One of the greatest philosophical arguments of our time is the question of free will. Do you believe you have free will? Do we actually have free will? Or is it an illusion? There has been an answer to that. I think many people accept — most of the smartest people I've listened to answer that question always answer it with no, clearly, first of all, but they go on to explain why it is so.
And it is because of all the preset conditions that we are born into. You don't necessarily have free will because too many people influence you, and too many factors influence you, before you have a choice. And so that narrows your path to a very, very strong degree.
You would have an absolutely different life if you could choose at age three what secondary school in this whole wide world you want to go to. If you had that choice, and you were given that choice, and you made one, we can say you have free will. But because your parents had to make that choice for you — your diet, people had to make that choice for you for a very long time.
Maybe the school you chose to go to, in terms of boarding, their diet affects your health history throughout the course of your life. And you didn't make the choice of that school, maybe you didn't make the choice of the diet. But also your health can affect the decisions you make in the future. The point is, you do not have free will because there are too many external factors narrowing your path.
So you're just picking from the list of options you have in front of you. And I hope you are convinced as well that we don't have free will when it is explained to you in this manner.
Are you aware of propaganda? Propaganda is people wanting you to think a certain thing by feeding you, you know, misinformation or inaccurate information. You know the idea of propaganda — how they would want a mass of people to have one kind of thinking, or ideology, or opinion on a matter, by feeding them intentionally a specific kind of information that would help them support that agenda, or believe that propaganda. It happens everywhere. This entire world is running on propaganda at the highest levels, and people who believe that they cannot be manipulated are the easiest to manipulate.
Many people really become manipulated because they believe that they have a high resistance to it. The higher the resistance you think you have, the easier it is for people to manipulate you. Because when you believe that you can't be manipulated, you let your guard down. If you believe that everybody has the possibility of tricking you, the capacity to trick you, you'd be much more vigilant, and that in turn helps you actually spot manipulation and propaganda in your environment.
But the man who says, because he has learned one or two things about psychology and caught one person trying to manipulate him before, or spotted propaganda in his environment, "I can spot these things now" — some subconscious background ones can be running by him every single day, and he's going to miss them, because they're not the type he's used to catching.
One of the instruments of propaganda is media. I think it has been the major instrument of propaganda for a very long time, because it is the one way a message can reach millions of people without having to repeat the message. Media is the number one tool for propaganda. And if anybody can control the media, as they say, they can control the people that the media is feeding.
We've had a conversation in this country a few months ago about the Uludu uprising. Recently, I've had a change of heart on my opinions — some of my opinions in that episode, or on the way we are facing the issue in general. And I wonder to myself, ah, this propaganda and this manipulation caught me. It caught us out as a country.
You see, divide and conquer is one of the most effective ways of controlling people. They call it divide and rule, divide and conquer, anyway. But when people are not united — that's why they say divided we fall, united we stand, divided we fall. Certain arguments cause a disruption of connection between a set of people that naturally should be united. Say, for example, Nigerians. Nigerians are supposed to be united. This is one country. We are one country of people. We should find more reasons to work as a collective than as individuals. But anybody who seeks to control Nigeria will always quietly find ways to make sure, among Nigerians, our divisions, our differences, are accentuated or highlighted. It is glaring.
Think about how propaganda was pushed in the year 2008, for example. It would have been everything you watch on the news and read in the newspapers. You could go a level deeper to say even the storylines on Super Story — a show you love so much — were kind of teaching you something in line with what the news was saying.
Now, the news one is obvious. They are supposed to tell you what is going on in the country, but they choose to tell you this and not the other. So that one, yeah, it's propaganda. They say, hey, why are you telling me this news and not telling me that news? Or why are you framing this news like this? But the Super Story one is just entertainment — you're just consuming what could be the tricky thing hidden inside this entertaining play they're showing you. Sitting in front of the TV consuming Super Story and the news and everything else could be one collective effort at pushing a narrative or pushing propaganda.
Why do you think that today it didn't continue? Now we are more aware that propaganda is in movies and in all these things, and they know that you do not just sit in front of your TV anymore. You're not 12 anymore. You don't just sit in front of your TV every day. But your TV is on your phone now. That's like — everybody knows this. But they know you are on your phone every day, and they know what you watch every day. It's not as if our information isn't with the service providers of these social media platforms and the rest. They know what you like and what you visit. So they can tailor propaganda into everything you consume, and you will not have a clue. Technology helps to make it easier for everybody to achieve their goals. Easier targeting for propaganda is an advantage of technology for the right person.
Two episodes ago, I talked about geopolitics — how we are connected with the rest of the world, and the role we play, and the influence the West has on us. Why would you think that Nigerians don't appreciate valuable content on the internet? You may believe — if you're listening to this podcast, especially up until this point — you're a certain kind of person that likes knowledge, that is curious, that is intelligent. And you'll be thinking to yourself, this podcast should be more popular than this. I used to think that to myself too. Wow, I'll be making all these videos with all these insights and ideas, and nobody's watching. How can this meat pie guy have national fame? And I'm here dishing out back-to-back knowledge every time. I got nothing from it.
Are you saying Nigerians don't like that stuff? But we are on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and Snapchat and all these other places — all these other apps with algorithms that are controlled by your colonizers, with algorithms controlled by people outside of your country.
The naive thing to be thinking right now is, okay, but what does Mark Zuckerberg have to do with being a colonizer? He's not a colonizer. But Mark Zuckerberg operates under a government — a government that has been running for hundreds of years, a government that has a relationship with the rest of the world, a government that has to have policies in place and do everything within its power to keep the relationship it has with the other parts of the world intact, especially if it benefits them. And so if a social media platform that is working in their country, hosted in their country, that they have some kind of jurisdiction over, can do something for the government to ensure the government and its people continue to prosper — they will put laws in place to ensure that. Even if it means tweaking the algorithm in those countries to feed them high entertainment, low value content — brain rot, nonsense — that's what you load them with. And that's what you reward in that part of the world. Because a podcast like mine would definitely thrive in the US or in the UK, and content that you see some other creators making — you see them now, some of them that reach us here — they whip up their phone, drop valuable knowledge, comments in the thousands, right?
If you try that in Nigeria here, you will not see anything. And you will say, it's Nigerians that don't like it. No, no, honey. The algorithm — no, honey. The apps are designed to overflow you with one type of thing. And it's easy to like that type of thing, and make it your type of thing, and begin to live that life. And so even if you enjoy valuable, informative content — you come across it every once in a while and you consume it — they still won't fill up your page with that only. An example: if they are sending 100 pieces of content to Nigeria per minute, they will make sure 90 is brain rot and only 10 is valuable. And the algorithm is already tweaked to continue pushing that proportion of content, and to reward what does better. If you give me 90% brain rot, it means I will watch 90% brain rot. But watching 90% brain rot gives you feedback that you have 90% interest in brain rot. And so you just get given more of that.
Don't look at your fellow Nigerian and assume that they don't like valuable content. They've just been preconditioned and rewarded for consuming what they are consuming.
And remember, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in this country, we are still on safety and survival. If you're on safety and survival, you cannot, just by natural order, be interested enough in other things — like avoiding propaganda. You understand? If somebody is preoccupied with their next meal or their next credit alert, how much cognitive space can they assign to investigating their algorithm? It's not just designed to work that way.
You have to be comfortable with being detached from the mainstream if you want to upgrade your thinking. It's not what everybody knows — you have to know the Grammys, and Big Brother, and certain things may be happening. If you can replace all of that — even the Premier League — with things that you chose intentionally on your social media, of course it's not going to be easy. It's a grind. It's a fight. You have to keep clicking "not interested" on almost every video they give you. And even if you're not interested in a video that is valuable, even if it's not for you, you have to leave that kind of content playing on your screen till it finishes, and like it maybe, before you scroll on to the kind of content you like — so that you can start rearranging your algorithm.
A lot of people make effort to rearrange their algorithm. They try for a few days, before you know it, they are swarmed with brain rot content again, with comedy.
And when I'm saying brain rot content, I'm talking about low quality videos. This is not to shade anybody — I'm talking about actual comedy. Sabinus. Oh fuck — I cannot just say Sabinus and forget everybody else's name now, or I'm just going to sound like a witch hunt. But you get the point I'm trying to make. And when I'm talking about this brain rot, people will be thinking I'm referring to maybe Pella or some of these people that are obvious. It's in the non-obvious ones as well — it's in Tunde Ednut, it's on Instablog. You know, somebody like Don Jazzy.
By the way, I'm not saying anybody could be doing better. I'm saying the design is flawed, and you can now help yourself. I'm not saying anybody that has clout or has followers is supposed to be making better or more informative content. Nah, that's not what I'm saying at all. People are making a living with the way it is. They are thriving through the design, and it is not wrong to do that.
But a Don Jazzy, for example — if this design was not in place working against all of us — would be very influential in letting us know what kind of laws are being passed in our senate house. Everybody would know, because it's him that posted it. You know that kind of thing. But the design is not such that it is easy for him to do that. So you can't expect that of him.
Skit-makers are one of the biggest celebrities in this country. Skit-makers abroad are not in the top five of who you'd consider celebrities in America, for example. But here, high reward. So how is skit helping us improve our collective situation as a country? It's not. But the people who designed this reward system know that if you keep consuming this thing, you will not go anywhere. You will not do anything. And it's not your fault, and it's not the next person's fault. If somebody is sitting down every day, and all they are watching is funny content and laughing, or following somebody's live stream for six hours straight, it's not their fault. It's not that they don't like good things. If you show them now, they will say they don't want that stuff. But how would they want it? Is it rewarding them? And where we are in the hierarchy of needs — like I said, you can't expect them to have interest in that.
And I'm supposed to end this episode with, okay, what do we do?
It's beyond me. I hope it's not beyond you.