[Transcript starts at 1:21]
Hello, friends. Maestro here, bringing you another episode of my favorite podcast. If you're listening, tuning in, watching on the day that it drops, it is Monday, February 3rd.
Welcome to February and congrats on making it out of January. I'm going to use that to segue right into the episode, uh, because that is a sentiment that I've seen echoed many, many, many times on the socials over the past month, throughout January. And folks are saying it's been the longest year ever and it's still.
January. Y'all, this. And also, this, you can't see me if you're listening, but if you're watching, you see me gesturing to everything around. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Yes, that is such a cliched phrase, but it needs to be said. I will be the first to champion social media, but I will also be the first to say that humans are not supposed to be privy.
To this much information and this many opinions, this many people's opinions, right? To me, this is the downside of quote unquote connectedness because what we really have with social media and such is awareness, not connectedness, right? We are aware, we are aware of all the things. all the time. If we, you know, take it back to whatever, prehistoric times, which is what folks like to compare this to, and like the paleo diet, if we take it back to those times, I think that if every cave person was aware of every single animal attack, whatever animals were there that we were chasing them, every single drought, Every single fight and every single battle that was occurring.
I don't think that we as a species would exist today. I think we would have died. We would have anxiety, ulcers, overall, all the stuff that we have now. That, you know, modern problems, we have modern solutions. But we would have had back then, we wouldn't have had solutions. And I think that the species wouldn't have survived.
All that to say, pacing and pausing. Are both extremely important. That's why I titled this episode, Pacing, Pacing. Wow. Wow. Pacing, pausing, well, the other two words, curiosity and compassion.
It is super important that right now, as we consume all this information. We gotta pace, y'all. We gotta pace our consumption of all this information and all this content. I mean, Trump's whole fucking approach and what we saw in his first week, two weeks of office rests on the shock factor. It's come in and shake shit up.
Come in hot, make a lot of noise, appeal to the core base, have them believe that he's doing what they want and that he actually fucking cares, when in reality we know that if you're not a big corporation or a billionaire, he doesn't give a fuck about you. But And we saw the fucking meme coins and the text because we saw, I digress a little bit.
All right, but all I have to say, we have to pace, I mean, we have to pause. I too find myself scrolling, right? And especially through threads and I'll just be like, what's the next crazy shit that's gonna happen? Like, how much crazier can it get? This ain't helpful, y'all. It's not helpful. The other side of this is scrolling for that confirmation bias, right?
It feels good to get that confirmation bias and be like, see, I fucking told you, I fucking told you he was going to do all this. Okay. And then what? I told you so. And then what? Right? So it's like, yes, get your fix, get your fix. If I told you source of that confirmation bias of being like, yes, I knew this was going to happen.
And then we probably need to take a little pause, right? Because at the end of the day, what is ultimately needed. And I'm speaking to myself, as I say, I write these episodes for myself, right? What is ultimately needed is curiosity and compassion. And I say this with fucking clenched fists. I got like the Arnold clenched fist at my side, right?
Because there's also a time to fight. Absolutely. And ultimately, we know revolution is not peaceful. And big upheaval and big changes is not peaceful. But what will ultimately get us to a place where this same shit doesn't happen again, where there's more revolution, there's more unrest. It's compassion and curiosity, right?
Inverting the power structure does not dismantle it. So don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to be in a, in a glass house throwing stones, right? I'm throwing stones at myself. Like I, I, I am in there with you, right? Whatever the metaphor is, I'm right there with you. I'm saying this to myself, all right?
Because it is incredibly fucking difficult, if not impossible, for me to have compassion for people like fucking Trump and Elon. Because I'm human too, right? I have a very difficult time having compassion for others who seemingly intentionally look to make. People's lives worse, and those people are worse off than them.
Like people just punching down like, what the fuck? All right. But as it relates to the folks in our day to day lives, our friends and family that maybe we disagree with, or we differ with, just our neighbors. That's where it starts. And that's where the compassion and the curiosity has to be. And this is not about like pitying people.
It's not like, Oh, I feel so bad for you. Now I'm going to listen to you. It's like. Having genuine curiosity, which for me where I am currently at is why the fuck are you the way that you are? Why the fuck do you think that doesn't even make any fucking sense? But I think it's a start. I don't wanna give myself grace on that.
I think it's a start, right? That compassion part, that curiosity part. But largely the compassion part speaks to that double lift that I brought up in a previous episode. I think it was episode 630, 635 maybe? My post election reflections. Thank you for linking that, Courtney. Um, but that double lift and James Baldwin speaks about this and spoke about this.
And much of what he said was that black people will never be free until white people are free, right? The unhappiness, the jealousy, the self doubt, the comparisonitis, the scarcity, the insecurity that is at the heart of racism until that is gone. Racism will always exist until white people are free of that shit.
Black people will never be free. And this extends, this concept extends in my opinion, to any group where there are oppressors and oppressed, right? This is the double lift of the oppressed. Right, until the oppressor is free, the oppressed will never be free. But you can look at this with men and women, until men are over their shit, and get help getting over their shit, their inherent insecurities, right, all the shit, and I don't say it in a pejorative way, but until they are over that shit.
They will oppress women so as to maintain power and make up for those insecurities. All right. So the double lift becomes having the comp, the compa, the comparison, the compassion and the curiosity for a group that quite frankly, you feel like doesn't deserve it, but perhaps as I say that you can maybe already kind of hear the irony in like needing to earn compassion.
It's kind of like, Oh, wait, that kind of sits weird with me, but I get it. All right. Everything has nuance. And that to me speaks to where the pause and the pacing that I spoke about earlier comes into play, right? Social media doesn't allow for that, right? Information is being just shot out at us, pushed out to us.
Eleventy billion miles a minute. So what's the action item here? I think it's to take a pause, all right, take a pause from social media, pick your head up and spend some time in your community. And when I say community, I don't mean like just like in your town, though that could be it. When I say community, I mean like your people, like your friends, your family.
Get outside and talk to people. Get outside of the internet and talk to people. Slight tangent here as I bring up this idea of getting outside. It is so fucking important to get outside. All right. The fires came here to LA. This is a weird way of saying it, but they didn't. Fires happened. Uh, and I spent like two weeks inside because I was like, the air, my friends, not good, that shit will make you go crazy.
So many of us talk about in the movement space, if you're watching this, listening to this, there's a good chance you're in the movement space. And so often, like you get around other people that are in the movement space that really, you know, have movement and exercise as like a core value. And then you get outside of your bubble and you talk to other friends, your friends and you're like, holy shit, I like left my bubble and I went to the airport and I see the state of like the United States, the disposition of the United States and fuck, she was just what the average person is living like from a health perspective.
And you're kind of like, I don't even think they realize how much better they can feel. I don't think they realize how bad they feel right now that they could feel so much better. To me, there's a very real possibility that folks. You know, this is their, their reality as it relates to going outside. I think back to when I lived in New York city, like at least, at least you were walking outside a lot in New York, right?
And you walk everywhere, but I can't imagine being in a place where you can't go outside, I can't imagine being in a place where there's no fucking grass. There's just, there isn't even that much grass here. We have the beach, right? Like to me, it's kind of comparable there. Um, but when that was taken away from me for the past two weeks, I was like, fuck, you will go crazy.
Walking on your walking pad is not the same. You got to be able to go outside, have some fucking fresh air. I am actually working on partnering with my brother, Justin, that brother. I brought him on the podcast. If you could link that episode, Courtney, that'd be awesome. Thank you. To help out with a fundraiser that he is very involved with.
Um, and it helps get minorities, I think minorities, U. S. minorities we should say, uh, into places with parks and grass and helps get parks and grass into the inner cities and things like that. Because, fuck, like, if you don't have it, like, the It will kill you. So stay tuned for that. Started working on it before the holidays and just like life happened, election happened and live events happened.
So stay tuned for that because it's something that I really, really want to make happen and it will happen. So stay tuned. But circling back to the topic of this episode, right? One of the things that I'm seeing on social is infighting, and this is nothing new. This speaks to why the segue here is that like speaking about pausing and, you know, actionizing things we can do because what I'm seeing is infighting on social media.
There's nothing new, right? When something happens, people want someone to blame. They want an easy fix. They want an easy way to fix a problem. And so oftentimes, unfortunately, people will punch down. Or they will punch at most sideways, never punching up, except for Luigi, right? Except for Luigi. But we see all these DEI initiatives being rolled back, and what I'm seeing in the space, somewhat, is black women on social media saying to boycott the big brands, and it's like, Yes, fuck Target.
Y'all know, I've always said that, like, I've always hated Target, but there's nuance to this discussion, right? Where we see these black creators, these black brands that are in Target, Target rolled back DEI initiatives and people are like, you should boycott it. And yes, and nuance, right? We got to buy the small brands out first.
We got to make sure they got their money and then we can make more drastic moves, right? It needs to be strategic, not just a tactic, right? Not just knee jerk reaction. I boycott the big brands, uh, and, and then also be on social media saying bad things about the black brands that haven't immediately jumped ship.
And it's just like, again, we need a pause. We need curiosity. We need compassion. In that, very much in that same vein, I kind of spoke about earlier that I told you so ain't gonna get us where we want to go. It feels so good in the moment. Be like, motherfucker, see, I told you, look, I told you Trump was going to do this dumb shit.
I fucking told you. And then what? And then what? It's the pause, it's the pacing, it's the space to give yourself and be able to have curiosity and compassion. Because, right, folks don't want more facts, they want more friends, and so if you're just like, I told you so, look at all these things! You think that person's gonna come around and be like, you were right.
Fuck no! They're gonna dig their heels in, do some sort of fucking mental gymnastics in order to feel good about their actions and feel good about what they did. It's a pause, it's curiosity, it's compassion. I will continue to champion, you know, going after joy. But this isn't a, a kind of head in the sand action.
I got my new guitar. It's over there. I'm going to show it to you, actually. Very quickly, this folks, if you're on the YouTubes, you can see it. Look, she's so beautiful. This is a Fender Telecaster player two series. Her name is Red. If you're listening to this, maybe go to YouTube so you can see her. But I
got that new guitar. I've been playing it like crazy every day, multiple, multiple times a day. And. It brings me a ton of joy. I speak about chasing joy so that I, you, we have the patience for compassion and curiosity. Change requires effort and effort requires energy. So we pause and we pace so that we have the energy to fight and we also have the energy for compassion and curiosity.
So I'm going to wrap this up. I love these short episodes. I'm going to wrap this up. I want to make it up. I wanted to bring it up because I know that I changed the intro of this podcast somewhat with the intent of, of like having this like super online business focus, which was really what I, the reason I wanted to change it was so that the intro matched what I was saying in the actual episodes.
But either way, I know that I haven't like dispensed any like online business advice really in this episode. Maybe some of the past ones. I don't know. I speak and then I kind of forget. Um, but. To me talking about this stuff and using my platform to speak about this stuff. It speaks to what I did say in the intro, which one line in the intro that I say is This is about building a business that fits your values and helps you live your best life.
Online business is so much more than what happens on the spreadsheet. Your life is so much more than just what happens on the spreadsheet. So yeah. We be talking about all the things that happen and contribute to building and actually living your best life and doing things in accordance with your values.
All right. So gonna wrap it up here. Big super grateful that you give me your attention, that you give me the space to, to talk about this stuff. And yeah, I'd love to hear from you. If you've got things to share, I think it's really important to, to speak to other people. I'm not trying to argue with anybody.
I said speak to you, not argue with anybody. But you know, I had my live event for Legacy last week, at the time of recording this was last week. And some of the women went on a On the walks during lunch and things like that and during the breaks and they would come back and they'd be like we went on a rage walk and like we just like talked about politics and like got it out and raged about it and I'm like, yeah, it's really important, really important to speak about these things.
And yes, it's really important to take action. You know, I will always be like, and then what? And then what? But we got to beat the ball in motion with the initial step, which is actually talking about these things. And so I'm happy to have that space. Um, yeah. At the time this comes out, the Mafia dinner will have already happened, so it hasn't happened yet by the time I'm recording this, but fingers crossed, I have good hopes for it.
But it's important to speak about these things. So if you want to chat, y'all know my Instagram, The Movement Maestro, shoot me a DM. You can shoot me a text, 310, what is it? 310 737 2345. And yeah, super grateful for every single one of you. Until next time, friends! Maestro!
Watch this Episode on YouTube!
MOTM #635: My Post-Election Reflections
MOTM #234: Environmentalism is for Everyone with Justin Dennis
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