 Meritocracy, meritocracy is you move up the ranks in life based on how hard you work. As an African, I know that's bullshit. As somebody who's lived in America, who's worked in your industries, I know that's bullshit. People who move up, sometimes they enjoy the benefits of nepotism. Their dad was frat brothers with social and so, or he used to work for the company, or he knows somebody who knows somebody. Sometimes they enjoy the benefits of, you know, economic white privilege. Meaning that while your grandfather's neighborhoods were being redlined and the property value was being plummeted, his grandfather's neighborhood, the property value was being inflated. So a house that grandpa bought for $20,000 is now worth $2 million. Whereas a house that your grandfather bought for $50,000 is now worth maybe a hundred. So it's easy to say, oh, Jimmy is just a harder worker than Jamal. Jimmy did half the work, but because of how he's been positioned, through no merit of his own, it's going to appear like he works harder. So when people say you have to do twice as much to get half as far, that's what that means. I still have to say meritocracy is a myth. In Pearl's case, the reason why she has 6,000 videos up on YouTube is because, number one, and she said it herself, the worst that can happen is I have to go back to my mansion at home. And she's done a mansion tour, so if you guys wanna see her mansion, you can go look. Number one, she's not gonna be as risk averse as the rest of us who I can only put aside this much time and this much money to make this YouTube shit happen. She could throw everything she has at it. And she has a base and a foundation to start from that we don't have. All of the reasons she has 6,000 uploads is because she has disseminated the work. Now her Africans are doing it for her. She's got Nigerians editing her videos. So whereas somebody like me who's editor, director, producer, talent scout and the whole nine and some of you guys as well, she has a team and it builds on itself, right? She uploads more videos, more opportunities for virality. So it's gonna look like Pearl does more work, but no, she just has more Africans. When you listen to the Anton Daniels of the world, when you listen to the obsidians of the world, they'll have you believe that she deserves her success. Subsequently, other white people, other white men and women who are doing better than you deserve their success because they work harder than you and they want it more than you. The reality of it is, that's not the case. Anybody who's worked in corporate America like S. Ed can attest to that. The reality is the fact that to get to a level to be neck and neck with our white counterparts and means we have to be exceptional means that we're not progressing. Because unfortunately, we've been led to believe that as black people, the reason why these people are stuck in Chicago shooting themselves and these people are stuck in the slums and these people are stuck here is because they just didn't want it enough. They just didn't want enough, they're lazy. These motherfuckers led us to believe that the products of ancestors who built this country are lazy and we believe them. If I wanna go further back, they led us to believe that the products of the ancestors who taught their ancestors how to wash are uncivilized and we believe them. We have the goal to sit up on public platforms, not just to defend mediocre white women but to tell our people that you're not doing it because you don't want it enough. You're not doing it because you're not part of my bag chasers or my mastermind this. But as high time, we start thinking these things through and we start considering who our heroes are and we start considering who deserves our attention, our patronage. Are we going to continue to fall for the optics of success or the reality? And I'll give you this quote from somebody who interviews women on a regular basis and has people DM me or even tell me in real life, man, how you find all these beautiful women? This, this and that. I'll tell you this and it's a double entendre. Hopefully the wise can hear it. Just because she looks good doesn't mean she smells good. And that's true for women and that's true for men too. And the smell obviously is not necessarily scent but it's also like character and things like that. If the people who have the largest followings in our community start sounding like white supremacist when you close your eyes, you know there's a problem. When they start defending, spending more time and energy, either defending their ego or defending somebody who's counter to our progress. You know there's an issue. Pearl hiring staff was just smart business. She's been transparent. Then when she started out, it was just her but she reinvested everything into building her team. She knows how to scale. Absolutely, absolutely. One thing that our white brothers and sisters know how to do is leverage talent because they don't have it. One thing they know how to do is leverage talent because they don't have it. One thing they know how to do is exploit resources because they don't have it. And until we start to value our own talent, our own resources, they'll continue to. And to his point, it's just smart business. It's just survival. And that's why I've always said like, yo, if you don't like white people, like if you hate white people, for instance, you don't understand racism. You don't understand history because the point is not to hate white people. The point is to know how to move around. I said a while back, some people speak because they have something to say. Other people speak because they have to say something. Unfortunately, in this man's fear, we've made famous the people who speak because they have to say something. I thought the man's fear was created because the white man's fear wasn't necessarily speaking to our specific issues. I thought the white man's fear wasn't as embracing of us. And that's why we created this space where we could talk specifically about black men and specifically to black women. Because again, as somebody who actually wants to speak from a place of understanding and knowledge and like competence, I listen to the divestors. I listen to the themas and thoughts. I listen to a bunch of people that I fundamentally might disagree with. But what breaks my heart is when no motherfuckers make better points than the people on this side of the man's fear. I see Bernard Riley, he posts, he posts, I think it's a thumbnail saying, who does more damage to black men? White women or black women? And I'm like, yo, if I'm asking this question to a group of middle schoolers, I can understand how this might be a hard question to answer. But when I'm asking this question to the niggas who were born in the 60s, 70s, and they're telling me that black women do damage to the level of white women, that the black woman who has you in child support court on the macro is more dangerous than the woman who got Emmett Till lynched. You're telling like, but you have grown ass men who think comparing the damage that white women have done structurally, institutionally to us as a community and even us specifically as black men, who taught them feminism? Like, do y'all niggas want to attack the cancer or you just want to attack the symptoms? We have the audacity. We have the unmitigated goal. Shout out to Stephen A. Smith, the impetus to say that women are less logical than men. Women are more emotionally based than men. Like how am I or anybody else supposed to defend us logically, factually, facts over feelings, right? Against the divestors, against the neo-feminist, the radical feminists when we have stooped to some levels lower than them. Somebody sent me Bernard Riley stream and the FD signifier was on there. Do I agree with FD signifier? No, obviously not. I think the niggas panned it a little bit. But when I'm just optics, right? I'm just watching five, 10 minutes of the stream and he's more composed than the black men who are standing up for black men. I'm like, man, you lost. Because I thought we were supposed to win on logic. I thought we were supposed to win on the superior argument. But now we're playing the ad hominem game. Who can be louder? Who can talk over who? Who can flex? Who can convince the crowd in the chat that if we were face to face, I would win in a fight? That's where we are. I think catharsis is important. I think men deserve an opportunity to have their grievances heard or have their grievances articulated. And that's what I do to women. I articulate men's grievances to women. However, do you wanna be angry or do you want things to change? Do you wanna be angry or do you want a future where your son doesn't suffer some of the things that you did at the hands of white supremacy ultimately, our women specifically? And unfortunately, if we just keep regurgitating spending, yeah, that bitch did this to you or this bitch did that to me. It doesn't move the needle. And we need to be able to, even if we make space for this, we need to make more space for that. Because again, despite if you go overseas and you prop up another man's economy, I would hope that some of that survivor's remorse would still stick with you because there's another version of you, gear, still who could not afford to go overseas. I thought men were solutions oriented. I thought when the world was falling apart, our women, our children are supposed to look to us as a paragon of strength, as a pillar. As you know what, shit is falling apart, but you know, daddy is still standing tall. Daddy is still composed. And again, I'm not saying this as somebody who hasn't been a black man. I'm a black man. A lot of this stuff, the reason I can articulate them so well is because I've experienced them. I have the same grievances. I have the same issues, but I still understand we have to keep the main thing the main thing. And the more easily distractable we are, whether sexually, rhetorically, like the more we end up looking like a joke, it's easy to piss off a black man. It's easy to get under a black man's skin. We want to critique the Democrats because they know it's easy to get black people to react. It's easy to get black people to vote with their feelings. And we try to tell the story, but it's because we're a matriarchy and it's ruled by women, which is true. However, when I watch some of these spaces, it's easy to get black men to think with their feelings. It's easy to get black men to react. So brothers, if we want better, we have to be better. And that doesn't just stop at performing better. That doesn't just stop at making more money, but that starts, that starts and stops at your perspective on the world and your perspective on problems and being able to see past what shit looks like and being able to see past the symptoms and get to the disease. The world will not take the black man's fear serious because it claims to be pro-black male, but not pro-black.