On December 26, 2024, it was my 4,959th day on YouTube as a full-time YouTuber. My main subject is Internet Computer Protocol and crypto, and then I keep this personal diary channel to help you get to know the real side of me as a regular person, which I think is important for trust. So here's what's happened since my last one.
Yesterday was Christmas. We had a real nice day together, and I wrapped the day up by walking the dog and making some more ambient music. My third massive mix, just playing around with that. I love having a video that's going to release at 6 a.m. on crypto every morning. I know that's taken care of, and then I'll just do a live stream if I want to, if I have extra time.
The dogs, and the fear and anxiety I don't like feeling
What I just finished up with today is that my mom is going to have her dog stay with us. He's like a hundred-pound Great Dane Retriever mix. I was having my mom's dog meet with my two dogs here, and that was really annoying. They were barking at each other, it was tense, and I felt all this fear and anxiety. My mom's over with her walker and her big dog, and both my dogs are barking, being very vocal. After Melanie's sister Roxanne used to attack her before we gave her back to the foster home, I feel like I'm more on edge now, because I've seen how dogs do attack each other. That said, Melanie's fine today. She had several bite marks on her, but I would like to relax more around the dogs in the future. I get annoyed. I'm like, come on, you stupid dogs, can't you just get along with each other? Why do you have to do all this barking and growling and hair going up?
Maybe they're just more honest than people are. People do seem pretty amazing sometimes, how well big groups of people can interact. Then you put a couple of dogs together and they're just animals. I don't like feeling out of control, feeling like there's all this fear and anxiety. My mom's going away to visit her sister for a few days, and I have an easy situation with her dog. He stayed with us for months when she was in the hospital, so he's obviously comfortable in our house — we didn't have Melanie back then. So I'm just kind of letting the feelings of that go right now. I'm not used to feeling fear and anxiety and tension, and it's yucky.
I used to feel that so often, though. What I do now is I go to yoga, and I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings five days a week, and I just generally don't put myself in situations where there's a bunch of fear and anxiety. A lot of the stuff you all watch contributes to fear and anxiety. I used to play Call of Duty Warzone, and that would contribute to fear and anxiety, because you feel a lot of fear and anxiety while you're in the video game, so it conditions you to keep feeling that stuff.
Two crypto videos, and the ethics of staying unbiased
Today I filmed two crypto videos, which I'm really happy about. I filmed a video with a member of the Popeye project. He's holding Popeye, and he's one of the early investors in it — Popeye the Sailor on ICP. It's valued a little bit less than the Jerry Banfield JB coin, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. What's great is the guy paid $333 for a call with me, so we talked a little bit privately, then we recorded an interview. I got that up, and I can share that with everybody else in the ICP community.
The challenge for me is the ethics aspect of it. I know the video is going to release, and sometimes when I put a video out talking about a project, it'll go up a lot in price right afterwards, and it's definitely tempting to just throw 100 ICP, like $1,000, into the project and then see if I can turn it into $10,000 relatively quickly. At the same time, it's distracting to do that, and I like the feeling of being less biased. Once I start holding a coin, I've lost a significant degree of bias, and I like giving a fair, somewhat neutral treatment to all the different projects in the ICP ecosystem.
So I have this marketing channel that I love, where cryptos in the ICP ecosystem pay $100 a month to be in there, and then I try to talk about them whenever it makes sense. I'll do posts about them, and it's organic, and I don't hold coins for any of those projects, but I share them with other people. I find it really helps to have simplicity in life wherever possible. The more you add complexity, the more life seems to get difficult, but to me, genius is being able to simplify things. If you want to follow how I think about ICP and the projects around it, that's the whole conversation I keep going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Anyone can make up complicated language and try to make things complicated, and a lot of crypto especially does this. These altcoins try to present themselves as so complicated and different and special and technical, but a lot of times they're literally just making up words, trying to use phrases you don't understand. When you simplify it, it's like, okay, so this coin is basically a copy of Ethereum — that's what I'm getting at — and then it doesn't sound so good either. If they just spoke about it in the simplest terms, like, yeah, we just copied Ethereum's code, changed a couple of things, and pulled these terms from some other white paper, we tried to make it look good so we can make some money.
Why I want people I can be brutally honest with
I was talking to my sponsor today, and I was sharing about how at this Wednesday meeting I went to in AA, there were seven of us guys there, and I shared very honestly and graphically about both my journey getting sober and the areas where I want to be dishonest in my life now — things that, if I said them out loud, might not make me look so good. I'm really glad I'm comfortable today sharing the darkest corners of my brain. I've done that online before. I wrote a book, Speaker Meeting 2017, that's on Audible and Amazon that almost nobody buys, but it's got my whole fifth step from Alcoholics Anonymous in it. It's about as graphic as you can imagine, and it shares all that kind of stuff I've learned. I've put things out for free before, like really crazy podcasts, a lot of shocking content and rough language.
I definitely prefer not to share that in a public forum where anybody at my kid's school, or my family members or friends, could see it. So I prefer to do this diary — this is kind of a sanitized version for YouTube. In person or on the phone, I'm going to share a more explicit version, so to speak. It's really important to have people in life you can be brutally honest with, to tell people exactly what you're thinking and how crazy or inappropriate or wrong it is, and then feel okay with it. I started doing that at Alcoholics Anonymous, being able to share with a room full of people my innermost thoughts that I'd normally be embarrassed to even admit to myself, and that's been extremely therapeutic. That's what's helped me across all areas of my life — being more honest. And honesty starts within. It starts here. It's about not acting like I'm not thinking about things, being okay with the thoughts that go through my mind, and realizing I'm not my thoughts any more than I am the food I've eaten that's in my belly.
Thoughts just come and go through my mind. What really matters is how I speak those thoughts into existence and how I take action on them. I say the ICP price looks to me like it could hit over $6,000 — that's in the video I recorded yesterday and put out this morning. Those are things I'm imagining will come to pass; I can see how that would happen. But it's your actions that really count, because you can think whatever you want about me, you can even say whatever you want about me, but if you're not doing anything to me — good, bad, or indifferent — then from my point of view, it's like it's not even happening. I used to feel so bad because of my thoughts. Now it helps me, like at the AA meeting, that I can share my innermost, most embarrassing, craziest thoughts, and the guys are laughing. I was swearing a lot. I've sworn a lot online and shared all the same kind of stuff online before. My wife prefers that I keep it more PG online, and it's a lot easier to keep it more PG online. When I used to upload some of the more cutting-edge, on-edge content, I'd always be nervous about the kind of reaction it was going to get, and the lunatics that would bring up sometimes.
Whatever you see online isn't the whole picture
If you're putting something online that people all over the world can be watching, I hope that when you're seeing stuff online, you know that's not the whole picture, and I hope you're filling in the details. One reason I love not using things like Facebook or Instagram — I deleted them — is that people are trying to put up this facade that gets you to think better of them. Often, imagine what they're not putting on social media. Imagine that the picture they put on social media was the only good part of their day, or was a crappy part of their day, but they tried to make it look good. I try to be as real and raw as I can in a public-square format, and I love that I can absolutely, with no filter, dump it out in an AA meeting.
Finding inspiration when I have none
Today I enjoyed filming my crypto videos. Earlier, I felt like I had no inspiration and no idea what I was going to film. I just went on YouTube and looked at what some other people were filming, I did this call with the Popeye guy, and I came up with a few good ideas. I've seen a few people copying me — the exact format. I came out with these titles like, "I bought 100 ICP, I'll be a crypto millionaire soon." I was the first one to do that exact format title, and I've seen a few people copy that since. I take copying as a compliment. There are people whose channels I see with "going to zero" videos and "I bought this, I'll be a crypto millionaire" videos, and I'm like, nice, this dude's just copying, that's great. But I'm always looking to innovate, to do something nobody's done before.
So I had an amazing idea today. I figured out a video that I'm going to put out on December 27th at 6 a.m. Eastern on crypto, showing how ICP is number one in crypto developers per market cap — such a creative idea, such a nice chart, such powerful information to communicate. I was so uninspired and didn't have any ideas this morning, and then, bam, I hit a really nice idea. I trust that even if I'm not inspired, something will come to me. I tell my mind, look, give me something really good today, give me an idea that communicates some really valuable information in a way that's easy to understand. And my mind delivers.
Why I treat video games like alcohol
I'm going to go play tennis in a little while. It's the day after Christmas. The coaches weren't sure if we'd have a clinic today, but I hope we do, because I love getting out and playing tennis. I've been thinking more about playing video games, and it seems like such a trap to me. A lot of things in life — the thing itself is kind of fun, but the consequences are what it does to the rest of your life. My kids had so much fun doing their tablets. They got these dopamine hits, and they would put as much time as they could into their tablets, but all the time they put into their tablets sabotaged the rest of their life. It blocked them from doing stuff like playing with Legos, running around, playing in the backyard, building things with their hands, reading books, having play dates with friends.
I had a girl over to play with my daughter one day, and my daughter did not want to play with her, because it was around the time she did her tablet and she was obsessed with doing her tablet. "I want my tablet, Dad, I want my tablet, Dad." It's like, I had this person here for you to play with. The little girl was so excited to play with her, and my daughter was so obsessed with doing her tablet that she missed out on having fun with a real person.
So I haven't played any video games. I played some little tiny web-browser game on ICP as part of my live stream, but I haven't played any serious video games in like eight months or so, maybe six or seven months. I love how I've started playing tennis, I've been doing music, and I love the results in the rest of my life. This is what's hard: there are so many traps in life, things like alcohol. For me, I used to take a drink and often I'd feel what felt like immediate relief and gratitude. I'd feel a lot of good feelings right after the first few drinks, and I'd have fun and laugh. But overall, alcohol messed my entire life up. All I could focus on was that first-few-drinks feeling, getting just the right buzz, and meanwhile the whole rest of my life was getting sabotaged. To me, video games are the same kind of thing. Yes, there are positive sides to them, but it's about looking at the big picture. If you want to see how I work through that pull, I keep talking about it in my Games playlist, and I went deeper on it in why the hardest thing in gaming is starting a new game.
How you know you really like something
I also started listening to Brandon Sanderson's Elantris again. I stopped listening to it after the first few chapters because I thought, eh, this sucks, it's not that good, it's boring. But here's how you know you really like something: it's if you quit it and come back to it. A lot of stuff, like videos I watch by creators — I watch one video and I don't think about that creator again. What's magical is when I watch a video by a creator and then I'm thinking of them again later. I know that's what's happened to some of you all off my videos. You watch one or two of my videos, and you're like, huh, I wonder what else this guy does, or I wonder what he's saying today. That doesn't happen with most people.
I've been doing vlogs for years
There was a guy at the meeting last night who said I should do a vlog or something. I'm like, I'm way, way ahead of you on that. People suggested seven or eight years ago that I should do a vlog, and I did vlogs at various points, but it was always jumbled in with all my other content. I'm really happy right now with my existing content strategy: a vlog, a crypto video, and a music video every day. That mix is the same daily rhythm I've shared in my St. Pete daily vlogs, and if you want to come hang out and chat while I keep it going, you're always welcome in the Jerry Banfield Family.
I am wondering what to do with the music. The music and the gaming — the music is so good for the rest of my life, but it doesn't give me that adrenaline rush. I'm wondering where I evoke that passion now. I've gotten gaming out of my life, and music I love for all the different sounds, but I'm wondering what the heck to do with titling the music videos.
Yoga, and telling a young woman not to worry
I went to yoga this morning, which was really nice to get a good stretch. I hadn't been since Monday, so it's been since Thursday. I love going to yoga at least one out of every three days, at a minimum. My body feels so good, and it's nice to be there with other people. I talked to somebody new today — the husband and daughter of one of the moms who go there. The daughter seemed to appreciate that I wanted to know about her life. Lots of times when you're going around at a yoga studio, people won't talk to you as much, and I always used to love when I'd go somewhere and people talked to me.
She's in her early twenties, in college, and she said she's feeling pressure that she needs to figure out her life. Man, you've got plenty of time, don't even worry about it. I remember feeling that pressure too, and I threw myself into being a corrections officer and a police officer. Then, three years after college, I was like, this is not what I want to do with my life. I discovered YouTube a couple of years after that, I started making videos, and out of everything I've done, professionally making videos is the one thing that's really stuck.
I'm a professional video creator, and I'm taking my time
To me, I'm a professional video creator. If you're a professional musician, you practice music every day. If you're a doctor, you practice medicine every day. I'm a professional video creator, so I like to make videos every single day, maybe occasionally taking a day or two off. I love making videos, I love all the different videos I do, and I'm really grateful to get to do this, because I remember feeling pretty lost about what I should do. I look back now and think, why was I so impatient and in such a hurry? I could have taken my time and had more fun. So I'm intending to take my time and have more fun going forward in life.
A hundred views on a video on this diary channel means as much to me as thousands of views on one of those crypto videos I do. If reading this is one of those moments where you find yourself wondering what I'll do next, I'd genuinely love to get to know you — you can find me and the rest of the Family there, and I'm always curious what's going to happen next. If you want the longer version of how I got here, I told my whole life story in about ten minutes.