#1318 - Hotep Jesus

I need that drop. How the fuck do you get a.

Name like Hotep Jesus? How'd that come about?

It wasn't my idea. You know, I had just went through my spiritual awakening.

I just.

Hip hop industry, and I went through, like, that mace thing, you know, where you go to.

What are you doing with the headgear? We got a lot of lot going on up there.

I had tied my head down. It's a black thing, man. I got school.

So you have spiritual awakening?

Yeah, I had this spiritual awakening, and I'm tweeting on Twitter, like I do, right? And somebody said, what do you think you are, some kind of hotep Jesus?

That was sexy. Yes, I do think I'm a hotel Jesus. That's perfect. And now you own it. That person is probably like, fuck. God damn it. That was a great name I gave that dude.

Yeah. I don't know who that person is or was or where they are now.

Shout out to whoever you are exactly. And vibe high your twitter. Why didn't you switch it to hotep Jesus? Can you switch it? Does anybody own hotep Jesus?

I do.

So you have hotep Jesus on Twitter, too?

Yeah, I reserved it.

Oh, dude, I think they could probably swap. Do you have one of them cute little blue check marks yet?

No.

What the fuck is that? How do you get one of those? I don't know. There's some people that have those that have, like, a thousand followers. How are you getting, like, have you worked for the New York Times or some shit?

I thought you had to hook up. I'll do Joe, and then I get verified.

I don't know how Twitter feels about me. I mean, I think Jack likes me. He's been in a couple of times, but I think the whole. They're. I mean, I think all social media, all tech companies want you to toe a line right now. And if you're not toeing that line and you're bringing on forbidden guests, and you have people that have controversial ideas, they have that finger on the button of getting rid of you. They don't know what to do.

It's just like radio. Radio. A lot of people don't know it, but radio has to play happy songs because happy people buy things. Really? Yeah. Well, that's what the studies say. Allegedly. The marketing studies and advertising studies say people who are in a good mood tend to buy things. Right. So the radio is supposed to play happy songs all day long? And the radio works for the advertisers, kind of like media so on and so forth. So social media is no different. They have advertisers. So if there's people on the platform who are creating disgruntled crowds, could be hurting the bottom line.

Yeah, but Facebook's algorithm actually favors that. The way Facebook has it set up. Like, say if you get into debates with people on abortion or something like very controversial, they will start sending that shit to your feed. They'll sort of steer it in your direction, because the more you engage, the more clicks they get. The more money they get, the more advertising dollars they.

Absolutely, absolutely. The Facebook algorithm is quite unique in the way that things can go viral there. Twitter. I feel like the Twitter safety and council board, what do they call it?

Trust and safety?

Yeah. Is that what it's called?

Something like that, yeah.

So when I go and look at the entities that contribute to that board, I kind of start saying, oh, okay, I see why certain topics are taboo when there's a board. Those people on the board are the voice. They're the ones that have the opinion. So if your group isn't represented, maybe you need to figure out how to get on that board. You know what I mean?

Right. I don't know anybody's getting on that board.

No, it's not going to happen.

And you better be left wing if you're going to get on that board. I don't think there's any.

Right. But do you think. I think Jack's more, like in the middle. Yes, I think he's closer to the middle. I don't think it's Jack. I think Jack's working on a bunch of different projects, but I think it's know whoever else is in the office making the day to day decisions.

Yeah, I like Jack a lot, but I think Jack is in the middle of a gigantic corporation, and there's so many people with so many ideas. Essentially, the founding fathers of our country had a great idea when it comes to freedom of expression. They felt like it was very important that you have free speech and you can't be silenced, you can't be undermined by people who disagree with you, because it's dangerous. It's dangerous when someone can just decide that you can't have a voice anymore and only their voice can be heard. And we're kind of seeing that with Twitter and we're kind of seeing that with Facebook and with Google, and they're deciding what could be heard and what not to be heard. They think they're doing it for good reasons. They think they're doing it to preserve our culture and our civilization, and they want to protect people from the election. Reddit shut down the Donald, the Donald Trump support Reddit page. Yeah, that's not a good idea.

Right before the debate, right before the democratic debate.

And that is like, where all the funny memes come from. And look, man, you can't do that just because if you have some people that are saying some shit that's bad on there, get rid of those people, get rid of that. But you can't just shut down a whole forum. That seems insane. Is there a reason for it?

It's not shut down. It says it's quarantined.

What the fuck does that mean? Does it have a disease?

It's sort of like temporary scatibola. It happens to people. They got to do something. It says there's violent threats. I'm looking to see what. Repeated misbehavior, violent threats.

Skeptical, very. Seems weird, right? I feel like all this stuff is we're seeing what the First Amendment is really all about, why it exists. We're seeing it play out with all these social media sites.

I really think my thing is with the Reddit thing, right. It's very easy to create an actor, right. The left can create a right wing actor online to pretend like it's something about.

Sure.

It's something else. They can go into Reddit, do something malicious to get the whole Reddit banned. Right.

Like an agent provocateur.

Yeah, exactly. And I never leave that off the table. When I look at instances like this, when you say, oh, somebody was, it's the Internet. Everybody's anonymous. Are you tracking this back to who it is? You know what I mean? Do you know it's conservative? Do you know it's a Republican? Are you sure? So I take those things, these pieces of information with a grain of salt.

Yeah, you should.

But is this election meddling?

It kind of is, right? It feels like if you're killing a whole sub. Well, it does. It depends. That would be really interesting if it turns out that it was someone from the left that was posing as someone from the right in order to shut down a forum and pretend there's death threats.

You look at YouTube, right? And what's been happening with YouTube, even just the know, I'm pretty good with keywords. I do SEO marketing. So when I type in certain keywords or find certain things, I know what's going to come up or what type of content comes up. Now, when I type in those keywords, it's like ABC, NBC, ABC, CNN. And I'm like, that's not what I wanted. They don't even talk about these keywords.

What are you talking about?

So when you start seeing that, you start thinking about Ingsock and Orwell in 1984, and socialism and communism and fascism and the degradation of society and a lot of control coming down, people, in some ways, it's like, was the Internet created for freedom or was it created for control? Right. So there's two different pathways. We could probably look at that. But it seems like in many ways, they set us up to be controlled, and they're doing it through monopolies. Google controls search through YouTube and Google. And by what you search, you can think it's a truth. But what did Kanye say? Kanye say Google lied to. So Kanye says a lot of crazy shit, though.

You gotta really think about that.

He does, and I like crazy.

I do, too. I'm a big fan of crazy.

I'm a little crazy. A lot of crazy sometimes. So I appreciate his crazy side more than his calm side.

Well, great things come from wild thoughts, right?

Exactly.

I think the Internet was initially created to exchange information, and then when it got loose to the general public, they realized what a crazy idea that was. What I think we're seeing right now with the algorithms is that these corporations are influencing these companies to say, hey, when someone's looking for these things, how about you send them over to ABC? How about you send them over to NBC? How about, like, we want to be able to get the first views on these things? So if someone's searching for that, I don't know how they do it. I don't know whether they have agreements with them. There's also a lot of copywritten shit that's on there that could get YouTube in some significant trouble if they ever really decided to pursue. I mean, how many videos are on YouTube that people have on their channel that are just straight off of Fox News, or, I mean, there's a lot of copyright protected content that YouTube is essentially profiting off.

Oh, yeah, they make a ton of money off of that stuff. Yeah.

So they might have deals where they say, look, we'll send these people to this first.

Yeah. And that's why, you know, that's where the control comes in. The advertisers. The advertisers are the ones paying for the platform to a thing. It's not us, the users that are paying for it. YouTube's free, so who's paying? Right. They're monetizing us. They're monetizing us, the users and the viewers.

Yeah, that's where it gets tricky. Right? Because as soon as the advertisers get on board, they say, look, we want to give you money, but this content is not advertiser friendly.

Right? Yeah.

And then they start moving stuff around and demonetizing things. And with demonetization, the real thing that they're doing in a lot of ways, whether it's intentional or not, is you're influencing what people post.