https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GWz1RDVoqw4
Well Dave and I are here today to talk about patreon and so I’ll start we’ve been engaged in lengthy series of email exchanges with all of the people in our network and No one is happy at all with what’s been happening. And so we’ve been Determining what our options are and we looked at subscribe star But it looks like PayPal decided to cut funding out from them And so it doesn’t look like moving to an alternative provider An alternative commercial provider that’s out of our bailiwick out of our control is going to be viable So Dave, why don’t you describe what we talked about today? Yeah. Well first I think we should just make it very clear for everybody how Significant what happened to Carl Benjamin Sargon of Akkad is it doesn’t matter what you think of him or whether you agree with him Or any of that stuff the banning of him for doing something that was not on the patreon platform That wasn’t even done on his channel because of a word. He said where he was using the word against the The alt right or the neo-nazis or whatever you want to call them is a massive Move of that line of what’s acceptable now? There’s all sorts of debates we can have and we’ve had them of what lines should be if there should be lines at all But the fact that this guy got booted with no chance of recourse with no warning just just like that It’s just an extension of everything else that we’ve all been talking also also given that It’s also the case that he didn’t break patrons rules of engagement The ones that they stated and that Conte had talked to you about the fact that that wasn’t going to happen and that patreon hasn’t Responded well to this well look look Jack Conte came into my studio in my home and said he he said a phrase that I had never heard before maybe you had Manifest observable behavior, so you had never even heard that phrase before right? I thought I thought maybe this was just something that went past me. Okay now, of course manifest observable behavior MOB mob But but so the point was that it had to be about behavior and then in their terms of service it also had to be about What was happening on platform? So at every firewall here of what would have been acceptable patreon failed and they’ve put us in a position Where look I told I called you last Saturday and when this was really catching fire And I said, you know patreon is about 65 to 70 percent of my rev That’s I have a company now with with employees, you know full timers part timers I was actually considering deleting it right then and there which no one in their right mind would do no business person would do And I’ve I’ve taken big risks in the past, you know before I was on patreon We were at aura TV. I me and my producer and my director We all quit our jobs lost our health insurance all of it to join patreon So I’m not I like taking risks, but then I realized all right We have to figure out a plan and that’s exactly why we’re doing this right? Yeah. Yeah Well, and we would have moved faster, but we well and I did set up a subscribe star account Although I never quite finished setting it up partly because subscribe stars seem to fall apart almost immediately Under attack and and also it wasn’t obvious that I also read their terms of agreement And it wasn’t obvious that we weren’t going to be just in exactly the same situation again And there’s only so many mistakes you can make before the mistakes start to become fatal so we actually wanted to come up with a serious and And and and stable solution and I’ve been working on for months Literally for months. It’s been six months. I’ve been working on a system to allow authors and other people who engage publicly on intellectual issues To interact more effectively with their readers and viewers and listeners and It occurred to me this week that with a bit of modification that that could serve exactly the function that we’re hoping it would serve So what we’re going to try to do as fast as we possibly can is to set this system up on a subscriber model That’s analogous to patreon. It’ll have a bunch of additional features Which I don’t want to talk about right now and I don’t want to over promise but the system is is Because the system is new But we’re gonna try to get that rolled out as fast as we possibly can so and we have a number of people who are interested in hypothetically interested in moving their their subscription service over to it Dave and I are very Seriously planning to do this as soon as we can do it in an intelligent way and so yeah You know by the way one of the interesting things here We haven’t talked about this but I’m guessing your experience is just like mine the amount of emails that I have received and of course tweets And everything else but most of the emails from developers from investors from regular people from engineers I mean just anyone going this is the one because you know the issue With all of these free speech things is it’s like you don’t want to swing too early Before you realize that the problems got into critical mass But then most likely you’re gonna swing too late the lines will have moved so far that we may be on the outside of them And that’s why this one. I think was so interesting because Carl You know years ago five or six years ago when I started waking up to what was going on with the left Obviously and then all of the free speech stuff Everyone said you’ve got to talk to Sargon of Akkad. He’s the guy So this is the guy that’s been ahead of all of this. Sargon too was like he was big he was very helpful to me when I was first under attack, you know, and he’s a brave guy and and so and it’s a real mistake what patreon has done to him and and and as I said everybody in Our network is extremely upset about it Like we’ve been sending emails back and forth Well, probably with 30 or 40 people and so as Dave said earlier We wanted to make this video today to let everybody that we’re communicating with know that we have not been Sleeping on this front man people are trying to figure out what to do So this stops happening and and so and we have a good plan and and we’re gonna try to implement it as soon as possible so if I would ask everybody who’s listening to be You know reasonably patient imagine that this will take somewhere between a week and a month to sort out properly Oh, we’re gonna we’re gonna try to get something up in the next week Hopefully before Christmas if we can’t manage that, you know Because when you implement something like this there are technical complications that might emerge that you don’t foresee But I don’t want people to get the impression that we’re taking this lightly or lying down and that we’re not looking for a permanent Alternative because we are and I think we can come up with a better alternative and so that’s the plan Yeah, that that’s exactly what I would say. I would just add that it was like we were waiting for a moment You know, we’ve watched these doors slowly closing on us all of us whether it’s Twitter whether it’s Facebook who’s getting banned Who’s getting shadow ban payment processing everything else and we are taking this as seriously as possible Of course, you know Jordan who’s working harder than anyone on the face of the planet Somehow you manage to also partly build a platform over the course of the past year in the middle of all of that We knew that this we knew that this was lurking in the background and that this was gonna be a problem and Dave You’ve spent lots of time talking to investors and developers about building alternatives to these platforms that seem to Be willing to throw their weight around in an increasingly arbitrary manner But it’s not like it’s a simple thing to do people want somebody to say enough is enough and I mentioned this In a live stream I did the other day, but you know, I’ve watched my patreon drop. We’ve lost around 600 patrons I think about 5,000 bucks a month, but in a weird way I’ve actually been inspired by it because I’m watching yeah great for themselves So it’s like on one hand people are emailing me and they’re saying I’m dropping my patronage and I’m really pissed and it’s not About you and I want to support you and on the other hand my business side is going that’s not great But yeah, but we will solve this thing. I I’ve lost a thousand subscribers and I feel exactly the same way it’s like well they’re telling patron to go to hell and You know, it’s it’s not so good for me on the financial front Although that’s not too big a catastrophe at the moment. They’re they’re taking the right stand and encouraging us Let’s say or encouraging someone to do something about this. So anyways, that’s what I like I like what you said if we can just ask you guys to be reasonably patient We’re talking to everybody that you can think of and some people that you can’t think of we’re gonna fix this We’re gonna fix. Yeah. Well, we’re gonna or at least we’re gonna do our best to fix it There’s gonna be some bumps along the way man Because we’re now we have to speed this process up to so you’ll have to consider this a beta version But at minimum we hope to provide a an easy way of switching To a new subscription service within the next very short while so and thank you everyone for your patience and your continued support and Your attention and your thoughts and your reaction to all of this and and it’s it’s very much appreciated and it does help us I would say maintain motivation to continue doing this constantly you know the fact that I have all these patreon subscribers certainly is one of the Reasons that I try to put my youtube channel I wouldn’t say first and foremost because it’s had to take a back seat to this lecture tour But man, it’s way the hell up there on my priority list Absolutely, and it gives us all sorts of flexibility to do all sorts of things It gave me a little bit of flexibility to join you on this tour So I’m incredibly humbled and and appreciative of everybody that Jordan I will I will see it in a couple days in West Palm Beach. Listen, are you still eating steak? I will take you out for a good good good. Well, I found a good steak place here So we’ll I’m looking forward to seeing you Dave Continuing the tour a because we’re gonna continue the tour in in California. Yep, three venues in California in January and then the to an Australia New Zealand and we’re gonna add additional dates and hopefully soul and Singapore maybe the Philippines. We’ve got all sorts of additional things planned. We doing anything on the moon Yeah, well not so far but but I have some connections to Elon Musk Okay, man, we’ll talk to you soon we’ll get this up right away a great okay. Bye. Bye