Slop, Solidarity & Survival

 In this episode of the M3 BearCast, Malcolm Travers digs into two powerful topics: the intentional decline in product and cultural quality under capitalism (“slop”) and the grassroots power of mutual aid as a survival tool in a crumbling economy. Why do we accept cheap, disposable goods? What can we learn from countries like Rwanda about caring for the unhoused and maintaining dignity without money? Through livestream excerpts and personal reflections, Malcolm challenges the comfort trap, explores community-based alternatives, and calls for a radical rethinking of value, dependence, and resistance.

🔗 Join the conversation.
 🧠 Follow for real talk on mental health, community, and self-growth.
 💬 Support the show at patreon.com/MaleMediaMind

#Capitalism #MutualAid #M3BearCast #CommunityCare #EconomicJustice #Podcast #BlackVoices

Transcript

  📍  📍  Welcome to the M three Bear Cast. My name is Malcolm Travers. Male Media Mind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And on this show, I try to break down topics that I do all my live streams and go deeper. A lot of times those topics are around spirituality, relationships, mental health, personal development. Or anything that could use a different perspective or some experience. And I try to go deeper on the podcast and explain why I talk about those topics. I do a pretty good job doing that on the live stream, but I take excerpts from the live stream and maybe give added context and explain why I chose those topics. And I'm pulling two excerpts that are around the same topic. Dealing with capitalism and mutual aid. The first one was from a content creator who talks about the idea of slop, economic slop in the sense that capitalists intentionally trying to make products, services, information communities that are of lower quality so that they contain all of the resources to continue their capitalists. Homogeny and how Americans, especially in modern day global supply chains have accepted lower quality goods. And then the second topic, I'm gonna break down the idea of mutual aid built into society versus. Organizations and systems that are designed to aid those who are less well off disabled or in need of help. 

  

 So my first topic is on capitalism and slop, and I played a video during the live stream that I will play in just a moment, but I wanted to contextualize what it was dealing with. We were talking about the tariffs that were being waged. Many of them have been dialed back since we made this recording. But the underlying assumption of placing tariffs on foreign goods, the rationale, which I don't believe in, but was stated was that foreign companies were flooding our markets with low quality goods at cheap prices that flooded and priced out American products. Now part of the, part of the emptiness of that argument is that certain goods that are made overseas are made so cheaply that Americans will not be willing to purchase them if they were made in the United States. We've gotten to the point where low quality goods are just goods. We don't consider them low quality anymore. And I wanted to question that assumption, like, why have we not really, how and why have we started to accept the fact that the goods that we buy are going to be of lower quality? And that in a sense we have bought in to fast fashion, fast food, fast products that break and have to be replaced frequently. There was once a time when items were prized for their longevity. The one of them that really stuck in mine to me was the Maytag brand. They went out of business and they were bought up by another company, I can't remember which, I think it might have been GE or Whirlpool, I'm not sure, but another American Washington Machine company. And it had to do with the fact that Maytag brand products did not have much, they had customer loyalty, but they didn't have the sales that other companies had. And that might've been even between American companies, not to mention companies like Samsung. A Korean company that is known for higher quality goods, but also they're made cheaper as well. And I think at a certain point we. Value the initial price of a item over its longevity, especially if we knew that there was consistent supply of low quality goods that served our purposes. So like I think certainly a washing machine lasting 20 years is nice, but if you can get a new, updated, modern washing machine every five to 10 years, I think people. Kind of enjoyed the upgrade, and we got in, we got used to the subscription model of things of upgrading every few years and not holding onto items for a very long time. Now that's not true of every area of our life. There are still items that are considered luxury items or, designer items, jewelry designer bags and clothes, which are considered almost investments at times. And they're meant to last for a long time, but they also are very expensive. The thing is, those items themselves after one, those items themselves are not. Doing well in the market right now. So let me go ahead and play the video and I'll talk about it on the other end. 

 

I'm gonna start off thinking about something very serious and it is really dealing with capitalism. This guy had a like five minute video. I broke down into two minutes. 'cause sometimes I feel people overexplain something, but I'm also going to explain part of what he was saying. And the idea came up when we were thinking about tariffs and, liberation day. We're putting all these tariffs on all these countries and it occurred to me that there was once a point when, American products were considered higher quality than those that we imported. And I'm not sure if the quality of overseas goods got better or if we just got used to it being lower quality or some combination of the two. But this guy got me thinking about it. It's like I definitely, I, there is a portion of the world and myself that has gotten used to just lower quality goods. And he was like, that is by design. I want to. Get your take on his take and we'll talk about it. I've been wondering lately why everything sucks and I think it's because it's supposed to suck. The fundamental substance of our economy and society right now is slop, and that is on purpose because what slop does is it helps the rich get richer and it keeps you in your lane by denying you access to quality information, quality capital goods to build a business or do whatever, and quality kind of situations and social context to like form solidarity. Slop is a method to keep power. If you look at American society from this perspective, a lot starts to make sense fast food, which is the culinary equivalent of slop. It isn't just that it's unhealthy, it's that it comes in and replaces what used to be like a local food way. Connections between people or connections between people and nature. With a system that connects the individual person through their money to like a massive multinational corporate entity, money becomes the only interface that you can use to interact with the world. It used to be that trust and like community bonds were an important kind of currency that people had their spiritual connection to each other, to a higher power. To nature was another kind of currency, to persuade others to do something with them, to, try and make a living. But now it's literally only your relationship to these large systems that operate at such a scale. That nobody really controls them. And the thing that mediates that relationship is your dollar. By reducing the scope of the lives people can live, they reduce the chance of resistance to their regime and they reduce the value kind of being taken out of this shadow cloud economy and being put back into the real world. And the way you reduce the scope of a life somebody can live is by feeding them slop so that culturally their horizons don't extend. They never see great art, they never get educated because they're using AI to cheat on all their tests. They never are actually able to get good capital goods to be an entrepreneur because all the capital goods are slop. They're never able to get good services to support their business because everything is slop and they're never able to like, make strong community bonds that would fuel their own power because their community has been destroyed. And the only interface is the dollar and everything is locked. So how to resist this because it all sounds pretty apocalyptic. If they wanna make you as small as possible in order to control you and in order to keep you from producing value, then what you have to do is commit to making yourself as big as you can. Learn new things, take on responsibility and accept dependence in equal measure. Put yourself in situations where you can fail and grow. Because they're betting that if they can keep people from growing, if they can make that voice inside of your head that says, no, don't try that's embarrassing, or that won't ever work. If they can make that voice as loud as possible, they win. And so don't let them. So I thought this came out yesterday, last night when you were talking about the woman, being comfortable on a thousand dollars a week. And I thought about that term comfortable. That comfortable is a trap, because I think a good life I. Has an in equal parts difficulty striving for something if you're going to obtain some sort of business or something, or create value, as he was talking about as an entrepreneur, there's no comfortable in that. And part of that means struggling, not necessarily financially, but like energy wise, mentally, trying to learn something that's difficult to understand, facing resistance from people who don't want you to disrupt their industry, whatever it might be. Like people don't like competition for the most part, I thought about that, when starting this channel, like a lot of people didn't realize that, we, as much as we are competing for other people's attention on different shows or whatever, more people in the same space usually expands that space at least when it comes to content creation. And, like a lot of people in initially did not understand that. And so people, initially would, be resistant to collaborations or, just come on people. But it's also a learning process for me as a content creator. One of the most difficult things is criticism. Like for me, I have a thin skin. I really do. And I'm trying to get better at it. I have gotten better at it. However, one of the major ways that I do get better at it is just to not pay attention to it. But, once in a while I'll get a message like, I'm not interested in anything you have to say, please don't message me ever again. Something like that. It stinks. I'm like, God damn, I'm just promoting. Damn. And I'm like, okay. I've preferred you call me a slur or something. It's damn. I think they were in they were not rude. They were very direct and it stung. I was like, fuck. But, that is part of the, part of life, like the pain part. Yeah. And I think capitalism in general is this idea of let's make it as easy as possible. Let's reduce the friction of getting your food. Like I was talking about as we deliver, is a blessing and a curse because if I just slightly don't feel like cooking a couple taps on my phone, and they're trying to make it easier than that, they would just want me to talk to it to bring me some food. The same thing you brought me last week. I can lay in my bed, I can make, I can like just grab the phone, do this a couple of times. I have a hot meal being hand delivered to somebody. I ain't gotta get dressed, I ain't gotta shower, I ain't gotta, I ain't even gotta pull out my wallet. Like it's all exactly, right there and the palm of my hands. Yeah. But unfortunately it's a trap. Because you're extracting more money out of you by doing that. And one of the things he was saying is also these idea of the more you sink into capitalism is realizing that money isn't the only capital you have, right? So when people go online and make an ass of themselves for money, they don't realize that, there is a such capital as reputation, as dignity as, your soul. If you're a liar and all you do is, make content that makes people upset, like you've corrupted your soul and you don't even recognize that you've given something up. Because, capitalism is the prevailing way in which we exchange value and I hate to say it, looking at Elon Musk when he was forced to buy Twitter, I'm calling it Twitter folks, and yeah, I mean there probably wasn't a lot of money to be made in inquiring it, but look at what he has acquired. Look at what he got out of he basic. It's funny 'cause I saw the other day, somebody said, he's now the most followed person on Twitter. Gee, I wonder why? Because he owns the damn thing. And he can pull, he can push the levers and do whatever he wanna do. It's wow, I'm showing up on everybody's feed. How did I do that? I must be really smart and I must be really entertaining. It's no, you, but you own the thing you can do with it what you want. You can gather all this information, you can control the narrative. Yeah. And so you're right. Like it, yeah. He's not making a lot of money off of it, but again, it is not always about the money. For him. So there are other forms of capital, there's reputation, there's social influence. Yeah. Even if it's a negative sense right now he's definitely made its mark on the world. I think a lot of people, like I said, I had family member honestly did not recognize that he's not the vice president, just assumed, it's like the vice president. That's so just so cringe. But that's true. Damn. It's damn, no one elected his ass. No, but he's basically him de facto vice president right now. I've seen him do more stuff with Trump than Vance has. Yeah. So it's yeah. People look at him like, are you the defacto vice president or are you the president? We were rolling with that for a while there, calling him President Musk yeah. Yeah. But it's just terrible. But no, that guy is right. It's I have noticed that too, that the quality of goods has just gotten worse and worse. And so it's like you said, is it really just, has it gotten bad or are we just used to like, are we used to things getting worse and we're just kinda oh this can get more, yeah. We used to I do remember this actually having a conversation with a relative about this, about clothes and particularly like clothes that you could own for decades, she's I've had this suit for 20 something years. I wore it to my, wedding. I had this, and, I'd be like, yeah, okay. But I got this one and I can get three more before that one runs out at the same price. At a certain point when you recognize that you can buy cheap goods and they're, the items themselves are disposable, you start thinking in that terms and the first time I've heard of that being explicitly cast in that way was what people call sheen halls. Those videos where people would see, show what they got from Sheen. And most of those clothes would disintegrate after a few was, very rarely did they survive a year, yeah. They're not designed to. And it's the same with, and this is a thing that, that I keep hearing about. It's like with with appliances, things like that. There was a time in this country where, you know you bought something and it would last forever, and if it breaks down, you could fix it. Manufacturers now are making things. That it if they break, it's almost impossible for you to fix it. Fix it. Yeah. And so the goal is, why would we make all these extra parts for you to be able to fix it when we want you to just buy another one, buy the newer model or whatever. So it's like they pur they purposely make it difficult to fix because they don't want you to fix it. They just want you to buy a new one. Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is, the companies that tried to go against that grain went out of business. The companies that tried to insure their products and say, yeah, it'll last you a lifetime. There's no money in that for them. No. So is now capital is really the only thing. It used to be your reputation. The fact that you own this thing, you felt proud about it. And it's yeah, I've had this thing for 20 years. You had memories with it. You actually care. You were like, yeah. No one cares. They don't care. Exactly. But you know what he was saying, the antidote to that is, making yourself a little bit uncomfortable finding something you really care about, you called it is making yourself bigger, finding ways that you can be interdependent and be dependable to other people. In ways that are not necessarily financial, with your time and your energy, your attention. That's part of. Why I was bringing this up is because I feel like the economy is collapsing in front of us. So not even in slow motion, but like it's collapsing. And the goods are likely to rise in price by 10% or more. Yeah. A large percentage of people are gonna be without a job and probably unable to find a job for a period of time. Unemployment is fairly low right now, and it's not gonna remain that way. And with that, fewer jobs, more people looking for jobs, meaning people are gonna accept le lower paying jobs where goods are gonna cost more, and it's just like, how are you gonna be able to deal with that? Part of it is, being interdependent with people. Say for instance, you lose your job and you don't have enough money to make it over a period of time. Do you have a backup plan for a living conditions or, do you have a, a place to couch surf? That's a real thing. Yeah. Do you have enough savings to, or, other capital, even if it's not money, like reputational capital. If you asked for a favor from someone, they would be, they would take it considerable. Yes. Serious. Because it's oh, he never asked for shit. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. That's, I try to be, that's why I try to be, I'm like, I ain't, I don't, I'm trying to ask for nothing but what I do, it's damn, you don't never ask for that. You really must need this. Exactly. That is a form of capital. Your reputation is yeah. He doesn't lightly ask for anything. So if you were to ask me for something, maybe I'd be more likely to give it to him. 'cause I know that I wanna save that for when I really need it. Exactly. Are do you have the disposition, the personality, to accept rejection? I think that's one, if you were to ask someone, because I think Greg and I were talking about it one of these other days where someone asked him for something, and he said, no, and then they yell at her. He was like fuck you, you bitch. I didn't run that for you knowing. I think we all have experienced that at one time or another. It's just okay, thank you for making it easier for me to say what I said then, because now you definitely ain't getting shit. Exactly. Yeah. Those are real, real situations, but, yeah. So I'm thinking about that and putting a thought and a prayer for those who. As our economy dissolves in front of us. 



And then we wanna talk about those issues on here for people, our audience, we always try to be a little, it's okay to talk about it. Yeah, let's see if we got any comments or questions. Thick is on his way and demon exists. Good day, cast and audience. How you doing, sir? Glad to see you. Sammy says, Hey, horse and delivered. We are, we loves men. We don't love delivers. This is one I'm gonna throw this one out there. Okay. Oh, I, we got a new guest. Hey, what's going on? Okay, I took myself out. Hey, what's up? What's going on? Yeah, so I got, we just finished our first time. I'm gonna do another one

  

 So for my next topic, I want to discuss the concept of mutual aid. And this is an idea that also comes from the sort of sociopolitical environment that we find ourselves in, and the idea that the federal and many state governments are likely to dismantle social safety nets for people. And I saw this video of a young man talking about his time living in Rwanda and a teaching program. And some of the things that he observed while he was there. And we started to have a deeper discussion about what mutual aid would look like within the United States. And I don't think it can look the same as it did for him in these other countries. So we started making our way back to the church and there have been discussions about the fact that in my own life, a church that I once attended is still considered a, my church in the sense that the people who I met while I was there are still in my life. And I have solidarity with the people there, even if I don't maintain their beliefs. And I also strongly believe in the idea of community outreach. And there are very few local organizations that pride themselves on doing community outreach as a part of their. Existence. And what does mutual aid look like in the United States? And what can we look for, as a stop gap measure for community based aid organizations when federal and state organizations are being starved, their money or outright abandoned? So I will bring you this conversation that I had about mutual aid. 

 

. I'm doing a little things on the economy and, solidarity and things like that because I think we are going into an economic downturn. And I found this video from a, a young man who spent some time in Rwanda as a teacher, and he was explaining. He was explaining like some of the customs of poverty versus I guess I don't know the word I would turn like in, I wanna say not integrity, but poverty versus your pride, and one of the things I, it reminded me of is several people who I've talked to who are from other countries, say Jamaica or let's say Puerto Rico Trinidad, one of the first thing they notice when they came to the United States were homeless people. It's you are the wealth, one of the wealthiest or the wealthiest nation on earth, and you have homeless people everywhere. Like what is up with that? And honestly, I didn't understand what they were talking about at first. They were like, we don't have that issue even though we have much greater levels of poverty in our country. And it was really difficult for them to understand. And I think, this is an interesting story about the same idea in Rwanda, and I was wondering if there's any, is, are there any lessons to be learned from countries that have, I guess they have a lower level of. Infrastructure and technology and wealth, but their social intelligence and infrastructure is much more sophisticated, if that makes sense. Like they have found solutions to problems that don't re, require money or capital goods and things like that. And can we adopt something from them? Okay. Let me see. How does Rwanda care for their unhoused population? It's a very small country, but it's very heavily populated. So you'd think you'd have a lot of unhoused people lining the streets like you do in a city here in the United States. And you do see unhoused people, but it's not as common as you might think. And one of the ways that they keep those numbers low is through housework. Very common house setup is that you have your main house and then you have a courtyard space behind it and then an outbuilding behind that. That courtyard space is where most of your life happens. That's where you cook, where you clean, where you spend your day. And that outbuilding is where you store your food, your charcoal, all of the household goods. And it's very common for a Rand's person to have someone live in the outbuilding. That person is a house worker. They can cook or clean or wash your clothes, go to the market for you. They have a lot of things that they can do around the household. And when we moved to our site in Rwanda, we were teaching there we had a lot of people come to us and say, Hey, if you need a house worker, here's some people who could do that for you. And we didn't have a housework for a long time 'cause we didn't fully understand the culture behind it. And then I remember once having a conversation with one of our students and he was like, why don't you have a servant? And we're like, as an American and as a white person coming to Rwanda and then having an unpaid laborer, having a servant that's not, oh, that's not okay. And they're like, why not? Why wouldn't that be okay? And we're like because it's a servant. And we're thinking like the optics of this class divide. But then we learned that people in our village had started to think that maybe we were a little bit rude, that we had extra space in our house with no one living in it. And that's when we learned that it's actually disrespectful to not have a house worker. I remember the day that it occurred to us that this is why we don't see unhoused people all over the place. It hit us that when we walked down the street, every single property has at least one house worker. There's at least one person there who cooks and cleans and takes care of the property in exchange for a place to sleep and food to eat. And then having this realization that this is how society has always functioned until we ruined it, that you can have servants quarters built behind your house where the house workers live, but it's not degrading them. And it's not even really about using them for yourself or exploiting them. 'cause in the United States, we have a history of people having servants quarters on their property, but that was always some kind of exploitation. And because of that, when you did see someone unhoused on the street, it was only ever because of a mental health reason. Because there are places for everyone. And it's not these institutionalized shelters where you're just taking all of the impoverished people and shoving them together. No, they're just in everyone's households. But even for the people who do sleep on the street, there is food built into the structure of the town for them. Because in Rwanda, there are fruit trees all over the place. Sometimes on the street that there are guava trees or avocado trees, there's all kinds of food trees. And we observed that there are certain trees that people just leave the fruit. And mostly that fruit is left for. The most impoverished children who would especially see this with guava trees that I'm not gonna go and to eat guava off of the tree that's on the side of the road. I'm gonna go down the street and I'm gonna buy guava from a farmer 'cause I could afford it. So if you can afford food, you buy food. But if you can't afford food there, there's not a lot. But there is some for you and there's this honor system and it's a very strict honor system that it's bad culture to eat from those trees. 'cause we had one of these trees that was right across the street from our house. If I went and I started eating from that guava tree, that's just me stealing from starving children. So yeah, I think the approach to the unhoused and the, to the most vulnerable populations is to incorporate them into society there, while in the United States, often the practice is to try to get them outta sight, to push them into the margins of society. So I guess in their society it's just more shameful to be selfish than it is to be poor. Yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking about this one of the things that like I said, people who are from other countries who immigrated here were actually shocked is just how many unhoused people exist. The reason why is just because it's built into the culture to, incorporate them into your house. Like you have servants, you have, workers day laborers, whatever, where there it is not any shame in that work. There's no shame doing that. And it's also. One of the things he mentioned is because there isn't the history of exploitation of workers the way that it exists here, right? Like when you have a service, or if you were to say, I have a maid or a worker in my house, some people are gonna look at you like, what? 

There's a either, I dunno if that's feedback or echo. Oh yeah. Jeff, you might have you might have do you have your speakers on? I don't know. You're welcome by the way. Yeah. We might have an echo on you. Let see if you could turn down your speakers a little bit. I don't know, but I just muted myself. I don't think it went away. Okay. It could be we'll continue to talk, but it was just a little bit, but sometimes I have to use speak headphones. But if you if you have some that'll work. Okay. Grab my headphones, see if that'll help. And it seems to have gone away now. I don't hear it anymore. Oh, no, I think I do, but yeah. I can hear myself when I speak. Can you hear it? Yeah. Yeah, you might have to. Yeah. Can I mute you, Jeff, until you speak. Okay. All right. All right. I'll make sure to give you a chance to respond to this 'cause I definitely want your opinion on it. One of the things that I was gonna say is that with the incoming, recession incoming, one of the things we have to think about is what sort of mutual aid can we provide for each other? And oftentimes, I would, point people to things like the church, for instance, though, like a lot of people have a lot of hangups with religious institutions. But I think one of the things that, like I, I happen to not have an issue with the outreach that my church does. I've never had issues with the way that they spend their money or how they collect their money. 'cause we were talking about that, that mean that you send about a dude who said, lock the doors and we getting some money, whatever. Oh the Marvin Marvin sap, Marvin Snap, Marvin sap. Yes. That would never have happened at my church because all of the donations and the way that the money is being spent is open book. They, we know from month to month how much is collected and what the money is spent on and they vote on the people's salaries. There's no way that you're. Sapping money from the church without people choosing to do that. Did you say sapping money? That is a right choice of though. That's, I don't even know. You're right. That is hilarious. But there's no way that you're bleeding the church dry rain without the consent of the congregation and and so I still feel that is a great thing. I I saw this one person who, they would do a food drive and they would provide shelf stable meals that were basically like canned goods and boxed baking items that you can make. And they had recipes, so it's you could hand out this bag with a recipe and say, you can cook a meal with this. Yeah. And they basically tried to raise enough money through like different organizations like Amazon and Walmart or whatever, you can buy the items. And they had 'em shipped to their house and then they made these meals and delivered them to different places. Like that's the kind of stuff, that I. Churches are for my my, okay. So I, even though I'm, I am spiritual, I still claim my church is my church. Yeah. And never will that's my church. Yeah, me too. Yeah. We used to I think they, I don't know if they still do it because, the city of Atlanta had an issue with, churches feeding the homeless at one point, and they tried, I think they actually did pass a law to make it illegal to do that. I'm not sure if that law's affected wow. Okay. That's kinda silly. Yeah. We used to go out there with like bag lunches and hygiene kits and pass 'em out to the homeless and yeah. So I think their idea was that if you feed them, they'll grow. What is this, like cockroach theory or something? Yeah, exactly. But that's where we are as a country right now. To need help is a bad thing. And you're a bad person if you're not able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go get a job, they pass all these laws that like, if you receive government assistance you can only be on it for a little while and you gotta go get a job and all this other kind of stuff. And again, white people have just taken, the, I guess the culture out of it. 'cause you're right, him being over there in Rwanda and Yeah. The optics would not look good for, to have this white man be like yeah. Black people you come work for me for free. I'll allow that. It's yeah I'll allow you to live in my house with, free. Exactly. I'm not gonna you, but, I got place out back. You can do you in the house, in the basement. Not, he didn't say that he got a servant. He just said exactly. Exactly. He was like, that will abstain from that. Thank you. But imagine us being able to do that here. It's if we have an extra room or something like that, it's like, Hey, you can come stay here. I got a place for you to stay. All you gotta do is, make sure everything's clean and stuff like that. But that would probably do a lot to take care of the homeless situation. Yeah. Because a lot of those people don't wanna be homeless, they just don't have anywhere else to go. And just Yeah, I was saying like, I really do feel like this is gonna be a thing that's gonna happen and for people right now, people probably who are listening to us right now, six months from now probably won't have a job, right? There are gonna, there are gonna be lots of layoffs. Then there's also gonna be lots of price increases. And so there's gonna be a portion of time where you're between jobs and how well you handle that is a huge indicator of how well you can, pick yourself back up, find a new place to live. Are you gonna deplete your savings or whatever financial resources you have at your disposal. Do you have a couch to surf on? Do you have a friend? Do you have a family, that will take you in during a rough time, and I think that's important to consider. I know, like he was mentioning that this applied to large cities in Rwanda. Whereas for myself, I live in a small town, and so it's very common within small towns for there to be networks of friends and family through a church, through school, through family, through tangential relationships where you might take someone in for a few weeks, and you vouch for them because you know them. And you, I don't know. It's not so much as it was, now as it was say 20, 30 years ago. But certainly when I was younger, it was very common for it not to be an issue, to have friends of friends who you called a cousin, which they're not really your cousin, they're staying over, they got whatever people just bring you food for no reason. Like it was a really common thing, especially on Sunday. It was just like food. You pretty much had, you pretty much had lunch and dinner for Monday, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Because people just took care of each other and I think it was, I think it was because we had to. And we're gonna have to discover that again. I think we're, unfortunately there was a sense of community and like neighbors were looking out for other neighbors and things like that, so Yeah. And some of those neighbors were annoying and homophobic and messy. Yeah. And nosy and No, it sure was. As they deliver the food, it's but you didn't hear it from me. Or they'll come bring you a plate just to see what's going on in your house, like Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. None of your local news yet. But yet it's here's that cup of sugar I borrowed three years ago. Oh girl, what you got going on up in here? None of your business, but thank you. So true. Be a damn nosy person. They're definitely trading food for dollars. They wanted know what going on in the neighborhood so they had clout, because who's gonna bring, you exchanged knowledge for food. You did. I know. I'm about to get me a grill. I'm gonna start grill some hot dogs. I'll be like, yeah, but I'm gonna bring over hot dogs. Be like, I grilled this hot dog just for you. It's burn. I know, but I just wanna bring it over. So what's going on? What got going on? I dynasty what's going on in here? Because like I tell y'all, my neighbor across the street, she always got some shit going on in her house. I'm dying to see what are you doing on girl? Oh no, that's too funny. Oh God.



Alright. All right. Do we have any comments or questions? And I will yes. Not many, but we do have some. Okay. Sammy says, go ahead Dr. Jeff. Dr. Jeff in the MF house. Hey, Jeffrey. Hey. Hey Sammy. And, Damon says Rimshot from the draining the church dry. Yeah. That whole barber sap thing is hilarious. Yeah. But Okay let's talk, let's take a quick minute. Yeah. Go ahead. About that Marvin SAP thing. I wanted to bring this up on, on swag show yesterday, but Yeah. Swag got his topics always. I was like, nevermind. No, that's good. But let's reassess this for me or talk about this for a second. Okay. Because he did come back and say, oh and he, okay. So when. You know how they'll apologize, but it doesn't sound like an apology. It sounds s an explanation. Yeah. It sound like an excuse for what they did. Or the reason you actually get outta the context. What I was saying was, there's there was some people, certain people online, and then we had this many people in the church and they all gave this amount of money. We'd make that money, but I never, it wasn't my intention to make anybody feel like I was holding people hostage or that I close the doors. Yes. I feel like a hostage. Yeah. I wanna tell you what I heard. I don't know if you heard him say this as well. He said, I asked him to close the doors because it was a distraction for people to be coming in and out when they bullshit. Minute. We don't believe you, but okay. Yeah. I was like, that was the biggest oh and then he goes to says you know what? I gave more than, I gave the most amount more than anybody in there. I was like, so you're trying to apologize and defend your actions. And then you brag about you gave more than everybody else. Of course. Because you know of your status the most to Right, exactly. First world problems, dude. Oh my. That is a thing. And I and I was saying I hope that you realize that not all churches, I wanna say that quote unquote, now churches do that. Obviously wherever you go, you should understand a place typically should have open books as far as like how much people are getting paid, right? How much projects cost, how much donations are being received and where it's going. That is a normal thing if you are a regular contributor to a church. And if they don't give that information, like you probably shouldn't be going there just saying it's really easy to do. Anyway.

  

 Okay. And  📍 that'll do it for this episode of the M three Bear Cast. If you enjoyed this program, consider becoming a patron. Go to patreon.com/male MediaMind. There, you'll get access to our after shows from our live streams as well as groups on Telegram. We have a Discord server and I am always looking for ways to thank our patrons for their support. I'm also doing a book club. Every month I will choose a different book and we'll talk about it in some of the telegram groups that we have, as well as on the podcast. This month I'm reading the Let Them Theory, I'm trying to find a fiction narrative that we can, derive some conversations about social constructs. I was looking at one. We're still trying to come up with that. That book to read, but that's the idea to read books that will further a conversation on a host of different topics. If you would like to support us without a financial contribution, the easiest way to do that is to simply rate and to share this podcast with people. And you're a podcaster. You can put, give it stars. Or you can share it to your social media page. As always, appreciate your support and thank you for listening, catching the next episode.