girl. I used to pay for it, too. Like, ah, forget it, I'll just dial this phone number and be with whoever comes over. But now, dude, my standards have gotten ridiculous. I'll have a huge desire for a woman, and then as soon as she says something stupid, my desire is just gone. I'm like, ah, I can't stand you. Women used to be able to say the craziest stuff and it didn't affect my desire at all. So I see that either I've got to compromise and take a more plain-looking woman, or I've got to compromise and deal with some crazy. I can't be expecting a woman to be extremely attractive and not crazy.

I should have let the parenting rant go

I think I'll probably continue to optimize for attractiveness, and I just need to let more go. Like the woman I went out with who was talking trash about parenting and all that. I should have just overlooked that. I should have just let it go. Because she was hot, she was fun, and she cursed a lot. I like a woman who's like, forget them, talking trash, making obscene gestures. I'm like, yeah, she's hot. I like that. I was so turned on by her. But she literally went on a 10-minute rant, and my desire went to zero for her. I'm like, dang it. And she was very interested in me. She was simping to me. She was trying to brag. She was clearly so insecure. She was trying to brag and make herself up to be the best woman, talking so much trash. I recognized that, and I thought, man, I should have just recognized what she was doing and let it go.

Because one of the hottest girls I went out with this year, who was also very successful and professional and a decade younger than me, I was doing that same thing on a date with her. I'm like, man, don't do that. That's pathetic. So this woman, very attractive, was doing that on a date with me. She thought I was a heck of a catch, and she was really excited about me. And then I lost all desire for her after she said that stuff about kids. Me in my 20s wouldn't have given two hoots about that. So I'm excited to talk more about this on the dating channel.

Pain is the opportunity

I'm grateful, and I hope that when I share this with you, if you're in pain in your life, you can see that this is also your opportunity. The pain is the opportunity. Even in the middle of the pain, you can say thank you. And what gets you out of it is spending time with people and talking to people. Fortunately, my roof was leaking yesterday. So my neighbors, who are my landlords, came over to have the roof repair guy there. I was in the worst mood, but I was just surrounded by people. My kids were there. The neighbors came over, and I can't be in a totally foul mood in front of my landlords slash neighbors. Then I went out to dinner with my kids. My mom was supposed to come, but she was so late that we had finished the food before she even arrived, so we just met her at my house. Then my mom's over. Then I go to the grocery store. I spent so much time with people and so much time doing things for other people.

I still ended up crying, and to me, crying will often move those feelings and get them out. It's often hard for me to let negative feelings pass unless I cry it out. That's my idea of emotional intelligence, because it can be hard to let negative feelings go until I just cry my eyes out. I said goodnight to my daughter. I gave her a hug and snuggled with her and sang "You Are My Sunshine." That's when I started sobbing, because sometimes my mind says, life is so magical, but the magic's not happening for you. Where's your magic with a woman? My mind will often point out where things aren't magical. But it's like, look, this is a beautiful experience. My daughter's in middle school, the time when she's probably going to stop wanting to snuggle her dad and have her dad say goodnight. That's something that could end any time. I remember my mom and dad singing and snuggling me goodnight until I was about 12 or 13, and then I didn't need them to say goodnight to me anymore. Then it was just, goodnight. I'm 13. I'm a teenager. I don't need Mom and Dad singing "You Are My Sunshine" to me. I'm a grown man. That's how I was thinking at 13.

See what's here now by noticing what you'll miss

I realized there's a certain amount of magic and beauty available every day. The question is, can you see what's here now? Often you can see what's here now by realizing what you're going to miss when it's gone. I'm going to miss my daughter being 11 and my son being 8. That's flying by. Those are precious, beautiful ages where they've got a lot of cognitive and communication skills, but they're still kids, and they still worship you and follow you. Those ages are about to be gone. They're going to be teenagers who think they're grown men and women who ought to be deciding and doing things for themselves, and who don't need their dad for anything except money, or a place to sleep, or a ride somewhere.

So this is the self-talk I'm having. Look, you're going to have that magic with a woman again. One of the beautiful women I've had crushes on and been friends with, one of those will work out. I've had a lot of beautiful women I respected whom I could have been friends with if I'd been lasered in on my type and realized, just be friends. Have as many beautiful women as friends as you can, because they have other beautiful women as friends, and somebody's going to fall in love with you, and you're going to fall in love with them. But for God's sake, if you've got a woman you desire, don't push her away. Keep her as close as possible and keep that together. I'm telling myself, look, you're going to have something happen with a woman again. And kind of the fun of it is that it's going to be a surprise. You don't know which yoga class it's going to happen at, like the yoga girl date, or where. Maybe I'll go to a run club tonight. I've been running on my own, and I'm kind of feeling like I should take myself out to a run club tonight, but I'd have to miss the AA meeting I usually go to. We'll see. The point is to be ready for the magic to happen with a woman, because I still want love to find me the real way. Be ready when it happens, but appreciate that this magic is here now with your kids. You might have some woman in the future and be missing this time with your kids.

So realize that in life, there's always more to miss than there is to appreciate. You've got to ask, what am I going to miss when it's gone? I'm going to miss having the house to myself to film videos whenever I want, and say whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, to whoever I want. When some woman moves in, I might not be able to talk like this. I hope it'll be the right kind of woman where I can have plenty of time to film. But even if it is, there's a certain ease with which I can speak when I'm just sharing this with you, and I definitely need a woman who would appreciate that. I didn't feel comfortable with my ex when I was in the house with her for years. I didn't feel comfortable with her hearing the things I was saying on my videos.

A beautiful, perfect time in my life

This is such a beautiful, perfect time in my life right now. And I hope, if I've communicated anything, that you can see how this is a beautiful, perfect time in your life too. Yes, there are things you miss. I think of all these women, and it's like, dang, there were so many opportunities, and I just threw all of them away. Sure, they did stuff to throw them away too. But I need to adjust what I can adjust. Some of them have done perfectly well finding someone else to be their boyfriend. And I need to be ready to do it right next time, with the next great opportunity I get. I don't care about anything else besides a woman I'm very highly desiring, where we can also have a great friendship and she would respect me as a person. I think that's a great opportunity. Not a woman who sees me as an eventual meal ticket, or just a father, or whatever, but a woman who would just love hanging out with me, because the right person makes you want to give, not take. And man, I hope I've communicated this: look for what's beautiful in your life today, because it's going to be gone in the future. These kids are going to be grown and out of the house before I know what happened. I may have another woman and more kids, but these kids now, I love these kids. They're amazing. They're wonderful.

The shirts, the mystery boxes, and what's next

And I love this shirt I'm wearing, but I've got it listed on my website. This might be gone and out of the house before I know what happened, too. I love this shirt I'm wearing right now, and you can buy it if you want it. If you want some of these things I've worn on stream before I put them in the much cheaper mystery boxes with a bunch of other stuff in them, grab that stuff now, like the Queen shirt. I probably shouldn't even sell it, because that shirt has special significance to me, but I think it'll help me let her go. Just sell this shirt. Let somebody else have it who would appreciate it. It's a beautiful, Christmas-looking Jerry Banfield shirt that I've actually worn a whole bunch of times. It's a medium. So I'm going to let that go, and I'm going to let this one go too if you want it. I'm going to get rid of it all one way or another, and I'm going to make some money so that I can keep doing this.

I appreciate your love and support. If you've watched or read to this point, you are a lover, and I'm going to do whatever I can to keep creating for you, to create what you want to watch, and to offer what you want to buy. I value your feedback. If you're a member, I'll read your comments, and I will have members-only live streams to talk with you and get to know you. I plan to do a live stream sometime this weekend. If you want to follow along with the rest of these days as they happen, every one of them goes in my Daily Vlogs playlist. Thanks, and I hope to see you.

October 2, 2026 Vlog

From my video published October 2, 2026.

It's October 2nd, 2026. I'm Jerry Banfield. All I do is content creation full time. I have a few hundred thousand dollars in debt. I'm a single dad, 42 years old, looking for my second wife. And this is my real, raw, authentic human experience, which I hope you'll enjoy if you feel like you're a little different and you wish somebody would just tell the truth.

I've got an idea today. I've got an idea for a product I can sell that might single-handedly pay off the debt. Because nobody's bought a call. I've been selling, or trying to sell, these calls, and nobody's bought a call, and it's been depressing. But you know what? That's okay. Because I always have another idea. I don't give up. I will not give up. I will not give in. I'm going to keep borrowing money, whatever I've got to do to keep this house, with its front wall holding the 25 or 30 books I've written and all the YouTube videos. Whatever I've got to do to keep this house, to keep this way of life, and to show you by example.

I got into this debt on purpose

Actually, the coolest thought I had today was that I got into this $220,000 in debt on purpose. That's right. You heard that correctly. On some level, I got into this debt on purpose. Because I'm going to show you from the inside, in real time, I'm going to document how I get out of it. And that will be the best way I can help. Because I'm not that interested in somebody who's got a whole bunch of money and who's just telling me how to get out of debt. Like, were you ever in debt? Do you really understand my experience? Or are you just making money selling me stuff?

I know that sounds crazy to some of you, but I could say the same thing about alcoholism. I'm sober 12 and a half years in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'm fully sober: no alcohol, no drugs, no marijuana, no medications. I don't even take any supplements. My body is fantastically healthy. I'm so grateful I got into alcoholism so I could spend the rest of my life showing people how I got out by being sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. But I'm not just a drone that goes along like some of the people in AA do. I love AA, but at the same time, it can get a little culty and a little bit "just do what your sponsor says." Your sponsor's gone? No, I don't play that. So I'm so happy I got into alcoholism, and I have the same feeling about my debt, because the best way to teach is to get in the position yourself and show the way out, which I'm going to do in brilliant fashion with debt.

Now, how many of you who had $90,000 in credit card debt would think the same way? Well, what I want to teach is to share my thinking, because it's the thinking, it's the feeling, the emotions, the beliefs, the skills, and putting all of that together. That's what makes amazing things possible. I've been in debt since I was 18. It's ranged between student loans and car payments and houses and, most recently, business loans and credit cards. When I'm out of debt, I'm going to be so happy to show how I did it, how I never missed a payment in 24 years, and then lead by example, the same way I've shown this is how I got sober and I've helped so many people get sober.

I have been where you've been

I also used to be a big fat ass. I used to be a big fat ass. And now I show people what I did to get out of that. Number one, I stopped drinking and poisoning my body. That's the first thing I did. Then the next thing: I took inventory of everything I was eating and realized I was eating a bunch of junk. Step three, I stopped eating junk and started eating the absolute healthiest, most nutritional foods I could, and I crushed any opposition. I crushed any stories. I don't care if my mind says I like steak. Screw you. I don't care if my mind says I like steak. You don't like steak anymore. I love cheese? You don't like cheese anymore. I reprogrammed myself.

So when I see someone who's an alcoholic, who's overweight, I can say, I have been where you've been and this is where I am now. And if you want what I have now, I can tell you what I did and what I still do. You'd think there'd be some overweight alcoholic out there who'd schedule a call with me. Or just go to an AA meeting and read the book How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. You read the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and How Not to Die. I followed the instructions in both of those and, in my experience, it worked for both things.

So for getting out of debt, I am excited to make a spectacular story of how I got out of debt. And therefore, I say thank you for $220,000 in debt. I applied to Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit yesterday. And who knows, that could give me a chance single-handedly right there. Or maybe I've got a product that I'm working on that will be awesome, something I've never seen anybody do quite like this.

Coming down after VidSummit

Now, here's what's interesting, though. You might notice that I'm very up right now, right? I felt so bad earlier today. I was on the plane flying back from Dallas. I was at VidSummit 2026. In my last couple of vlogs, I said, one, I spent $2,000 to be lonely at VidSummit. I talked about that and how I was feeling, and I said, I'm not going to be lonely. I was in such a down mood. And then I met Mark Manson the next day and went to a bunch of great talks. Jordan Matter, is that the dude's name? I saw a bunch of great talks at VidSummit and got all hyped up. And then I kind of went into dysphoria today. I'm like, damn it. Do I need to start another YouTube channel? Do I need to change my YouTube strategy? Is there something better I could be doing?

What I've noticed is that if you want to make real change, you often need to go through the dysphoria, the dark night of the soul. It doesn't have to be that dark. It can just be, everything's screwed. I thought about titling this "I'm 42 and I've lost everything," but maybe we'll save that for a later vlog, because I haven't lost everything. I've got my health. I've got relationships. I've got my kids. I have a bright future. Most futures ahead of me are fantastically bright, and I'm really excited about that.

Because the last thing, the very last thing, is getting rid of this debt. As soon as this debt's gone, I've officially conquered life. I've conquered life. I've conquered addiction, being overweight. I've had a family. I've been through divorce. Once I start printing money, that's all I need to do: print money. And my mind tends to do really well when I'm obsessed super hard about one thing that I can actually do something about. I can't do much about dating directly. I can take indirect approaches, or I could just go start talking to women, but I realized, let's knock out the cash flow first. Then once the cash flow is handled, I can put more time, if I want to, into talking to women and dating. But for now, we're going to forget about dating. Just get that money in there. And maybe my YouTube will just attract a woman directly.

"I just suck at YouTube"

But I was down earlier, and I tried to just think and be present and go through the thoughts. And I was like, man, I just suck at YouTube. I suck. It doesn't matter what I do. I've had several videos with a million views, but my mind's like, it doesn't matter what I do on YouTube, I'm never going to get another video with a million views. I might as well just grind out whatever, because I know no matter how hard I try, I'm not going to make a banger. All my videos are just going to get a couple thousand views and that's going to be it. So just grind out as many as you can. That's kind of how I was thinking on the plane.

And yet I had a really nice morning this morning. Oh, and I filmed a vlog about the Netflix party, so I don't have to tell you about it here. Watch that one. In it I also talk about applying to be on Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit. That Netflix party was so awesome. That was the most lit thing I've been to in my life. That was the type of thing you just have to experience. I don't think I said "type shit" correctly, but it was so fun. And maybe I was coming down from that.

Salad Station in Dallas

I went to this place today for food. You want food? I went to this place that was so good today. What was it called? I'll make sure to get it right. It was called Salad Station, off North MacArthur Boulevard in Dallas, and it was so good. It was just a big restaurant salad bar, a whole restaurant dedicated to a salad bar. How awesome is that? That's just perfect. I went in there and they chopped the salad up and tossed it too. I haven't had my salad tossed in a minute. And it was so nice. It was all chopped up. I was like, damn, this is nice. I don't have big pieces of lettuce falling out of my mouth. The chewing's basically been done. I put all kinds of plant foods in there: beans, garlic, multiple types of beans. I did get the chipotle ranch dressing. That stuff was so good.

Then I took a nice leisurely drive to the airport. Since I got an electric car, I only used half the charge the whole week, and that was awesome. So I didn't have to even plug it in. They just charge it for you. I went to the Dallas airport and there was this woman complaining like, oh, this airport's always like this, it's terrible. I'm like, lady, what is wrong with this airport? The planes are landing and taking off. There's food to eat. You're safe. What do you expect? It's an airport. The planes land. It's amazing. You're missing it. Who thought to put all this together, and it all works pretty well most of the time, most days? All these people coming from all over the world in here, landing and taking off. It's great people watching. Ashley Cummings reminded me of that in a voice memo she sent. There's people watching. There's people from all over the world. And I'm like, why do you have to complain? This is an amazing thing, this airport.

That's what some of us need. We just need to be able to see our lives with a fresh perspective again. Like, damn, this is so cool. All these planes from all over the world land and take off and they hardly ever crash, and people are all just here, and somehow it all works together. And somebody actually thought of this. Somebody is actually in charge of making sure it all runs. Wow. You should be awestruck going to the airport. You should be awestruck. I can barely comprehend how all this works. All the food comes in, all the people come to work and slave away for probably not that great a wage to make sure that when I'm hungry, I have something to eat while I'm locked in past security.

I like the security people, the TSA people who are doing extra on their job. This one dude, I should have said something, but when I was in Tampa on Monday, this guy was on top of his job. I've never seen somebody running the security screening who had it together like this dude. He was on it. He's like, all right, one at a time in here, push the barrier. He's telling everyone exactly what to do. It was so organized, it all made sense. I was like, damn, somebody needs to promote this guy and make him a manager. It was awesome. So it was funny, this woman complaining helped me see all the magic in the airport. I'm like, damn, this is so cool. To look at the airport as if you were a kid.

Crying in the Atlanta airport

I'll share this memory I had from the Atlanta airport. It's amazing how we forget how we used to think. And we get this dumb idea that we're just fixed personalities. Like, well, this is just how I am. No. At one point you didn't suck. At one point you were awesome. And I hope you still are. That capacity's in there.

When I was a kid, we went to lots of airports because my mom was in the military. So we ended up flying around the world and living around the world. In 2022 I went to the Atlanta airport to help my mom move. I flew from Tampa to Atlanta and Atlanta to the little airport near where my mom lives. And I was on the underground train they have at the Atlanta airport that moves you around among all the terminals. I had this flashback to being, what, six years old or something like that? I had this flashback to my dad and my mom, how as a kid all I had to do was follow them. I didn't have to figure out what gate it was and make sure I made the plane on time. All I had to do was follow them. And I remembered that feeling, that feeling that everything is taken care of, that feeling that my dad and my mom have everything figured out and all I have to do is do what they tell me to do. My God, I started crying in the middle of the Atlanta airport, remembering that feeling of just being totally taken care of. It nearly made me speechless. That feeling really is still there. Some people attribute that feeling now to God or a specific religious figure, but really the truth is we're still totally taken care of. It's just a lot more people doing the taking care of.

Jumping into the crowd

With my debt, I realize that you all are capable of totally taking care of me, that I could have zero debt and it's completely up to you. It's up to you. Whether this works out or not, I'm taking the risk, but it's up to you whether it works out. I'm metaphorically jumping into the crowd, and we'll see if I fall on the floor and you all want me to take the hard path, or whether y'all are going to catch me. I imagine that y'all are going to catch me, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to encourage you to catch me. And what's nice is it doesn't matter how many people don't participate. It only matters how many people do show up, in whatever way. And I'll do what it takes for that. My intention is that this mindset and this thinking will rub off on you.

Oh, you haven't rubbed off on anybody lately, have you? Ow. No. And perhaps one day that will change. Some amazing woman will just come into my life and really want to be with me. My matchmaker said she submitted another match for planning. I haven't gotten anything yet, but I'm interested to see how that next date goes. My approach is just, look, I'm going to show up and hang out with this woman. Probably we're never going to see each other again. And it's completely on her if she wants to see me again. I'm not going to do anything. If you want to see me again, that's up to you. She can ask for my number. She can text me. She can ask me on another date. I'm done. I'm done chasing. I'm done leading. I'm done trying to push a horse into the water so that it'll drink.

If a woman wants me, you're going to have to do everything. You're going to have to take the lead. Because today, with dating, me trying to take the lead has not worked once. The kind of woman who does want me to chase her, I don't want. I don't want the kind of woman who thinks that I should be leading the effort in this day and age, with what I have to offer. Women have been so empowered by our society to the point where some would argue, like Owen Cook, that it's a matriarchy now, and women want to choose the guys they want to be with. So I'm always encouraging ladies. Most of the relationships I know were started by women. Most of the guys I know in relationships, the woman started their relationship: the woman asked for the relationship, the woman made the initial move on the man, the woman came up and approached him and gave him her phone number, sometimes literally chasing a dude down, or just deciding "I want a boyfriend," walking up to a guy in the bar, instant boyfriend. To me, as dudes, we just need to try and put ourselves in a position to be chosen today. Peacocking or whatever.

Reading Darrel's book and feeling like an idiot

So I was in a bad mood for a good bit of the day. I was reading Derral Eves' book. A lot of times reading about YouTube and learning makes me feel like an idiot, which someone, I'm sure, would be happy to affirm. "Yeah, he's finally listening to me. I told you you're an idiot. Told you." Because Darrel lays it out in his book, and it's so simple. All you have to do is package your stuff properly: thumbnail, title, and retention. It's just so easy. And I've got all these plaques for all these channels, and I feel like a dummy if I can't do what he's doing. "Just pay for Channel Jumpstart if you're not getting the results you want."

And then my mind goes, survivorship bias. Darrel's always talking about all these people who have graduated his Channel Jumpstart program and went on to be so amazing, and I believe that, but it's also survivorship bias. Darrel, tell me about all those YouTubers who paid for your program and went nowhere. I want to know how many of those there are. How many people spent thousands of dollars on Channel Jumpstart and don't do YouTube at all anymore? Probably there's way more of them. And Darrel's a great guy. I love the VidSummit conference. I'm not trying to talk trash about Darrel. I'm just saying I read something like that and it makes me feel dumb. I'm like, I don't even know how to do YouTube, man. How do I not know how to do YouTube after I've done 10,000 videos? And then it puts my mind into dysphoria and it starts circling the drain. Maybe I should just quit again. Maybe there's something else I should do. I suck. A couple thousand views a video. Maybe if I was in Darrel's program I could get tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views per video, with a bunch of people who don't even want to buy anything from me, a bunch of crypto people who won't buy my meme coin, a bunch of people watching on the internet who don't want to pay for calls.

I'm willing to change that. I'm willing to change. Let's get rid of that cough right now. I'm willing to change because I love y'all, and maybe I shouldn't have been talking that trash, but I'm doing comedy. I'm trying to entertain you and make things fun, and I love each of you. That's the kind of guy I am.

A product to heal my own debt

I'll put my strip club outfit up on the wall. I'll put up the "the queen is now" shirt, the one I wore when I met the queen, and also the VidSummit shirt, so we might have to move things up even higher. I'm going to just put all of it up there. And I know some of you have a bunch of money and you'd love to support me, but you're not going to pay for a call. I've got that by now. You would buy something that you could have physically, that would be like a souvenir you could hang up in your house, or that you could look at and be like, look, I got that shirt he wore to meet the queen.

So I'm thinking of a product that I'm going to launch. Physician, heal thyself. I'm not a physician, but I'm in debt, so I'm going to make a product that I'm going to use on myself to heal my debt, and then I'm going to sell it. I'm going to put together the product for me, and this is going to be the perfect thing. I'm going to sell the best get-out-of-debt product, or comeback kit, or something like that. I'm going to make a nice product that's for myself first.

It'll be perfect for you, or not all of you, but those of you who can identify with me. I'm also wondering who watches this channel, because Darrel's talking in his book about how you've got to know your audience. I really don't know y'all. I could look in the analytics and look at my audience, and I can see there's 96 percent dudes watching up in here. Y'all gonna make me lose my mind up in here. Y'all gonna make me go all out up in here. Y'all gonna make me act a fool up in here. Y'all gonna make me lose my cool up in here. Now I wonder how that'll do on my retention graph.

Who actually watches this channel

It says 74 percent of my audience is from the United States. I wonder if Darrel could have guessed that correctly. 5.7 percent from Canada, 4.9 percent from the United Kingdom, 1.8 percent from Australia. If I look at individual videos, that gives me a further breakdown, with a little more or a little less from the U.S. And if you look at age and gender, it's 96 percent dudes, 3.8 percent women, so same as usual. I've got all dudes watching, and most of the dudes are 35 to 44 years old, which I guess makes sense because you're watching somebody in your demographic. There are some dudes watching who are a little younger, but there are more dudes who are older. I guess y'all are just fine with me swearing more. And although I love the women who swear, I can swear more.

And if I'm talking to guys, I know I should be challenging you, because in my experience men often need to be challenged, and women often need to be supported more. Which is why sometimes when I go to AA meetings and challenge people and it's just men, the dudes don't get upset. But if I challenge the meeting and there are women in there, the guys are ready to fight. You might even find an alcoholic or two. So if most of y'all are dudes, then I should be challenging you all. I should be challenging your beliefs, challenging the things you think, confronting you, talking trash, being as ridiculous as possible. And if there are a lot of women, I might need to speak differently.

Please hit me again

So I was reading Darrel's book and I was feeling like a dummy. I'm like, I'm an idiot. Why have I done this for so long? And I'm just like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. "Please hit me again. Let us use the place, Lou." And Lou's just beating the hell out of him, and he's like, "I'm still not getting it. I got it. Ah, I lost it." That's what I feel like. I got it. Ah, I lost it. I'm on the plane like, man, I'm screwed. This is not going to work, man.

So I was thinking, oh, don't distract yourself. But sometimes you should distract yourself when you're in a bad mood. So I put on YouTube. What did I watch? I watched Owen Cook, one of his videos about business and making money. And I listened to one of Bobby O's videos about ICP. I'm like, eh. When I was drinking the ICP Kool-Aid and I was in the ICP cult, I wasn't being as critical. Now I'm like, eh, half the time you're right, half the time you're wrong. There are a lot of assumptions in there that break down pretty easily. But then I watched Owen Cook's video and I'm like, all right, now I'm feeling something. And because I'm feeling something, I feel a little better. And then I start getting ideas, like, you just need a product to sell. You just need some cash flow. You just need to make some money. And I'm like, you're right, Owen. I do need to make some money. I need to get some cash flow in here.

I'm so sick and tired of this. I've got a few thousand coming in right now. I had zero cash flow in March, and now I've got several thousand a month coming in: about a thousand a month from YouTube and about a thousand a month from MaxFi. And if y'all schedule some calls with me, then there'll be more coming in. But you know what? I'm going to put a bunch of stuff up there. I was selling more when I had more things to sell. The calls experiment has been a flop again, the second time I've done this this year. So don't let me do it a third time.

I was watching a podcast earlier, and their thumbnail said "Jerry's got a gun." I'm like, all right, that's pretty good. They must be talking about me going to Texas Gun Experience. I was enjoying watching that for a while, and I appreciate them shouting me out. Barry Janfield's video also just came out, and the title is "Banfield versus Hammer: Jerry Banfield applied for Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit." I can tell he wants Jerry to push up on it, and I'm all in on it.

Getting in the shitter to find inspiration

I started watching Owen and I started to feel better. And this is what I try to be: someone you can watch and feel better, because if you feel better, then you're going to think better. But at the same time, sometimes you need to get in the shitter mentally to get some inspiration. Because when I got in the shitter, I started to open my mind. I'm like, all right, forget it. I surrender. What do I need to do? Okay, just tell me what to do. What do I need to sell? What do I need to offer? Just give me that money. I want several hundred thousand to pay off all my debt, where I could afford to go to Mons Venus and get a lap dance every day if I felt like it.

So I got out of the airport and I was like, Mons Venus is, I'm in Tampa, I looked at the GPS, 15 minutes with traffic. I'm like, what? I don't want a lap dance that much right now. I just want some dinner. All right. I just want some dinner. I don't need a lap dance right now. So I drove home, ate some Larabars, honey and almond, almond butter, and chocolate with cocoa nibs, and I'm like, all right, let's get back here and film this video.

I'm going to not make these so long now that I'm back at home, because I can film some videos on my other channel. And maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, everything's going to go fine. Because sometimes everything is in position and you just need to keep going. I think this channel's in a good position right now. Right now it's at 8,700 watch hours, 54 percent more than in the previous 28 days, and the watch hours are heading toward all-time highs, with $982 in revenue, mostly from super chats. Maybe I'll get out and live stream again. I need to figure out the right workflow, because I get distracted as hell doing live streams. Maybe I should just do hour-long Q&As and limit them. The vlogs tend to be more focused. The live streams really get all over the place, but live streams are nice to build community and get feedback and talk to people in real time. So I'm going to work on it.

The get-out-of-debt kit

I've got to get a product set up for myself and test it on myself. I'll probably put an email list out so you can keep up with new products. And then it'll land in the Gmail promotions folder and you won't find it. But I'll do the work to get you on my email list, so then it's in the promotions folder and you don't see it. That's great, isn't it?

I also started reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow book, because Owen Cook was mentioning it. I'm like, I just blew $10 on this. Not a big deal, but I'm learning, I'm building, I'm growing, and I'm excited to see what happens. I'm so curious, because there are just so many balls in the air. Now I'm jumping. There are two more balls in the air. There are so many things that could happen in my life, so many cool opportunities. Some millionaire could die and leave instructions: "In my last will and testament, I want Jerry Banfield to get out of debt, so I'm going to leave Jerry Banfield a quarter million." Some millionaire could die and leave me a quarter million. That's possible. I don't know how likely that is, but it's possible.

If you want to have an amazing life, you've got to be able to see more possibilities. That's what my content is about: seeing more possibilities. And that'll probably be a part of my debt kit. Something like, I want you to write down a hundred different ways your debt could be paid off, to start spawning these possibilities. I'm thinking the get-out-of-debt kit could be the best money you'd ever spend if you're in debt. And then I'd get out of debt off selling my get-out-of-debt kit. But even if 10 percent of people actually got out of debt from my debt kit, imagine how much good that would do.

All right. I think I'm good. That's enough. I think there's a sweet spot with these. An hour is kind of too long. Ten or twenty minutes is a little too short. Maybe 30 to 40 minutes is the sweet spot, right? I don't need to go on about my day for longer than that, especially when I'm home. So I'll see y'all tomorrow. Watch all the other vlogs in my Daily Vlogs playlist. Say it with some enthusiasm. Get on all my channels. Watch all my stuff. Just leave your computer and have this on as background. Put me on the TV. Put the Jerry Banfield playlist on your TV and just roll through all of them. Just have me in the background. "Now, Jerry, I can't have people over while you're playing, talking like this." Well, it depends on what kind of people. You could have some cool people over with me talking like this. Maybe you couldn't have some people with sticks up their asses over with me talking like this. No, I understand. All right. That's it. See y'all tomorrow. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably not. Ah, forget it.