Native Lamp Pod is a production of iHeartRadio and partnership with Reason Choice Media.

Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Welcome.

All right, everybody, welcome home.

This is Native Lamb Pod.

It is a mini pod, and we are so thrilled to have some very very special guests joining us today.

Isaac Hayes is the founder and creator of fan Base, and he is joined today by a producer who recently had a very viral conversation with him, Tamisha Harris, about fan Base and why we should be utilizing our own platforms, especially in this day and age.

We just had a whole conversation about fascism.

We know a little bit about that.

We are witnessing it all together.

So we are grateful for you all coming here and joining us today.

Thanks for having us.

I'd love if we could get started one give us a little background.

On each of you.

What brings you really to this work?

Mister Hayes.

You can imagine that there are a lot of fans out.

There of your of your name.

Uh but yeah, but your family obviously, and uh is it Tanisha Misha?

Yeah, I thought it was a m but I thought I wrote it down wrong.

Yeah, Tamisha, I'm curious because I saw your video as well, and I was telling the ladies before how not alarmist you sounded.

I know you referenced.

You know I'm not a you know, I don't you know, I'm not being sensational.

I'm telling you that we're under threat.

Give us in our audience a little bit of background as to what brings you one to that point, and I think basically through your background, they'll understand it a little bit better than obviously Sam for you, Missays.

Thanks Andrews.

So I think for me, I have been a news producer, local and network news for since I want to say, twenty eleven, and so, you know, watching how stories are being told, watching how our community is impact by the way we tell stories or the way that we don't tell stories, has always been of concern to me.

But you know, we keep working, you know, because you have a job to do, so you just keep working and you do what you're supposed to do.

For me, I started by making sure we brought women on air, that our lineup of subject matter experts were diverse, so we can hear from their point of view.

Even an Angela ry Angela you've been on several of my shows.

So it's bringing on guests who can speak to from a certain perspective that our community can understand that's important to me.

And then from there it started to become more of a more critical issue from me that once the networks started losing their base, the views social media is now it's becoming clear that's where we're getting our news, and it's a good time for us to take hold of it and and get our legacy anchors, the Tiffany Crosses, get them, get them in one space so that we're not all spread out, so we can come as a collective and be incredibly powerful.

Now that we can own the space and get organized so that when anything does come down, because we all know that things get organized, things are being organized, that we are also organized and we are forceful, and that we're bringing the correct information to the people who need it most, to the people who uh uh.

Mainstream media may not focus on because they have other focuses.

They have a wide group of people that they need to focus on.

But we we have a collective, we have a specific we have specific challenges in our community that we have to address, and so that's what brings me.

That's why I say fan base is a is a good opportunity for us.

I don't have a vested interest in fan base.

I have a vested interest in getting our stories out, get our getting our stories told accurately.

To me.

Sure.

I love that you said that you don't have a vested interest in fan base, because there's an article that just came out about creators who have been paid by a platform, and there's all of this solations.

So the fact that you're like, hey, let me disclose this, this is what I just believe is the right thing to do.

And to that point, we actually were challenged by a native lampod viewer who said, why aren't y'all on fan base?

And we were on the pod and I was like, you know what, we need to be on fan base.

So I don't know if if Tip and Andrew started their accounts yet, but I did mine.

I opened up your start of line to go ahead.

Angela'sation good, so I started, mind, we have a native lan one, Isaac.

I want to hear from you about why this is so important your biases.

Of course, you are the owner of this platform, but why is it important for us to have our own be in our own space, especially in a violent time like this.

Well he's aheading the curve.

Yeah, Well, from the beginning of social media, I think black people have always influenced the culture.

If we go back to black Planet, black Planet page looks very similar to a MySpace page, and between now and then, we haven't really had a social media platform founded by someone that's African American, and I think that or that's founded by someone in African American that it has at least achieved the level of success that fan Base has and the opportunity there.

I'm more interested in infrastructure because the infrastructures of these social media platforms reach hundreds of billions of dollars, and the people that own those platforms, the people that monetize those platforms, take that wealth and they and they pass agendas that work against black people.

So Elon has x there's.

True social Zuckerberg tends to flip flop between whatever it is and whatever's going to happen with TikTok.

I'm pretty sure the Trump administration is going to have their hand in that.

And so the design for fan Base to build something that was black OneD, but for every single person on the planet to use because we have to look out for ourselves.

We have to make sure that we're not getting shadow band, our accounts aren't getting deprioritized, we're not getting pushed off these platforms, and then more importantly, owning these platforms, because again the idea behind creating a social media platform that people could actually have equity in is because we know that black culture puts social media equals billion dollar platforms, but we never have equity and ownership of these platforms.

And then we beg to be respected, we beg to be let in, we beg to be acknowledged, we beg to be equal, and no one has ever gone and just taking the step up, let's build the infrastructure.

Like I always look at Black cultures like vibranium.

This is our vibranium.

We're the only people on planet Earth that can make this.

We're the smallest culture group on the planet and we're the most influential African American people.

When you pour pour a black culture into a shoe, you get a Jordan.

You pour pour black culture into a record player, you get DJ culture.

When you pour black culture into a phone, you get social media.

But we have to think about who's going to own those infrastructures first, because they're literally scaling these things two hundreds of billions of dollars, and we have to start creating generational wealth, and on top of that, we have to start creating wealth collectively.

I am happy for everybody that's black in this country that has had individual success, all the millionaires and billionaires, but that is doing nothing to pull black people out of.

The wealth gap.

So what we need to start to do is invest in infrastructures that are technologically based, so tech tech founded, tech based that need black culture to survive, and then invest in those by the thousands, and then scale those platforms two hundreds of billions of dollars, not a billion, not twenty billion, two hundred three hundred billion, like Byte dances worth three hundred and thirty billion dollars.

Instagram separated from Meta is a four hundred billion dollar company.

Meta itself has a one point eighty five trillion dollar market cap.

We need something like that in our community that we own.

So rather than having one Zuckerberg, we canna have a twenty three thousand multimillionaires and billionaires that are invested in a platform and scaled it up.

I know you guys want to I know you guys have to jump in.

I just want to say one thing real quick.

If I'm looking at just as a as a viewer, as a person who watches the news, and I'm watching Tiffany, and I trust Tiffany.

Tiffany is the person that I watch every single day, every single night.

I trust, I trust Angela.

These are the faces that I'm I'm used to seeing, so I trust them.

Andrew, if for whatever reason, you all are shadow band the trusted people that I need to get to, I can't get to you, especially when there's information that needs to get out.

That's my big push with fan base right now, particularly with this administration.

If there's something that needs to get out, and for whatever reason, these tech founders are acquiescing to this administration, We our community can't afford not to not to hear what Angela has to say, not to hear what what Tiffany has to say, and Andrew has to say.

We can't afford it.

We have to know what to do.

So that's why it's important for that's why it's important for us to be in on it, on a platform that will not silence us regardless of how you feel about a Isaac or whatever.

It's bigger.

I wanted to to jump in here on one just for context for our viewers.

Isaacy reference Bite Dance.

That is, of course, the parent company of TikTok, which they accord, the d o J, the FDC, all the people said, you have to sell TikTok in order for it to operate here in the United States.

So it's caught up in a lot of policy.

Uh So we'll keep our eyes and keep our viewers informed on what happens there.

My question, I want to go to you to Misha on this because long before I was ever on air, I was a producer and executive producer, bureau chief, and so I would trade war stories with you, my friend, as a fellow survivor of network news, because I know how challenging that is as a black woman, and navigate some of those spaces and advocate for stories that I imagine that you did in your long career.

Part of what you're describing I have experienced as a double edged sword when people began getting their news from social media.

One I understood it because mainstream media summarily dismissed our lived experience.

If the only time you saw outrage about a kid in a hoodie being shot was on a meme, or a twelve year old being shot, or a black woman winding up dead after being arrested.

If the only place that your interests and your stories and your outrage was reflected back to you was on Facebook or Instagram, of course that is where you were going to gather.

However, what we saw particular leading up to the twenty sixteen election is bad actors, foreign adversaries completely infiltrated these places and pretended to be a quote unquote journalists, influencers, commentators, et cetera.

And they were gaining traction.

Of course, that was the IRA, the Internet Russia agency who spent millions of dollars on these campaigns, reaching millions of black people, and we certainly saw the results.

Now you cut to years later, I imagine China has invested interests and the information we get.

I imagine Iran has invested interests and the information we get.

So as social media became more democratized and who has a voice, I do fear that people missed who is an actual reporter, who is a journalist, because having an opinion does not make you a journalist.

I mean Native lampod we are technically under in news category, but we are not reporting.

I try to inform.

I think we all try to inform, but it's a lot of opining.

And so because someone comes out and you know, because someone has two million followers, their podcast gets two million viewers, people will take a Joe Rogan like, oh, you're a voice of authority, and that to me has created a danger.

It has aided misinformation and disinformation.

So as you're promoting people getting their news on social media, how do you balance that with who to identify as a trusted voice, How to know the difference between someone who is a commentator offering an opinion, someone who's an actual reporter who did the reporting themselves, someone who's citing someone else's reporting, Because those are all very crucial things, especially at a time like this, when fascism is on the rise because of misinformation and disinformation.

I love that question so much, Tiffany.

And here's why we're moving to social media.

Whether we like it, we're here.

So whether we like it or not, we're already here.

This is mainstream TV, right.

There is a clear difference in anyone if someone wants the real information.

There's a clear difference in a Tiffany Cross as opposed to someone who just started as a journalist or someone who doesn't have the information.

Because Tiffany is going to give us the background story.

Tiffany has done the research.

You hear it and you know it.

Tiffany.

You know when you hear a real journalist, that person is going to give you both sides.

That person is going to bring on guests so we can get the full picture.

There's context there.

A person knows if they want the real information.

It's very clear what Angela sounds like.

It's very clear what you sound like.

That's not.

A sophisticated enough.

As we continue to cord cut from cable news right after being ignored, younger generations are not reading newspapers like they literally.

I hear so many people say I want to be a journalist, and they have no idea what that means.

They think that I'll get to go on TV and talk, and I'm like, journalists don't talk.

They listen like you are not giving an opinion as a journalist.

So I don't know that.

The same way we were taught, Tiffany, the same way we were taught what is your source this?

We always ask that question, what's the source?

And then who's paying them?

We have to know, we have to teach people how to learn, teach people how to source if it's a real if this is a if this is all the information that they need, if this is a true source.

We teach them because they're just learning.

You know, this is a new space and they need to know how how okay is this information right?

We tell them, we break things down, start from the backstory.

We teach them how to source news so they can so they can become sophisticated the same way we did.

It's just a different platform.

To that point, Tomisha, you said, we are here.

We are in the land of social media.

This is where people are getting I get stuff from social media on our news sites.

I'm like, this is easier to pull this clip from here than it is here.

Let me send this over to somebody, right.

But I think that what also is important about what Tiff was raising is the ways in which these folks have been validated is by the number of followers.

There have been recent reports that talk about the number of conservative hosts or influencers who pay for their followers.

They actually didn't earn those people.

They're not right.

There are these audiences that have been curated and built because they were able to pay for them.

So, Isaac, can you talk about how fan base is different in that regard?

Can you buy followers on fan base?

If not, how are you preventing that from happening.

No, you can't buy followers on fan base.

But more importantly, I want to be very clear that linear television is dying and even the way that we consume all media and I mean music, I mean podcasts, I mean Netflix, Hulu, anything that you consume media wise is going to be distributed through a large social network in the future.

It is not We're not going to get on our TVs and go to Netflix.

We're not going to go to Hulu.

We're not going to turn on direct TV or Infinity.

We're going to go and watch all of these things, listen to these things through a Facebook, through an Instagram, through a Twitter, through a TikTok, or a fan base.

That's how all media is going to be consumed.

It's going to be pushed all into one place, and that's how we're going to receive all of our information, be it entertainment, fun, community, all these things, and so I'm not you know, I didn't build a platform to silence people or even pretend or buy fake followers.

I actually built a platform so that people can have the reach that they actually have on these platforms.

You're suppressed on Instagram, You're suppressed on platforms like x and TikTok.

You're suppressed because your reach means money.

So if you're someone that has one hundred million followers on Instagram, they're not letting you reach one hundred million people because one hundred million people garners the ability to charge eight million dollars for a one minute commercial like we do on the Super Bowl.

So really, ever since.

Video got added to social media, it turned every single person on the planet into a television network.

We are all TV networks.

If you have a social media platform and you have video, you are a network.

Now on fan Base, it's free to down, I'm free to download, a free to use, and even free to post content.

But you can simultaneously take content and put it behind a paywall in charge as well.

So it now gives the freedom for every single person on the planet to be their own content provider to a community of people that are going to consume content as a community.

We're going to watch shows together, and we're going to talk about them in audio rooms, and we're going to chat about them in real time, the same way young people are doing on Twitch.

And so I'm ahead of the curve.

I understand that this is where everything is going, that the new networks of the future are human beings and not networks themselves.

So the infrastry lecture just has to be fan based again a.

Regular like because you're saying, like every well, because everybody, if everybody is their own network, and you're saying like, yeah, you know, I'm free to download, like something I find very curious, like Angela saying that these conservative people they buy their viewers.

It's very true.

They also frolic where where they're their bots or they're real people who like you know, Blue Sky was a platform that you know, was I think skewed to the left, and so a lot of people were there, and then as it grew on popularity, this huge surge of maga people came and started you know, dropping fake information there, harassing people.

How do you regulate, like their regulation determines you know, what is constitutes hate language or hate speech, what's appropriate or somebody uploads you know, naked pictures or porn.

If somebody is spreading disinformation that you know is spreading disinformation, what does the regulation look like on fan Base?

Well, artificial intelligence is a real big part of how you monitor content.

Now, human moderators were hard.

It's impossible to moderate content with just human beings.

So when you think about content ingestion engines that are see what's written, see what's spoken, see what's in the video.

There's a lot of platforms that use that and it's called like moderation software, and AI makes it faster and easier to do.

And we actually use that software on fan Base, and we actually are building a stronger recommendation engine to actually serve people content that they want.

So artificial intelligence is definitely going to help.

You know, you can fact check a lot of things through artificial intelligence.

Now I wouldn't necessarily I trust trust all artificial intelligence platforms may be the one that Eline built per se, but the ones that can provide factual information and links and the way that you train artificial intelligence tould be absolutely truthful.

Then there's no getting around the truth.

When the truth is.

There you know, Isaac, just picking up where you left off.

I think it's also important that in these communities that we police each other, that there's accountability by the folks who are signing up and subscribing, who are contributors.

I think you know in Tiffany you know as well.

I think just the democratization of access through these technologies to people has yes inflated a lot of people's personalities.

And you know, there's a lot of mess out there, and a lots you don't.

You know, you don't want to get into the uh, into the ears and the eyes of of of of your kids and and and friends.

But but I'm curious to know, is you you talk about building well for our community and ownership for our community, and certainly the opportunity for authentic and real truth tellers to be heard, not censored, not reduced to the algorithms so that you never get to hear their voices and access their content.

How you know, it's one thing for you to make it, and it's another thing for you to have a commune are your folks, Because I think frankly, more begets more, uh, the more of yous that exists, the more of us that are out here demanding it, and then we start to expect it, and then we start to say, if it isn't this, that I don't want it.

What's the community look like of folks who are also building, you know, frankly, as you all climb, are there more?

I mean?

Yeah, So fan base is just an organic community, right, of course, it started with seed investment of myself and then investment from people that decided that they want to own the.

Future of social media.

Martin Brock.

Communities heavily African American.

Yeah, of course, absolutely shout out, shout out to Roland.

But it's people that believe that we actually really need to be able to say the things that we want and have a way to speak.

Now, my concern in talking to you guys, and I get a little I get a little concern with black media is that I feel like in this area, black media does not do what black media should do a lot of times in highlighting the stories that can uplift our community or bring attention to things like that.

You mentioned Blue Sky just to sheer.

Fact that twenty five million people went from X to Blue Sky in sixty days raised the value of that company to seven hundred million dollars.

It was just a sheer volume of people deciding that we want to leave one place and go to another place, and so it's just the actual fact of downloading.

That's why how Tamisha and I got together.

Tamisha said, Isaac, I need to come talk to you, and she was like, fan base is an emergency.

If we don't get on this platform, we're not going to have a place where we can have our conversations, meet, organize virtually, you know what I'm saying, to create physical organization and activation.

And so that's the part that's extremely important.

I understand that social media was a toy from two thousand and four, you know, all the way up to maybe two thousand and sixteen.

But now it is a tool, and we have to take control of the tools that disseminate the information to our community.

And so it's open for everybody.

Like I said, we're in one hundred and ninety country countries and territories and we're both on iOS and Android.

So this is a global platform.

And we talk about Africa coming on wildly to the Internet in the next few years.

It's almost two billion people that will be platformed and who's going to who's going to own the infrastructure of the platforms that they use to communicate and do that, And so black people have to own our own sources of media and have those conversations.

So when I say, if you can't say what you want, how you want, how often you want, the way you want, that's what I call media.

That's what I call where.

It's like, if there's an injustice happening anywhere, it doesn't matter if it does, if it's not good for ratings, if it's not good for whatever it is.

If truck drivers are going missing, if team if black teen girls are getting sex trafficked, if young young boys are getting harassed by the police in DC, and the only way that we know this is by them pulling out their own cell phones and sharing it to a community like fan base or social media.

And that's what we need.

And that's the urgency and importance of having this platform.

I love it.

I know we've got a run and we can't keep y'all all day, but we leave people with takeaways, admonishments, things that they must do as a result of this conversation.

And I'm curious for both Timisha, you and Isaac, what instruction do you have for folks?

What should they take away from this conversation as an admonishment to go and do something.

Thank you Andrew.

Just real quick, what I see is that our stories are not a priority.

Whereas you saw in twenty twenty, we were seeing all kinds of stories on police brutality, we were seeing stories that impacted black people come to the forefront in the news.

Now we are really fighting to even get a story that needs to be an urgent story that impacts us.

We are fighting for that in in our production meetings and for me, that impacts us greatly.

That's my concern.

We need to be able to get our stories out, to be able to make sure that we are helping our our people, our communities.

So my last words are for the media people, for the anchors, the reporters, join fan I say, joined fan base, so that we know we have a specific place for where you're going to be that we trust, because we trust your voice, we trust your research.

We just need you all in one place.

That's what I'm saying.

I love that, Thank you, and and for me, I would say invest we don't you know again, I love the individual success.

I love all the black being a billionaires we have in the United States of America.

But if we have fourteen black millionaires billionaires, we need one hundred and forty more, or we need thousands and thousands of millionaires because agendas are bought, right, These agendas are purchased.

Elon Musk bought a whole social media platform so he can win an election.

And what I'm saying is that I tell people that if you want to own and own a piece of fan Base, you can do that.

Now.

I know that Angela talked about investing.

I think you guys have talked about investing.

But anybody that wants to invest and actually own part of this platform, go to start engine, dot com, slash fan Base and invest the minimum it's three hundred and ninety nine dollars, and I feel like we have over twenty three thousand investors.

And again, we have to take this opportunity to own the infrastructure of the things that we make great.

If not, we will be customers to our creations.

We just we will be the talent and we will not be the infrastructure.

And that is my ask, is that people actually invest in fan Base and own a part of it.

I love that.

I love that, as you all mentioned at this onset of this black people you know well box our weight.

We've always out boxed our weight since our arrival here in this land.

And so.

Uh uh, if we make the choice, we then set the curve for everything that then comes after.

It's just it's a fact.

I think, Tiffany I can say it's a fact.

You're funder that phrase.

Uh.

And Angela, I know you bought us in and you want to close us out, But I just want to say, on behalf of our listeners, you want to thank you all for this, for sounding the alarm, but also for setting the agenda.

The plate.

You know what we have to look forward to.

I'm looking forward to it.

And before I just want to say, really quickly, Isaac, when you hear me say on a platform on the public states that will be customers of our creation, I'm giving you credit in my heart you.

Yes, because she will out loud sewer.

We freestyled greatness.

When you hear that again, you won't get credit, but.

In my heart because you dropped like three barns and I'm just I'm taking them well.

At some point, even when we borrow from each other, we shall all be free someday, So we thank y'all for joining us.

Isaac Hayes and Tamitia Hairs are really really grateful for this conversation.

You all are always welcome back.

Welcome home, y'all, Welcome home, get on base.

Thank you, Flavor Flavor Boy, I tell you by my damn.

Thank you, guys.

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