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Dec. 4, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:46:58
Announcement: Solving Creators Big Tech Problems With Locals.com | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report
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01:46:16
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All right, people. Today is a big day.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
We've got some announcements and some major stuff cooking.
This is basically going to be a livestream that will culminate a year of my life that I haven't really been talking about, that I've been kind of teasing about.
For the last year, but on top of doing this show and touring and going to colleges and stand-up and writing a book, somehow I managed to squeeze that in in the last year or two, I also started a tech company.
It was about a year ago right now, basically this very week, and I'll get to why it was this week.
I started a tech company to solve As many of the problems that are humanly possible that we all know are sort of the biggest problems of the day.
And I'm not talking about our political problems and I'm not talking about our cultural problems and our social problems.
Except I'm talking about all of them at the exact same time.
We all know there are massive problems with big tech.
You are watching this on YouTube right now.
I hope this went to your feed.
But there's a good chance that it didn't go to your feed.
We have something like 1.2 million subscribers and I think we give YouTube a pretty professional show that could be on network television, right?
I mean, we've built something here that's pretty spectacular and we've got a great crew and a great studio and really expensive lights and all that good stuff.
And we put out a weekly show, sometimes more than once a week here on YouTube, but we have no access really to our own subscribers, our own fans.
Now we all know that the algorithms are manipulated in really weird ways.
They can decide what videos to push to you.
in your recommended videos. It's just a a calvacade of problems related to how you actually
get the content that creators are creating. And this is not just my problem, this is a problem
for quite literally millions and millions of other creators.
And by the way, it's not just YouTube that has these problems. We...
Everyone knows at this point that Twitter shadow bans people and you just go sometimes months without seeing people in your feed.
I see it in my feed all the time.
I get people messaging me every day and I'm not talking about furries or anime avatars or eggs.
I'm talking about real people who say, you know, I just never see you in Twitter anymore.
We know that there's de-boosting and down-ranking.
All of these big tech words that basically are meant to manipulate what information you
can get, how you can get it, when you can get it, if you can get it, all of those things.
And a lot of really bright people have been trying to solve as many of these problems
as possible.
So about a year ago, that's where I decided to really get more involved into this game.
I'm going to get to that in just a sec, but first, let me just tell you a couple things that we're going to do throughout this.
So, what I've decided to do was, well, you know, we'll do this a little bit differently.
I'll tell you the story first and then we'll tease out some stuff here.
So a year ago, right about now, I was still funding this show on Patreon.
I'm sure many of you remember about a year before that I had had Jack Conte, who is the CEO I had had him in here in this very studio
after they had booted some people off of Patreon, off of the platform.
I think it was specifically it was Lauren Southern that they had booted off the platform.
And Jack basically made all these assurances that people will be safe on Patreon
and it's not what you say off their platform, it's what you say on their platform.
And Lauren had broke some sort of amorphous rule Doesn't matter.
It's their platform.
You guys know my policy on these.
Companies can do whatever they want to do.
That's fine with me.
But I had Jack in here and he said, he announced a new phrase, actually, during our interview.
He said that they would respond to, and you could be banned for, manifest observable behavior, which is a fantastic acronym, MOB.
Manifest M, observable O, behavior, B. So mob behavior is what could get you booted off Patriot.
I mean, you can't make this shit up.
Right.
So anyway, so I had him on.
I think his answers weren't really totally satisfying, but I treated the guy with the same respect that I treat everybody else.
And then about a year goes by, I already was feeling, ah, I don't know how much longer I can stay on Patreon because they can always come up with some reason to boot you.
Any of these platforms can always come up with any reason to boot anybody.
As you guys may know, just last week, Andy Ngo, who is a journalist, a real journalist, not a journalist that I have to put quotes around.
He's an actual journalist.
He was suspended from Twitter because he made a factual comment about race related to people that are attacking trans people.
He made a factual comment, and Twitter decided you're going to be suspended for that.
He eventually deleted it after a couple days, so they're not in the game of truth.
Again, these companies can do what they want and you guys know my feeling.
I don't want the government involved, right?
I mean you all saw just a couple weeks ago AOC and the rest of them grilling Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill and it's like do I want big tech and now The government to be even more intertwined so that the government can tell big tech what to do.
And I know some of the Trump people right now actually kind of want that, right?
But it's like, well, Trump may not be president in a year or two, and then you've given over the power to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or something.
Anyway, we're still talking about a lot of high level stuff here.
So a year ago, you may remember this, Sargon of Akkad, Carl Benjamin, who I've had on this show, He was booted off Patreon because he said the N-word, although he was mocking the alt-right use of the N-word, but he said the N-word not on Patreon, which he was a patron.
He was a creator on Patreon.
It wasn't on Patreon.
It wasn't even on his YouTube channel that he was funding through Patreon.
It was on some third channel.
And again, he was using the word to basically mock the alt-right.
He wasn't saying it as a pejorative.
Shortly after, he was basically immediately booted from Patreon, and there was sort of no recourse.
And then, I'm sure many of you guys remember, over the next couple weeks, a few high-level people, myself, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, we all left Patreon and started funding on our own.
And what I found was actually pretty amazing.
And then this is where my decision to start a company, which I'm about to get to, all began.
On January 15th of this current year, We officially closed my Patreon account.
For weeks I had been telling people, leave Patreon, join us at DaveRubin.com.
We built out a great site so that we could just do the same fan funding that we were doing on Patreon.
We actually went to a place where we were offering no rewards.
So on Patreon I was doing all these Google Hangouts and we were sending people all this stuff and it was becoming another job unto itself.
We then just created DaveRubin.com and we allowed people to just donate whatever they wanted to do to help us keep the show independent and everything else.
And we found that by not even giving rewards, just showing a little bravery, just kind of sticking up against big tech, against Patreon in this case, that our revenue actually jumped about 30%.
So we were actually giving people less rewards in that we were giving them no rewards anymore.
And our revenue jumped because people were like, oh, Dave and Jordan and Sam and a few other people.
It's like, oh, you guys are doing something good and doing something brave in a really bizarre time.
So as we decided to do that, I thought this isn't enough.
You know, I, because of a couple years of doing this, have built a nice business here and I've got a great staff
and we were able to build us a website and figure out how to fan fund.
And my garage, I'm in my garage right now, My studio is in my home.
My control room right over there is a guest bedroom and the green room right over there is another guest bedroom.
We've built an incredible business here and what I realized was I want to start giving the tools that I've been able to build, I want to start giving them to other creators because these problems are not going away and it doesn't matter if you're on the left or if you're on the right or if you're even a politics creator.
You could be a knitter or a gamer Or a chef, or quite literally an unboxer.
That's a thing, apparently.
You could be anyone online, and you have no idea about how you can create a functional business when the big tech overlords can either silence you, or just push you to the side altogether, or de-boost you, or shadow ban you, or the rest of it.
Okay, so now I'm gonna do the first call to action of the day.
So what did I do?
And I'll explain all about it in a little bit.
Over the past couple, it's been about two months, we have done a soft launch for the Rubin Report community app.
And what I believe is, and it's consistent with everything else that I talk about on this show, is that the internet is about to flip.
That we've done everything sort of top down, right?
We have big tech companies telling everyone what to do and how to behave and all of those things all the time.
And we have no recourse.
You know, you get suspended.
You don't know how to contact them.
For years I had no contact at YouTube, despite giving them a pretty damn good show, if I do say so myself.
We finally do have a contact there now.
But you have no recourse with these companies.
They don't really care if you're there or you're not there.
They want all your data and all of that stuff.
And I thought, I want to give some of these tools back.
So we created The Rubin Report app, which right now, by the way, I've never announced it until just now.
We've had a small beta launch and then we sent out an email to a couple people.
You can now get the Rubin Report app in the App Store and in Google Play.
There's also a desktop version of it if you go to rubinreport.com.
And what I believe is that small communities are now going to be the future of the internet.
That what we have to start doing is giving the power back to creators.
It's like every time you sign on Twitter, Or even you go on your feed in YouTube, however they've manipulated it.
It's like all of these things are making us all crazy.
You start hating people you liked.
You're fighting with trolls and bots and all of these things.
All of these people have a million burner fake accounts.
You're seeing the blue check Twitterati are treated a certain way and can say certain things that other people can't say.
We watch accounts get banned all the time as they kind of clear out the brush.
So what I thought is, what we need to do is that creators, again, whether they agree with me politically or not, whether they're in the political space or not, need to start being able to own all of their properties, own their video, be able to directly communicate with their fans, have their fans be able to communicate with each other, make sure you can have ad-free video and ad-free podcast and you can communicate directly with me,
in this case, in my app, with whatever creator you're supporting.
So we built the app.
It's been about two months now.
It's humming and hurring, and I'm very impressed with what we built here,
and people have really been digging it.
And here's part of it now, and then I'll get to the wider business proposition.
It's subscription-based.
I actually think that part of the problem right now is that because everything is free online, you become the product.
Your data, your information, you can make all these million fake accounts, all of these things.
And I watch, it's funny, I'll see this on Twitter all the time, I'll watch really bright People like well-known authors and lecturers and thinkers, people who I've had on the show who I totally respect, I'll watch them on Twitter and they're fighting with pink foxes and they're fighting with Street Fighter characters on Twitter, anonymous ones.
And what I think is we need a maturing of the Internet.
And I think that small gated communities that then figure out how to network with each other,
and I'm gonna get to that in a little bit, are gonna be the future of the internet.
It's not that Twitter won't exist, it's not that YouTube won't exist,
it's not that Facebook won't exist, but I think people are gonna have to show
a little bit of skin in the game to start being involved in communities
where there's actual mature conversation.
And one of the things that we've built with this app, and I'm gonna talk about Locals.com,
which is the company we started in just a sec, is that on YouTube right now, as I said,
I have about 1.2 million subscribers.
I have no way of communicating with these people because when we put a video out, for example, this live stream right now, we have no idea how many people that actually subscribe and click the bell and the whole thing.
We have no idea how many people get this video.
When we put up any video, any clip, any full episode, it doesn't go out to all of our people.
We know that.
It's going out to seemingly smaller and smaller amounts of people.
So we wanted to create something where if You, as a creator, post something.
Not only do you own it, but it's actually gonna go out to all of your subscribers.
We're not gonna manipulate algorithms.
We're not gonna de-boost, and down-rank, and shadow-ban, and the rest of it.
And, here's another beautiful thing, by having a subscription-based platform, you eliminate 99% of all of the evil that's online, because guess what?
Trolls generally won't pay you to troll you, right?
So, if you go to RubinReport.com right now, on the desktop, you can sign up to be in our community
and watch ad-free videos and listen to the ad-free podcast and communicate with me and with other fans
and all sorts of stuff and check the feed and you can post information and buy tickets to events
and all of those things.
Trolls generally won't pay you.
But what I believe will happen is by forcing people to put a little bit of skin in the game.
And you can pay whatever you want.
It's $3 if you want to pay $3.
It's $50 if you want to pay $50.
If you want to support more, it's totally up to you.
But by having a little bit of a skin in the game, we can start building communities that will be a little bit more mature than everything else that's happening everywhere else.
And then what we're gonna do is figure out ways to link these communities to each other
so that all creators are in effect creating their own network.
So, okay.
So let me fast forward a little bit here.
So, as of today, right now, it is open, as of this morning, we have started Locals.com.
This is a company that I created along with my business partner.
We brought in three investors.
We do not have any big tech money.
No big tech money.
I know some big tech people, but we don't have any of their money.
I just went into Trump mode there for a second.
We have three investors who are all fans.
This is a beautiful thing.
Over the last couple of years, I always talk to you guys about how I've met so many freaking incredible people who have offered to work for us, who have offered to volunteer for us, intern for us, who have offered to invest in things if the right thing ever came around.
Well, three people actually did just that, and we got three investors who are fans of the show, who believe In solving problems outside of big tech and outside of government, right?
I'm not asking the government to solve my problems, and I'm not asking big tech to solve my problems.
I'm solving my problems myself, and that's what I thought, is if I can solve all of my problems as a creator, right?
I am as independent As anyone that you could watch in this space, right?
Not only do I do this show from home, but we're fan-funded.
We're totally free to make every decision for good or bad.
All the decisions ultimately fall on me.
And what I wanted to do was give some of that ability to some other people.
One of the days that this really hit me was about a year ago also when Tucker Carlson
walked into my garage and he's about to do the show, we're like five minutes from going live,
and he walks in, he opens the door, he sees the studio and he goes,
"Holy shit, man, you have done it right."
And it's like, this guy is, I think, the highest paid person on cable news
and he walks into my garage and sees, wow, here's this guy that built it himself,
he's free and it's pretty damn good.
So that's why we started Locals.com and here's what we're going to do.
What I want is we are going to build subscription-based communities for all kinds of creators.
Again, even if you hate me, if you're one of the people watching this and you hate me, and I'm sure you're out there, if you have any sort of fan base and you are creating anything worthwhile, We want to work with you.
We want to work with you.
You can jump on Locals.com right now and sign up.
We're going to be selecting creators.
We already have a couple pretty big name people actually that have signed on already who we're going to unveil over the next couple weeks and months.
So here's another beautiful thing about your community.
So when you create your community, and again you can put video on there, ad-free video, we've got a beautiful video player and the ad-free podcast and you can communicate with your fans and all of those things and a great feed and all that.
You will find like-minded creators that you want to link with on the back end.
And if they agree to link with you and you agree to link with them, you can actually create your feeds together, thus basically creating a network effect.
We've actually got a pretty cool referral program.
I don't want to get too lost in that right now.
And you will create a network.
And not only that, but here's the real thing that's different than everything else that you're seeing online right now.
One of the problems is that we all know that these big tech companies, and it's almost not their fault, it's just the design of when these things become these sort of monstrous behemoths, We know that the terms of service can never be upheld properly, right?
It's just there's so many freaking competing interests and political interests and all of these things.
So it's like you sign onto Twitter and you've got white nationalist frogs
arguing with crazy socialists and anarchists and all of these people
and everyone's trying to ban everybody and all that.
When you create your community with Locals.com, you set your rules.
So in my community, I've set a very, very, what I would say are open-ended set of rules
that basically as long as, well, you're not breaking the laws of the United States
and you're not being just an awful, relentless sort of schmucky troll.
You can be in our community and you can keep it respectful and hang out and talk and all of those things.
If you can't do that, I don't want you in my community.
Now, that is not an infringement on free speech, so I'm going to beat you guys to the punch on that one.
Free speech, I absolutely believe in free speech, but this is why I wanted to create small communities, not a giant platform.
A giant platform, when they silence people or they ban people, that you can definitely argue,
and many people have done it in the studio, is an actual infringement on free speech
because big tech has become the way we all communicate with each other.
When you do something with small communities, it's like, I'm all for free speech.
Everyone can say basically whatever they want.
We have very strict libel and slander laws and you can't directly threaten to murder somebody,
that sort of thing.
I don't welcome everybody into my house all the time to say whatever they want.
And what I wanna do with Locals.com, and this is what we've done
with the Rubin Report community and with the app, is we are gonna build communities
where the creators can set whatever rules they want.
So if some creators want very strict rules around speech and what can and can't be said and the type of people they want in there and all that, that'll be on them.
And if some people will have a very liberal, open sense of what they wanna do, that'll be on them.
So again, I think that starting at the bottom down, Building communities where the creators themselves are setting the rules.
The creators can figure out who they want to network with.
And with all of the ability to actually communicate with your audience without having to deal with algorithms and shadow banning and the rest of it.
I think this is actually what the future of the internet will be.
I think this will sort of be internet 3.0.
I said 2.0 yesterday on Twitter and a lot of people took me to task on that.
But I really do think that the day of a gajillion burner accounts and anonymous accounts and all of that, you gotta have a little skin in the game if you want to be part of sort of more mature conversations.
And by the way, not only I mentioned how our investors here are not only fans, but people that I've gotten to know over the last couple of years.
The amount of other people that I'm now working with, like I think there's a way, we need community back.
When you're on Twitter, do you feel like you're getting any sense of community?
Do you feel better when you're on Twitter?
Or do you feel worse?
I'm guessing that when you sign on Twitter, you go, why am I doing this again?
Yet we all keep doing it.
When you go on Facebook, you end up looking at your feed and you start hating people that you're either related to or you're supposed to like, that are supposed to be your friends.
We all walked into this.
This is nobody's fault, by the way.
I think there are, well, there is actually a lot of evidence that a lot of these companies design these things to keep us as addicted as possible.
But also, you know, none of us had this thing.
20 years ago, right?
And now we're walking around with the world in our pocket, and we were handed over this awesome power.
But, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
Thank you, Uncle Ben!
And because of that, we've all walked into these things, and now we're sort of trapped in them.
And I want to figure out what an off-ramp is, not only for creators, but for people that want to fix some of this, that don't want to be part of the endless destruction of everything.
So!
Here's what we're gonna do.
First off, right now I'm gonna do a Q&A, but we're only doing it for Rubin Report community members.
So you can go on the Apple App Store right now, or on Google Play, or you can go to rubinreport.com.
You can subscribe for as little as $3, and I'm gonna take questions from people.
I'm happy to answer all of your questions about big tech, why we did this, literally anything that comes up, that is fine.
And then I wanna tell you a little bit more about sort of what we're building here and everything else.
But Locals.com, if you're a creator, if you are a creator, people, and I know you're out there, and you might be a progressive who hates me, you might be an unboxer or a video gamer, if you want direct access to your fans, there's no reason to be on Patreon.
Why are you on a platform that could boot you at any moment, that really doesn't offer you anything other than they make sure you get paid?
Well, we're gonna make sure you get paid every month, you will be paid every month.
We take the exact same fee as Patreon, But we're gonna build you a desktop community, and for the creators that are of a higher level, sort of where I'm at, but doesn't have to all be there, we'll build you a freakin' custom app, a white-labeled app as well.
So there's a real beauty to what we're building here.
You will secure your assets, you will make sure, you don't own the stuff that you put on YouTube.
If YouTube boots me, now we have backups here, right?
I've got a server with backups, and we've got a lot of hard drives with backups.
But you're gonna own your data on Locals.com.
Yeah, it's your data to own.
And by the way, if you leave Locals, if I was to leave YouTube right now, the 1.2 million people that we have subscribing to us, I have no way of telling them where I'm going.
I have no way of getting a message out to them.
Yeah, I can put it in the feed.
But we know that that doesn't go anywhere.
If you leave Locals.com, congratulations, you get all their email addresses and the rest of it.
All of the data that you have provided us with is yours.
We're not gonna be in the business of selling data either.
We're trying as hard as we can to solve as many of the problems that are humanly possible.
And that's what the plan is and that's what we're gonna do.
So, okay.
I had a question about the community name part of signing up for Locals.
Does that refer to your individual endeavors or your industry or possibly either or both?
So right now, if you go to Locals.com, we have an open sign up right now.
We're also looking to scale the business and we're trying to find more investors and the rest of it.
So this isn't all gonna happen overnight.
We've brought on a couple people and our team is growing.
We've actually got an incredible team.
Oh, and I should say, by the way, I am not taking a dime from this company.
I am not on salary.
I've put money into the company, and I've put a tremendous amount of time into the company, and I obviously own a portion of the company, but I'm not taking any money from the company.
I'm not on salary or anything like that.
I believe in this thing.
I'm taking a risk, right?
Everybody complains all the time.
Everybody complains about, oh, Twitter do this, and YouTube do this, and I do it too, right?
And then the other people say, government get involved, government do this.
This is my best effort shot to see if we can fix some of this stuff and really look at the internet in a whole new way.
Stop thinking big tech and the Goliaths are our master, but focus a little bit more on small communities.
And look, if David beat Goliath, well, I think Dave can maybe beat Google.
We shall see.
Anyway, the answer to your question is, When you're signing up, give us the name of what you want your community to be.
All of these things can change over time.
We're just actually right now by launching Locals.com today.
It's a pretty great name, too.
How did we get Locals.com?
Not bad, right?
Because you're creating your local.
That's the idea.
This is so consistent with all the things that I talk about, about small government and why you want to care.
more about your local community than the big hegemonic monster that is somewhere far, far away, right?
I want you, whoever you are, and by the way, this doesn't even have to be purely YouTube creators or podcasters or things like that.
If you run a local baseball league and you want a community, a web-based community, and potentially an app for your community so that they can all contact each other and you can contact them and you're not doing it on Facebook, And you're not doing it on Twitter, and it's a good way to fundraise for your community.
Then we want you to be part of it.
So there's so many cool applications for this that I'm very excited about that.
Also, we should remember, most of the people that are going to do this, that are going to join us on Locals.com, you're going to be established creators.
So obviously we're not creating communities for if you've got two people willing to pay you, well, we can't really go into business with you.
But as I say to people all the time, who are always telling me, Dave, I want to do what you do.
I wanna be a YouTuber, I wanna be a podcaster, I wanna get into the political space.
It's like, keep building your stuff, and once you have enough people that are supporting you, that you have a worthwhile community, well then, Locals.com will build you your community.
And again, remember how cool it is, the idea that you're going to set your rules.
And then on the back end, so I don't wanna announce, I'll announce at least one next week, but we've got some great creators on board already.
And when we connect these communities on the back end, where the creator, One creator, another creator.
We'll have to say we want our communities, you know, we have a similar ethos, something like that, right?
And we want our communities to be together on the back end.
Within the feed, you'll be able to see more and more creators.
So we're giving creators the power to create networks, too.
So there's a lot of cool stuff here.
All right, let's see.
The minimum monthly contribution from supporters won't go below $2.
As a smaller content creator with a modest following, what if I'd like to make my content free in order to build a following?
Will that be possible?
So right now, with the way we're doing it at RubinReport.com, Our minimum is $3.
I want people to have a little bit of skin in the game.
It's not much.
Many people do more than that because they just want to support.
Ultimately, if you create your own local and you're a creator, you can do whatever minimum you want.
You can do whatever maximum or no maximum you want.
That'll be completely up to you.
We have several ways that we can work with creators.
For some people that are only going to bring in a tiny bit of revenue at the beginning, you're going to have to you know, pay a little something up front
so that we can build you this stuff.
I mean, these are all the ways that a sort of mature business has to operate.
But I also wanna say this, I'm leaving all of my,
everything that I've been doing on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube,
the audio podcast, that's all gonna be there.
That's all gonna be there.
Now the thing is, I don't own any of those properties, so I don't know when any of those things could be cut off.
You don't know it either.
Everyone's sitting there, putting, complaining about all of these things,
and watching the ax slowly drop on our necks.
And the time basically is now to own some of this stuff back.
So again, you will own everything.
So it's a way of protecting a lot of your digital assets too.
But what you want to charge, what your minimum is, what your maximum is, the rest of it is absolutely Completely up to you.
How should I go about getting started on Locals.com?
If you're a creator, you can go to Locals.com right now.
We have a couple questions for you, and then over the next couple weeks, our team will reach out to you.
We're launching a couple people in the next few weeks, and we have to figure out how we can scale this thing properly, and we don't want to over-promise, right?
Everybody over-promises all the time.
But if you have a fan base, if you have some subscribers, if you're on Patreon right now and you're just sick of They're not offering you anything, right?
Patreon is a big tech company that basically, there's no community there.
You post things and a couple people comment.
What we're trying to do is I truly, truly, truly believe that the next version of the internet
is cleaning up the endless mess that we're all in all the time.
We're all fighting all the time.
You see something on Twitter from somebody that you didn't know halfway across the world
who said something you didn't like and then everyone's destroying each other.
I actually think, and I know this is happening right now because when I open the Rubin Report app right now,
it's like when I open Twitter, it's like, ugh, what's going on on Twitter now?
When I open the RubinReport.com app, we've got really cool people in there
with thoughtful, interesting questions and comments.
And if you do a feed, you can just see a feed that's just what I'm posting
and what the Rubin Report is posting.
Or you can do a feed where it's fans that are posting as well.
And people are communicating with each other.
And again, (thud)
by literally charging just three bucks, so having a little bit of a gated community,
not an armed gated community with people outside with rifles shooting the zombies as they cross over,
but just having a little skin in the game.
Trolls won't pay ya to troll ya.
And if they want to, either, well, I guess I'll gladly take your money,
Or if you're just being a relentless asshole, which is sort of how everyone behaves, especially anonymously online, we'll refund your money.
I just don't want you in my community.
But any creator can set whatever rules they want about that.
So that's pretty great.
So we're excited about that.
From Mike, thank you for spending the time, money, and effort.
I'm all signed up and ready to go.
Awesome.
I thought everyone's trying to solve every problem and everyone's trying to outsource their problems.
And it's like when I was watching that thing on Capitol Hill and these politicians who have never done anything, they've never accomplished anything, they're grilling Mark Zuckerberg.
Now, I have no love for him necessarily.
But it was like they're grilling Mark Zuckerberg about how he has to be the one to decide what truth is online, and they're going to punish him if he doesn't figure it out.
It's like you guys are trying to outsource your jobs to him.
The government knows that they can't infringe on your First Amendment, your right to free speech, so they're trying to force Facebook to do it.
No more of this.
This is childish nonsense, and we need some adults in the room again.
And I think there's a great opportunity here to start, while they're all fighting about all that nonsense, let's find Let's find good creators who are doing interesting things.
Let's make sure that they can monetize properly, right?
If you're a creator on YouTube right now, and you're not doing any sort of subscription thing, you have no idea what your rev is.
We look at our rev every month, and depending on whether YouTube decided to let us see the videos, let the audience see the videos or not, or what gets monetized or demonetized or whatever, our revenue is like this.
Try to build a business like that.
That's why when we started doing fan funding, which now We originally got on Patreon, gosh, that was in, I think, May of 2016, if I'm not mistaken.
So we've been doing this for over three years.
So I think I'm one of the people that have been sort of at the front end of what creators are trying to do.
And as I said, because we built this and we're totally independent,
I sort of think that I'm the right guy to help us get out of this mess.
I wanna give all of the tools that have helped me be independent.
I wanna give them to as many creators as possible.
And I think that really is what the future of the internet is.
That's what I'm excited about.
Oh, oh, you know what?
Here's what we're gonna do.
We got some new promo shots right here, okay?
Professional promo shots, people.
So any, for the first hundred people that sign up at RubinReport.com or download the app in the Apple App Store or in Google Play, I'm gonna sign one of these for ya.
Today, and we're gonna mail them out, and you have to do $10 or more, and you are gonna get a Dave Rubin signed promo shot from this livestream.
There's the first one right there.
You know, signing pictures.
You know, signing pictures, kissing babies.
It's like running for president, people.
Okay.
From Jonathan, Dave, what an awesome app this is.
You should be very proud of your work.
This is amazing.
Cool.
I'm really, I mean, for those of you, so right now, By the way, if you go to the Apple App Store and you download the Rubin Report app, or if you go to Google Play and download it, you can download it for free, but you can't interact with any of the content.
So if you're just going, what the fuck did Dave create here?
Is this all nonsense and blah blah blah?
Go look at the app.
You won't be able to comment, you won't be able to communicate with other people or with me, but you will see we have a freaking slick video player.
The ad-free podcast is in there.
Ultimately, we don't have it yet, but we're working on it.
We'll have it probably in just a matter of weeks.
We're gonna have group chat, so I'll be able to just, you know, if I'm sitting at the airport, I can just open up a group chat.
You'll get a push notification on your phone and dozens of people will be in there chatting.
We're gonna have one-on-one messenger.
As I said, you can buy tickets to events, all of these things.
And there's no middleman, and this is what I wanted to create for everybody else that's a creator out there.
No more middleman.
If you've got some fans, if you've got some base of support, then we want you to have all of the technology, which we own all of it.
We built all of this from scratch, from the bottom up.
Nobody owns a piece of this thing besides us, okay?
We wanted to give you guys all of the tools so you could communicate with your fans all the time.
So if you're a YouTuber right now, think about it, you could be a massive YouTuber.
unidentified
Let's think about the biggest YouTuber of all, PewDiePie, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
So PewDiePie's got 400 billion subscribers or whatever it is.
YouTube could shut him down.
Today, he would have no ability to get to those people, right?
Now, I'm not saying they are gonna do it.
I'm not saying that everyone in big tech is evil.
I'm not even saying there's some mass conspiracy here.
But shouldn't we as creators, whatever it is you're doing, again, even if You hate all of the things that I'm doing with this show.
Shouldn't creators be able to make sure that they can get in contact with the people that support them and do it outside of an old school email list?
I mean that people have been basically reduced to email lists and creating group chats on WhatsApp with their fans.
Like, that's not right, that's not cool, that's not good.
So we want to give all of those tools back to you, and have you set whatever rules you want in your community.
You can do whatever you want.
We're not trying to create some terms of service that is going to fit everybody all the time.
We have a basic terms of service of...
You know, you can't put illegal things on there, or snuff videos, or things like that.
But basically, you create whatever you want.
Create whatever you want, and if you have fans that are willing to pay you for it, you can communicate with them however you want to.
Okay, let's see.
Hi Dave, I'm producing a musical with a friend about one of the books on the Bible.
We've been shut down twice and got reported many times now by trolls who don't like our show.
My question is, is Locals.com gonna be our new house to sell tickets, merch, and connect with our audience?
Yes, absolutely!
We will build you a community.
Go to ReubenReport.com right now, just sign in, and create an account and sign in, and you can see the exact community that we will build for you.
And we are going to add new features to it, and live streaming, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
But yes, if you, I mean that's a great example, like you might be in a theater group, you might be a band, whatever it is that you're creating, if you want to have a rich experience with your fans, with your community, and then figure out, so let's say you're doing a A musical about the Bible, okay.
Let's say there are five other people out there, creators, that are creating similar kind of things.
Maybe not exactly the same.
Maybe you like some of them, you don't like them.
But let's say now they have their own local.
So your local is what we created for you.
It's whatever your website is.
So mine's RubinReport.com.
You've got your whole community there.
Now you find some other groups that are kind of doing similar things, and you want to expand what your fan base is, you want to have the ability for new people to find you, and you want to find new people, and you want to connect, have a network effect with other creators, right?
Well, they'll be on Locals too, and then you can combine on the back end so your feed is one thing.
So it's not like on Twitter, it's like, okay, you see a politics tweet, a baby picture, a terrorist.
It's like, it's not right for the brain.
It's all making us all crazy.
So yes, you absolutely will be able to create your own community and have the people who want to support you.
You'll be able to make sure that you don't lose touch with them just because the big tech overlords are stopping you from doing it.
Oh, by the way, you know, I said 10 bucks.
for the signed pictures right here.
So if you go to rubinreport.com, it's 10, you know, for 10, you can sign up for as little as three, but for $10, we're gonna get these out to you today, because you're gonna put your email address in, we'll contact you, get your address, we're gonna mail these out to you.
But on the app itself, just because of some rules with the Apple App Store, it's $9.99 to sign up there.
So if you do, if you do sign up directly through the app, Through the Apple App Store, it's $9.99.
We will send you the signed picture right there.
Okay, let's see.
From Morgan, I've been creating some content for what I thought this would be, but it's not quite ready yet.
Is there a timeframe where my community name will be shut down for lack of activity?
That's a great question.
We did discuss something like that in the last couple days.
I would say for now, go ahead and sign up.
If you're thinking about it, or let's say, Let's say you're one of the type of people that I get questions from all the time, especially at colleges.
I want to be a creator.
I want to be a YouTuber.
I want to be a podcaster.
You may as well sign up right now at Locals.com.
And I don't know how long we can just hold every name if you're not going to build your community in some Sort of timely fashion.
But for now you may as well sign up and then we'll deal with it there.
That's what I'm talking about, about not solving all the problems all at once and not over promising.
If you think there's a chance that you want to be part of this, that you want to be able to have your own community so people can always contact you, that hopefully if you're a big enough creator and then we can build you a pretty freaking sleek Custom, white-labeled app like we've got for me right now.
Then you may as well sign up, and I don't know how long we can hold everything for, so we'll see.
That's actually a great question.
Oh, I'm gonna sign a couple.
So people are actually giving us their names at the moment, so I wanna thank Nick, Christina, Jessica, and Rick, who have all just signed up at RubinReport.com.
Is it okay to have paying sponsors for a community channel?
Okay, this is a great question.
So look, I actually believe that part of the problem right now is that the advertising mess on YouTube especially is what caused so much of this problem, right?
So if like anybody says anything that's that's out of Off the Overton window, or just a little politically incorrect.
Then the mob comes, and it's usually not even people who were supporting the creator in the first place.
It's just like, you know, the Media Matters, HuffPo, Box, BuzzFeed, Vox.
It's like they gin up all of this hate to make sure that Tucker gets taken off, or that Ben Shapiro's podcast sponsors dump him, or whatever it is.
And that is unfortunately one of the risks that's coming with advertisers.
Now, I wanna be extremely clear.
So our podcast right now, our audio podcast, we've never been boycotted by a sponsor.
I've had people try to get my sponsors to quit.
Our sponsors have been great.
And that is a piece of our business, right?
So our business basically has sort of three prongs.
And again, these are some of the lessons that I want to show Younger creators or newer creators, how to create a successful business.
That's why we created Locals.
It's like, we've done something really cool here.
People tell me about it all day long, every day.
I'm incredibly proud of what we've built here.
So we've created a business where our subscription model, and again, we were not giving anyone anything after we left Patreon.
It was just because you wanted to support what we were doing here, make sure I can pay my guys a decent salary, we pay all their health insurance and all that good stuff.
That's about 70% of our rev.
Then we have audio podcast rev, which is ads on the audio podcast, and then we have the YouTube rev, which as I said is like this, you just kind of can't, you can't sort of...
It's not a way that you can look at a functional business and go, okay, we can project this for next month and this for six months down the road, because you just don't know if it's going to be there.
On top of the fact that you don't know that people are even going to see your videos.
So the question is, are we going to allow sponsorships in there?
It's something we're discussing.
It's a little bit different than the model, obviously, that I'm talking about right now, because what I really want is I want You, person watching this right now, I know you guys don't mind paying a little something for content, right?
Everyone pays for Netflix, or you have your mom's password, or Disney+, you got your uncle's, brother's, cousin's, nephew's, niece's password, whatever it is.
I started The Mandalorian last night, it was excellent, by the way.
I believe that subscriptions are the future because I think by you putting in just a couple bucks, if that's what you want to put in, or if you really love a creator and you want to put in more, you put in more.
But by putting in a couple bucks, I think A, it will make people act a little bit more maturely, right?
Like part of the problem is that the reason that there are a million Burner accounts and people can sign into a thousand different accounts and you can have anonymous people trolling people all day and just raising havoc, like everyone knows Everyone knows something's wrong right now.
Something is wrong with our level of discourse.
And a huge amount of it has to do with just that there's just all of these bad actors out there.
I actually think, through a couple bucks, and I can see this right now in our community, we've got great, thoughtful people in there.
By the way, most of them have their real picture and their real name.
How novel, right?
Because it's like, oh, you know you're sort of surrounded by interesting people.
And I want to give every creator out there the chance to have their own Sort of home, right?
And this is what I said before.
I'm all for free speech.
All for free speech.
I don't want to infringe on anybody's free speech, but I don't let everyone in my home to say whatever they want.
And what I want creators to have is a stable home where they can put their content up, where they can communicate with their fans, where their fans can communicate with them, and there is no middleman.
There is no middleman.
We're going to take the exact same fee that Patreon's taking.
So if you're on Patreon right now and you're a creator, well, wouldn't you rather your own community and potentially your own app, if you're big enough so that we financially can make it work, and you own all of the stuff, and if you leave, as I said before, if you leave us, congratulations, you get The information of all your customers, unlike YouTube, unlike Twitter, all of those things.
If Twitter boots me today, those 700,000 people, or however many followers I have, I have no way of communicating with them.
Same as YouTube, same as the rest of it.
Okay, so just a quick little radio recap here.
You can go to Locals.com.
We have launched officially today.
The first thing that we did with Locals.com was build the Rubin Report community app.
We want to build these communities first on desktop, then on apps for as many creators as we possibly can.
We then want creators to network with each other, find the type of people that you want to be associated with and have free voluntary associations
with other interesting creators.
Set the rules in your community.
If you don't want people talking about X, Y, and Z, you set the rules.
Big tech isn't gonna set the rules.
You set the rules.
Monetize your content properly by support of your own fans directly.
And as the question, the previous question was, we'll look into some ways,
there might be some interesting creative ways we can do sponsorship,
where maybe sponsors come in and sponsor X amount of people to get in for free for a certain amount of time.
We're thinking about all sorts of things.
So we'll see about that sort of thing.
But we started, I wanted to solve my problem first.
I cannot solve, you know, everyone has this idea out there that we should solve everybody's problem at once, right?
We've got to solve everybody's problem once.
I don't think you can solve everybody's problem at once.
I thought if we can solve what are the problems that me, as a creator, that's right in the middle of the free speech battle, that's right in the middle of the tech battle, who somehow, in the course of this, managed to graduate to the point that I actually am truly free.
Well, there was one piece of this that left me not free, and that piece was that I don't own the access to you guys.
Right, like, YouTube right now, they're probably not that thrilled with me, right, this very second.
Like, they could just end this stream.
They could make sure nobody sees this stream.
Twitter and the shadow banning, all of those things.
So every creator should have direct access to their community so you can create whatever you want and you can set rules that you want or have, or you don't set any rules.
It's actually up to you.
Okay, let's see.
As the Rubin Report community grows, how will that play into Locals.com?
Will it remain its own independent community or be integrated into that?
What do you see as the future of the Rubin Report community on this platform?
So look, the idea is small is the new big.
The idea is that every community, we're going bottom up, okay?
Big tech is top down, right?
So you got the big boys, you got the Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, etc.
And they sort of set the rules and then we're all the way down here.
It's all of our data.
That's sort of the lifeblood for them, so they're just kind of sucking from us all the time.
We're doing this the other way.
I want, whether it's far left progressive nutbags, if you hate Dave Rubin,
but you wanna create your own community, and then you have a couple other content creators
who you think you'd like to network with, and you wanna make sure that you're also protected
from YouTube and big tech and all of those things, I want you to be on Locals.com.
So let's say you support a couple of creators on Locals.com.
So let's say you support me, and we bring on X, Y, and Z, and you have a couple creators
that you really love.
You will have a curated feed of your creators.
You will be able to see all of your creators through one app, through one community.
You'll just toggle on who you're supporting, and maybe you don't wanna see some people,
or maybe you do wanna see other people.
That'll be completely up to you.
And then one of the things we're deciding right now is we may ultimately create a Locals.com app that will be sort of the aggregator app.
So if you're the Dave Rubin super fan, you'll be able to access all the creators you support through the Rubin Report app, but we may have one just Locals app where it's sort of branded just as Locals and not as a specific creator.
But either way, you'll be able to get the feed and the content of all of the people that you support.
Let's see.
From Megan, I don't have content I create or podcasts I sell.
What's the best way to use the app?
Well, if you don't have content you create or products to sell, well then you probably, well then you're just a consumer of content, right?
I think that's what you're saying.
So you're not creating content, you're not selling a product, right?
But actually, that does bring up an interesting thing.
If you're just a businessman out there, you're selling You're sellin' supplements, you're sellin' video games, you're sellin' electronic equipment, you're sellin' desks, chairs, whatever it is.
If you've got a little bit of a community that you wanna reach directly, that might be willing to pay a couple bucks a month to have some sort of curated information and content from you guys, you should be on here too.
But if you're not a creator of any kind, well then, you won't need a community yourself, but you will be part of a community, or as many communities as you wanna be part of.
Let's see.
So it's actually a pretty great story because, look, you guys know my feelings about this.
I talk about local all the time.
I talk about small government.
I talk about those issues all the time.
I talk about just sort of your Your local community is what matters.
Believe it or not, I try to say hello to my neighbors.
It's crazy.
Sometimes they don't want to say hi to me, but I try to.
So we were trying to figure out a name.
We had an original company name that still exists, but we wanted a forward-facing name for the product.
And as I mentioned, we have three investors who are great guys, who are fans of the show, who all of them happen to reach out to me to say, Dave, you know, if you ever build something, you know, I've got a little bit of cash.
Let's see if we can make it work.
So everyone that is literally everyone who is involved in this project.
is a fan of what we do here, is someone that cares about these ideas.
Like, that's why I'm so excited about this.
Anyway, it turns out that one of the guys, I won't say his name right now, I don't know if he wants to be named at this very moment, but he actually owned Locals.com.
And we were sitting there trying to figure out, well, what's the forward-facing name of the company?
And I'm just rifling off buzzwords and blah, blah, blah, and it should be local and da, da, da.
And he was like, well, you know, I own Locals.com.
And I thought, well, I think we have a name.
So sometimes things actually just work.
Can we get some hints about other creators coming on board?
So, I don't want to hint too much right now, right?
Because we've still got things working out.
But I have reached out to a couple people.
We have a couple big name people.
For sure, without question, people that are in at least the world.
Look, I'm starting off with my local community, right?
So I've reached out to a couple people who I think are creating good content, who are doing it through fan funding.
Several of them are on Patreon.
And as I said before, it's like, there's no need to be on Patreon anymore.
Why be on Patreon knowing you could be booed at any moment?
They don't really offer you much of anything other than they're your payment processor.
But we will be your payment processor.
And you will have your own community, and you will own the data of your customers, and if you leave you can keep that data, and we're not going to sell your data, and a whole bunch of other stuff, and you're setting your rules, etc, etc.
And when you put content up there, you know that your feed is not going to be manipulated, right?
You know that your fans, when they go on, and hopefully You know, you've subscribed to a couple people that are on Locals.
You've got a great curated feed of people that you're interested in that are creating great content.
You know that the feed itself is not going to be manipulated because we're not manipulating the feed.
The feed is actually going to be the way that the feed of Twitter was supposed to be, which is just chronological.
It'll all be up there.
And because we own all the technology, we're going to constantly be adding new features.
So eventually, as I said, we're going to have live streaming, we're going to have group chat, a whole bunch of other stuff.
We're testing out all sorts of stuff right now.
We own 100% of this.
We are not licensing any of this stuff.
We own it, and we can curate it, and we can fine-tune it for whatever you need as a creator.
So some creators may want certain features that other creators don't want.
We can build it for you.
We can build it for you.
So if you're curious as to what we have built so far, you can go to ReubenReport.com, and for as little as three bucks, you can be part of the Reuben Report community, and you will see What we are going to build through Locals.com for all kinds of creators.
It doesn't matter if you're in the politics space, the sports world, video game world, it does not matter.
If you are creating anything worthwhile, whether that's video content, audio content, you've got a great product to sell, whatever it is, if you have any sort of community and you've got some people that wanna support you and you wanna make sure you can contact them, then this is how you can do it.
Okay.
Let's see.
I signed up through the Google Play Store at the $9.99 price.
Can I change my subscription amount later?
I'm not creating anything, just looking to participate.
Yes, you can do that.
Yeah, you can do that, no problem.
Not a problem at all.
Let's see.
You may have gone over this, but is everyone who signs up at Locals.com going to have a profile account on the site, or is it something you guys are gonna roll out over time with waves of people?
So right now, anyone that's signing up at Locals.com, and from what they're messaging me on here, we're getting a ton of signups.
Anyone who signs up at Locals.com, we're gonna have to do a little vetting, right?
So that's why we ask you a couple questions about your community.
Are you crowdfunded now?
Et cetera, et cetera.
Because we obviously, if you've only got three people that are willing to pay you three bucks, You know, just realistically, we can't build you a website yet.
However, we do have some ways where you could pay some stuff up front so that we can build you the community.
And again, for the creators that are of the higher level, we're gonna build you an awesome, custom, white-labeled app just like I have.
And I think you're gonna be pretty freakin' impressed.
If you haven't done it, go to the Apple App Store or Google Play right now and just check out the app.
You don't even have to pay anything to download it.
You can just look if you want.
You won't be able to engage with the content, but you can see that we built something really, really cool here.
So yeah, go ahead, sign up, and then we're gonna do some vetting, and we'll figure out if we're able to work with you.
And again, I don't care what your political allegiance is.
I really don't.
This is a business that is separate from the things that I talk about here.
So it could be kind of funny, I'll end up building sort of secure digital enterprises and communities for people that probably dislike me, but that's okay, that's okay.
At least from my end.
Oh, I wanna thank a whole bunch of people who have just signed up for at least $9.99, or for $9.99 on the app, or for $10 or more, you're gonna get a signed, we just printed these babies, Dave Rubin headshot.
There we go.
Oh, not only that one.
For those of you that want a closer look at Dave Rubin, in case you're not sick of my face yet, here you go.
Here, I'll sign that one right now.
There we go.
I'm gonna sign that for the first name that I see here.
Truett!
Truett, you're getting this one, my friend.
So I want to thank Truett, Loppelthrott, Alina, WLT, Megan, Mysterium Lugosi, Martin, Matt, Stefan, Scott, Jeff, Jesper, Luan, and Tristan.
Welcome aboard, guys.
And what we want you to do is, once you're in the community, start posting things that you're interested in.
Do you own a business?
Let's get some fans to show up at your businesses.
All of this came out of what the last two years of my life have been, which was touring with Jordan Peterson, where every city I went into I would tweet.
That we're in the city, is anything interesting going on or can I give away a couple tickets to the show tonight?
And I would meet fans in every city and people that owned restaurants or owned coffee shops or a falafel place would take me out and I thought there's got to be a way to connect these people with each other.
I was at a restaurant once, I think this was in Seattle, I don't want to say the name of the restaurant and I'll explain why.
But the guy invited me and he said, when he invited me, he said, but do me a favor, don't say that you're here because I'll get a lot of hate for it.
And I thought, man, this is so screwed up.
The mob has so scared everybody that someone who appreciates what I do is inviting me to their restaurant.
Knowing that I've got a pretty big following, and if I just tweet it out, you know, I'm gonna show up at this restaurant, that they would get business.
There is no doubt they would get business.
But people are kind of afraid because of the way the mob operates with everything, and this was one of the reasons I thought if we could create small communities that people have to put some skin in the game, well then I think people are gonna start sharing stuff more.
You know, I've done this a couple times.
The last few times I've been in New York City, I've tweeted out that I'm gonna be out
in this area tonight, right, at like 10 o'clock.
And then I usually say to people, you have to have a real picture and a real name on Twitter,
and if you do, I'll DM you.
And I've had people show up, and I did one on the Upper West Side of New York City
about two months ago, and within like 15 minutes, about 40 people showed up.
It was awesome.
We had drinks all night.
I met great people from every walk of life.
A couple of them actually now are supporters.
And I thought, this is crazy that I'm doing this through Twitter, but I can't put up public information on Twitter because God knows who's going to show up.
And again, there's many reasons to just create smaller, controlled communities and not infringe on anyone's free speech.
You want to be in this community or you're there to raise hell or just be an asshole?
I just don't want you in there, but I'm not deplatforming you because this isn't a big platform, right?
That's the way you really have to think about it.
These big platforms, the reason they have the deplatforming issue is because these big platforms are sort of sold to us as if they're for everybody, right?
Everyone can be on there.
It's the new way of communicating, right?
It's like having a phone when phones first came out 80 years ago, right?
But the idea that you would do it small first means it's not really for everybody.
You don't invite everyone into your home.
You don't go to dinner with absolutely anybody and everybody all the time, and I think that will be the next version of the internet.
We're gonna have to curate and be a little more responsible with who we want to associate with.
And then as I said, so if you're a creator, right now, so a few of the people that we have that are coming out,
and I can't wait to share it with you, I just can't right now, but I've brought on
a couple people that I think you guys dig that are sort of in my circles,
and I'm going to connect my app with their app on the back end, so then we will start having
a new type of network with really no overhead because you're gonna have a whole bunch of creators
who are independent, who you guys can fund as you wish to see funded, who can all set their own rules
as they wish to set, and then we will have a network effect where we will actually be able to,
I'll be able to push my fans to other people that I think are interesting, and hopefully
they can do that to me, and I think that's now the future.
You know, the idea that we need big networks to get us all sort of, get a bunch of whole,
wrangle a whole bunch of cats together just doesn't really make sense to me.
I think we can do voluntary associations with people we like, and you know if...
If I connect on the back end with the creator and then it turns out that he murdered a family of four in 1982 in Wisconsin, well then we just disassociate and that's it.
I don't have to, if people want to keep funding him, if the government hasn't come for him, if the police haven't come for him for murdering people, well then so be it.
But you'll be able to associate with who you want to associate with.
We'll have eliminated most of the trolls.
We'll actually make conversation a lot better.
I'm very excited about how we can do it.
Okay, let's see.
You can sign up right now.
So just a reminder, you can sign up right now at ReubenReport.com and you can ask me anything and you can do it through the app, because we've got an app and we're gonna build these for the premium level creators and we're gonna build desktop communities for smaller creators and then hopefully you'll become bigger creators and then we can build you a great app as well.
So you can go to Locals.com right now and sign up for that.
All right, so I've even got papers here of all the things that I wanted to hit on and talk to you about.
So I thought it would be interesting, actually, if I told you just a little bit, I know some of you know this, but just a little bit about how my adventure here sort of led to all of this.
So, you know, I started on YouTube in February of 2013.
with the Young Turks.
Now, I have no need to talk shit about them or throw them under the bus.
I know they do god-awful videos about me all the time filled with drivel.
So be it, that's their right on this very platform of YouTube.
But I was with them for about a year and a half.
Most of you guys know this.
I was not thrilled with a lot of the political stuff they were doing and a lot of the behavior that they were exhibiting.
And we left there.
I went for about two months.
I went to a startup called riot.com and we took the Rubin Report there.
And at first, for those of you that never saw the Rubin Report on the Young Turks,
it was sort of a panel show.
I would have three or four guests and it was usually comedians and authors.
And it was sort of like hot topics on The View.
And then we took the show after I just didn't wanna work at the Young Turks anymore.
I just thought this is not what I wanna be part of and I don't like what's happening here.
It was a startup and we thought the show was really gonna blow up from there.
And then they started going more into 3D video.
And I actually totally liked everybody there and it was a really cool place to work.
But we did the show there for about two months and we realized that just like our futures
were going in different paths.
And that's when Aura TV reached out to me.
And Aura TV, you guys probably know this, was created by Larry King who is my friend and mentor
and sort of adopted extra grandfather, I suppose.
And Larry King brought me into Aura TV to do a show and they built us a great set and all that stuff.
And we were gonna just continue the Rubin Report the same way with the same panel show and the whole thing.
But the first episode, and I believe this was on September 9th of 2015, I had Sam Harris on.
on September 9th of 2015, I had Sam Harris on, and it was the first time that I decided
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And it was the first time that I decided But the first episode, and I believe this was
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
to do a one-on-one interview, because there was so much happening with Sam.
He had been lied about by so many people, including my former colleagues.
I saw the way the left was trying to destroy a good liberal who was just trying to talk about some difficult topics
in an honest way.
And I had Sam on, and that was when the second the show ended, I thought that was the most important thing
that I've ever done professionally, and I wanted, that's the show I wanna do.
I want to do an interview show with interesting thinkers and talk about important things and not just talk about clickbait and some of the nonsense that we had sort of been taught at the Young Turks.
That's what I wanted to do.
And we stayed at Aura for about eight months, and that's when the show really blew up.
I started talking about free speech more, but more than anything else, I started talking about my frustrations with the left as a liberal.
I started finding other people who felt similar things, people who usually were good old-fashioned liberals
like Peter Boghossian and Majid Nawaz and Ayhan Hersi Ali and a whole slew of people
who were not far-right radicals or anything, who weren't even conservatives,
who were just decent people who were shocked by what was happening with the progressives,
which is so interesting because that was literally four years ago.
I'm talking about the fall of 2015, and I started seeing this thing and talking about it,
And then suddenly people started watching.
It's like everyone sees it now.
Everyone sees how bananas the progressives have gone now and the way they've embraced identity politics and the whole thing.
Anyway, we stayed at Aura for about eight months and it was great there, but we were suddenly bigger than the network.
And that is when in May or June of 2016, I thought, I thought we could do this independently.
Let's see if we could do this independently.
And I was basically the first one in the political sphere to go on Patreon.
And we left.
I walked in to the green room and I said to my producer and to my director, I said, I'm leaving.
I hope you guys are going to join me.
And the three of us quit our jobs.
Full-time salaries, health insurance, you know, 401K is the whole thing.
And we launched on Patreon in May or June of 2016.
And the night before we launched, it was Sunday night, I remember I said to David and Amira, I was like, I may have seriously screwed us.
Like, this was before people were really crowdfunding, nobody really knew what Patreon was, there were some video gamers on there.
But nobody really in the political world.
I was like, I may have just totally, just absolutely fucked us.
I have no idea what's going to happen.
And we woke up the next morning and within about an hour I knew we were going to be okay.
And then we went completely independent.
We then, we've rented a studio.
Some of you may remember this.
I don't know that I've actually ever said this publicly, but for about six months, we rented a studio, which was actually owned here in Los Angeles by Roseanne Barr, who is a friend of mine, or is a friend of mine.
And we rented a studio with her, and that was actually going great too.
And then I realized, well, we're still not totally independent, right?
Because I'm crowdfunding on an off website that I don't own, and I'm renting studio space.
And then after about six months of that, or I don't even know if it was six months, maybe about four months of that, that's when I decided, all right, I want a home studio so that there is no more middleman.
And real estate is not cheap here in LA.
I had to take out two loans to do it just for the down payment and everything else.
But then we built this in November of 2016.
And then it was just a short year later when all of this nonsense happened with Patreon and we decided to build out DaveRubin.com and RubinReport.com and completely remove Patreon as the middleman.
And now I have all of the tools to be totally free.
And until today, basically, until we decided to start Locals.com and build our community, the one missing piece was we had no way of getting directly in touch with you.
We were still, our way, of getting our content out there, our way of communicating
directly with you still had the big tech middleman. And now we've removed that. We've
removed that. And not only have we removed it, I want all of the lessons that I have learned for these
past couple years, I want to kind of pass these lessons on to all kinds of creators so that you
can be independent too. I think I really believe that independent creators will save this.
You know, why is Hollywood so sucky right now?
Why is there so little good comedy anymore?
Why is there so little good stuff?
It's because everything comes from these big monoliths and big corporations and all this stuff.
And not that there's anything inherently wrong with those things, but I don't think those things are Made for human ingenuity.
I think if we can give the right tools to you guys out there that are YouTubers, or you're musicians, or whatever you are, and you can start being funded by the people who support you, and you can start communicating with them directly, and maybe meeting them in real life, and selling tickets through what we do, and doing more live events, and making sure that your content actually gets to your people.
And again, if you leave us, it's yours.
You can still contact them.
We're not gonna own it.
We're not gonna exclusively own it to the point where you can't have it.
I think there's a lot of interesting things happening here.
Okay, I want to thank Borealis, Thomas, Josh, Christian, LJ, and Nissan.
Again, anyone who downloads the app from the Rubin Report app on the Apple App Store.
Or on Google Play.
I think it's $9.99 on there.
I'm gonna sign one of these.
We're gonna get this out to you immediately.
One of these pictures.
And just do it on RubinReport.com.
It's just three bucks or more if you do it there.
There's just a difference in the way that Apple does charging than the website.
Okay, let's see.
What else do we get if we join the Rubin Report community?
Is the ad-free podcast part of it?
Yeah, so all of our clips are on there right now.
Every new clip that we've put up in the last three months, and eventually we're gonna work on putting up all of our archives on there, all of our videos are all there, completely ad-free.
And I think you're gonna be super impressed with our video player, by the way.
You press the button, and guess what?
The video plays, and it's pretty clean.
It's pretty great.
So the ad-free video is on there.
There's ad-free podcast on there.
So I know, look, some of you guys just wanna support, right?
So there's a lot of people actually.
that support and don't want anything.
They don't wanna be part of a community or they're more private
or they don't even care about ad-free podcasts, they don't mind listening to ads, any of those things.
But if you support for as little as three bucks, not only will you get ad-free video and ad-free podcast,
you will be able to communicate with other fans.
We're not really doing tiers at the moment, but if you wanna communicate with me directly,
it's either 25 or 50 bucks, you can message me directly.
We're trying to figure out all these things, and we're playing with all these things to figure out what actually totally works right.
But as I said, we're also going to have group chat on there, you'll be able to buy tickets, all of those things.
But more than anything else, you're supporting, you know, these are sort of the bells and whistles, and I think building new mature communities that are creator first instead of platform first.
Everything right now is platform first, and that's why they all feel so crazy.
You've got all of these people who all hate each other attacking each other on all of these platforms,
particularly Twitter, but even YouTube, right?
Like YouTube is designed to make everybody crazy.
So every time when somebody starts doing something good on YouTube, what happens?
A million lesser creator, not lesser creator, it's not exactly the right way to say it,
But if you're doing something good on YouTube, what happens?
People start doing all these videos about you because they know that if someone puts your name in the search bar because you're doing something good or something popular, well they wanna jack that, right?
So they go out of their way to do videos to try to take you out.
Like all of these games, these algorithmic games, these search games, these recommended games, I just don't want to play these games anymore.
We're gonna keep all of our stuff here.
We're not going anywhere, right?
I mean, maybe they'll kick me off after this, but we're not going anywhere.
But what I really do believe is that the future of this is no more games.
No more games.
You want to support people you like, you want to get things ad-free, you want to...
You wanna communicate with interesting people.
You wanna not infringe on anyone else's free speech, but you wanna be in communities that are of somewhat like-minded people.
And I don't mean, I don't mean politically like-minded.
I mean people who basically, you know, wanna see the world in some way that you kinda see it, and that's why you support certain creators.
Well then that's what we wanna build for you.
So I'm excited about that.
So you guys right now, if you're a creator, if you're on, I'm talking to all of you, that are on Patreon right now.
There is no more need to be on Patreon.
Patreon, I'm coming for you.
Jack Conte, I'm sorry man, but this stuff doesn't fly anymore.
Nobody needs to be on these big platforms.
If you're on Patreon, By the way, if you join Locals, you won't have to cancel your Patreon right away.
When we moved over from Patreon to DaveRubin.com, where we were just doing our crowdfunding there, when I left Patreon, I had done videos for a couple weeks telling people, I'm leaving Patreon on January 15th, please cancel your account, end your support for me, move over to DaveRubin.com, support us directly.
When I ended, we still had about 10 grand a month sitting in there.
Of recurring payments.
And I guess I could have just not canceled my account and just cashed in on that, but obviously that wouldn't have been ethical or honest and I didn't want to do that.
But if you're a creator on Patreon right now, I know a lot of the fear around moving to a new site or moving to a new crowdfunding is that you're afraid.
It's like, oh, well, people support me on Patreon.
I don't want to take the risk of doing something else.
It's not like we got to rip the mandate off and you're just canceling Patreon and joining us in one day.
You can do it, take as much time as you need to start telling your patrons, hey guys, we've got something better because I'm going to own it.
You are going to own your community and you can treat it however you want to treat it.
I think that's a great, I think it's a great sell, and your people will come along with you.
And over the course of a couple weeks, you can send out emails, you can post on Patreon, you can do live streams, whatever you gotta do to tell them, join us over there, and once you join us on Locals.com, just cancel your Patreon account, and we're here for ya.
That's a pretty beautiful thing.
Is the content the same for all subscribers to the Rubin Report app, or is some content exclusive to a tier of premium supporters?
I don't think we're gonna, now look, first off, every creator will be able to do whatever they want.
Again, you're setting the rules.
You wanna have tiered content that's premium at a certain level of price, you can do that.
What we're gonna do is, if you're in, as long as you're in at $3, The minimum of $3, but hopefully you want to put in more to help support what we're doing.
My feeling is I'm just gonna, everything that we put everywhere else, we're gonna put on the Rule Report app and we'll do some premium stuff in that.
I'm gonna do some more behind-the-scenes live streams and some more personal stuff.
We've got some interesting stuff maybe with a book club and some dinner things and some other live event things and a little more impromptu stuff that the only way to really do that stuff properly will be to do it through the app.
I'm not gonna have a paywall, like a higher paywall, for extra content on the Rubin Report app, but again, this is the beauty of what we're building with Locals.
If another creator wants to have totally different tiered access for different things, which is sort of a little bit more of the Patreon model, go ahead!
Do it!
We can do that very simply.
So I think right now, the way you can see that...
Is that right now, the only thing that we're doing is that if you want to message me directly, if you go to RubinReport.com right now and you sign in, there's a Message Dave button.
If you're only paying three bucks, if you click that button, I think it says it's $25 for signing to Message Dave directly.
By the way, I know it sounds sort of ridiculous to do something like that, but imagine if I just left that up open.
I would be getting hundreds or thousands of messages every day.
So we have to have some barrier to entry on that, and actually I think 25 is probably too cheap, not because of the money, but just because, literally because of my time more than anything else.
By the way, I also wanna say that several of the people that we've hired that are building Locals.com, that are building my app, are fans.
So it's not just the investors.
We've actually started a really cool, interesting, worldwide, there are people all over the world that are building this thing for us.
Oh, and I should give a shout out.
Our team is absolutely incredible and have been working all hours of the day.
And by the way, we've started showing Locals.com around because obviously we're gonna have to go in the next round of fundraising now that I'm going public with this, right?
We're going to grow very quickly right now.
We've been doing this all on the DL, on the back end, and we've been building out the way we wanted to, and it was a long time coming to get to today.
And I hope you like our branding and our graphics and all that good stuff, and the smoothness of the app and everything else.
But now that we're gonna go into fundraising, we're gonna have way more eyeballs on us right now, and things are gonna move pretty quick.
And hopefully we'll be able to bring on as many creators as we can in short order.
So we'll see.
Are you gonna continue posting on YouTube or move your interviews to locals?
No, everything will remain on YouTube as long as YouTube will have me.
But remember this, YouTube, we shouldn't be thinking of the big tech platforms as a home or a community.
Anyone out there, whatever you're creating, YouTube is a search engine for video, right?
That's really what it is, right?
They have an algorithm, and the algorithm, when you put in certain search terms, can manipulate things certain ways.
Now, I don't want to get into all the details of why they do it or how they do it or whether it's being manipulated or all that, although you may remember just a few months ago, a Google insider said that one of the channels that was being suppressed on YouTube was the Rubin Report channel.
He also said it was Tim Pool and a couple other people.
But none of us should view big tech as our digital home.
I wanna create digital homes for creators.
And by creating those digital homes for creators, we'll start creating digital homes for you, the consumers, because the creators will own what they're doing.
They're gonna own their websites, right?
I own RubinReport.com and the community there and the content there.
And that way, if YouTube wants to suppress my videos, I'm not demanding that the government comes in and stop them.
Do I want AOC in bed with the YouTube execs?
No, I don't.
So there's a mature, thoughtful way of dealing with the future of the internet.
And then, when we have a lot of interesting creators, all who own their own content, who own their own communities, who have decided who they want to network with on the back end to create bigger feeds and bigger, more robust discussion, well now we've got something totally cool and it's a complete Everything we're doing with this, everything we're doing with this is a complete flip on how big tech operates, on how big business operates.
We're really trying to give the power back to the creators and give the power back to you guys.
Gracie, I wanna thank you for signing up at $10 or above.
On Patreon, we could talk to you directly.
Are you actually on the app in the community yourself?
Do you respond to people?
Yes, I do.
Believe me, this thing has been an absolute pleasure.
I've responded to people this morning already.
But when I open the app, it is truly a pleasure to go on there because there's thoughtful, interesting people who are posting articles and asking questions.
And commenting on things and talking about what happened on the show last week or what's going on in their lives.
Yes, I'm going to spend way more of my time on here than on the other social media platforms.
I would rather invest in the people who are investing in me than invest in a bunch of anonymous trolls on Twitter.
You know what I mean?
We all know this.
All of these things, they're all making us crazy and no one's doing anything about it.
So that's why I wanted to start doing anything about it.
You look at the amount of blue check people on Twitter who complain about Twitter all day, and yet we can't get off because it's sort of like crack.
Well, I'm not saying get off Twitter.
I'm not saying get off YouTube.
Stay on all of those things.
Use them as you see fit.
But why not have a special place?
a special place for your community to be able to talk to each other.
This is the tab that I have open right now, is just the community tab,
where people are posting shows that they're watching that they find interesting,
or documentaries, or a restaurant that they went to, all sorts of different things that are all on here.
And as I said, we've got a great video player, so I posted a special message.
Today is an absolutely huge day, so for those of you watching--
You see how fast that worked?
I just clicked play and it worked.
That was a special message I posted just to our current subscribers this morning, telling them about what I'm doing right now.
Okay, let's see.
How is this different than Patreon?
Great question, which I've hit a couple times.
Patreon's a big tech platform.
You don't own any of that stuff.
You post your YouTube videos there, you post your ad-free podcast, all of the data, your customers' data, your supporters' data, all that, you don't own any of that.
With Locals, you're going to own it.
You are going to own it.
You are going to set your rules.
Whatever rules you want for your community are not gonna be the subjective, manifest, observable behavior, mob behavior that Jack Conte laid out to me for Patreon.com.
You will set the rules for your community.
You will own the content that you post there, and you will own the data so that if you're,
if you wanna leave us, if you just wanna leave us, you're just like, you know what, this product's not working,
or I don't like the app, or whatever it is, I'm doing, I'm building my own thing.
Congratulations, you can walk with all that.
You can't walk with any of your data from YouTube or Patreon or the rest of it.
Again, I have 1.2 million subscribers on here.
I can't reach these people, because that's the system YouTube has set.
So I've tried my best over the last couple years to nudge YouTube in the right way,
but I can't force YouTube to do anything, and I certainly don't want the government
to force YouTube to do anything, so I thought, all right, let me take control,
as much control as possible, and solve as many problems That really was it more than anything else.
I thought if I could solve most of my problems as an independent content creator, then I could solve most of the problems that most people have.
And it's as simple as that.
And look, if you're doing something that is illegal, well then we're not going to have you on Locals.com, obviously.
But short of that, if you're a creator building something interesting and you have people that want to support you, you know, we're a tech company.
The way that Squarespace is a tech company, right?
Squarespace isn't monitoring everybody that's on Squarespace all the time.
You do whatever you want when you build your website.
We wanna build a community for you.
It's up to you to set the rules that you wanna set.
I wanna thank Richard Kelsey and JC Betrago.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I love that idea.
question to communities versus individual creators. I've been
brainstorming a virtual art production house where artists don't necessarily
all promote themselves but organize through a virtual guild to promote their
collective arts. Any insight into how a single user can manage the local
interface as an administrator. Yeah, I mean I love that idea. So what you do is
you try to get, let's say you're in an artist community right now.
This is a great example of how to use a local and how we can build you something really cool.
So let's say you're in an artist community.
There's like 15 of you.
You all do different, interesting different things.
Some of you are into pottery.
Some of you are painters.
Some of you are, you draw by hand.
Some of you do 3D art.
Whatever it is.
Some of you do glass blowing.
Whatever it is.
But you've got an interesting community and you know that none of you are huge yet.
None of you are absolutely huge where you could own your own website where people would want to pay in
to see your stuff.
Like, there's just not, you haven't hit that critical mass point, right?
We've all been there.
All of you creators watching this right now, like, trust me, I've been there.
We've all been there.
Well, what you could do is you could all decide, well, we're gonna create a local together,
and if we can sort of join forces enough to have enough people start supporting us.
So let's say we each have, we've all got 10 superfans that love us, but that's not really enough reason to have a community.
Well now if we've got 12 of us and we all have 10 superfans, now we have 120 people who all want to pay, you know, 5 bucks a month and that turns into, you know, something like 600 bucks a month.
total, we want to build a community and then we want to start inviting more people to be
in this community.
So there's all sorts of interesting ways that these can work as collectives in the right
sense of collectivism.
I'm on the ThinkSpot wait list and therefore have no clue what the site will entail.
That said, what, if any, will be the connection to locals?
Complimentary platforms, competing between similar platforms, et cetera.
All right, so I'm glad you asked that, and let me address it straight on.
So first off, I can't say too much about Jordan, but I just want you to know that Jordan Peterson is doing well.
I saw him last week, and he's gonna come back bigger and better and stronger, and all of those things.
Than ever before, I just have absolutely no doubt about that, and I'm psyched for his return, so let me just say that.
Jordan also knew all along, you know, back in January, when Jordan and I left Patreon, the idea of ThinkSpot came up, and I said to Jordan from day one, I said, you know, I've got this idea about an app, it's gonna think about these things a little bit differently, blah, blah, blah, and Jordan was all about it, build it, let's build as many things as possible, you know, I'm gonna work on side things, you work on side things, all of those things.
So where I'm at right now is I'm putting all of my energies into this, into Locals.com.
I do think, and I've communicated a little bit with Jordan's team, but I can't just say too much right now.
I hope and think that there's ways we're going to be able to line these things up.
I don't know exactly where the ThinkSpot launch is, but Jordan has my friendship and allegiance and all of those things, and if there's any way we can link these things up, or if I just can't even say too much more than that.
But I do think that solutions are coming.
I think what we've built here with Locals.com is probably the best, the best, most thoughtful way to deal with the problems of the day, right?
We're all worried about being deplatformed.
Well, you're not going to be deplatformed off your own community.
We're all worried about algorithms suppressing videos and manipulating things.
We're all worried about shadow banning.
The future is the creators, right?
The future is no longer the networks.
Nobody really cares.
Think about it when you flick a channel anymore.
Nobody really cares about that.
like CNN or MSNBC or something like that.
It's like nobody cares about these networks anymore.
You might like one of the hosts on these things.
But the chair, it used to be that the chair had a certain amount of value,
meaning like if you had the 1130 chair on NBC in 1987, that was the Johnny Carson Tonight Show.
And a certain amount of people were gonna watch that, whether Johnny was the host or eventually
whether it was Jay Leno or whoever it was, meaning that the chair itself was on at a certain time
and that was gonna bring you a certain amount of viewers.
I actually don't think that's true anymore.
I think what the truth is is that people care about individual creators.
You care about the people who are speaking to you who hopefully are being forthright and honest
and decent and all that.
And those are the people that I wanna figure out how we can help them build their business.
You know what I mean?
Like I know a lot of people are, A lot of people are jealous, jealous isn't the right word, they're jealous in the best sense of it, of all of the things that I've created.
And because of that, I want to give the tools, every tool that I've used and built to build all of this, I want to give to all the creators that want to do that.
I want to thank Ash real quick.
Oh, how do we get one of these signed pictures?
So if you want one of these signed pictures, I've got a fancy, ultra fancy, pilot silver marker right here, and I'm signing headshots, people, for the first hundred people that sign up at 9.99 on the App Store for the Rubin Report app or on Google Play.
We will send you one of these.
I'm gonna sign it right now.
This could be yours.
right there, or for as little as $3 on rubinreport.com.
And the reason that we have to do that is just because of the way the App Store deals
with financial transactions.
It just is what it is.
We literally can't charge you less than that.
It's a long story.
Oh, I should also mention that part of what's going on here is that there's this issue about gatekeeping.
Like, has Twitter and YouTube and the rest of these big companies, have they become the gatekeepers?
Should we have gatekeepers?
Should everyone be allowed to be on everything all of the time?
Should there be some limits on what is allowed in public discourse and all that?
So without getting into the purely philosophical part of that, which I talk about all the time, obviously, right now, if we build you a website, there's really no gatekeepers.
We're a tech company, we're building you a website.
If you're going to be one of the premium creators for us on Locals.com, we're going to build
you an app.
That app is going to have to get into the App Store and Google Play.
If those guys aren't going to let you in, then there's some other problems.
This is what I meant about not trying to solve every problem for every single person.
We're trying to solve as many problems for as many people as possible.
I think by doing that, really starting with what I thought were the issues for my business
and how I want to communicate with my audience and how I want to engage with the people who
care about what I do, I thought if we solve that first, that will solve most people's
problems.
We can't solve everybody's problems.
It just is what it is.
Okay, let's see.
Very excited about this, and also Locals.com.
As a podcaster and someone with a very modest group on Facebook, these issues have been at the forefront of my mind for the last few months.
Very excited to see all this.
Thank you, Dave, and the team.
Well done.
Awesome.
Look, that's a beautiful thing.
I was once but a humble, modest podcaster, too.
You know what I mean?
Really, that's why I wanted to build this thing.
I know there are so many Great people out there.
You know, I love competition.
I really love competition.
And if there were suddenly a hundred more interview shows that did it better than I do it, right, that built a better set and the host was better and had better hair and all of those things and better guests and everything else, either I would up my game or I'll find something else out.
I'll find something else to do, okay?
So I really want to give you guys the power not to be beholden to these things.
The amount of people that I know Good people who have been on this show, who have been banned or temporarily suspended from Facebook for saying nothing, you know, saying true things about genders or just any of this nonsense.
We're constantly being force-fed right now.
And that was another reason, you know, a couple months ago when Zuckerberg was up in front of Capitol Hill and they kept saying that, you know, he kept saying, well, we can't scan every ad to figure out if it's fully true.
We just can't do that.
We want the market to figure that out.
We want people to figure it out on themselves.
And AOC and the rest of them are sort of lambasting him for this.
And it's like, alright, so what are you really saying?
Because if you're saying that we want Facebook to say what is true,
well, if you were to ask a higher-up at Facebook how many genders there are,
now we know there are two genders.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't be disrespectful of trans people.
Trans people, I think, deserve the exact same respect and certainly equal treatment under the law of everybody else.
But that doesn't change what biology is, right?
But if you were to say there are two genders, that could be considered hate speech potentially by Facebook's terms of service or YouTube or whatever else.
So these things, this competing set of interests where we demand that someone who has more power than us
tell us what is true, I just think it's nonsense.
I don't think it's the future of any of this.
What I think the future of this is, is that little communities will grow.
And as they grow, they will find other communities that they wanna connect with that are somewhat like-minded
or totally like-minded or very different but can figure out something that they agree upon
so that communities from one creator and communities from another creator
can start communicating themselves.
And they can do this through their own desktop apps or web-based or native apps on iPhones and Androids
and the rest of it, and that will be the future.
Small is the new big.
I really believe it.
I really believe it.
It's the only way to solve some of these problems.
And I know that, obviously, when I sign off this thing, I'll be getting a ton of hate on Twitter, and, oh my God, he's charging, and uh, and it's like, all right.
If you don't want to be part of it, you don't have to be part of it.
And by the way, if you want to pay me, if you want to pay me to troll me or say awful stuff or fight with people or the rest of it, I may tolerate a little of that just because I'm a pretty tolerant guy.
But ultimately, we'll just boot you and refund your money.
I don't want your money.
I'm trying to build something for mature people.
I'm trying to build something for people that want to build and not burn.
Everybody wants to burn everything down these days, right?
That seems to be the theme almost everywhere.
And it's not just in America.
There's this theme of just like, let's destroy the whole thing.
I'm not interested in that.
I'm interested in building sort of sustainable, long-lasting things.
As we watch the institutions of old crumble, and we're watching them, right?
We're watching the institution of television and media crumble.
We're watching financial institutions crumble.
academic institutions crumble, let's start building new institutions.
I think this is my first foray at it, and we're gonna give it a shot.
Where do you see Locals one year from now?
I mean, we've got big plans, which I can't tell you all of it
but my hope with Locals one year from now is that we have taken as many content creators out there,
we've gotten, you know, hopefully thousands of people off Patreon at that point or however else they're funding.
We've shown enough people that you shouldn't just be reliant on big tech, you shouldn't leave your future up to YouTube's algorithm to decide whether you're successful or not and how that should affect your financial stability and the rest of it.
We've created small communities that have connected with other communities to start building all new networks.
I mean really new networks of creators.
And just wait over the next couple weeks as we lay out some of the people that I'm bringing on board this that I'm going to network with, thus creating our networks.
And then I think we'll have all of these new networks, and then maybe we start figuring out some new things related to advertisers or a whole bunch of other things.
I think the future is our oyster.
That's why I wanted to build this thing and own it, and own it so I could hear what the concerns are from you guys.
I could look at my own business and go, well, what are my concerns?
And then we could We could kinda go from there.
So I think this thing's gonna be huge.
This is my best effort, guys.
This is absolutely my best effort.
And I think we've built the right team.
I think we have the right investors.
We've got the right developers.
Oh, by the way, I should have told you this right at the beginning.
We're hiring also, right?
We've got a pretty great company here.
If you are a developer, an app guy, you're in data, anything, graphics, whatever you think, if you dig any of the things that I have talked about right here, Email us, jobsatlocals.com.
We're hiring, we're hiring.
So email us at jobsatlocals.com, and let's figure, I mean, this is what community's all about, right?
If you dig what I'm talking about, wouldn't it be cool to help us build something that could be Internet 3.0, that could be the future of all this stuff?
I think that would be pretty freaking awesome, and I'm seriously excited about it.
We're also looking for investors, so you can email us, just email contactatreubenreport.com.
Look, I've got friends in big tech, and I've talked to some people, and there might be some interesting plays with that, but I love that we've built this so far with just a couple individuals who are taking a chance, just taking a chance, and who are mission-aligned and believe in what we're doing, so I'm excited about that.
If locals creates an app for me, will I have community building and tech support from anyone?
Okay, so one of the other things is we're gonna help you guys on the back end.
You know, one of the things that I hear all the time is that all these creators, you get on Patreon,
you start getting success, and then what happens is, doing all of the things to communicate with your fans
and to do all the rewards and to moderate content, if that's what you wanna do.
All of these things become other jobs, and then before you know it, you're succeeding, except your ability to create is actually diminishing because you're doing all the business stuff that you don't want to do.
So yes, we want to be the business behind you.
We want to be the business behind you.
We want to help you manage your subscribers, communicate with people, newsletters, all of those things.
Basically, if you're a creator, we want to give you the tools to create and we'll handle as much of the rest of the stuff as possible.
So it starts with, we'll build you a desktop community, and if you're at a level enough where it financially makes sense, we're going to build you a native white-labeled app.
It's pretty awesome, I assure you.
And then we go from there.
And we're going to help you be able to focus on what you want to focus on, which usually is just creating content and not having to deal with all the stuff on the back end.
By the way, As I said, because you're setting your own rules in your community, if you want more moderation in the comments.
So let's say, you know, you have a totally, your policy is, you know, I don't want people talking about this or that.
I don't want people promoting themselves or blah, blah, blah.
Well, we'll handle some of that moderation.
But again, it will be up to you and your community.
So this isn't a platform-wide thing.
The day of platform-wide rules that apply to everybody seems very silly and archaic to me.
So that's what we're gonna do.
Is there a space for small local businesses?
I create custom wooden baseball bats for all levels of play and ages.
My intention is to be and stay local, which means I would remain relatively small, but I would love to support and be a part of this.
So I love that.
So that's really the next part of this that I really want to figure out and we've been talking about.
You know, a lot of what I'm framing here is for content creators, right?
Like, it's for people that create video and audio podcasts and the rest of it.
But I mentioned before, it's funny you say baseball bats, because I mentioned, because I have a friend who runs a baseball league back east and he's got, you know, a couple hundred families that are really engaged in local baseball.
And it's like they also want to support the local team and local communities.
So I think we're going to start working with him where everyone just puts in a couple bucks a month.
That money then can be used to clean up the fields or buy uniforms or whatever it is.
We will help manage the community and you can use this platform for whatever you want.
So yeah, I want businesses on there.
So for someone like you, let's say, You're creating great wood and baseball bats.
You want to stay local in your community.
What you have to figure out is why would, say, a fan of what you do give you a couple bucks a month so it's worth having your own community?
And then, are there other like-minded communities that you want to connect with that are maybe in the baseball world or the sports world or the woodworking world or whatever it is that you can connect with so you guys can all sort of network together?
And a little bit of this is gonna be a learning process, and I hope that if you join us on here and it's worthwhile for you, and let's say you've got a couple hundred or a thousand people who really dig what you do, and they wanna just help support your business with a couple bucks a month, and then start engaging a little bit more on there, that then the answers will start presenting themselves.
I'm a big believer that if you build it, they will come.
So we'll figure out as much of this stuff as possible.
Okay, people, I'm gonna do a little radio reset here.
What have I been babbling about for the last hour and a half?
Look, we all know about big tech problems.
We know about shadow banning.
We know about algorithmic manipulation.
We know about de-boosting and de-platforming.
Well, everybody's been complaining about it and everybody's demanding the government do it or that Twitter start behaving better than they will.
or any of those things.
You've watched Jack Dorsey on Rogan and gave us no answers.
I've had Jack Conte from Patreon on here.
Apparently it's a Jack thing to run one of these companies.
I thought over the last year, there has to be a better way to do this.
And my feeling was small is the new big, that actually having people put a little skin in the game,
pay a couple bucks a month to support creators that they want to, just the way you buy in,
you pay a couple bucks a month for Netflix or for Disney Plus or for Hulu or whatever else you do,
the day of the bundled package where your...
your parents probably, we're paying 120 bucks a month to have a gajillion channels that they don't watch is over.
Cancel cable and start paying for people and projects that you actually like and wanna support.
And if we can start creating small local networks who can network with other people,
that that is the future of the bottom-up internet.
That is the future of, that is internet 3.0.
That's the way we get the power back to the creators.
That's the way we make sure that we're fighting the machines properly, right?
Like, think about it in a Terminator sense.
Skynet is on right now, right?
The machines are coming, the algorithms are coming, the way they can manipulate us and search results and all those things, it's all here.
It's all here.
So the only way, I wasn't going to demand the government fix my problem as if the government, which you know, you look at a government website, it looks like Prodigy in 1992, as if the government was going to solve big tech issues.
I just don't believe it.
So what do I think is actually possible?
Well, what I think is possible is exactly what we created here.
We can build you a great community website where your fans can connect with you,
where you can monetize, where you can have video and audio and chat, and we're gonna eventually
have live streaming and group chat and a whole bunch of other things,
and then you'll associate with other creators you want to, thus creating a network effect.
We'll think of networks in a new way.
Instead of thinking about big networks with huge overhead and all of those things,
independent content creators will start having their own networks.
I think, as I said before, I think it solves many of the big tech problems as can possibly be solved.
I don't think the answer is just creating some, another free site that says we will respect free speech more than the next guy.
Plenty of people have tried that, by the way, and what happens is only a certain set of people go there, then mainstream media tries to destroy them, and then they just can't, they can't get to scalability.
So I just didn't wanna do that.
Every single thing that we've laid out here with Locals.com is completely consistent with all of the ideas that I believe in and try to talk about on this show.
We've ran a test for the last two months by creating the RubinReport.com community, first with just a couple dozen people, and now getting a few more people in there, and it's starting to percolate, it's starting to bubble, and I hope that I will see more of you guys in there, and that's where I'm gonna communicate with you, and I'll start telling you where I'm, Okay, I think we're gonna stop in just a little bit.
two show ups and you can buy tickets to things and make sure that you actually see our videos
instead of being reliant on big tech that we don't know what the hell they're doing.
I just believe it can be done.
And as I said before, if David could be Goliath, then maybe Dave could be Google, we shall see.
I wanna thank memes, James, David, Michael.
And okay, I think we're gonna stop in just a little bit.
So, wait, sorry, I got a hundred, I got papers here, I got pictures here,
So for the last few people...
That wanna sign up while we're doing this live stream, I will sign one of these bad boys for you.
So if you go to the iTunes App Store, or the Apple App Store, or you go to Google Play, $9.99 a month to sign up for the Rubin Report app.
The app itself is free, but if you wanna engage in the content in any sort of meaningful way, you gotta pay.
I really believe that is the future of the new internet.
That is it, and I think people are willing to do it, and sometimes you have to kinda train people.
We're gonna have better, more mature, gated communities.
Not because we're infringing on anyone's rights, but because we wanna protect people's rights and we wanna sort of protect people's ability to share things without fear of being destroyed and mobbed and taken out by anonymous accounts and bots.
So if you're a hater, if you're one of the premier Dave Rubin haters, you could try to sign up right now.
You could try to sign up right now and jump in there and hate me all you want.
I'll either take your money, and then you have to grapple with that, and grow this show and all of the ideas
that I'm talking about even bigger, or we're just gonna boot you.
And that's not deplatforming you because it's not a worldwide platform, right?
We're creating small communities for creators.
And then as we do that, those creators will network with each other
and then we will build something big, bottom up.
If you build it, they will come.
That's what I believe.
So you can go right now to RubinReport.com and you can be part of our community and for as little as $3, although if you do over $10, we're gonna send you one of these as long as you do it while we're doing this live stream.
And more importantly, the business behind this is Locals.com.
I have one business partner.
I have three investors.
I am taking no salary from this thing.
I obviously own a portion of it.
And we hope it will be far bigger than anything else I've done.
I really think there's a chance.
but this is my best effort to solve as many of the problems as possible with the internet
and hopefully give the power back to you guys.
Nobody's doing anything, right?
Like, no, everyone's complaining about everything.
Everyone's asked, "Can't somebody else do it?"
You ever see that episode of "The Simpsons"
where everyone in Springfield wants, "Can't somebody else do it?"
But you're somebody else.
To loosely quote Homer from another episode, "I'm a guy like me."
And I thought, all right, maybe I can solve some of this stuff.
So I think, I really think we have.
We can protect your digital assets.
We can help you grow your business.
We can help you communicate with your fans.
We can make sure that if you have a support base that they're going to actually see your content and it's not going to be manipulated in any way.
We're gonna make sure that we're not selling your data.
And if you leave, by the way, if you leave Locals.com, we're gonna delete all your info.
We'll keep your screen name so that in case you wanna come back.
But beyond that, we're deleting all the stuff.
We're never gonna be in the business of selling data.
And if you as a creator leave Locals, congratulations, you can keep all of your supporters' email addresses and the rest of it so you can contact them.
Right now, I mean, really think about it.
Think about it right now.
I give one of the most professional shows there is on YouTube out of the hundreds of thousands or millions of channels that there are.
There's got to be millions at this point on YouTube.
I give them one of the most professional shows there are.
For four plus years, I didn't even have a contact at YouTube.
Now I do have a contact.
She seems actually quite lovely.
I think she's coming here tomorrow for lunch.
But I have no way of communicating with my audience here on YouTube.
Only a certain set amount of people got to see this live stream right now, and once the live stream's over and we post the video, only a certain set amount of people will get it.
They make sure that your videos don't get out to all of your people, even the people who want to see your videos, who subscribe to your videos.
And then they do all sorts of things related to recommended videos, where they push you away from certain channels and push you towards certain channels.
I tried to fight that as much as I could, and I suppose at a certain level they're certainly within their right to do it, but I thought there's gotta be a better way to do this, and I think we can do something really cool, and I'm excited about it.
So if you're a creator, guys, go to Locals.com.
This is just the beginning.
Sign up.
Tell us how many people you've got supporting you, what you're trying to build.
We'll be reaching out to people over the next couple weeks.
We've already got a couple very cool creators who I know most of you guys know that are gonna be on board this thing and I'll be networking with them and seeing what we can build out of that.
So I'm super psyched about that.
But if you're a creator, go to Locals.com.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Let's see if we can give you as many of the tools that I've built here so that you can be as free as possible because you will own your community.
That is completely different than anything that's happening elsewhere.
And I'm very excited about that.
I wanna thank Louisa real quick, and one more time, ReubenReport.com if you wanna be part of our community, and Locals.com if you wanna be part of your community.
Obviously, this is just the beginning.
If you wanna work for us, if you've got any tech experience, graphic designers, developers, architects, whatever it is, JobsAtLocals.com, and if you're interested in investing, and again, I'm not taking any salary from this thing, If you're interested in investing, you can email us at contact at rubinreport.com.
It's my best effort to try to do something.
I think it's gonna work.
I really believe it's gonna work.
I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think so otherwise.
Everyone that we have shown this to, and we've gone into some pretty influential big businesses over the last couple weeks, and we've had to sign a lot of NDAs to make sure people aren't leaking it and the rest of it.
We have blown away people.
We have blown away people with what we've built here.
So I'm super psyched and here we go again!
I always say it's funny for all the things that I build and all the times I've changed networks or built a home suite or all these things it's like I'm always back at the beginning and I think today is another day that I'm kind of back at the beginning but I'm psyched to be doing this with you guys and I appreciate all of your support whether it's just watching the videos and Whether it's emailing me, whether you actually support us on reubenreport.com, or financially, or whether you used to support us on Patreon, or whatever else it is, I think this is the best shot we got at fixing some of these problems, and I hope you'll be part of it, whether as a supporter, or someone who just watches these videos and shares them, or whether someone who ends up working for us, that's jobsatlocals.com, or as a creator who wants to take the power
That's what this really is about.
And if you want to build out your community and make sure your assets are yours and your digital future is yours and not be relying on big tech, we're here for you.
Locals.com.
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