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Well, Dave and I are here today to talk about Patreon and so I'll start. | ||
We've been engaged in lengthy series of email exchanges with all of the people in our network and no one is happy at all with what's been happening. | ||
And so we've been Determining what our options are and we looked at Subscribestar, but it looks like PayPal decided to cut funding out from them And so it doesn't look like moving to an alternative provider An alternative commercial provider that's out of our bailiwick out of our control is going to be viable | ||
So Dave, why don't you describe what we talked about today? | ||
Yeah, well first I think we should just make it very clear for everybody how significant what happened to Carl Benjamin Sargon of Akkad is. | ||
It doesn't matter what you think of him or whether you agree with him or any of that stuff. | ||
The banning of him for doing something that was not on the Patreon platform, that wasn't even done on his channel, because of a word he said where he was using the word against the alt-right or the neo-Nazis or whatever you want to call them, is a massive move of that line of what's acceptable. | ||
Now there's all sorts of debates we can have and we've had them of what lines should be if there should be lines at all But the fact that this guy got booted with no chance of recourse with no warning just just like that It's just an extension of everything else that we've all been talking also Also given that it's also the case that he didn't break patrons rules of engagement the ones that they stated and that Conte Had talked to you about the fact that that wasn't going to happen and that patreon hasn't responded well to this Well, look look he jack conti came into my studio in my home And said he he said a phrase that I had never heard before maybe you had heard it before manifest observable behavior So you had never even heard that phrase before right? | ||
I thought I thought maybe this was just something that went past me Okay. | ||
Now, of course manifest observable behavior mob. | ||
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Yeah I mean, that's There's a real beauty there. | |
So the point was that it had to be about behavior, and then in their terms of service, it also had to be about what was happening on platform. | ||
So at every firewall here of what would have been acceptable, Patreon failed. | ||
And they've put us in a position where, look, I called you last Saturday when this was really catching fire, and I said, you know, Patreon is about 65 to 70% of my rev. | ||
I have a company now with employees, you know, full-timers, part-timers. | ||
I was actually considering deleting it right then and there, which no one in their right mind would do, no business person would do, and I've taken big risks in the past, you know. | ||
Before I was on Patreon, we were at Aura TV, me and my producer and my director, we all quit our jobs, lost our health insurance, all of it, to join Patreon. | ||
So I'm not, I like taking risks, but then I realized, all right, we have to figure out a plan, and that's exactly why we're doing this right now. | ||
Yeah, well and we would have moved faster, but we well and I did set up a Subscribestar account Although I never quite finished setting it up partly because Subscribestar seemed to fall apart almost immediately Under attack and and also it wasn't obvious that I also read their terms of agreement And it wasn't obvious that we weren't going to be just in exactly the same situation again And there's only so many mistakes you can make before the mistakes start to become fatal So we wanted to come up with a serious and and and and and stable solution and I've been working on for months Literally for months. | ||
It's been six months. | ||
I've been working on a system to allow authors and other people who engage publicly on intellectual issues to interact more effectively with their readers and viewers and listeners and it occurred to me this week that With a bit of modification that that could serve exactly the function that we're hoping it would serve So what we're going to try to do as fast as we possibly can is to set this system up on a subscriber model That's analogous to patreon. | ||
It'll have a bunch of additional features, which I don't want to talk about right now And I don't want to over promise but the system is is because the system is new but we're going to try to get that rolled out as fast as we possibly can so And we have a number of people who are interested in, hypothetically, interested in moving their subscription service over to it. | ||
Dave and I are very seriously planning to do this. | ||
As soon as we can do it in an intelligent way. | ||
And so... Yeah, and you know, by the way, one of the interesting things here, we haven't talked about this, but I'm guessing your experience is just like mine. | ||
The amount of emails that I have received, and of course tweets and everything else, but mostly emails from developers, From investors, from regular people, from engineers, I mean just anyone going this is the one. | ||
Because you know the issue with all of these free speech things is it's like you don't want to swing too early before you realize that the problem's gotten to critical mass. | ||
But then most likely you're going to swing too late. | ||
The lines will have moved so far that we may be on the outside of them. | ||
And that's why this one I think was so interesting because Carl You know, years ago, five or six years ago, when I started waking up to what was going on with the left, obviously, and all of the free speech stuff, everyone said, you've got to talk to Sargon of Akkad. | ||
He's the guy. | ||
So this is the guy that's been ahead of all of this. | ||
Sargon too was like, he was big. | ||
He was very helpful to me when I was first under attack, you know, and he's a brave guy. | ||
And so and it's a real mistake what patron has done to him and and and as I said Everybody in our network is extremely upset about it. | ||
Like we've been sending emails back and forth Well, probably with 30 or 40 people and so as Dave said earlier We wanted to make this video today to let everybody that we're communicating with know that we have not been Sleeping on this front man. | ||
People are trying to figure out what to do. | ||
So this stops happening and and so And we have a good plan, and we're going to try to implement it as soon as possible. | ||
So I would ask everybody who's listening to be, you know, reasonably patient. | ||
Imagine that this will take somewhere between a week and a month to sort out properly. | ||
We're going to try to get something up in the next week, hopefully before Christmas, if we can't manage that. | ||
Because when you implement something like this, there are technical complications that might emerge that you don't foresee. | ||
But I don't want people to get the impression that we're taking this lightly or lying down and that we're not looking for a permanent alternative. | ||
Because we are. | ||
And I think we can come up with a better alternative. | ||
And so that's the plan. | ||
Yeah, that's exactly what I would say. | ||
I would just add that it was like we were waiting for a moment, you know, we've watched these doors slowly closing on us, all of us, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Facebook, who's getting banned, who's getting shadow banned, payment processing, everything else. | ||
And we are taking this as seriously as possible. | ||
Of course, you know, Jordan, who's working harder than anyone on the face of the planet, somehow you managed to also partly build a platform over the course of the past year in the middle of all of that. | ||
We knew that this, we knew that this was lurking in the background and that this was going to be a problem. | ||
And Dave, you've spent lots of time talking to investors and developers about building alternatives to these platforms that seem to be willing to Throw their weight around in an increasingly arbitrary manner, but it's not like it's a simple thing to do. | ||
People want somebody to say enough is enough, and I mentioned this in a live stream I did the other day, but you know, I've watched my Patreon drop. | ||
We've lost around 600 patrons, I think about $5,000 a month, but in a weird way, I've actually been inspired by it because I'm watching people... Yeah, I agree. | ||
So it's like on one hand people are emailing me and they're saying I'm dropping my patronage and I'm really pissed and it's not about you and I want to support you and on the other hand my business side is going that's not great but yeah but we will we will solve this thing I I've lost a thousand subscribers and I feel exactly the same way it's like well they're telling patreon to go to hell You know, it's it's not so good for me on the financial front. | ||
Although that's not too big a catastrophe at the moment They're they're taking the right stand and and encouraging us. | ||
Let's say or encouraging someone to do something about this So anyways, that's I like I like what you said if we can just ask you guys to be reasonably patient We're talking to everybody that you can think of and some people that you can't think of we're gonna fix this. | ||
We're gonna Well, we're gonna or at least we're gonna do our best to fix it There's gonna be some bumps along the way man, because we're now we have to speed this process up, too So you'll have to consider this a beta version, but at minimum we hope to provide a an easy way of switching To a new subscription service within the next very short while and so and thank you everyone for your patience and your continued support and | ||
Your attention and your thoughts and your reaction to all of this and and it's it's very much appreciated and it does help us I would say maintain motivation to continue doing this constantly You know the fact that I have all these patreon subscribers certainly is one of the reasons that I try to put my youtube channel I wouldn't say first and foremost because it's had to take a back seat to this lecture tour But man, it's way the hell up there on my priority list Absolutely, and it gives us all sorts of flexibility to do all sorts of things. | ||
It gave me a little bit of flexibility to join you on this tour, so I'm incredibly humbled and appreciative of everybody that does that. | ||
Jordan, I will see you in a couple days in West Palm Beach. | ||
Listen, are you still eating steak? | ||
I will take you out for a steak. | ||
Good, good, good. | ||
Well, I found a good steak place here, so I'm looking forward to seeing you, Dave. | ||
Continuing the tour because we're gonna continue the tour in in California. | ||
Yeah, three venues in California in January and then the two in Australia New Zealand and we're gonna add additional dates and hopefully Seoul and Singapore maybe the Philippines. | ||
We've got all sorts of additional things planned. | ||
We doing anything on the moon? | ||
Well Not so far, but I have some connections to Elon Musk. | ||
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Small steps, man. | |
Okay. | ||
We'll talk to you soon. | ||
We'll get this up right away, eh? | ||
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Great. | |
Okay. |