Joe Rogan | The Problem with Gab & Minds w/Hotep Jesus

What do you think about all this talk like Elizabeth Warren's talked about it and some other candidates have talked about it, some other politicians have talked about breaking up these big companies, breaking up Facebook, it's too big, break up Google, break up Twitter. What do you think about that? Well, I think we have to study what happened to Standard Oil. What happened to Standard Oil? Standard Oil, they broke it up and it became Exxon, Chevron, Texaco, I think BP, don't quote me on that one. But does anybody have brand loyalty to gas? Does anybody like, dude, I'm a Chevron man? They create those cards, right? Oh, loyalty cards? Gas cards. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. So that's how they create a loyalty program. Here it is, the evolution of Standard Oil. Jamie pulled it up on the screen. Yeah, there you go. Wow. So Standard Oil was too big. Yeah. Fuck this place. Right. We have to move it around a little bit. 1911. 1911 they did this. Right. So if you look at it, it's broken up into, I think it says 34, right? 34 companies, right? So you start them on the left, right? And then as you go, what do you see? You see a consolidation, don't you? You see these merges? Yeah. So when you break up a monopoly, you're not really breaking up a monopoly. What you're doing is you're creating a divide and conquer dynamic. So it's like, okay, I'll let my brother control this one, my sister control that one, my cousin control this one, and you actually corner the market. So breaking up a monopoly isn't exactly a good thing. In that case. Yeah. In that case. And I think we'll see the same thing with Google. If we break up Google, what you're going to do is just have little subsidiaries or little satellite things that will just control a certain segment under a different name, which will make it harder to track back to its source. So when I say break a monopoly, I think that the establishment's like, yeah, come on, break me up, baby. Do you think so? I don't think they want it. I don't think they want to lose any control. I certainly don't think Facebook does. It's not losing control though. They're trying to get rid of Zuckerberg forever. Right? Aren't they trying to get rid of him? The board members are like, that's what they claim, but... Get that robot out of here. Let's look. In the way he drinks water. Right. He does look like a robot. But be a little... In the way he drank water in front of Congress? But isn't that socialism? That's socialism. When the government comes in and tells you what you can do with your cooperation, that's socialism. So what I feel is like the powers that be pushing socialism are like, we can use this as an excuse to infiltrate corporations and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and start controlling this internet space. So the internet space is now communist. I'm of the opinion though, that if we believe in freedom of speech and you create something that's so big that it's essentially a town square, which is what I think these platforms are, you... If you ban people, especially if you ban people for shit like learn to code, like things that don't make any sense. There's people that are getting banned for some pretty ridiculous ideas. That as soon as you start doing something like that, you are going against the fundamental ideas this country has found done. Absolutely. Freedom of speech. I think it's incredibly important that if you have someone saying something that you think is wrong or is hurtful, there should be an avenue where people can examine that and talk about it and combat it with good speech, with speech that makes sense. Yeah. Well, you know, a couple of years ago, last year, I forget, no, it was about a couple of years ago, I was lambasted for defending white nationalists. You know, when they first got deplatformed, some of them got deplatformed with just white nationalists period. I'm like, well, if this is how these people feel, let's listen to them, let's listen to their gripes. What are they mad about? Right. And then people are like, oh, how could you? These people are racist. I'm like, I don't care if they're racist. Like that doesn't affect me. Right. Like I'm not asking them for a job so they can't be racist towards me. You know what I mean? But when you have these groups that people call fringe, I feel like the people that are fringe are the test for freedom of speech. It's not the people in the middle. It's the fringe groups on the outside. If they don't have freedom of speech, everybody in the middle is screwed. So I stood up and I said, yo, let these dudes talk. Like stop doing that. Like, like, you know, I don't care if they're racist or whatever. People call me names. But then now you see it coming down and we lost, you know, Louis Farrakhan. He got deplatformed. He lost his verification, you know, and it's like, you know, he's like, was there anything specifically that he said that allowed him to do that? They just make a sweeping because they got rid of Milo. They got rid of Gavin McGinnis. They got rid of a bunch of people that were on Instagram and Facebook that they had in deplatformed. But it didn't seem like there was anything that happened that caused them to do that. It seemed like they just made some sort of a decision that I think was probably based on preparing for the 2020 elections. Absolutely. So what I think what happened was the banning of Louis Farrakhan. It's just a theory, but they were like, all right, if we ban these conservatives, the conservative crowd is going to just go ape shit, right? But if we throw them Louis Farrakhan, it'll kind of settle things down a little bit because it'll look like we're fair. I think you're exactly right. Yeah. So I'm like, so that's what they did. They're like, oh, let's throw them in there and I'll, you know, smooth things over. That's exactly what I thought when I saw it. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, this seems weird. Yeah. Yeah. It's like they have to justify it. Like, no, we got rid of him too. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a strange time because there's even though there is gab and there's mines and there's a couple other startups that are trying to make their way and the Jordan Peterson one. And there's nothing that really stands out. And once someone starts, once a giant group of people starts using something, unless it's like what's hilarious is when they, one of them vanished like Myspace. How fucking badly did they manage Myspace? Oh man. Because Myspace had it all. Yeah. They had everybody. Yeah. And then it just fucking died and it's still around, but now it's like some fringe music publishing platform. It's very weird. You know, it still exists, but what Twitter is right now and what Facebook is right now and what Instagram is right now, it seems like there's no real competitors, specifically YouTube. There's no real competency. Because when, you know, I don't want to, you know, dog pile on, you know, mines or gab or anything, but the problem is when you build a social network, and this is why I will not build a social network, at least not into the next 10 years, you have to understand that you can't build a social network that mimics another one. Has to be different. That's why snap is still here. Right? Snap is inside a certain demographic. That's my daughter's, you know, generation. That's them, right? They're on snap. So when you build these things, you really have to sit down and say like, you know, what's the, what are we going to focus on? Like with mines, right? You post videos, you post photos, and then how do the photos appear, right? So when I look at mines, mines is my Instagram. When you look at mines on mobile, the font's really small. So it's like, I can't read this. So I'm just going to use this for photos. When I put the photos, it pops up, right? So it's like, is mines going to go that route? Are they going to go the video route? Are they going to go the tweet route? You got to pick one and then grow from there. If you look at Twitter, Twitter didn't have all these features in the beginning. You just had a tweet. That's it. There was no threads. You know what I mean? It's none of that. So you have to start at your core. But when you, the other problem they do is they try to build these social networks completely robust, right? With all the bells and whistles of the giants. Nah, bro. You got to start small and slim and then let your audience tell you what the next feature is. So if you were going to start one up, what would it be? I don't know. Or would you not want to give out that information? No, it's not. I don't want to give it out in information. I think information should be free. But I hate the idea that people want to create social networks. I'm like, they exist. Let's choose the ones that exist and let's just figure out how to make them better. Right? But when you do that, then those have so much power because they can dictate who's on and who's not on. Right. So what you do is when you have something like a Twitter, you use your Twitter to congregate your minds. Right. But then your bills of the world, your Andrew Torbers of the world have to listen to the community and then curate their product around what the community needs. Right. Andrew Torber figured out what the dissenter when he found out, oh, the internet is blocking comments. So he created, you know, you can comment on anywhere on the internet and then Google Chrome smashed it. Right. Yeah. Why did they do that? What was the justification for getting rid of that? They want to censor. They want to censor information. Is that what they want to do? Or they want to keep a competitor from using their platform and profiting off of it? That's how I looked at it. I looked at it from a marketing or a business perspective. Not anywhere about his name. Because it could be, but if it becomes huge, I mean, anything can become huge if it's useful. Yeah. It seemed useful to me that they were going to be able to comment on anything. You'll have like a little link and if you use Gab, you can comment on anything that comes up. Yeah. Yeah. You can look at it like that. I don't. I feel like, you know, their budgets are so huge. You know, their cash reserves are so huge that they're not worried about competition at all. You know, what they're worried about is a controlling thought. And that's their primary goal. Control thought, right? For the betterment of the ruling class. And that's, to me, that's the end of it all. But these people that create tech products, like when we create Coinbits app, or for example, my app Jifotize, do you only do one thing on Jifotize? The only thing you can do is save a video or GIF from Twitter. I always call it GIF. Is it Jif? I think it's Jif. I don't think I ever hear anybody say it. Jif could be correct. I call it GIF. Jif is peanut butter. Jif is peanut butter. But our app does one thing, right? And people love it. When I first came on as a co-founder, this app did more than that. And when it did more than that, it didn't do as well as it does now. What did it used to do? It had incentives to share the app. You could edit GIFs. You could put text on them, crop them, all types of like, it had an editor in there. So I was like, yo, take this editor, toss it out. Oh, we had a keyboard. It still has a keyboard, but I took some of the functionalities and I just started taking stuff out. Just like, get this out of here, get this out of here, get this out of here, and slim it down. As soon as we slimmed it down, we gave it a new face, boom, our revenue quadruple. What's it again? Tell people who let me get it? Yeah, Gifitize. Gifitize, there it is. Jamie's got it. Yeah, G-I-F-I-T-I-Z-E. The ultimate Twitter GIF downloader. Yeah, yeah. And this thing's about to be super huge. We have a gallery coming soon and that's going to be awesome. Going to be perfectly curated. I'll speak to my partner, Simone, this morning about that. That's one of the fun things about Twitter. When someone says something stupid and then you look at all the GIFs underneath it, all the memes and GIFs. Yeah, so we empower people like, black Twitter is on our app. So whenever there's a new video, something funny happens and you use it as a reaction. So on iOS, there's no way to save it. Now you can with our app, but our app only does one thing and everybody's, they love it, right? What's the core of the business? What's the core of minds? What's the core of GAAP? What's the core feature? Does anybody know? There is not a core feature. Yeah, I wouldn't, I would say just something as an alternative to traditional media. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So there is no uniqueness where there is no uniqueness. You can't compete. You have to first create uniqueness or fill a need. There's no need for me to be on these other platforms. The problem is when you get on those other platforms and there's no one there, you go, ah, let me go back to Twitter real quick. Yeah, and that's why I say when you build a social network, before you build the network, you have, I mean, before you build the platform, you have to build the network. What's interesting, if you go back to like 2003 when MySpace was king and then you imagine what the world would be like 16 years later, no one would have saw this coming. No one would have saw all these social media platforms and that it's used as a way of breaking news now. I mean, especially in places that don't have real objective news. So if you're in some country, that's some more torn country and some horrible shit is going down, you see the news breaking on Twitter before anywhere, which is really interesting. Oh yeah. That's why I tell people like screw Facebook and Instagram, the news breaks on Twitter. You know, by the time, you know, by the time I show my friend, my friend shows me a video and like I saw it on Twitter like two weeks ago, bro. Because he's on Facebook or he's on Instagram. Right. So it's like, how do you market a product or market yourself when you're two weeks behind? Mm. Is everything two weeks behind on Instagram though? I get a lot of shit on Instagram too. Like you're Joe Rogan. Yeah, I am. It's a bit different. I guess. And it depends on who you're surrounded by, right? Right. So when we talk about a network, it's like, you know, who are the people connected to? Who are you following? Who's you interacting with? Right. But I get like, well, that's not true. I was going to say I get like most of the fucked up videos of news stories of bad things that are happening in the news come to me on Instagram. But I think- They send it to you. Yeah, but I think it's even. I think it's even with Instagram and Twitter sending me things. Well, when you're Joe Rogan, even if you're a hotep Jesus, like people will say to me, how do you know so much? Like, yo, my followers sent me like books and links and stuff like that. Like they're just sending it to me. You know, sometimes I ask, sometimes I don't, but they're volunteering information. So when you're in that position, you know, you can afford it. But when, so the key to marketing is this, you know, you got your four P's of marketing, but the key to marketing is relevance. If what you're talking about is irrelevant, nobody's paying attention to you, right? Yeah. So the only thing that makes some of these platforms relevant is to juxtaposition to the big tech giants. You remove the tech giants. Are you still relevant? What makes you relevant? Right, right. Right. That's where a lot of people that do content, whether they're, you know, podcasters or whatever, they probably should be thinking about developing an email list and putting things on the website, having something available independently of these big platforms. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Do you want what? But something independent of these big platforms where like if, I mean, you see all these people that have gotten deplatformed and I don't think I'm at the risk of that, but if the, I didn't think these people were just a few years ago as the climate shifts and people get more and more radical with this idea of deplatforming. I think it becomes like a game of like shooting ducks. People get excited about it. They like taking people out, whether it makes sense or not.