 So, hi, my name is Carly Russell. I am applying to the Master's Program Scholarship for African American Women. I know that for the scholarship, I have to interview or basically just have two of my mentors in my life that have brought me to this point that I'm at and that have taught me to just continue pursuing my goals and my dreams. So here we have my grandmom, Lucille, and my granddad, Glen. I know that they had to overcome certain obstacles. So my granddad and my grandmom had two children when they were younger and my granddad had to end up selling drugs. Eventually, the drugs weren't enough to provide for the children, so... When you're trying to go back, come on, is this for your school? Yes! They don't know, y'all. Okay, for real. All right. Thank you, granddad. And granddad is going on. Just go on and get on, okay? Mmm! All right. So when the drugs wasn't enough, my grandmom ended up having two prostitutes. She clearly has Peter Pan syndrome, clearly does not think there should be or there are repercussions for her actions. So she's operating like a girl, not a woman. The amount of man hours that she wasted, the amount of money and resources that she wasted, and for me, the piece that's the most crucial is the way that this situation trivializes the thousands of women and black women in particular who are missing and have been abducted and are being sold into the sex trade is disgraceful. And I think there should be consequences. But like I've said before, I think the difficulty, though, is as a society, we don't know how to prosecute women. We don't know how to see women as perpetrators. I haven't figured out if she's smarter, if she's stupid yet, right? Because some aspects of this were clever, but other aspects, she didn't think it all the way through. For instance, she didn't think that her search history would come up. And the amount of criminal minds women watch, you would think that that would be the first thing that she would recognize or realize, but yeah, I'm still racking my brain if she's clever or stupid. I'm leaning towards stupid only because she didn't consider the repercussions. She didn't consider the magnitude of this. Like I even shared it when somebody sent it to me, I shared it. And also part of what we need to discuss, and this is why I have her boyfriend on the thumbnail, he came out recently saying that we don't need to bully or people need to stop bullying Carly on social media. And for me, I understand he's trying to be a gentleman, he's trying to be a big man and all that good stuff. To me, he sounded like an idiot. Because number one, kind of like I've talked about how, you know, men who sell their souls to women for attention or sexual attention are the reason why some of these lessons that we try to get women to understand don't get through to them because they have somebody who's going to catch them when they fall. I think this was an example of that. I think if he was being honest, there were telltale signs in Carly that she was spoiled, that she was entitled, that she suffered from Peter Pan syndrome. She's a little girl in a grown woman's body. But he still saw fit to be involved with her romantically and now sees fit to defend her despite the fact that she's beyond defending. So I think a lesson for brothers here too is why are you in community with and correspondence with, romantically involved with certain types of women. And what does this mean for the big picture? What does this mean for the behavior that we are subconsciously telling women is okay? I'm Carly and I think Cindy's going to be the drug case because she's irresponsible. I think there is some class privilege that she enjoyed as well. I don't know if she was some girl from the hood if the social media storm would have been so much behind her because think about it, she went missing driving a red Mercedes. You know what I'm saying? She comes from a two-parent household. Even when you saw the facade of her house, it's a nice house. I don't know if she was a broke girl from the hood if people would have cared that much, which I think is worth the conversation. But the other piece too that I think is worth the conversation, particularly for this space, I think sometimes we oversimplify some of the issues that we see in our community, especially as it relates to women. And some brothers notice, some brothers might not, but some of the worst women that you'll meet come from two-parent households. Come from households where their dad was in their life. Come from households where for all intents and purposes, they really have no reason to think niggas ain't shit. But they still drank the Kool-Aid. I remember when I went to, I had a speaking engagement at Spelman. They're not gonna let me back, but it was cool while it lasted. But a lot of the girls that I was engaged with in this conversation, their dad dropped them off at school. He helped them move in. But they still had that same, as Dr. Tia San Johnson calls it, baked in contempt that's rooted in a sense of entitlement and a lack of self-awareness. And I think in Carly Russell's case, which is why I brought up Peter Pan's syndrome. If you saw the interview with her parents, her dad didn't even say two words. He was just there. He struck me as a background father. And I know that because I have a background father. A lot of people meet me and they think, oh, you must have got a gang from OG. No, I learned all this shit by myself. My dad didn't, he was there, but he wasn't really there, right? So I think there's a conversation about men not just being there, but also insisting on being involved. Because some of the girls that I see with fathers who are entitled and their daddy's little princess, they sometimes are worse than the girls from the hood whose dad ran out on them when they were five. I think the simple answer is yes, you have failed. And I think you should have authority, primarily because even as we are evolving in our understanding of masculinity, femininity, the male and female dynamic, the two things that have not shifted from the expectations that the world and women have of men is protect and provide. And I want to hone in on protect because in movies, we see protect as taken. Shout out to Carly Russell, where the dude, he's got a particular set of skills and he goes and he pulls up and boom, boom. But in real life, sometimes protect is, babe, take two steps to the right. Or babe, sit down real quick. Or babe, let's go. That's really what protect looks like in real life. And that can only work and happen with authority, right? The police department, the reason they can do their job is because they have a certain authority. The government, it's impossible to protect your constituents without authority. Kings of old, it's impossible to rule over your jurisdiction without authority. Now, like Kevin Samuels will call it a benevolent dictator. I don't know if I'll go as far as calling it a dictatorship, but if you can't listen to me, I can't protect you. None of this shit that we're talking about, none of this shit works if you're afraid of not being liked, losing women, making enemies, or whatever the case may be. None of it works. And I think if we can keep the focus on how can each man become the type and caliber of guy who gets to the point of understanding that yo, pussy ain't shit. Like pussy is the greatest thing on earth that a man is going to experience. But something greater than that is the process of bringing something from your mind's eye to fruition. Even Louis Farrakhan said that. The greatest pleasure a man will feel is not a woman, but it's about manifesting his ideas and taking something from your head to your hand, right? So I think if we can move the conversation there, it creates a different kind of posture in men. So they understand that yo, I don't give a shit if you don't like jazz. I like jazz. If you want to ride with me, you listen to the jazz. And ironically, women respect that. But the dude who, I know so many dudes who the only reason they smoke weed is because the woman that they were trying to mess with smoked weed. There's a series on Netflix. It's called Young, African and Famous. And one of the people who shows up in the series, his name is Tufes Idibia. He's a Nigerian artist. And he's famous for being like, he's probably the equivalent of Nigeria's like Tupac. Like he's very well regarded. But he's partly famous for having like seven kids out of his marriage to his wife. Right? So he got another one. No, I think he had, they say he had five before him and her got married. And then he had one more after they were married. Something like that. But anyway, he got kids all over the place. But anyway, it was funny because at one point during the show, the show was being shot in South Africa. So he pulled up to South Africa. The show was kind of focused on his wife and her friends or whatever. He pulled up to South Africa. Man, if you see how excited this woman was, she was parading him around like he was a Gucci bag. Yeah. And it really, it really let me understand that in that moment, it didn't give a shit. I mean, she didn't give a shit that he was making her look bad in the whole nine. He was her trophy. You know how we want a woman to be our trophy? They want the same thing. They do, yeah. You see what I'm saying? So we kind of got the game messed up because we're so focused on telling her yes and being a yes man, not understanding that. The sexiest thing you could tell a woman is no. Although I'm not team, save yourself black man. I'm not team passport bros. And this is why I was defending passport bros with the Jackie Hill Perry video. I think there is something there, right? I think like in business and sales for instance, we learned that the person who's the most willing to walk away has all the leverage. And I think that one of the things that I see that differentiates men who find success with women and men who struggle is the men who find success tend to have abundance, right? And I tend to not necessarily need this one woman to cooperate because I have another lined up to take your spot. And it sounds kind of toxic. It sounds kind of future-ish, but there is a sense of stoicism that's necessary to deal with women. And I think where some brothers fail is this scarcity mindset when it comes to women. And that scarcity mindset pushes them to tolerate things that they don't need to tolerate and pushes her to think that she can move and do whatever that she wants to without having to suffer any consequences. So even though, like I said, I'm not necessarily a fan of passport bros, I think some of the result of women having to watch some of the best and the brightest men in our community take their business elsewhere, I think that could do some good in incentivizing changed behavior, right? And I think on an individual level, a man's focus should be his mission. Finding and growing what he's been called to do and as a consequence, a woman is gonna wanna come alongside you and help you with your mission. But I think a lot of times men make women our mission and women can never respect that. I've been having a lot of conversations about the whole mental health thing. And a good friend of mine kind of convinced me that it probably has nothing to do with mental health just because of how methodical she was. Stupid, but methodical, right? It wasn't a manic episode. But the attention thing, I don't know. I think it's a fair assumption only because attention is the new currency now. Like she's getting her 30 minutes of fame. Whether it's infamy or fame, we don't make that distinction anymore. But you could say it was attention from her boyfriend. I wanna see if he loved me. I don't know. I've talked about this book called Way of the Superior Man. In some of it, he's talking about ways to maintain respect from the perspective of your woman by doing what you say you're gonna do regardless of her influence. He uses an example where you're driving with your woman and both of y'all get horny and y'all pull over to the side of the road and y'all start having sex. And while y'all are having sex, she asks you to ejaculate inside of her. And you know that you shouldn't, but you circum and you ejaculate inside of her and then she gets mad at you. And the example in the book is to illustrate that in that moment, she was testing you and she wanted to see if you could maintain your masculine frame despite her influence, which I think there is some validity to it. But the part that the book started losing me, it talked about how a superior man not only seeks out, but also welcomes a difficult woman. Because they framed it like an iron, sharpens iron type of thing, like difficult women are superior women because they help you rise to your highest level as a man. And I think black men in particular drink that Kool-Aid. Too much. And I think a lot of us, kind of like cowboys, we rank ourselves based on our ability to tame the wildest horse. So I have some sympathy with these brothers, but at the same time, I'm like, yo, stop choosing difficult ass women because they're only gonna get more difficult as they age, as they get you further into their grip or further into their, especially in an American context, when you think about all the potential hazards of leaving her, right? So I think it's an opportunity for us as men to be more responsible with our decision-making and to be more critical of not just who she is, but who she's gonna become. Because even in my interviews, one of the common things that I'm seeing kind of come out is, most of women's grievances with their men is the fact that he didn't change. You know, he's still the immature 20-year-old that I met. But conversely, most of men's grievances with their women is that they did change. She used to be a fun-loving 20-year-old. Now she's fucking grandma, right? So with that being said, I think men, we can better anticipate that inevitable change in women and project out, number one, if this is the direction that she's going to change, is it a direction that I'm happy with? Is it a direction I'm willing to navigate? At the same time, too, I don't even know if I'm fully comfortable blaming the women because there's also the possibility that he just is just one of those background dudes. So even when he did have opportunity, and it's not even like the woman was suppressing his authority, he just didn't have any. In the story of Adam and Eve, the first thing God gave Adam was not Eve. The first thing God gave Adam was instructions. You know, he first said, I'm God, and then he then said, tend to this garden and all the creatures in it. So the first thing God gave Adam was a job, right? Was a purpose, was a reason, right? And then he gave him Eve to help him with the, that's where the whole helpmate thing comes in. But I think what's even more interesting than that is like, the garden is what feeds Eve. So if Adam isn't tending to the garden, Eve starves. And I know that gets complicated because you have some brothers where, because they work so much, their woman feels neglected and go cheats with the milkman or whatever the case may be. But I think that also plays into the caliber of woman that you choose, and also how you cultivate said woman. Right, like how, what kind of understanding, absolute, like what kind of understanding has she gotten from you about life, about philosophy, and about how to conceptualize some of these things? Or did you just allow her to be indoctrinated by the media that tells her wrongfully that she should expect you to be the CEO and also have 50 hours a week to spend with her? Yeah. So even though I spend a lot of my time trying to articulate this to women I think we can own some of that. We can move a little bit better as well to really make these points that are valid hit so much harder. If you wanna see more of this, please click that like button. It helps tremendously. And share this with somebody you think would gain value from the message and hit that subscribe button as well. Peace out y'all.