early, but these changes I've made, if you wait five years, well we'll be in good shape then. I've really set this up for the future. No, it's not good now because it's an investment, right?

So if Zuckerberg were not the head of his company and he said, all right, Facebook maybe isn't killing it at the moment but look what I'm doing with Meta. Right? Meta is Zuckerberg's way of saying we're doing something good that you can see. Hey, look at this. Pictures of us in Meta. Hey, look at these goggles that you wear. Hey, it's all visual and it diverts you from the fact that their core business doesn't have a future because young people don't use it.

So you see this effect everywhere all the time. It's universal. It's every company, every organization. Managers manage to what can be seen and easily agreed upon by observers, especially their bosses but also the public. So it's not a case — and this is where everybody will go wrong — it's not a case of there are not enough diversity hires. That might also be the case. Might also. And that would be systemic racism, blah blah blah. But if you have a situation where everybody has to have a high number of diversity hires and everybody's scrambling for the same limited pool of people, in theory and in practice you will always get lower performance. Not because the people are bad but because the managers will manage to the look, not the reality.

Does that — am I clear enough about that distinction? There could also be a question that there just aren't enough. You know, the limited pool of who everybody wants to hire because everybody's looking at the same pool of people. It might just be a shortage of people. That would give you a terrible result too. But you don't even need that. Those people could all be better than everybody else and the fact that people are managing to the look still gets you to a bad place every time. So it's a Dilbert problem.

And I would summarize it this way. I'd say that wokeness is a good goal that became a bad system. I would, on top of what I've said already, every good idea gets ruined by exaggerating it to absurdity. Let me give you a concept. Are taxes a good idea? No, some absolutes say no, no taxes. I think taxes are a good idea because it allows you to fund the military. Yeah, fund the military. But are the current level of taxes good? No, it's too much. Everything that's good in small amounts will eventually be ruined by people who have figured out how to make money by taking it too far, right?

When I say that the base idea of woke is a good goal, I got a lot of pushback. But here's what I mean. On day one, on day one it was a good idea. By day three it was already ruined. On day one it looked like, you know, wouldn't it be great if we treated everybody with the same level of respect? And that's what I think wokeness is at its base. To which I say yes. Yes, on board. Everybody should be treated as their own individual and respect them totally unless their individual performance says otherwise. Absolutely.

But as soon as you go from treat everybody with respect and oh, and by the way I'd like to be called by these pronouns, to which I also say okay. You know, don't judge me if I get it wrong, but I like calling people what they like to be called. It's just polite. And next thing you know, white people are hired last. Like we immediately went from treat everybody with respect to everyone except white people. That's where we are now. It's literally just anti-white now.

Does that mean it was always a bad idea? No, no. It's like everything else. Everything starts as a good idea. It just turns to shit when it gets extended by the grifters and the media. Like everybody's got to talk about it. They've got to signal. They've got to be on that team. And actually, you know, Drew Barrymore is underneath in front of a trans activist on her show. That was big news today. And I think that was a trivial, trivial news bit. But yeah, everything goes too far.

So here's what I'm going to do for the world. If you've been watching me for a while, if you've read my past books, you know that I always talk about systems being better than goals and you know that I like to reframe things. So I'm going to show you the first draft of my four-page PowerPoint presentation. The title of it, I think you can see it there. I'll read it. The racism mindset and the success mindset. Choose one.

Now I could just go home after the title page because that's the whole story. They're incompatible. They're incompatible. The racism mindset or the entire topic has lots of good historical things we should all know. So in terms of information it's pretty good. I like the information. But if you make it your focus and you build your systems around looking backwards, you're doing everything that's the opposite of what successful people do. And I'll detail that on this page.

So on one column — I showed you an earlier version of this. I'm just refining it because I think it's important. So on one column you've got the things that racism cares about. Equity. Well, I'll just read it to you. Equity, focusing on the past injustices, systemic racism, reparations, dividing people by race. That's the racism mindset. Does that turn things into oppressor and victim model? Resentment. Resentment of current people for not doing enough as well as old, you know, the long dead. And then the racism mindset is basically could be summarized as I can't because I can't succeed because racism. I can't get this job because racism. So it's a can't because philosophy.

Now the success mindset has a direct or pretty direct — sometimes a little indirect but correlation — where what you would do for success would be instead of focusing on equity you would say how about winning? How about winning? Have you ever heard anybody in the success industry like somebody who really knows about how to do success have you ever said if you work hard you could be average? You know, if you put your muscles into it and your brains and you work hard you could be as good as other people. That's ridiculous. Any success mentor will tell you why aren't you trying to win? If everybody tries to win and we're playing by fair rules and we're not breaking any laws, the whole society is better. Just everybody try to win. That works.

How about focusing on the past versus focusing on the future? If you want to be successful you have to focus on the future. It's not optional. Nobody ever got successful just thinking about the past. Or how about systemic racism? It's a real thing. You can't forget about it. Can't ignore it. But if you have a success mindset you're not thinking about what's stopping you. You're thinking optimistically. Nothing can stop me. Oh, your problem is systemic racism? No problem. That won't stop me. Oh, your problem is that you're short. Let's say you're a man and you're short. No problem. I'll work with that. I'll make that work. Your problem is that you're less healthy or maybe you're disabled. No problem. I'll make that work. Yeah, I can make that work.

So the success mindset is all about the problems won't stop you. The racism mindset is all about the racism did stop you. It did and it's going to keep stopping you. So that's what your brain should focus on.

The cleanest one is reparations. Reparations is you owe me something. Whereas the success mindset is what can you do for other people? And also reciprocity. If you're Jeff Bezos, talk about Amazon, right? What made Amazon work? He says an obsessive focus on the customer. Did that work out for Amazon? Yeah. I use Amazon specifically because I can feel their obsessive focus on the customer. You can feel it. It's like it's like an actual feeling, right? Everything from the one-click shopping to how easy it is to reorder things. It is insanely customer focused. And that's Jeff Bezos. That's all Jeff Bezos. He is forcing them to be customer focused and probably there's a big problem when they're not. My guess is that you probably get fired if you lose that focus for a minute. Now that's a winner's attitude.

But looking at things as reparations, you owe me, is a short-term strategy at best. The racism mindset divides people by race. But if you're in a success mindset you're playing the odds. Why would you limit yourself to part of the public by thinking that some people are against you? Stay away from these people, whatever. Network is you try to meet as many people as you can from wherever might come in handy.

Of course the racism mindset is about resentment. And how does that work if you're trying to find a mentor? Imagine you're a young Black person. You're trying to make it in the world. You're in a big company and you'd like to find a mentor because everybody would like it. It's good to have a mentor. But most of them are white. What do you do if you have resentment toward white people for racism? It's going to be harder to get a mentor because I think that resentment is going to come through pretty quickly. Like people are going to notice. Yeah, you can't really hide it. It would come out in your language and the things you focus on, et cetera.

And then the can't because it turns into the can-do mindset with success. So that's the list. I think you should be at least at the very least you should agree that the lists don't line up. Would you agree? Would you agree that the racism mindset the way it's being used in America is opposite of the success mindset? That's the thing that bugs me the most. And part of what is misunderstood about me is that I'm coming from everything from a success filter, not a race filter. But if you come from that filter it can be really jarring. It can be jarring to somebody who's in the other filter. It's very jarring, as we learned.

But I should also say that you don't want to ignore history. You want to teach the history, of course. But don't focus on it. You should focus on strategies for the future. It's just a focused question. Don't forget that.

And then here's the kill shot. All right, I'll read these but you can see it's just three points. The kill shot is the persuasive dagger that I'm gonna put into some people reading this. Here's the dagger. A child who learns the tools and strategies of success will do better in life than one who is taught to see life as a racist struggle. How does that feel? How does that feel? Yeah, you're killing your kids by teaching them the wrong frame. You're just ruining their lives and you know it. You can't argue with it because nobody's going to argue that ignoring the tools and strategies of success to focus on race struggle is a good strategy. Literally no one would believe that. And yeah, we're doing it. So that's the dagger there.

Here's some explanation. Point two. The media, race grifters, well-meaning teachers — see I'm not insulting teachers but well-meaning teachers — and professional activists are poisoning race relations and destroying the future of Black American kids by teaching them a losing mindset. Do you think the Asian American kids are learning to focus on race or are they learning to focus on building a talent stack which is central to success? Maybe they're focused on staying out of jail and not doing drugs, which are essential to success right now. We got to stop pretending that every culture is being raised with useful mentoring messages. It's just not happening. Some of the cultures are getting useful mentoring success-related messages and the Black culture is being poisoned into thinking there's a reason that's going to hold them back and nothing's going to change it. That's what they're taught.

And I would imagine that the progressive white part of the population is taught the same thing so they would be on board with that. But it doesn't matter as much that progressive whites buy into that frame because it's not them. It's not them. They're probably going about their own lives however they want. But I'm watching something that looks like a Black holocaust. With you know obviously that's hyperbole. I'm looking at something that's a disaster for Black Americans and I don't think they're doing it to themselves. I believe that white America is allowing the situation that is the current situation. To me it looks like the media assigns people's opinions and the media is still controlled by white people. So if we have these opinions it's because somebody told the left and the right what to think largely and then they adopted those opinions. And those opinions are not coming mostly from Black people, right? It wasn't Black people who canceled me. I had zero cancellations from anybody Black. Zero. It was all white people.

So I don't see the blame being squarely on anybody in Black America. I see the teachers unions being evil and they're a mixture of everything. I see white Americans creating the situation that's not good for anybody. And I think the only people who can save themselves are Black Americans because if Black Americans rely on white people to help them with their reparations they're going to get the Gavin Newsom treatment. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, we'd love to help you. How about you do a committee and come back with your recommendations on reparations, huh? And then I'm helping. Look at me being supportive. Good, good going there. I'm so supportive. No. Only Black Americans can help Black America.

And if you think that I'm talking about like white tricks for success, no. It's what all Black successful people do. It's what all white successful people do. It's all the same. Look to the future. Be optimistic. Use some gratitude. Have reciprocity. Just basic stuff. Build a talent stack. Stay out of jail. Have systems over goals. There's like 12 things you have to learn. It'll take you 20 minutes to learn all 12 of them, right? It would take you 20 minutes to learn all the techniques of success. 20 minutes and then you're good to go. There will still be lots of racism but you'll cut through it like a hot poker through butter.

And then my final statement here to close down is the reason no one told you this before is because there is a high social penalty for doing so. There's a high social penalty for being honest on this topic. I don't know if you know anybody who had that issue. Now my problem was not the honesty. It was the hyperbole. The honesty part everybody was okay with. But I did cause a little trouble more than I thought by a little extra hyperbole. But I was, as you know, the people who have watched me use this pattern before, they know that I was causing trouble to draw a fire. I didn't think I'd draw that much. It was a calculated risk. I knew there was a risk. So that's why I'm not complaining. The reason I'm not complaining is because I intentionally did something with a high risk that I had in my opinion a potential high reward for the country, not for me. And maybe it didn't work out so far. I'm pretty happy with how things are turning