Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - F.D. Signifier Joins Higher Learning

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

We have a special treat for you, Thought Warriors! Today we have the one and only F.D. Signifier in studio, as Van joins us from Chi-Town. Rachel, Van, and F.D. get into his humble beginnings as a teacher and small-time content creator, to his evolution into one of hottest culture creators out now. Plus, they hit on his most recent and viral beef with Killer Mike.(00:00) Welcome to Higher Learning (1:35) Jay-Z to headline Super Bowl LXI (16:12) F.D. Signifier in studioHosts: Van Lathan and Rachel LindsayGuest: F.D. SignifierProducers: Marco Escalante and Jade WhaleySocial Producer: Bernard MooreVideo Supervision: Chris Thomas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, yo, thought lawyers. What is up? Higher Learning is on. Is I Van Lathan Jr.? And it's me, Rachel and Lindsay. And special guest in studio. I am FD Signify. You call on today.

Am I doing the appropriate? I'm sorry. Y'all are so polished. That was amazing. Because we weren't doing that a second ago. Chat. We weren't. And I wasn't ready.

I'm sorry. I'm used to a basement. Yeah. And kids yelling outside the door. You're doing just fine. We're shooting this out of order, though, by the way, guys. We're doing this out of order.

Just let you guys know, we were going to do a show and then we were going to bring in an FD interview. But as always, FD had a lot of time. So we went almost two hours and just an interview with FD. We did an FD signifier video on higher learning. So we basically just decided a short one, a short one, a short one, that we're going to get into the show, leave FD, and give you guys. one topic that everybody is talking about and then give you this amazing interview wide-ranging.

It talks about his beginning. FDs, I mean, it talks about his politics, his radicalization. Of course, it talks about the Black Miss Leadership class video that he just put out that everyone is talking about and his relationship or lack thereof with killing Mike. We're going to do all of that. But first, Jade, we have to talk about Jay-Z.

Jay-Z is reportedly set to headline the 2020. 27 Super Bowl halftime show. The performance would take place February 14th at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. The interesting part, Jay-Z reportedly selected himself. His company, Rock Nation, has helped organize and produce the Super Bowl halftime show since signing a partnership with the NFL in 2019. And the deal was renewed in 2024. Thoughts.

I love the phrase selected himself. Something's just fundamentally wrong with that, like selecting himself. Like I see him reaching the thanos glove, his hand into the thanos glove and being like, I'll do up myself 2020. This time. See, this is the best of Jay Tomito. Like, I like this. Like, who y'all looking around? Oh, it's me.

I'm going to do it. Like, I actually think that this is the whole that I grew up with that, hey, I'll put it on my back. Remember when they asked Jay's like back in the day. It was like he was looking for a record deal. And they asked him to rap. He was, this ain't no free show. He's about to do a free show, which is the Super Bowl. But he selected himself to do it.

He said his point in his career. I like it. I like the least shocking thing to me. I think like when they did the second deal for them being over, Rock Nation being over the halftime show, I knew eventually we were going to get Jay Z. And I think that with everything that he's doing, New York, overseas. He's in L.A. tomorrow or when this comes out he's in LA now he'll be

Saturday if you're still around maybe maybe you might skipping town maybe you might catch it but you know we're celebrating the anniversary of reasonable doubt of blueprint it just it's it's in LA it just makes sense for him to do it and when you see some of the other names which this is no shade to anyone would have been great it just won't be Jay Z so in my opinion if you're going to do it this is how you do it I love the opportunity to engage with Jay's

art right now. Like all the other stuff aside. Sure. And this won't be a side forever. But just the first thing I thought, and I was so, I was actually proud, not proud, what's the word, relieved? That when I heard this, there was a part, the part of me that went political, analytical, like, whatever, didn't say shit until the, the hip hop fan of me was like, oh, he's going

do, allow me to reintroduce me. I was like, I was like, oh, that shit will be done. And all I did was think about that moment first was just being able to witness the greatest wonder, greatest rappers of all time perform like that in that moment. Like that's what I thought about first. And I was like, oh, I'm still here. There's still a part of, like the,

I'm, the cynical aspects of me are not so powerful as to remove the joy and wonder and the love of music. So like, I think it's so important that you said that. I'm about to give you some cynical. I'm about to give you some cynical because I have a take. You guys ready to this? Wait, before you get it, I just want to say, I love that you said that because I think with what we do on our platforms,

you know, you talk about certain things. Sometimes it's controversial. You have to be critical at times. You're calling them out, calling them in, however you want to say it. But at this end of the day, you still are a fan of the culture, of hip hop, of the art. And so I'm with you. It excites me to know. I might not go to the concert, but I'm excited to watch your performance at the Super Bowl.

I got think pieces, you know, and I'm, I got think piece is cooking. Sure. There's not a think piece. This is just an observation that I had. First of all, there's a two-prong observation. First, I think that this will be the best Super Bowl halftime show ever. Better than the amount of records?

I think it will be. I think it can be. It has the potential to be. Let me say like this. I think it has the potential to be the best one ever. This will be a complete, this will be what the Super Bowl halftime show is actually supposed to be. a complete examination of the cultural pastiche of America. Artists from all over the place,

Jay-Z is one of those artists that he's gotten to the point to where if he calls on somebody, they appear. And most of the people that he calls on, they have some chapter in the story of Jay-Z. Jay-Z can give you pop artists on the stage with him, R&B artists on the stage with him, like straight-up gangster hip-hop on the stage with him, big records, cultural records,

records, he can give it to you all. But there's something interesting about this. I have to point this out. Okay, a little history lesson. After Janet showed her tit at the Super Bowl that was 2004, these were the Super Bowl artists that played right after that. Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, the Black iPys, Madonna, Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Katie Perry,

Co-Play, Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5, Shakira, the weekend, Dre, Rihanna, Usher, Kendry. Now, there's something that you will notice when you look at that list. No rappers. So there were no rap artists on the main stage as the main part of the Super Bowl halftime show, like, they're the people until Rock Nation took over the Super Bowl. And then he put Dre and all of those guys on there. and we've got Kendrick and now Jay-Z.

That means something very distinct. If Colin Kaepernick had not taken a knee, it is very, very, very likely that Jay-Z would have never played the Super Bowl. Never. If Colin Kaepernick had never taken a knee, it's likely that you never get to a point, particularly at this time in this career where J. Z plays the Super Bowl. Colin Kaepernetitates the knee, costs the NFL a lot, then the NFL needs to make that right.

They partner with Rock Nation to do inspire change. They give Jay-Z control of the Super Bowl. Jay-Z chooses himself. They might have never chose him. They were not putting rappers on stage at the Super Bowl. in a weird way, because this world we live in is so weird. Jay-Z has Colin Kaepernick to thank for the fact that he got the opportunity to choose himself to be on the Super Bowl stage.

That is not me delving into that and trying to jenny something up. That is the way history shook out if you really look at it. It's just such an odd thing. that in that whole vortex of happenings, he gets the Super Bowl and gets to make those choices because something else that somebody did and then the opportunity to choose himself. This is just a weird world.

When I say Galaxy Brain, this is what I'm talking about. I say that later in the episode. I don't know if he's going to make it in. But yeah, so you're completely right, that Monkey's Paul situation. And I love that you made that connection because I hadn't thought about that. My only fear is that Jay's gonna wear like a Kaepernick jersey

and then like make me just completely, all the cynicism I'm leaving out the door. It will pop right back up if Jay pops up in the Kaepernick jersey at the Super Bowl. But yeah, that's a wild. You're not wrong, but I totally disagree with you. I think that if there was a rapper that they were going to choose and it would have eventually, I'm sure, go back there,

Jay-Z would have been the one. For some of the reasons that you did name, because of who he has collaborations with, because of the Beyonce, because he is now this billionaire and this businessman, and for some of the criticisms that we give to him as a community, he would have been, they wouldn't have chosen a Kendrick, but they would have chosen a Jay-Z.

That would have been a- Oh, no, I'm not saying it wouldn't have been-dry. One million percent. I'm not saying it wouldn't be-drank. If they were going to go, if they were going to go for a rapper, if they were going to go for a rapper, If this was the year 2000 or whatever it was. Sure.

Sure. If they're going to go for a rapper, that would have a million percent been Drake. That would have. And look, by the way, this also Eminem, Snoop Dog, Dr. Drake, these people got records that could go wrong on a Super Bowl stage. They got records that people could come back and be like, whatever. They got records. In this situation for Jay, like, in that is weird. that his opportunity to choose the Super Bowl halftime performance came from that whole thing

and these two guys are at odds. I get it. It was interesting to me. It's an interesting point. I just can make the argument the other way. Rachel, I hate to tag team against you in the moment. That's okay. Both me and Van fight are misogy and our accusations on a regular basis.

Oh, I love this. And rightfully so, rightfully so. I don't want to ever to not folks be on my head when I missed up. It's very easy to misstep there. But I say all that to deflect from the fact that I disagree. And I think the galaxy brains are on point here because you got to think Jay, I said this in the video. Jay has had a lot of pop records. But of his time, Jay in terms of crossover, and tell me if I'm wrong here.

You just was not quite at the same level of a 50 or Kanye or Drake in terms of crossover. over. Jay has more us behind him I don't know, proportionally speaking than Drake Kanye 50 who else we got? Even Kendrick maybe? Yeah, I think even now, especially now post-battle, even Kendrick, in terms of like the amount of

your fans are black, like quota, right? And so I think because of that, it would have been unlikely that Jay would have ever had this position had he had not been able to Thanos snap himself into the spot, you know. And I think because of the Kaepernick, you know, the fuckery of that whole situation, the butterfly effect of him being here, is it 10 years? Is it also 10 years since Kaepernick?

It's 10 years since Kaepernick. Oh, fuck. Now I'm feeling more cynical. You guys, it's all connected. I'm not saying you're not wrong. I just, you know, he's had some, he's had some pop collaborations, some white collaborations. He does. I mean, Van pointed out on the last podcast that he performed with Kid Rock.

At the BET Awards. Yeah. We got Lincoln Park. At the BET Awards. Actually, you know what? I'll tell you, like, the Lincoln Park thing, look, here's the thing about Jay-Z. For me, I would have, Jay-Z is not, you guys can, people can say whatever they want to say about. Jay-Z has almost established his own culture.

He's like his own, he is every. everything to everybody. When you point out things about, like, number one hits and all, it don't even seem like that's the true, because the case, because all of these records are so omnipresent. Like, he set so many trends. He exists in a space that no rapper has ever existed in before, ever. It almost, you can't even, when you're having a conversation about who the greatest rapper of all time is, it almost doesn't make any sense to, like, when you put him in that conversation,

it sometimes feels minimizing to him because he's achieved so much more culturally and from an American standpoint, however you want to look at that, than anybody near him ever, right? And so him being on the stage, there's no place in America that he wouldn't belong. But there are places, though,

that you might expect other rappers who have chased that type of pop success to be first, particularly on the Super Bowl stage. So when I look at that, I looked at that and I was like, number one, we about to have a great time because that's like an amazing choice. Great job, Jay, we call your own number. But also, how ironic is that? Yeah, you're right. That is truly ironic to me.

And that's the kind of weird irony that like, when you say the galaxy brain shit that like exists like a splinter in my mind when I think about how all of this shit is connected in the same shit and how everybody should just go to dinner. but they're not it's not going to happen. So I've heard in feeling free to fact check me, I also heard he recently got like access to his masters in a different way. Yeah, that happened. Well, I think it was the reasonable doubt stuff that he was looking for. I'm not sure.

Yeah, I think it happened. I'm not sure. We'd have to go back. Yeah. I don't know. Because although the performance is free, the payment is the night after you become a, you know, every super,

you do the top 50, um, most watched things. of all time, like all the Super Bowl was on that top 50 list and then like mash or sign fit or some shit. So like it pays for itself in terms of like exposure. So like, and a lot of people,

you know, I hang out with my son's friends. And, you know, they only know the new little voice rappers as Curtis King calls them. And they don't know Jay-Z. You know what I'm saying? They're not listening like that.

And so like he gets to expose his great catalog of music to a whole new audience. that probably only knows him from being drunk in videos or Beyonce. Yeah. So he got his masters, but he still doesn't have reasonable doubt back. He got his masters some years ago. But he didn't, he doesn't have reasonable doubt back. That's the whole Jay-Z-Dane situation.

It was still, I don't think he has reasonable doubt yet. So that is something that in the next couple of years might be putting it back to him. But just interesting story, interesting story, you know, make of that what you will. But you know what? You guys got the opportunity to do on the other side of this break. Yeah. You guys have the opportunity to listen to a very in-depth argument with one Mr. FD. Signifier who's there in L.A.

I'm in Chicago. Higher learning on the other side of this break. Okay, guys, FD. Signifier video essayist and Brad Tuber extraordinaire is joining us today. And we're dropping to bread two these days. We're dropping to bread to these days. The brand on bread, There's no bread tube. The bread tube brand is highly tarnished.

All right. So let's do this for a quick. So, so thank you for joining us on Higher Learning FD. Yeah. First of all, tell people what Bread Tube was and tell me why BreadTube is no longer a thing that you are associating with.

It's hard to even explain what Bread Tube was effectively. But it started out as like a group of very talented video essay. It's all kind of emerged at around the same time like 20, between 2014 and 2017, several of them. I want to shout them out. I got a shout to H-Bomb. H-Bomb is a big influence on this last video. Lindsay Ellis is probably the reason why I started making content.

You got contrapoints. You got philosophy, too. I'm forgetting somebody, no shade, too I'm forgetting. And so they're all kind of making- Will Little Bill? Will Little Bill be in there? No, no.

Little Bill is post-bred tool. I love Little Bill. Post-modern bread, too. cornbread to, it becomes all these things. It's like any arts movement. It has this, it's factions and fractions. And the problem is that, you know, after being very successful for a while, you end up with that natural backlash.

And then you see some problems and schisms emerge. You know, certain people without getting into naming names and getting people mad at me, didn't necessarily stay aligned with the politics as they began to emerge. certain people kind of like, it was like, you know what, this is too much pressure and energy and attention. So I'm back out. We've had people exposed to be predators and problematic on various levels. So the concept is still there. The video essays will still, you know, still moves on. The politics overarchingly still move very much to the left of the status quo. But it's so many people and it's such a large space. that most bread tubers are kind of like,

like, think about how Neil's soul was once upon a time. Like, everybody was doing the music, but a lot of folks is like, ah, don't label me with that. So similar situation. Okay. Shout out to all of them. Shout out to all of them, yeah, if you don't want to smoke. So shout out, so that brings me to my first question.

Politics. You were a video essays that is in many ways a deconstructionist of cultural topics, cultural figures. What are the politics from you that undergird what it is that you do? I'm starting to engage with the term

liberationist. Black liberationist. I've seen that pop up a few places. I haven't done the full work to decide if that makes sense for me. But I don't rock with, I don't rock with labels. Too tough in terms of like

progressive leftist labels. I'm obviously left to like the norm left to the status quo. But I also find myself sometimes to the right of my peers, to the right of people who I admire and who influence me. And so for me, it's like I'm used, I got, I got gifted a platform. And in the process of that, I started to recognize certain patterns. I started to think about my own political tutelage and history and people that influenced me coming up. I started to think about the environment that shaped me in ways in which I am malformed because of that environmental shaping.

And I said, I want to put that into what I'm putting out into the world. The algorithms, these guys and the machines decided to give me a microphone and an audience. And I was like, all right, I can sit here and I can I can fuck around the whole time, which I will. I'm going to fuck around. Got a battle rap video planned. but I was also like my uncles and the people that I that influenced me would not respect me in the afterlife. My ancestors would be like, ah, you whack.

If I just only did shit like that. So suddenly the politics became a bigger part of my content. And I'm trying to keep balance. But, you know, the universe is asking me over and over again to break that balance and get back into certain areas. As you continue to grow in your platform and more people. get to recognize who you are. Take us back to like how you even got here. I mean, you were teaching before. What was it that you said, I see a gap in this. I feel like I can bring something to this platform. I'm going to leave teaching. And you're still teaching. But I'm going to move the

classroom to something different. Yeah. So I had stopped teaching actually a couple of years before YouTube. I had moved from teaching to essentially social work. I was working in the juvenile justice system in Atlanta. And I was already starting to become radicalized from teaching because I was in, I was in the system, like managing the results of a broken system, like kid to kid, moment to moment. Kids in front of me dealing with abject failures in their life structures and their families, and then they come to the school. And it's like, one of the first things I learned as a teacher is, I need to bring food to class every day. Every day I need to bring food to the class. is going to be five or six students per class that have not eaten and will not stay awake

if they do not eat something. And so like, you know, and that was illegal. That was against the rules, right? And as I kind of experienced that in all these different venues of working directly within the system, I came to understanding that the system is not broken, is working as design. The system is built to protect itself to manage the problems that it creates and to not put itself in a position to be sued. basically. And so I was doing that for years and I was, you know, planning different ways to at least move up the ladder and have a more fulfilling life in between trying to help people. And then I was always watching Brett Toad. And I noticed that there were no, there were not a lot of black people doing the type of content I enjoyed the most. And I would see some of my favorite people talk about, you know, black films, black movies. And I'd be like, ah, all right.

I was, you know, you did your best. I understand. And then so when COVID lockdown started, I was like, you know what? I'm going to just start making my own stuff. It started actually with me getting into a Facebook argument with somebody and being like, I'm going to stop argue with you on Facebook. Let me just go ahead and make a video. It was about Hamilton.

And after I did, I was like, yeah, I'm pretty good at this. And I just kept going. And I initially didn't plan to be very political in the content. I just wanted to be a media. talking guy. And then once I got my first real check, I just felt a sense of obligation. Like, oh, this is a lot of money for people to hear me talk about coming to America. So maybe I should find ways to intertwine politics into it to make sure that I'm not just

here dancing for the camera. I immediately got a relatively large white audience initially. And that made me very uncomfortable. There's, what is the, are we, are we lying? and what is our rules or names as I slander a particular person that shares the name with... You say whatever fuck you want to say. Yeah. Okay.

So I say that I felt like they were trying to Van Jones me. I was like, these motherfuckers are trying to Van Jones me. I feel it. Like, I can fill it in the things I'm being offered and the way people are talking to me. I was like, okay, so like, none of that, none of that for me. And I immediately started saying, okay, I need to dig deeper into the politics. that have been hitting from me. And I started to connect with people that were to my left

and they really radicalized me even further. And here we are. You felt tokenized? Oh, definitely. Definitely felt tokenized. If you look at my content, I've kind of engaged with that very explicitly over the years. But you kind of can help me because the algorithms decide where you go.

And I don't think YouTube has a, well, the way that black people consume politics, I just think is different. Because a lot of white folks consume politics as entertainment. Is that fair? Like, but politics would be very entertaining to a white audience because the politics don't have the same impact. And I don't think black folks as a whole or at least a large population of black folks

are being like, let me just watch this debate for fun as they debate my humanity. You know what I mean? And so I don't think YouTube even had like a developed audience for that. When I first started making content, I think that should. changed over time. And so I was just sit where an audience was receiving me. And so I kept trying to work through that and find ways to, well, first, I was just making what I wanted to make, period. And whoever came to watch it, came to watch it. But I started thinking about, okay, how do I engage with this machine to get this machine to show me to the people I want the most to hear me?

How do I curate my message to be true to what I want to say, but also be accessible. to an audience, who do I work with? Who do I amplify? Who do I collaborate with to kind of make that happen? And so yeah, I did feel like I was feeling a gap, but it was a gap that's still not fully filled, but also like kind of filling up a little bit. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

We'll get to the audience and the size of the audience and what you do on different, across different platforms in a second. But I want to stay on real quick the politics and your specific radicalization. When you say that you were radicalized and you moved to the left and there were people that were radicalizing you, who are some of the thinkers that you rely on? I know that Dr. Jared Ball is one of them. And what are the things that you feel like radicalized you? Yeah. So first it was what primed me for that was again being there in the trenches and like

witnessing and having conversations with other people there. And we were, we were, every other day having a conversation of what are we doing? Like these kids are coming into our care. We know what they need. We literally by law can't give it to them or we don't have the resources to provide it for them. What are we really doing? Right. And so like that they want kids to be starving in school. You saw that. Yeah. Yeah. They want kids be starving in school. They don't want the responsibility of feeding the children literally. The state doesn't. The state doesn't want the responsibility of taking care of children, literally. So they're bare minimum, you can't say it's our fault, resources and support for the

highest needed, of children for the highest need. You witnessed that for almost over a decade. And it's like, okay, fuck the system. It's not, it never will conduct itself in a way that truly serves, not just black people, but marginalized people, period. And so I have a background, like my mom was a revolution. Like folks, you know, they, they were running around with the Panthers in Chicago in the 60s. This is stuff I didn't know until later in life because by the time I got here, my mom had put, you know, the beret and the dashiki down and was kind of just moving in a more normie walk of life.

But that substance is all over Chicago. Like if you're there now, you can kind of fill it. And you can also feel the, what's the word? not fracturing, but like the stratification of the different ways that people went, you know, because you have in Chicago, you have Bobby Rush was a Democratic state lawmaker who was a former Panther, right? So he kind of went a more normative of path. But you have all these other folks that stayed underground and stayed more radical and more out of the norms.

But I'm getting off of the initial question, which was what radicalized me. So, you know, go to grad school. You know, they give you kind of like the standard sociological. leftist stuff. I get little marks. I get De Bois. I get Phenon. I get a lot of stuff. Then I'm not, if I'm honest, very critically engaging with in the moment because I'm in a class. And I'm just trying to, I'm also like becoming a father. I'm also still working a job. So like, how much of this do I have to read to pass the, to write the paper to pass the test? I'm not really like soaking it in like I need to. But it's creating a foundation. And so on YouTube,

where we have all these unofficial scholars presenting information. I'm getting more and more and more stuff. And it was Dr. Jared Ball. I went on his podcast. This had to be like 2022 to talk about Drake, right? And, you know, I didn't know who he was. I just knew I was happy to talk to for me an unc, right? For somebody that reminded me of my uncles because I hadn't done that in forever.

And, you know, we talked hip hop and stuff. And then his chat, his chat went in on me. Like this nigga ain't read nothing, you know, such as such and such as I was like, I guess not. I'm stumped. And I don't like feeling, I don't need to be the smartest person in the room, but I don't like feeling dumb. So I started saying like, all right, what's next? I need to get back in the books and look into the scholarship. I need to look into these people I've dabbled in but haven't really read.

Probably the most influential from that point is Kwamey to Ray and just black power. and from black power. Oh, and another person also prime me for that, but we may be come back to that later. But Kwamey to raise black power has this critique of the black bourgeoisie and like what happened to the black power movement post the death of Fred, post the assassination of Malcolm and King.

And like everything that happens in the 70s into the 80s. And that like was so revelatory to me because what I recognize is that I, and I think all of us are kind of a result of this massive movement to kind of curtail black political power and black political ideology away from its radical origins or the radical, at least the radical elements that existed up until the 60s and early 70s into what we have today where we do have a very liberal, a very moderate, a very status quo based policy. amongst black people where someone like like Van Jones can be seen as a viable political interlocutor for black people right

and so once I started to you know and I looked I started like going back and looking over this history and I'm like shit all of these people I dressed up as for Black History Month parades and plays in school were socialists. Why didn't I know that? Why wasn't that a standard part of that curriculum? You know what I'm saying? Like you know why

Why did I not know after all? I went to Clark. I took a lot of classes. You know, I didn't take, I didn't get into black studies. Maybe that had to change my directory. But a lot of people know that W.E.B. DeBois, who founds Clark University was a socialist. It was pan-Africanism. Yeah.

You know? Like, that is not a, I know about Du Bois and the talented Tenth. That's what was taught to us. And we don't know that De Bois said, low-keyed out with some bullshit before he died. He was like, yeah, that talented shit, tent shit. My bad, y'all. Knicks are not to act. We're not doing that no more.

And so like you look and you see that the most revolutionary figures of those times either were murdered, jailed, or exiled. And the people that were left are the people that kind of have hold the most influence now. And I was like, yeah, I want to tell this story to people because I feel like a lot of us came out of the Obama years confused. Like feeling like we're about to get one thing. We didn't quite get it. Okay.

Why? And the answers are there. We just haven't, those books are hitting under a lot of other stuff. And I was like, well, let me grab this and make a video about it. You know, and that becomes a lot of my content. That, when you talk about, I don't, I wouldn't say I'm radicalized, but I definitely have left. I think when I started this podcast, people would have said that I was more moderate. As we are six years in, I am not close to the center at all.

But I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm. Comrade Rachel. What? Comrade Rachel. Yes. But I think what it is for me is the systems, I wouldn't say we know everything, but we know the systems. It's the people within the systems, the people who have been taught, which is, I guess, leaning into your latest video about, you know, how black leaders have failed us, has been more so what has radicalized me as we are learning the truth about people that we revered.

We were learning what was missing from our history books or what we were taught. We were learning, we're, I guess, re-learning or unlearning. I should say, I'm not quite sure how to say it. Higher learning. Higher learning. Just even, I guess I'm so frustrated with the people I'm supposed to lean on to do better for us. And they are not.

Whether it be an athlete, we can get into that, a celebrity, a politician, whatever, an organizer, it's not quite what it's supposed to be. That has more radicalized me than anything, which is why I, I've loved several of your videos, but I really love this latest video and I want to get into that, this individual versus the collective, this how we work against one another,

how even just in this last podcast we're talking about, somebody who's a mentor to me has really been, who has helped me in a lot of ways, has I see totally different at this point. What has been the response from this latest video? Not necessarily from individuals, and I'm sure we'll get into that, but just as a whole of you really going,

I don't want to say going after, but just telling us the truth or maybe things we didn't know about people we've revered. And you've done it in other videos, but really this is a collective of the people who are supposed to be the best of us, who actually might not be. Yeah, it's been great.

I say in the video that I made an Obama video before, two videos, probably two and a half hours long altogether almost. And the response to it wasn't great. And that was a less radical me. And I was very nice and very gentle around it because I was still struggling with my rose color glasses of what Obama represented and what he actually versus what he actually was. And that was also a time where my audience had not transitioned to be as black as it is now. And so I almost quit.

Like when I made those videos and they were received the way they were, I hadn't really gotten used to the money yet. I was like, you know what, fuck this shit. Like if this is the limitations of what I can do, then I don't know if this is right for me. You fast forward, the precursor to this video is a video called The Truth About Black Conservatism.

And it has Farrakhan, Jay-Z, and Bill Cosby on the cover. And at that moment, I was like swinging at everything. I was swinging at everything. I was like, people paying attention. I got to get it all out. And that video blew up. up for me in a way that I had never had before. Before my Kendrick Drake video, that was my number one video,

over nearly four million views at this point. And it was all black people. You can tell from the comments, I don't know what the algorithm figured out, but it was like, hey, this is for the niggas, strictly for the niggas. Like the audience was there. And it was so much love and appreciation for what I was saying then. And so now this video is a more refined version of those previous videos. refined in terms of just even just my abilities create.

And the response has been overwhelmingly positive. There are still people that I'm getting more of the response of, dang, I didn't want to hear this, but I needed to hear this. I'm getting a lot of that. I'm getting a lot of this hurt to watch, but it was revelatory. And I'm really excited about that. That's why I make video. videos like this, even though they kind of take a lot out of me and I struggle with the

weight of that type of responsibility. I don't like being seen as this like public intellectual radical figure when I kind of know the real radicals and they don't look. They look he don't approve of me half the time. So it's like I don't want to false claim on some levels. But I think what I'm doing, the value to what I'm doing is taking that stuff and like packaging it in a way where people that would normally be resistant to it. are like, no, you got a point.

Yeah. And I also think the time is different. We're two years into Trump too. And we're two years into Trump too. Watching our institutions spend more time fighting a streamer than fighting for like our rights. Yeah. Which is crazy to me. You know?

And it's like, and so people are watching that and being like, what the hell is happening? Why are these politicians who we admire? and we've put there and we stand, like spending all this time, caping for all these other things that don't have anything to do with the struggle we're all in. And so people are ready for different answers than what they've been given. And even if those answers hurt, even if it's heavy truths that they got to swallow. So I'm excited that I'm contributing to that. On TikTok, they're calling it a four-hour ether. Oh.

as a nice fan as a nice fan I can't help but appreciate that but also like I fear you know I as I was creating this there were times where this is a much meaner

vicious thing I was making I had worse motivations at different times and I'm happy that I had several things forced this video to wait longer and longer and longer, which gave me more time to get away from the emotions

that changed it. I don't want to do what, do we, I know you have questions, but also at some point I want to explain the nature of the video that that makes sense.

Yeah. And I don't want to ramble too much. So the video started out as something different. I can't tell you the origins of it because those things are still God willing what happened. Eventually,

I ain't going to know words. I'm not going on that well for me. But it started out of something different. It was always going to include killer Mike, but it was not going to be what it ended up being. And then plan changed, and I had to change the video. And then it was just going to still be mostly the first hour and a half. That was still going to be the same video.

If you know production, you can kind of tell, like, things were shot in different orders. And I even showed that. I even showed it, I think, during the video, this is how I was initially going to go. And then when the distract dropped, I just took that as a sign that, because I had more to say, obviously. But I felt like, you know, a video that includes Bookerty, Washington, and Barack Obama should not have an hour-long killer mic section, even if I have personal feelings towards it. And so I put all that away and had it down to 25 minutes or so. And when that happened, I had to change the video. I was like, this is just, this is the world telling me, the universe telling me,

you need to go ahead and just get this out there and speak your truth about how you feel about the situation. And so, and then in the middle of that, I had an editor that just couldn't get it together. And so I had the video was supposed to come out like September. I had an editor that wasn't moving up on my pace. And I was like, look, I got to let you go. and I put a ringer editor in, a pitch hitter, and that forced me to do a lot of more work than usual. And so I eventually comes to where it is.

So it was always going to be about black misleadership and this concept of how we need to create a new rubric for judging who we put our support behind as black people, who we speak to as representative of our interests. And Mike was always, to me, a very emblematic. figure in that problem. And then when it was like, okay, this is, these other things that are more personal keep flaring up.

And so at that point, it's like, okay, now we're going to have to illustrate things more deeply because, if I'm just honest, especially in like the aftermath of it, how Mike is like seen and was seen. I think I told Vandis personally, the way that Mike is seen bothers me. It was like, I've been studying these politics now for years. And as far as I can tell, Mike represents these politics in the public imagination. And I think that's wrong. And so like, I need to do what I can.

I've been gifted an opportunity to correct that. And that's kind of how, you know, that's what they inform the end product. A couple of things. Let's, before we get into the direct animus between you and Killer or the back and forth or the two different sides of it. I want to make sure that the audience understands the philosophy. Black misleadership, you identify it as what? So black misleadership is most notably brought to us by Glenn Ford,

the late Glenn Ford, the late Glenn Ford, who had a website article, the Black Agenda Report, And he basically speaks to it as a concept of recognizing how certain black people are positioned to be leaders in the black community. And their leadership is mostly set as a managerial position. Their job is to siphon energy out of the black community and transmute that into undergirding the same structures that keep us in check. And because it was a really important section that I rewrote multiple times and even re-recorded like the day before the video out was selling out versus buying in. And so when we talk about, you know, sellouts, we're talking about the Candace Owens is and

Clarence Thomas, et cetera. And we can easily identify that. It's not, you know, some people obviously, obviously, right, they're on a certain size. But for the most part, black people easily identify the enemies that look just like us that are overtly on that end of the spectrum. But there's also folks that I don't even know if it's fair to call them enemies like in the same way, but they definitely don't serve our interests, but they're imbued with the responsibility of representing our interests at scale, representing our interests in the halls of power. And they don't. And we struggle to be able to identify

why they don't, how they don't, who keeps them in those positions. and God willing how to remove them from those positions. Glenn Ford has a speech that I quoted in the video where he talks about Cory Booker. And Cory Booker works directly, worked directly before he became who he is today with, I don't know if it's the Heritage Foundation. I apologize for getting this detail wrong. People can Google it and they can watch that speech. Glenn Ford breaks it down. But Booker was wanting to get into politics and he met up with some conservative school people.

and he helped champion charter schools in New Jersey in a way that had never been done before. Up until that point, a lot of folks in Newark and who Booker represented were against charter schools. And they got Booker to sell this concept of charter schools to his constituents, to the people. And that's kind of what black misleaders do. They sell our enemies back to us. They get us to get in line and undergird ideologies. and politics that ultimately don't serve us, but they might look and sound good.

They might make sense if you don't think about it too hard, and a handful of us will get the good end of the bargain on it. And then those people can be held up as leaders, as idols, as role models. And we don't think about the end results of how that, of what that is over time unchecked. And so, you know, I talk about Obama and the fact that before Obama, if you ask any black people about war anywhere, we're like, fuck that war. No, we don't, no. All these wars are dumb.

We got people starving here. Why are we fighting for oil? While we're fighting for access to this, access to that. And we're not going to get a piece of it back home. We have a long history of that in America. We've seen that Vietnam, Korean War, et cetera. And then during Obama, we was like, yeah, bomb them niggas. we we rocking because he was saying to do it because he was saying because yeah we rocking with the president

the president it's the black president now of course it wasn't everybody but the transition was palpable you know let me ask you something real quick so are you familiar with a german theologian um philosopher named dietrich bonhofer no Dietrich no i'm not i don't i don't know that uh Dietrich bonhofer um so uh he's he says he's got a quote He says, stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice is. The framing of this is that evil malice, we can identify very easily, right? We can see that. You rally the world around evil, and then you put evil down.

Evil inspires people. Stupidity, we accept. We accept stupidity. We accept ignorance as a function of who people are. And because we accept that, when those people get elevated, they have the opportunity to do much more damage than the person that we just see as evil. Yeah. He was from Germany. So you see Hitler, he kills six million people, the whole world, 12 million people, the whole world rallies around it, right?

Right. But the stupidity that led to Hitler's power is something that he watched people in his community, in his country. like acquiesced to. They were too incurious to do anything about the formation of this man. Okay. The reason why I ask you this is because from your estimation, this Black

Misleadership class, are these people who in the front of their mind know that they're selling out their communities? Or are these people who have the wrong ideas? And does it matter? So one, it doesn't matter. So let's start there. It doesn't matter. They got to

be taken off their spots. That's number one. My belief is somewhere in between. I have peers that would say definitely they know it and they should be beaten down for it. And I have people that would say they probably just are misguided. I would say it's in between. So like part of a conversation from a mutual friend that you witnessed a couple of months back, we're talking about Cop City.

And I think this person genuinely thought that what they were saying about Cop City was good. It was completely wrong. But I think there was, I don't think they thought, I don't think people are that sociopathic to sit in front of a peer and hear them talk about the realities of a particular issue and just lie. Like I don't think, I don't think very few people are like that. Some, of course, and those people are capable of getting to the highest levels of power sometimes. But for the most part, I think a lot of these black folks in this misleadership position think that they're, they know that they're doing things that are fundamentally wrong. but they have a belief that it will work out in the end. And I think...

Say more about that. Let's go back to Bookerty, Washington. So, okay. I don't like that people are canceling Bookerty, Washington. And I tried to, like, curtail that at a certain point in the video. Oh, you fucking ravaged them in the video. I'm like, I watched that bell. People are talking about the takedowns of some other people,

but Booker T. Washington is the one. He's somewhere, like, what the hell? hell, you know what I mean? I'm not saying I disagree with you. Right, right. Well, yeah, it was, that was one of the moments where, like, I wrote something. I came back to it later. I was, it was really a situation like, damn, these is bars.

I can't get rid of them. Let me try to, like, let me try to move things around and the aftermath to ease it up a little bit. I mean, at one point, you're like, you know, he's not with us, but this Tuskegee Institute is still there. You're like, it's still there. It's, yeah. What he created. It's still there.

Yeah, it's, yeah. I don't, you should have seen the first. It was eye opening though. It was eye opening. So the eyes had to be open, right? The eyes have to be open. Especially because Booker T is the ultimate black Republican recruitment tool.

He just is. That's why I was so happy when my editor found that Prager You stuff. Because like if Prager You wants to promote this figure and almost unadultered, right. Now, I think Booker T genuinely felt that the, order he was contributing to was the best thing possible for black people. I think he genuinely felt that. I think Booker T. Having seen the horrors of Jim Crow and slavery up close, had a different perspective than W.B.

DeBoise and said, listen, I feel you, brother, but you're up there and it's not the same. So I think this is best for black people. So this is what I'm doing. Now, the compromises that let him flesh out that dream, he may have said means justify the ends, history has said, ah, kind of didn't. And so, you know, so we have to, again, the first thing I'm very confident, we have to move you off that spot. But I don't think that Booker T, there's plenty of historical figures you can point to that knowingly, maliciously hurt black people when put in the position of power. But I think the misleadership, I think,

and I don't want to and I want to be clear about that as I as I operate with the language of of real black radicals who have done way more work in reading than me. I think a lot of these folks who are operating in this position think that they're doing something good because we've been taught that.

That is the standard practice for a lot of us that these compromises we're making, these compromises that we know are not the best things for certain members of our community and the end it'll work out. And so, So you compromise, you compromise, you compromise.

The next thing you know, you're in a position you could have never imagined. And people are making videos about you. Do you think that they're, because I don't know if I got that from the video. Like, do you think that when they do these things and they assimilate to a certain point or they do certain things in order to be accepted by like specifically when you're talking, going through the history of Barack Obama and you're talking about how he grew up and then comes to Chicago, and it was totally, it was a totally different, it was like a cultural shock for him. But he knew that he needed to do this to be, you know, accepting to, accepted by black people, but then also this for white people.

Do you think, because from the video, it felt like, and I hope I'm saying this right, that what they were doing is if I can do it, like as an individual, then it represents something that can be good for the collective or were they doing what they're doing to impact the collective good? Because I didn't get the latter with Oprah and maybe even Obama. It's case by case. It's case by case. It felt like I'm an example of it rather than

this is going to impact everyone and we're all going to be elevated. We've been imbued with the rhetoric of black firstisms, of role models, of, you know, I can do it, you can do it too, et cetera, rhetoric. That is what I grew up on, talented tenth. That was what the talented tenth framework was supposed to be. We get 10% of the population that are talented. They go in. They retrofit the social structure for everybody else to come.

for everybody else, open up doors, each one to each one, all that stuff. I think what happens is, first off, somebody said recently, and I was talking about this,

that the powers that be, whatever code word we want to use for these white supremacist structures, they cast a wide net. They cast a wide net and say, who's,

who do we catch in this net? All right, you're talented, you're talented, you're talented, you're not as talented, but you're in principle. So,

We're going to bring all you all to the table, right? All right. You're talented, but not that talented. You're out of here. You're really talented. We like you, but you clearly don't want to get with the program. You're on principle of this hell, and you got just enough talent, and we're going to give you everything else we need to get you to a point where you can become influential. And that person has never went to, something I did say in the video is that we imagine selling out.

We always talk about it like, hey, they took the check. you went to the meeting, you sold, you know, you got invited to a meeting because a bunch of white men with a briefcase, they opened it up. You see the gold shine on the face and you signed the contract, right? And I'm sure that does happen on some levels. But what I think really happens is these slow compromises and people convince you that what you're doing is good. Think of all the people you can help. Think of all the change you can make. Think of how it will look to your community, to the people back home to see you succeed.

And that shit's real. It's real to be in the face of black children or of other black people and say, look what I did. Look what I did representing us. Look what I did while still holding going to my blackness. That's real. But it's not power. And I think we've been, what's the word I want to use here? Propagandized to see representation.

This is something that Mike said in his interview with Vic. This representation, I was represented. people hurt me, but that's not power. Power is the ability to have a thing act. Oh man, I'm about to, I'm butchering, I'm butchering Ewey right now. But it's having a thing act as you will, right? And that is not the same as being the only black person or being tokenized or being represented.

That is creating change. And so I think these people get into these spaces. They're promised things. They're given parts of what they ask for. they are over time convinced to feel like what they're doing is good. They see tangible results. But when it's measured against the reality of the system, they're undergirding in the process, when it's measured against the end effect of what their behavior results in, it's not nearly enough.

And then when they're told this, if we have civil conversations, maybe even heated conversations, That's one thing when it's dismissal and misdirection and a lot of the things that I felt was happening with Mike. Now it becomes animus is involved. It's less about conflict and more about, okay, this has become, I don't know, another word that's more harsh than conflict. You know what I mean? And I think that's the other big problem that I wish I'd have spent more time with in this four-hour-long video. is this fact of that, because I remember deleting this section with like tears of my eyes. I mentioned it briefly, but the bigger problem is that over time, especially in media,

the misleadership class has been able to dominate the conversation. If you look at old videos of Panthers and, you know I'm bad with names, sister's name, Super Light Skin, Panther, Sister, something Cleaver. Angela Davis. Not Angela Davis. Angel Davis is one of them, but it's Kathleen Cleveland. Oh, no, you're talking about Elaine Brown? Is Elaine Brown?

It's one of the super light skin sisters that was a Panther. Chat and whoever else are, forgive me. Y'all know my name game is awful. But when you see these videos of people talking to Kwameh, people talking to Malcolm, and it's a whole panel of various black political stakeholders representing a wide variety of black political thought talking about certain things. those days are over. What has happened in the last 30, 40 years is they've created a limit on how far left or how

radical you can be in the public eye. And the people with platforms that they loki own still aren't holding on to a certain level of gatekeeping. So we can't even have the conversation appropriately. We can't even have a real ideal. logical discussion or at least present these ideas in concert to the community. The community assumes that this is the radical limit. One of the bigger issues and one of the reasons why it's important to like forcefully inject

this conversation into the zeitgeist is because it's very clear historically that those who we would trust to do so are not really interested in having conversations with those to their left. Now, I don't know if that's because they feel that they have all the answers already. They don't want to be challenged. I don't know if it's because the institutions that uphold them say, hey, you can talk to this person or not this person. But the fact that I was able to build what I did independently,

I said I have to do that because otherwise this continues to remain invisible. And so that's another big aspect of it, is that if we were having holistic conversations around these things, around this history, it'd be one thing. But we see the establishment media, the establishment narrative, wants to cut the conversation off at this point. And I'm not saying we entertain everything to the left of it, sure. But it's very clear, especially when you analyze the history,

that things are being left out for a reason and that people that can bring those things to light are being excluded from the conversation. I don't want to talk too much here. I want to make sure the audience gets a chance to hear from FD. But I'm going to go back to a couple of things that you brought up. One thing later, because I know everybody's here to listen to us talk about specifically the Killing Mike version of the video. this, and we will get to it.

I want to say one thing. Yeah, like, we will get to it. I want to maybe kind of pick up on something you said earlier. Earlier you said that a lot of the black historical figures that you'd read about or you had experiences with, you didn't realize how to the left they were. You didn't realize that they were socialist, right? You and I have talked about the Santa Clausation of Martin Luther King. Jr. and how the more radical aspects of Dr. King have been whitewashed so that people can accept him

as a more mainstream American political figure. It's my belief that those people that were assassinated and killed, we have the wrong reason in our head as to why that happened to them. We think that they were killed because they were black. They were really killed because of their politics. It was Martin Luther King Jr.'s politics that were assassinated. It was Fred Hampton's politics that were assassinated. Those politics were assassinated so that a more mainstream American politics could take hold in the black community so that there could be a control set. You had to go in and break up the Panthers. You have to go in and destroy Hampton. You had to destroy all of these black power movements more than just the Panthers, other black power

movements. The FBI had to do that so that those politics could not take hold so that they could reorient politics. Hoover himself said that he feared a black Messiah that could change and raise the consciousness of America, of American black people. That changing and raising of consciousness is a political one. It's a social one. It's one where people think that one thing is progress and success. But really, somebody comes along and says, this other thing is progress and success. you should try this. If in fact the leaders that we're talking about, even us, you know, who had to learn more about our luminaries and our leaders later on, if in fact those people are also victims of this, is it necessary to move them off their spots or is it more necessary

to move them? The reason why I asked this question of you earlier was whether or not you thought that these people were stupid or evil was because to me, and people do not like this about me, and we've talked about this. To me, community is doing the work to educate people on the fact that it was leftism that was killed in Hampton.

Leftism that was killed in King, it was actually King advocating for poor people. His son came on this very podcast and said that the poor people's campaign is probably what God is far. killed, right? So if in fact, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be like demanding and tough and harsh, we do it here on higher learning, but is it necessary to move these people out or is it necessary to do the work of community within community that changes the political understanding

of people that says, hey, this set of values does not serve you. That definition of power is very important. And if in fact that is what we should be doing, should we do it in community? Like, is there any part of you or me or anybody else that is trying to legitimately change the way people think? Is there a part of us that should consider the fact

that there has been such a Herkulean effort or Heraklian effort, if you like the Greek mythology, better, to make sure that people understand that a certain political goal brand is toxic, that a certain political brand is out of the American mainstream, that it doesn't work, that it can't work. And the only way to work is to produce, be a good company man, and move forward. And those people actually believe that.

Is there any work inside the community to where we should consider what we're up against and work within that? That was a lot of words. And I hope everybody understood what I was trying to say. Yeah, we got you. I think I get you. So I think it's a both end. So first, I'm not so arrogant as to think that there were not people clocking Obama eight years ago.

In fact, I know multiple people. I got a shout up my homie science who I never figured. We got into knock down dragouts over Obama circa 2012. When I was, by 2012, I knew he was right, but I wasn't ready for you. Right? And shout to Jabrille Jackson. who was like one of my guys who was the same way

talked about this. I've always been pulled from the left. I know exactly what you mean. Right. So there were always people. So I'm not so arrogant as to think that I'm the first person to discover these politics and say we should be doing this within community.

And to think that going to Mike, at some point, I have to believe that there were people with politics similar to mine right now in Mike's ear shaping him at a different part of his career. And so I think that has to exist. That is the most important aspect to cultivate over time. But without an injection of energy and power,

it's going to remain inadequate because of the machine we're up against. Even going back to the structure of the video, Malcolm pointed this out about King and the Big Sin. at that time for the, I have, for the, um, March on Washington. When you have, when you have a certain framework of, of certain outlook on struggle and black progress, you can, and, and then you have the tools to, to have that materialized for you, the tools being, you know, you know, white dollars and cents to help you shape your programs, you're prone to think that these people without access to any of that just don't

know what they're talking about. And, you know, I'm a holl at you in a second, brother. Like, I'm doing this over here. This is really important for a lot of people. I'm not mad at any, like, I'm not going to go back to 1963 and say, hey, the civil rights bill, not good enough, y'all just stop. Like, that sounds crazy, right? So, of course.

Yeah. But what the media machine, particularly over time has gotten so sophisticated, so impenetrable to certain ideas that just working within community, to me is not good enough. It doesn't work. Certain things will always be filtered and edited out before it reaches the masses. And so the way I see it is my injection onto the stage was akin to just thrown a brick through the window. And if that influence a reverberates into greater discourse and discussions, like now,

Now I would hope that conversations could happen with a mic and whoever else where I'm kind of losing with trying to thought. There's a hierarchy still that exists amongst whose ideas are relevant and important for people to hear. And that hierarchy trickles down to community. So you will have people who have been ordained by the structures, ordained by these normative media institutions, and they'll come down to community. and they're the people that are meant to be heard the most, even if they're wrong. And when the community talks to them directly says, hey, you're wrong for this reason, this reason, this reason, this reason, what reason do they have to say, hey, community, you know what, that makes a lot of sense.

I agree. There's an interview with Kalanji on Black Liberation at the time was Black Power Media talking to Mike about Cop City in 2021 when Cop City wasn't built yet. And Mike said the same thing. In fact, Mike was even less, seemed even less. interested in Cop City at the time, when it was still possible for something to be done. So that was an example of like a someone being in community and having the community speak to him about the problem and it being ignored because there was no power behind it.

So the power is the power to fuck up your reputation a little bit. The power to make you uncomfortable on the internet. The power to have a crowd say, hey, cut all, I heard what you said about Kaepernick-J. Why don't just move on to the next song. we're not with you here but we want to hear lucifer you know i mean like that that is what i'm trying to contribute to um i don't think these people are not just above reproach but also above reconciliation but they have to have a movement that demands that of them and if the if for years we have tried to do that quietly behind the scenes and it hasn't worked and now we have our

opportunity to do it loudly and publicly, I don't know if it's going to work still, but it's at least getting away from things that we've already seen to be proven to be ineffective. What would a leadership pipeline look like to you that doesn't run through celebrity or the church or the Democratic Party? It would be community base. It would be the people they murdered in St. Louis. You know what I'm saying? It would be the original Black Lives Matters protesters that were murdered or missing over the course of that, what was that six years, it feels like.

It would be people that had already been doing the work locally, that then the people pushed them into the next stage of visibility, a next stage of into the pause of power and said, this person represents us. This person represents our interests, has proven it through these bona fides. and that's who we want to talk to us. That's who we want to talk for us. And if you want to put them on your podcast, you want to put them in your city council, that's cool and all, you know, but we know from experience,

this person represents us for real. And I think what it is is kind of backwards. It tends to be backwards at this point is that this person may have came out of the community, sounds like the community, sounds, talks a good game, knows the things, but they were plucked out by the system and then put back in front of us

to now be our leader. And that changes the that changes the power dynamic because the first version I spoke of their power comes from the community. The second version, their power comes from the system. So we know who they answer to and vice versa. And that can only happen

with stronger communities, with stronger organizing activity on the ground. But we also have to create the soil for that. And we also have to create energy for that. We have to give them language. We have to do the education, the political education, among other things, for that to even to be possible. I'll just mention one thing, though. Some months ago, and this was in the video, he brought this up, didn't say my name.

I'll just say it now. Some months ago, I had two months ago. It had been like August. Like August or something like that. I called you and I asked you if you would be willing to have a sit down with Killamike. Right? Just to let everybody know I call Killamike 2. It's like, yo man,

you know, whatever it is with you and FD if there is some understanding that can be gained even if the understanding is that like we don't fuck with each other and this is where it goes, it's worth a conversation. Okay. My first question is,

as we get into the mic thing, why do you think I did that? I think you did that genuinely based on what you said, that you were trying to, as you said in your last pod, be peacemaker. You had love for both of us.

You don't see Mike as a villain. And I don't see Mike as a villain. I hope that was clear somewhere. there. And I think you also didn't know fully the ways in which I felt disrespectful. No.

I didn't have any idea of the depth of all of this stuff at all. Yeah. We should get into some of that because I don't either. Yeah. And so you didn't understand that. So you were just doing, you see, you saw Good Brothers getting ready to scrap. And you were like, we can stop that. Let's piece this out, you know, because you're, you know,

because you don't want to see. And you know there's consequences to public views. And so I think that's where that came from for you. Now, I will say, I heard from other people besides you, which is one of the reason why I didn't name you. And also the experience of just the production, especially toward the end of it, a lot of weird things were happening that made me feel like there.

And also just knowing how other things that happened, apart from me with Mike and critiques about Mike, I felt like there were barriers being put up for me getting the video out. But I did not feel that explicitly from you. I thought you were just trying to be a good, a good, you know, partner in black man amongst black men. Right. I think that you alerted me to the video when we, when we spoke. The reason why I asked that question is because, you know, we talked.

He was like, yeah, I'm into it. you were like, I don't want to do it. The only reason why that's important to say is because as I watch the video and as I talk to you now, and as you articulate your position, I think that you feel that something is singularly pernicious with this black misleadership class and with Mike himself that you feel like has to be dismantled rather than conversed with. Is that fair to say? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. What do you feel like the responsibility is in dismantling someone

or their worldview? It's not, it's the influence that I want to dismantle. I want to dismantle the effectiveness of that tool. So if I, So I'm local. So if I have to speak to when I had a problem with Killer Mike specifically, it was seeing the interview about Cop City. Because I'm a, at the time, a baby YouTuber, and I'm speaking on Cop City, right? And maybe that means I also have nothing to lose. So, you know, there's that.

And in his interview with VIII. Nick, he says, yeah, they killed that white boy. That was a person. His name was Tortiga, I believe. I may be mispronouncing it. They shot that man 50 times. You know what I'm saying? And so it's like, I have been hearing how people were reaching, because Mike can

galvanize the city pretty easily. That's what he was positioned to do, right? And there was few situations that would have been most appropriate. for him to do that. And crickets the entire time. The city presented the people of Atlanta with a proposition. I'm sorry, the anti-cop city movement, talk to the city directly after all this stuff.

People are getting killed. There's riots. They're throwing Molotov cocktails at bulldozers. So we have the civil unrest. So the city comes to the table and it's agreed upon. There's a petition process that will allow us to put this anti- cop city thing on the ballot. You got to get

100,000 signatures. I believe we've got 140. And the city just said, nah, never mind. Just ignore the literal will of the people. And to know that there was a leader

that knew that this was occurring that is still dapping up these folks that have explicitly ignored the will of the people in the city that is still being held up. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like, I couldn't imagine,

you can imagine if you know the truth about a situation and a lot of other people don't. And like, suddenly somebody asked you, what's your opinion? Oh, shit. What's my opinion? You know what? I got a four-hour video about it.

You know? So like, people think, so personal was also like the personal interactions that we've had or not had, but like, you know, through media. But it's also personal just kind of being like, man, this person is in this position to serve this role for the people and is not like explicitly not. And nobody is capable of speaking to that and expressing that and holding account to that failure.

And I know he's not. And so the universe asks my opinion. And I gave it. I was having a conversation with someone. It was actually about Jay-Z. And it was, they were white. But they were just asking a question about, like, the black community and then the way they respond to Jay-Z.

And I was trying to explain to him, it's not a canceling. It's more of a frustration of, we are telling you something that is working against us, that we are, we revere you, we're upset about this. And instead of listening or trying to, to hear what we have to say, you want to do a freestyle about it, or you want to talk to us as if, like, talk down to us. Yeah.

Talking about Killer Mike, is that where some of your frustration goes, just listening to what you're saying? Not the personal stuff aside, the frustration of people are telling you they're upset with something. The community is trying to get you to understand what we're saying. And instead of listening to leaders, to organizers, to the community, the people itself, you are defending what you're doing or talking to us as if we must be wrong. Is that where some of your frustrations and the necessary, the need to say something? And that's going back to my point earlier about like the way that being in that position allows you to shape the conversation in your favor without seriously engaging with.

This is something Dr. Ball. Dr. Ball's whole thing we kill him Mike this whole time is legitimately engage with my work. I disagree with you here. I disagree with you here. I disagree with you here. All the shady shit aside, legitimately engage in my work. And then we can, then we're cool. And when that doesn't happen, when you're marginalized by your own people who are marginalizing you in your own name, like in the name of black people, I'm ignoring these niggins.

And the name of black people, don't listen to nutting these niggas over here saying about me, my friends, my business deals. None of that shit. Power to the people, y'all. You know what I'm saying? So that frustrated. That was that was frustration ideologically before it got. And there's a passion behind that, obviously. But that was frustration ideologically before it got to like the weird space of, you know,

the way Mike came off addressing me and my mentor. And so to me, that is a misleader. That is a person in the role. I was easy on Mike with the whole crying at the right part. And I still am. I still feel like he gets maybe too much flack for that. But that lends itself, that is indicative of everything else that comes after it, you know? So do you think that a couple of questions?

I think the only disagreement that we might have because ideologically, it's the same. It's the same. The only disagreement we might have is two things. I think we talked about this before when we were, you and I did a YouTube. We had a conversation. It was on Discord. I would put it on YouTube, I thought it was great. I was walking around my neighborhood and having fun.

Is I still believe that black people deserve special treatment. I still believe that there's been such an intentional miseducation campaign. There's been such an intentional propaganda campaign that I owe a grace and patience to black people who I don't believe to be directly anti-Black. If you were directly anti-black, if you are engaging in direct anti-blackness for the sake of your own self, then there's really nothing for me to talk to you about, right? But when you described what you believed a second ago about like black to the power to the people, when you said, hey, they say all this stuff, and they say power to the people, I mean, they think they're right. They think they're right.

They're not right. but those people think that they're right. So when they're evangelizing to their people, they think you're wrong. That's why earlier when we were having a conversation and I asked whether or not they were stupid or evil, it's not to give them an out for the wrong ideas that they have. It is to give an end into the way we deal with those wrong ideas. And I think that sometimes the way we deal with those wrong ideas is we have to have FD signifier, right? We have to have somebody who points out the wrongness of those ideas and sometimes those

motivations. But if there's no conversation there, then we're treating each other like white people treat us. Like if white people dismantle black people, to me, black people exist in community with one another where even if you get a little dismantled, you have to be engaged in rebuilding one another. That's the thing that orientes me. And sometimes, that makes you come off pussy. I'm going to be honest with you. Sometimes you have a couple of conversations that maybe you shouldn't have.

All of that to ask you, do you think that community demands that you ever have a conversation with any people that you've ever criticized publicly? Yeah, like so if people like... And do you think any of what I just said was bullshit, by the way?

No, no, no. So I will say that there's a sliding scale because I agree with you that, you know, I completely agree with you black people deserve special treatment. I also think there's a pernicious algorithmic drive to tear each other down, especially on the

left, to have the most left, most woke, most ideologically pure take on an individual to be the woken woker than thou. There's a lot of that, right? There's a lot of not wanting to meet people where they are because that makes, that lowers you on the hierarchy

of the left, right? So I agree with that wholly. And I think that was my first mic video over a year ago. And that's kind of the thing is that, you know, like, you know, when I made that first video that I talk about in the most recent one, I was very nice. I was critical. I held the same tone I always hold. I expressed my admiration. And I just broke down the disagreement. And that was met with outright disrespect, you know, outright disrespect and derision. And now we're,

we're years into this problem, right, at this point. We tried it the nice way it wasn't respected. Right, nicely it wasn't respected. I'm not a, I think I joked about you with this.

Like, you box, right? And who else would be talking to that was talking about scrapping? I know a lot of, Vic, okay, I know a lot of fighters. I know a lot of people, ex-street people,

people that have scrapped, you know, that have been shot at, etc. I ain't that. nigger. I don't mind being seen this pussy sometimes. That's fine. You call me pussy.

You're not going to hit me. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's fine. I get called. So, my first adversary was the black mannisfar. Them niggas been calling me a lesbian since I came on the scene. One dude said, one dude said I was domesticated. I ain't going

front. I looked at myself long and hard in the mirror after that. I was like, do I look domesticated? Anyway. So I don't mind that, right? Overall, because I do think you get more with honey than vinegar. But I've also come to understand that some people only respect, like we're putting it, violence, I don't respect your ability to directly confront and stop them through force, if that force is influence or, like, public perception or rhetoric, right? In my case, obviously. And so, like,

that's kind of the point I was at. Because again, despite the ways in which I felt grievously, you know, like insulted and and disrespected, I was not about, this video was still only around two hours long up until August. And it was after feeling like I was being signaled by the ancestors, by the universe to take in a different direction that it became that. So we actually are, we have a lot of synergy there overall. I just, I think that's also situational.

And when a situation calls for a different approach, you know, than it does. Have you ever had a conversation with anyone you've ever criticized? No. No. And I wouldn't mind having conversations. Oh, that's one thing I would say, certain things around content I would be wary of. Because content, one, I just like to control my voice. I don't trust niggas editors.

And then two, I don't believe a lot. don't have a strong value in like public debate. One, that's not really my strong suit, believe it or not. And then two, a private conversation that leads to actual change is way more valuable than a public conversation that leads to views and engagement. So it depends on the situation. If somebody feels like, um, I've, like I've offended them and got them all wrong and we're going to have a real like unfurling of something, I wouldn't mind doing that publicly.

But if it's just to like hash things out, I, I, I would, I would have to understand the totality of what it would be. You don't think at this point a public conversation with like, because like you said, you've never, I think Van said you've never talked to anybody that you've done a video on, but no one has ever responded either, correct? Like Killer Mike has? I did hear from one other person a little too earlier,

but I don't want to bring that person up. But nobody ever responded in any meaningful way before Killer Mike. So and because there has been so much in more recently, you don't think that the public would benefit from the two of you sitting down on camera. Mike at this point, I would not mind sitting down on camera if that's what he desires. I would also still want to talk to Mike, like, directly and privately, if he's open to that. And I think I expressed that to the numerous people that reached out to me before the video dropped. I'm more wary about that after the video.

interview. Just because I thought he was going to come out looking better from the Vic interview, to be honest. Like I didn't think, I didn't, I hadn't seen it or anything, but I just assumed, I assumed better of how his response would be to the criticism he's been getting. And it was worse than I imagine, to be honest with you. And so like, I want to talk to him privately so that we didn't have to do that. Yeah.

Like, I would hate to have to talk to Mike publicly and it'd be a worst version. of what he presented to Vic. That's fair. Because then that's just drama of content to me. And it's not like, okay, how are we building from this? How we disseminating less of the community? I think part of that, though, is because, and this is my greatest fear. Part of this is that we're all doing a lot of choir preaching.

And no one is trying to build a new church. And it's no one person's, response. Somebody got to do that. Right. So somebody has to do that. As we take our respect of choirs, at a certain point, there is going to have to be some type of moment or some type of either that or we are in a mandingo fight for the hearts and minds of everyone else. This is not in any way saying that there's a right way to do this. That video was fucking valuable. I've never, I should have watched the past video before I asked. That's my fault. I take responsibility for that. He swears up and down. He did not know that there was a video coming

out. All of this shit is beyond the point to me. I'm sick of starving black children. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of starving black kids. I'm sick of dead black people. I'm back in Chicago right now and I'm staying up on the miracle mile where it's all nice. I walk around. I talk about how nice Chicago is. The last time I was here, I was. I, I saw a not so nice part of Chicago, man, where people are struggling. What do we have to do? What happens? Like, what are the stakes?

Like, if this is the way, if the way is for us to have a turnover of our ideas and some people got to get it, well, I guess that's the way that it goes. No problem with that. But what I want to know more than anything in my life right now is because I ask this question about myself, like, why are you doing this? but you could you van lathen me myself could be much more successful being america's black friend am i uncomfortable doing that because of a reason that's actually for real or does this lend itself to more career advancement for me am i better at this than i am at that like why is this

actually happen do we actually care who actually gives a fuck i know a bunch of people that are are doing this work every single day, and they don't be on the internet. Like, you know what I'm saying? And so for me, it's not necessarily, this is an indictment, not of, obviously not of you. I watch everything you put out and not of anyone else whose ideas I think are just

completely regressive and not useful at all. I'm trying to find out how we do the thing. And if a fight leaves up there, if it's an ideological civil war, I think these ideologies have to go. I think these ideas have to go. But the thing that I will admit in a vulnerable moment that I struggle with

is the people. The people, I know so many good brothers with bad ideas. I know so many good sisters with bad ideas. I know so many people that haven't had the full matrix of ideas presented to them in a way that they can even discern

what a good idea or a bad idea is. Like if you try to sit down and tell somebody about health care and the system of why going to the doctor, they will argue you down. Well, doctor's going to work for free. Right. Well, somebody got to get paid. Like, they'll argue you reasons that the homeless should exist. There have always been the haves and the have-nots. We've always had that. Some people got to live on the street. Okay. I mean, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. I mean, I guess what I'm telling you is that there shouldn't be a price on your dignity.

There was a time when I said publicly, me, Van Lathen said that America didn't owe me anything. It's bullshit. That's bullshit. That's bullshit. And so sometimes I believe if me, a guy who fights with misogyny, who fights with misogynar, who fights with homophobia, who fights with homophobia, who fights with this capitalistic need. People say it all the time. You're talking about any capitalist stuff. You love nice things. You love luxury. That is not capitalism being a highly paid worker and eating real butter. Okay. That's not capitalism. But I fight with these ideas

that I used to have, that I used to hold. And I believe in the progress in some ways that I've made and still have yet to make. And so I have to believe in the progress of other people. And I want to understand what the optimal way to do this is. And maybe there is no optimal way. Maybe everybody's way is just what it is. So that is the gistitis. The gist of this isn't the fact that what I watched over four hours of a masterpiece in underscoring all of these things, and I'll promise I'll stop after this, that we knew then. We had a conversation then about Oprah and that school and how she talked about black children. People were talking about it then the ludicrous that we were talking about all of this stuff then, then we just forgot.

Hmm. Yes. We were just overwhelmed by media and consumption and we forgot. We couldn't maintain that our lives are too hard. We're going to forget this too. We're going to forget this interview. We're going to forget my video. At certain point, videos reach heat death in the algorithm, unless it's truly, truly, truly, truly, truly, culturally. Like my Kendrick Drake video has never stopped getting a certain amount of views per day. But all the rest of my videos reach what I call heat death, which is 100 videos a hundred views a day. So this too will probably hit that point. But will-

I heat death start like three days after this shit come out. Like, we ain't, we ain't to that point. Oh, but so no, I don't know, I cut you off. And there's so many things that you said I resonate with and I want to respond to. No, no, no, no, no. I'm glad that you cut me off because all I'm going to do is start ranting again. If y'all notice, I haven't been doing that. I've been getting better.

So like, so. But you're good. I'm going to stop. I'm glad that you did. I think you're, you're one of the few fellow galaxy brain niggas that have a microphone and a platform. I call us Galaxy Braves. I don't know what type of undiagnet. neurodivergence I have.

I think it's a whole generation of black millennial men and women that were undiagnosed because we didn't have that language when we were younger. And half of us have podcasts. Yeah, sure. And I'm medicated. I'm medicated right now. And unmedicated. Not that there's anything wrong with that, by the way.

Just want to be easy on folks. Folks feel like you disrespect them. But anyway, so much what you just said I resonate with. that's also one of the reasons why I'm worried about the content of it all because what I don't want is to talk to Mike he kind of gish gallop and then nothing changes because when that happens

here is what will happen automatically I know the audience that's that folks with Mike is going to say Mike won the debate and the audience that folks at me is going to say FD won the debate and the greater population, we may not know, and it kind of won't matter, because again, coming back to when I interrupted you, it will leave the public consciousness

because something else would happen. You know, I don't even want to do it. But you know, there's so many horrible things happening right now, black people in other eyes. We literally can't stay focused on a particular thing in the broad scheme for more. more than two weeks. So that's that.

And so ultimately that will be, you know, a moment or whatever. But if there's no change, accountability is change. Like people think accountability is punishment. Right. And I've always been frustrated with that, especially on the left. You know, I'm getting so many DMs. Who next? Talk about such and such next.

Six-hour video on Jay-Z. I'm never, unless Jay-Z pop up, it diss me at the time. the Super Bowl. I don't think I got anything else to say about Jay Z, low key. So like, I don't want to be, I said in the video, I don't want to be to call niggas out guy. Because I don't think there's fundamentally any value in that at scale. But if Mike is reclaimed into community and he's forced to face some of those contradictions in his rhetoric and where he moves, maybe there's moves he'll make in the aftermath that get back to, or better yet, enhance the work he does. does that makes them

less, that makes it so when we have the next cop city situation or the next like significant wedge point for black people in Atlanta or nationwide, he doesn't sit on his hands. And so if that's what I've contributed to, I have no regrets. But if it's just

you know, Mike versus FD, big old rent versus AI letters, both of us making the YouTube face on the screen, on the thumbnail, I'm not super interested. I'm not super interested in that if it's not building

towards something. If there's not an initiative that me and Mike can agree on and both publicly contribute to that helps the people of Atlanta. There's data center fuckery going on. There's water fuckery going on in the city.

I think they just said Atlanta's housing situation is in crisis because corporations are bought up all the single family homes. when and where, Mike, for those situations like that, if that's what it contributes to,

but if it's just branding and marketing and online personas, I feel really good about mine. I feel really good about my work. And at the end of the day, Mike is still an extremely talented, well-connected, affable figure that I can't stop that for him.

If the LP, if Runner Jewel's five pops up, I think I'm not buying that and bumping that in my private time? Of course. I was listening. The hardest thing about this video was reconnecting with how much I love Mike's music. Love Mike's music, you know? So like, yeah. But you know what?

When we started off this conversation and I was like, how did you get here? And I was like, what were you doing before? What did you see? What made you want to create this platform? And then, you know, Vans question then became of like how you've evolved and how you've been radicalized. I would be so curious and look forward to a conversation.

This is what my hope would be if the two of you or anyone that you've done a video on you sit down with. The curiosity would be some of what Van was saying a little bit before about like what him being vulnerable

and what he's struggling with of like what he's doing with his platform or you know like versus what he could be doing. I sat down with you again about how you got here. That is interesting to me.

I want to know what motivated you to get to where you are right now. I would want to hear that same thing from him. And I think that that's at the core. That's what it is, is what motivates you to do the work that you do, to fight for the things that you do, to want certain policies for your people. And I think that there could be some commonality there

if you go back to the beginning. And I think then from there what I would look forward to is, okay, this is where we differ. how did we get to this point? Well, what kind of impact does that have on the community if you do this? It may grow, but I think that it would be such a beautiful conversation. Maybe that's what we need to do more of is, why are we doing this? What does motivate it?

And if it's something nefarious or self-serving, I think that that would come out and then the thing would speak for itself. But I think that more often we would know that we kind of want the same things and it's the betterment of the people. And maybe along the way, we've lost it. our way, you know, for self-serving ways or assimilating in ways we didn't know, realize we were doing it, or maybe we're ignorant on certain things. But I just think if we could have more of these conversations and maybe not be afraid, not saying you are, but other people being afraid to, like, sit down because they're thinking it's something that it's not. Maybe that is the start of being

in a better place. I would love a future landscape that was less adversarial and more communicative. The problem is the machines don't respond to that as well. Yeah. And people are aware of that and wary

of that. Nobody wants to be the Twitter person of the day, right? You know, the way things are clipped can change the context of how things are received, even if in the moment it was very different. But we do have to, we can

we can model that better. But also people with the levers and the power have to also be open to the have to want it. They have to want it. And going back to why I've been moving the way I have,

they have had little to no motivation in that regard. They've had a monopoly on black thought and public perception. They've been able to marginalize their critics and label their critics as haters or broke or, you know, too woke, hotaps, people don't know any better.

Right. And then the conversation never even becomes like a viable idea. And so when I can disrupt it when like, you know, the communities I'm a part of can disrupt that. Now, okay, so, you know, we have, as much as I'm not a fighter, I've been in a few fights with a niggins. to and been like, you know what? You know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, man, you know that.

Sometimes you scrap what a do. And after that, it's like, all right, got that out. Shit, almost always until you get to a certain age, after you get to a certain age, that's when the blood feud start. But when we was kids, we always got over them. When we were kids, we were so much more resilient. When we were kids, we always got over if you were willing to fight. If you did not fight, you thought about that for the rest of your life.

But if you had to fight, you were good. then you get to a point to where your testosterone is really taken over, and the enemy is kind of an enemy, and it stays there until one of you guys is obsolete. And there's a cost, you know? But, I mean, so I know exactly what you're saying. Yeah. And so I think maybe that's partly where we are.

The thing I talk about a lot in general is that the politics that I represent imperfectly were invisible five, six years ago. Just didn't just have no, no, no. No relevant role in public discourse. And then this year we're watching people like Chris Rob get elected to, you know, get elected as public officials. Not to not to put everything into, you know, any particular elected official, but that means something. Right. And so that's a disruption that is not going to be without consequence and skirmishes.

And I think what's happening right now with Mike is an example of a skirmish or a conflict. that is a result of a disruption in black political thought, shifting significantly for the first time in probably several decades. You know, I think post, essentially post the end of the black power movement, there's been this capturing of black political thought that has marginalized a lot of the politics I adhere to now to be seen as insignificant or unsurious or unrealistic. And we've all wrote real hard for these normative politics. and we rolled them real hard into the exact situation we're in now. Obama was kind of the culmination of that.

And so people that were sitting there in the aftermath were like, oh, that's not what I was told what it would be when I was a kid. You know? And so now we're gearing back up and there's going to be

conflict and, you know, that primordial not primordial, I don't know what the word I'm using. But like, as we're gearing back up, you know, there's going to be stumbles and conflicts and skirmishes before we get into what the next framework looks like. And hopefully it'll be more successful than the last. Last question for me. Last question. I'm sorry, Rachel.

No, no, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. Last question for me. You identified a black misleadership class. Is there a black leadership class? Is there a class of black leaders, of black people that are in prominent?

positions. I'm aware of Dr. Ball's. That is a destructive. You guys read the work of Dr. Jared Ball. Dr. Jared Ball's commentary on like what you have to be to be successful in terms of media and celebrity and black people. It's very damning. Okay. I think like I think about it all the time. So do I. But yeah, right? Every time, you know, you go to to a Netflix event tonight, you're like, is definitely, okay? Is the smile too big? All right. I think about it all the time.

Having said that, is there a black leadership class, a class of people that if you were to talk about in a positive light that you see on screen, on songs, in places that you have some affection for or believe in? There's tons of people whose presences in media, I think, are incredibly valuable. I don't know. So the class part is important. And my Hegelian analysis is minimal as moderate at best.

But the concept of class is that people acting into the interest of everybody else they share the class with. And I don't know where we are with that in terms of like this disparate group of political commentators, actual politicians, you know, thinkers, philosophers, educators, et cetera. But I know that they exist. I mentioned a Chris Rob, well, I didn't know much about before he ran for office. And I was like, those politics sound dope. And I'm happy you're about to get a little power. Let's see what you do with it, right?

There's a guy in Texas, I don't remember his name. I'm sorry, he might be Kentucky running for Senate in Kentucky, another dope figure who like, not even, never called himself a socialist, you know, never called himself any of the key words that. He's reached out. I think his name is Booker. Booker, yeah, Black Brother Booker. Even Angie, is it Angie Nixon? Angie Nixon, yeah. Charles Booker, Angie Nixon.

So these are. Charles Booker. These are mainstream politicians that. Wow, I don't know if they've read the books I've read and have the labels in their spirit that I have. The politics they represent, I fucks with. And so, like, those are people that I think should be getting support in the halls of power. And then when you talk about, you know, media and influence, I've mentioned his name multiple times. I really love what Vic is doing.

I think Vic, this like man about the world situation that he's kind of manifested, where he's having these complex conversations with a variety of people. And he's not he's not dominating the conversations. He's just kind of like creating fertile soil for really good stuff. I really love what he's doing. There's so many people. And so like one of the things. I got from Dr. Ball when I did my video on Beyonce a little while ago is I was talking about I was comparing Beyonce to Nina Simone

Stay with me stay with me And I was doing that I don't see see I got I didn't even know that that one was out there I got beyond with you I watched a lot of your videos you didn't see what I did let me I have not seen the Beyonce join because the algorithm didn't want you to see it you know it's bianzzi's internet I've seen I'm looking at all of these I I realized that when I got on you, there it is, Beyonce's everything one year ago. Tough.

Tough. I got to watch it. Boy, you, you don't, I like that though. Fuck it. You like, I was much,

especially with the, with the, with the, with the, with the bayhive, I was not. The energy was different for Beyonce. Also,

but, but it was partially different because I had a conversation with Dr. Ball going into writing it. And I was, I was comparing her to Nina Simone. I compared her to Nina Simone.

I compare her to Nina Simone in the video. And the, the, the, The end thesis of the video is like, Beyonce is this like megastar, like magnet for attention and thought and power and, you know, adoration. But she's not more to a struggle of the people in the moment. And her just being an entertainer, how can you expect her to operate within a politic that she has,

everything you've been saying, right, that she has had minimal access to. to our understanding of. Versus when Nina Simone was in that role, the struggle was prominent and dominant amongst the people. You essentially could not come to represent black people and be held up by black people if we did not feel like you had paid appropriate deference in like appropriate tutelage to the struggle that we were in at the time.

And that's why everybody was on cold. Because the struggle of the people dictated that. I mentioned in the video that James Brown was low-key of black Republican. People didn't know that. I didn't know that until I did this bit of research. James Brown was supporting Richard Nixon, which is crazy when I think about it. Because he made I'm black and I'm proud, but one of the Dr. Ball's... He had to.

Yeah. One of his anecdotes he tells about a debate he witnessed is... I can't remember. I'm butchering names once again. He pointed out that that... that song was like a mandate from the people. It's like, hey, shit is going on, James. What you got to say?

I say it loud. I'm black and I'm proud. However, only the kids said it. Did I see this video? I think I maybe did see this video because I remember even talking about that part of it on this podcast. Maybe I did see part of this video. You may have. You may have.

You may have. But yeah. But yeah, so I say all that to say. what I hope I'm doing I don't know it first and foremost I'm just making shit I think is dope just want to be clear about that I see myself as an artist at this point

that was another reason why I didn't want to talk to mic because I didn't want to break the creative vision and like process that I was in the middle of and so I'm just trying to make things I think a dope that I think people fuck with there's all these like minimal hip-hop like moments in the video that only a few people have caught and I'm like so happy when I see people catch them.

You know what I'm saying? But what I also hope I'm doing is being disruptive and agitating for a cultural zeitgeist, a tone, a level of expectation that we're all going to start to in unison command or create consequences for it. you know, the consequences, you know, we buy a little bit more, a little bit less of your stuff. We throw shade at you in between you playing our favorite songs. That's a start. And that creates, that creates, hopefully ripple effects for the next people to come forward, you know.

But also, you know, being people centered, the people are undefeated. And so at some point, whether I would have been successful in what I'm doing or not, I think folks, especially, in terms of what we're facing, are going to come to certain conclusions eventually. And I just hope that everybody survives what that end result looks like, you know? You just answered my, that response would have answered the question that I was going to ask you. So thank you for being here. We really appreciate you and all your time. You gave us a lot of time because I told you it wasn't even going to be this long.

Tell everybody where they can watch. We talked about YouTube, but there's other platforms that you have where people can watch and support what you're doing and get even more content from you. Yes. But really YouTube is all that matters. Okay. I did start a, I started my own podcast with a brother named Omar.

And it's, I'm trying to get away from where I'm best at. And like, I'm trying to be taking less seriously. It's my ultimate goal for 2027. It's to be less serious and less respected in general. So, you know, we spent half the last episode talking about a video game

and, pivot podcast and stuff. So shout out to that. That's the FDO show on YouTube. I have five other channels on YouTube. So it's the main channel. Signify B-Sides, which is where I do slightly less serious

and slightly less, definitely a lot less long content. And then I have a streaming channel where I'm about to start playing Mass Effect. And you're just kind of kicking it with people. And you see highlight. on that channel. And, you know, I'm on Instagram.

I'm on threads, of course. I saw you just pop back up on threads. Welcome back. Be careful. It's crazy. I'm leaving again. You already gone? You're out of out?

I got, I can't do it. I understand. I'm doing so good, man. I'm leaving again. And then you mess up. I said something just the other day. And I was like, oh, that was kind of an ass take. And I fucks it.

I fucks when I make an, I love what I make an ass take and I hear about it. Because, you know, it was, I got, I had an idea in my head and the people that knew better was like, ah, nah. So I want to cultivate more of that so that I can remain kept in check. That's one of the reasons why I try to be deferential to like, again, people to my left. Because if I start thinking I have all the answers, when I start to emerge and get access to all these other spaces, I won't know when I'm caught in that net. And I need people to be able to tell me like, hey, you know you're caught in that net, right? like you know you're being co-opted and reclaimed. But yeah, so you can find me all those places.

Please check things out. New episode. Oh, sorry, Nebula is a stream. Nebula. I wasn't going to say it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I do say it every video, but they also cut me a check.

So I'm not getting cut a check today. But I do have Goon World Episode 3 is coming out next week. Goon World is kind of. candid, somewhat uncomfortable conversation around sex work and pornography. Mostly male centered, but not really. The next episode is actually all about sex workers. So I talked to Kira Noir, who was a famous porn star. I talked to multiple OnlyFans creators.

I talk to sexologists. I talk to people that are anti-sex trafficking. Talk to feminist scholars. And we had like this great conversation around the nature of modern sex work. The last episode was about pornography. And the first episode was about, last episode was about addiction.

The first episode was about like, kind of an overview of like pornography. So all three of those episodes, the first two are already out, third one will be out next week. And there'll be one more, God willing, in November. So yeah, you can find it only on Nebula because YouTube would not allow me to monetize that content.

So all right, that's it. No more podcast. So it's done. We've talked to FB. I nearly cried again. My medicine is not working as well as it did. I'm starting a million a lot, so I apologize to everyone. Take a thing caps off.

Do not stop learning. I'm Van Lathen Jr. I'm Rachel Lynn Lindsay. I'm FD. FD, say goodbye. Peace. Bye guys. No, no, no.

I don't accept it. No. You got to say something slick. You got to be like, I'm FD signify. A misleadership killer. I'm like you like just, FD. You don't have. I'm a writer.

Get on your shit. I'm a writer. I'm not a freestyle. Remember when cannabis tried to do a battle wrap, so don't do that to me. Like, I need my notebook. This is FD Signifier. I hope everybody has a great day.

Bye, guys.