Oct. 22, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
16:25
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I hope so. | ||
| I mean, I had a great interview with Colin Quinn and he just had a book come out and he was talking about how we live in such crazy times that the extremes are telling the independents that they're crazy. | ||
| And he was saying, you know, this is the majority of people. | ||
| How crazy is it that people... He's like, they're the crazies. | ||
| Is there the ideologue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
| It's Locals Week here on the Rubin Report and I'm doing a series of mini interviews with creators | ||
| on why they decided to become less reliant on big tech and instead own their content, community, | ||
| and livelihood with locals.com. | ||
| Joining me today is comedian and host of the Dumpster Fire, Bridget Phetasy. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Always a pleasure. | ||
| It's nice to see you again. | ||
| Before we get into your- It's been too long. | ||
| Your Locals community, and you were literally the first person that I got on Locals besides me. | ||
| I thought we'd talk a little bit about why I thought you'd be the right person. | ||
| And it's because you are trying, sort of like I'm trying, I think, to bring a little civility back to discourse. | ||
| How's that going for you? | ||
| It's going well in the community. | ||
| I mean, it is. | ||
| The last debate, we did a live chat, which was really fun because that's like the best feature ever that brings everybody back to kind of a chat room vibe, which is amazing. | ||
| And everybody loved it. | ||
| And we did. | ||
| And, you know, I had some Biden supporters, some completely independents, some people who just aren't voting, people who are pro-Trump. | ||
| All of us were in the chat. | ||
| Everybody was laughing. | ||
| Nobody was fighting. | ||
| It was very civil. | ||
| People were having disagreements, but still being cordial to one another. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| So I believe that it's still out there. | ||
| Is it weird that you have to sort of cultivate a space for that? | ||
| Like I think what intrinsically comes to people like me and you pretty obviously, pretty simply, naturally, that these days it's just like gone. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's, I feel like it's less gone in real life than it is online. | ||
| So I think if you got a group of people together, they probably would, Even if they fell all across the political spectrum, I would hope they would manage to be civil, and I imagine they would be more civil than perhaps they would be online. | ||
| Although, everybody being quarantined and being online, I feel like some of that decorum has eroded in that time, and people are forgetting how to behave online and off completely, and they're becoming more and more kind of polarized or entrenched in their own beliefs. | ||
| It seems like things, because of the pandemic, have kind of accelerated this already rude and nasty tone that we were already seeing amongst people. | ||
| But I do think, you know, online it's worse, obviously. | ||
| People are much We're anonymous. | ||
| I really encourage people in the community to use their name, to use their picture, so that we can get to know each other and help each other and have it feel more like a neighborhood and less like social media where everybody's just outwitting each other and trying to be the snarkiest. | ||
| Yeah, one of the things that you push a lot that I always appreciate is that it's not all about politics. | ||
| Like, even if you love politics, even if you live politics, and I love politics, and what I've been doing for a long time, but that life is just not about only that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I hate politics. | |
| And falling into this space has made me hate them even more. | ||
| And it's only affirmed everything that I believed before I knew anything about politics, which is that they're dirty, and they bring out kind of the worst in people. | ||
| And it's not my favorite topic and my community is very, you know, I'm sober, so I try to talk a lot about just what I've learned in coping tools. | ||
| I feel grateful to have learned it in sobriety. | ||
| You don't have to be sober. | ||
| to have access to a lot of this stuff. | ||
| And my whole podcast, Walk-Ins Welcome, is about grit and resilience. | ||
| And so I do my best to -- | ||
| That psychological cultivation of that attitude is really the most important thing to me. | ||
| And I think in the community, that's the vibe of everybody supporting each other. | ||
| I have workouts with the girls five days a week. | ||
| So we do Zoom workouts. | ||
| And it's been amazing. | ||
| I mean, this community has truly saved me throughout quarantine and in the pandemic. | ||
| Just keeping me on the beam and working out and working on ourself and sharing goals. | ||
| I've seen people help each other through death. | ||
| I've seen people help each other through health struggles. | ||
| It's just been really inspiring to see, you know, this virtual community support each other the way that community should. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's funny to me because you're right. | ||
| Like we all got sort of jammed online even more because of COVID. | ||
| We knew there was like a problem with the online discourse. | ||
| And then the solution somehow is that we're all online even more and doing everything there. | ||
| And it's like, we need those spaces. | ||
| I'm having dinners with people in the community and we've hired several people for Rubin Report and for locals that have come out of the community and all that. | ||
| One of the things that I think you're trying to do also is carve out a space for people to still be centrist. | ||
| Do you think the centrist thing can survive the crazy partisan times that we live in? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I mean, I had a great interview with Colin Quinn and he just had a book come out and he was talking about how we live in such crazy times that the extremes are telling the independents that they're crazy. | ||
| And he was saying, you know, this is the majority of people. | ||
| How crazy is it that people, he's like, they're the crazies. | ||
| They're the ideologues. | ||
| They're the ones who are extreme and will die on whatever hill and carry whatever | ||
| water they need to carry to justify whatever they need to justify to themselves. And I think | ||
| people in the middle, more than anything, I just want people to be okay with expressing confusion or | ||
| expressing doubt or expressing uncertainty or expressing the "I don't know." | ||
| That's a perfectly acceptable answer. | ||
| And these times, it is crazy out there. | ||
| And so- Wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| Are you saying you don't know how much yellowcake uranium are at the Iran centrifuges? | ||
| No, I know nothing. | ||
| Do they even put yellowcake uranium in centrifuges? | ||
| That just sounds like something. | ||
| I know less than nothing. | ||
| The more I've entered into this realm, the more I've realized that I know so very little about anything. | ||
| And it's easy to just get online and become an expert in whatever is trending, because you can Wikipedia things and become this kind of armchair expert in any single thing that pops up. | ||
| But really, we don't know that much unless we are experts, and I'm okay with being kind of the dummy who's asking a lot of questions. | ||
| And that's the other thing I'm noticing is that people are afraid to even ask questions. | ||
| It's not even vote for X, Y, Z. If you don't say, if you say I'm not voting or I'm voting third party, you will basically be called a fascist as well. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're a facilitator. | |
| It's fascinating to me to just see how that There's a loss of people being able to speak their free and honest opinion and truth. | ||
| And so more important than anything is that we all continue to cultivate spaces where that's okay. | ||
| Where people feel like they can just say, I mean, I can't tell you how many emails I get from people who are politically homeless, who are like, I don't even care if you read this. | ||
| That just felt so good to say. | ||
| Because they don't have anywhere they can express this. | ||
| So I'm hoping that my community can be that place where people can express their confusion. | ||
| I think Jack Kerouac had a great quote, I have nothing to offer the world but my confusion. | ||
| I feel like that's very much My vibe. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, when I've jumped into your community and I just kind of see what's going on, it's like people are sharing other things besides politics and they're, you know, trying to help each other out. | ||
| And it's like, that really, remember, the word social is in social media. | ||
| It's like it was supposed to make, right, foodies and what do you have for dinner and all that. | ||
| That's, I mean, half of my community is just doing Recipes and dinners. | ||
| But it's like even you're smiling as you're saying it because it's like, oh, there's something good happening there. | ||
| But it's like people are on Twitter just telling you how miserable they are all day long. | ||
| And yet we're there too. | ||
| So irony, whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I like Twitter because I really feel like it's the Thunderdome. | ||
| So you get to just, it's very hard to be free there too. | ||
| And I like to challenge myself on Twitter Because it's an exercise in what I'm not saying. | ||
| So when it first started, when I first went on Twitter and started getting noticed even by people on the right, you'll lean into what's working. | ||
| And I generally have this rule where wherever I have a tweet that goes really big, I'll do the opposite or I'll say something just so that I can weed out anybody who might think that I'm too much of a You can see one tweet and be like, | ||
| "Oh, I know who this person is, but I need to weed out the people | ||
| who can't handle differing opinions." | ||
| Because on both sides, there are people who cannot handle you saying | ||
| anything bad about Trump or anything bad about the left. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do you see the internet going in the next couple of years? | ||
| Do you think these big things that they'll exist still? | ||
| It seems like everything's kind of crumbling. | ||
| Maybe they'll look very different. | ||
| I've been asking everybody this question. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good question. | ||
| I don't know where anything will be in two years or three in the future. | ||
| All of the things that we never could have considered possible are playing out or happening. | ||
| So I have to really, really get my mind around being comfortable with being uncertain and not really having any idea what... I think Twitter will survive. | ||
| My feeling, even seeing that my 12-year-old nephew now loves Twitter because it is the fastest social media in terms of the conversation and it is this think tank for all of these kind of thought people. | ||
| And the conversation is kind of happening there. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if it survives, but it seems like the forces to silence people, | ||
| and I'm seeing this even, like I was in Clubhouse last night | ||
| Holy crap. | ||
| I mean, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I don't even know really. | ||
| I got an invite a long time ago. | ||
| I logged on once and I was like, I don't need to like listen to these people talking. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like we need more of it. | ||
| It's like a zoo. | ||
| It's a zoo. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's, you know what I really love about it is that it's basically like being at a conference and you can just go pop in and listen to a panel of speakers. | ||
| That's how I see it. | ||
| But then with the introduction of people that make people in there not feel safe, it's caused a lot of discussion, the same discussions that happen on every single platform about who's allowed to be speaking, who's allowed to be where. | ||
| And so this is the conversation that I think will alter all of these platforms the most. | ||
| You know, Twitter, Facebook, who's allowed to speak where? | ||
| And why I love locals is because I feel like, and Malice and I have talked about this, at least we'll get a phone call before we get booted. | ||
| I mean, you can do whatever you want. | ||
| It's up to you. | ||
| As long as you're not breaking the laws of the United States, you know, you've shown a little, a little more skin than say I've shown on mine, but as long as, I don't care what you do in there. | ||
| I mean, the whole, the whole, you know, development team, they don't care. | ||
| It's your community. | ||
| It's like, we're just giving you some tools. | ||
| You go, you go do what you want. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| It feels very free and I like that. | ||
| And you know, it's really empowering in that it goes through my Stripe account. | ||
| I feel like that's the most empowering thing because I've been on a lot of these other sites and it goes to them, we get paid out, we have to wait. | ||
| This is truly giving the creators The tools to their audience and access to their audience and not being a gatekeeper because in this time when there are gatekeepers everywhere and you can just get booted off a platform and sorry, you now have to fight for your stuff and fight for your audience and now scramble to tell everybody. | ||
| This feels a lot more empowering and I think that that is the future and it's the most One of the most exciting things other than just the sexiness of the actual design and platform about Locals for me as a creator. | ||
| Yeah, just to be clear for people that don't get what you're saying, it's your Stripe account, meaning if you're a creator on there, it's your personal Stripe account. | ||
| So Locals doesn't collect the money on your behalf and then pay you. | ||
| You're paid as people sign up, then Locals gets their cut, but it all goes through you. | ||
| So there's no middleman. | ||
| Well, they're subscribing and yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And in my case, they're subscribing to Phetasy Inc. | ||
| I mean, this is this is an amazing and people just kind of assume that that's the way it was because that's the way it is. | ||
| And the fact that Locals has made that very small but obvious shift in the way that this works is, I think, enormously Important for creators in this space moving forward when things are shifting and people are being deplatformed and silenced and booted. | ||
| Phetasy, you're making me look good for picking you first. | ||
| I'm a business woman. | ||
| All right, well, everyone can go to phetasy.locals.com or just phetasy.com, just redirects to locals. | ||
| And I hope to see you in real life one of these days, my friend. | ||
| I know. | ||
| This digital thing. | ||
| Let's do this. | ||
| No, I know, it's overdue. | ||
| All right, we'll set it up. | ||
| But thank you for creating this and thank you to the team. | ||
| You have an amazing team behind you and working with you and they're all very loving and supportive and brilliant and talented. | ||
| I appreciate all of their help, and I want them to know that I see how hard they work and what they're doing, and it doesn't go unnoticed with me or my community. | ||
| I hear about it all the time from them, so thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Awesome. | |
| Well, I'd love to hear that, and they'll be happy to hear that. | ||
| All right, Bridget, we'll talk soon! | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about comedy instead of the nonstop yelling you get everywhere else, check out our comedy playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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