J oseph Aaron was helping out the youth – in the ghetto, in St. Louis – but he was broke as a joke and using God as a crutch.
“God hasn’t told me what to do or dropped the money in my lap, so I guess I’ll wait.”
That was his attitude. “I’m just suffering for God’s glory.”
My man was laying on a cross he didn’t belong on.
So he would do a little deal, get just enough money to check outta the $55-a-night Comfort Inn and move him and his wife and their three kids back into a house for a coupla months, and then the money would dry up and the cycle would repeat.
I’m watching Joseph’s talk at the SI Inner Circle Live.
He’s quite the rollercoaster – one moment yelling, next whispering, now on the brink of tears sitting on the edge of the stage, before jumping up and parading through the crowd. His material? A mix of stories and rants and offshoots. Seems like his main goal is to tug at heartstrings and have the audience repeat something every few minutes so he doesn’t lose ’em.
“I was ready to fight back against the injustice, against the dysfunction, and against the pain that the enemy had brought into the world!” he screams, almost outta nowhere.
“WHO’S READY TO FIGHT?!?” he follows it up with.
Meanwhile, I’m over here thoroughly confused. Not sure who the enemy is or what we’re fighting for.
“FOR WHAT IS GOOD! AND WHAT IS HOLY!” Joseph declares, kinda cluing me in – but not really.
Joseph’s dysfunctional belief about who God was and who he was, he explains, is what was cramping his style.
“How many of you have made a world that isn’t real?” he hollers next.
“How many of you have dreamed about doing a thing, but then you start imagining all the bad things that could happen if you do the thing that you’re dreaming about?”
“And so you start treating the real world as if it’s the fictional world in your mind; and it’s a phantom, it ain’t even real. But it’s imprisoning you from the world you wanna create. Somebody say: ‘That’s me!’” Joseph preaches.
Feel like I’d need a compass, a roundtable of philosophers, and maybe some shrooms to make sense of Joseph’s baffling monologue.
“If you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it!” he continues. “You gotta dream it first!”
“And when you start dreaming, the enemy will tell you all the reasons why you can’t. But are you gonna believe the enemy or God? Because God said you were made to create. You were made to make the world different!”
“But there’s a difference between a dreamer and a creator. And that difference? Is a decision. And when you decide to do one thing, you are choosing not to do an infinite number of other things.”
“And so it feels like loss, right?”
“And the paradox is, like, you must decide. You must decide to do it, to make it, to create it.”
“Are you gonna make a world to where you’re financially free? Have you really decided or is it merely a dream? Because dreamers say, ‘It would be nice if…’ And deciders say, ‘It shall be.’”
“I decided to do this. I decided to be… did you hear what I said? Everybody say, ‘Be!’” Joseph shouts.
At which point, I tap out.
I literally can’t take any more.
There’s zero substance here. It’s all sound and fury. Joseph roars about nothingness, pulls God into it, and then peddles high-priced masterminds to fund lavish homes and luxury cars. The end.
I’d rather walk barefoot on Lego bricks than pay thousands for his MXM Mastermind. There, that’s my review.
