Patreon: Problem & Solution: Dave Rubin & Dr Jordan B Peterson

Well, Dave and I are here today to talk about Patreon, and so I'll start. We've been engaged in a 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. So, we've been determining what our options are. We looked at SubscribeStar, but it looks like PayPal decided to cut funding out from them. It doesn't look like moving to an alternative provider, an alternative commercial provider that's out of our bailiwick, out of our control, is going to be viable.

So, Dave, why don't you describe what we talked about today?

Yeah, well, first I think we should just make it very clear for everybody how significant what happened to Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, is. It doesn't matter what you think of him or whether you agree with him or any of that stuff. The banning of him for doing something that was not on the Patreon platform, that wasn't even done on his channel, because of a word he said, where he was using the word against the alt-right or the neo-Nazis or whatever you want to call them, is a massive move of that line of what's acceptable now.

There are 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 like that—it's just an extension of everything else that we've all been talking about. Also, given that it’s also the case that he didn't break Patreon’s 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, Jack Conte came into my studio, in my home, and said a phrase that I had never heard before. Maybe you had heard it before: "manifest observable behavior." So you had never even heard that phrase before, right? I thought maybe this was just something that went past me.

Okay, now, of course, manifest observable behavior—MOB—you can't, I mean, that's it. There's a really… 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 platforms. So at every firewall here of what would have been acceptable, Patreon failed.

They've put us in a position where, look, I told you—I called you last Saturday when this was really catching fire—and I said, you know, Patreon is about 65 to 70% of my revenue. I have a company now with employees, you know, full-timers, part-timers. I was actually considering deleting it right then and there. No one in their right mind would do that. No business person would do that. And I've taken big risks in the past.

You know, before I was on Patreon, we were at EBI. Me and my producer, in my record, 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, alright, we have to figure out a plan. And that's exactly why we're doing this, right?

Yeah, well, and we would have moved faster, but we—well, I did set up a SubscribeStar account, although I never quite finished setting it up, partly because SubscribeStar seemed to fall apart almost immediately under attack. And 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.

There's only so many mistakes you can make before the mistakes start to become fatal. So we wanted to come up with a serious and stable solution. And I've been working on it 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, viewers, and listeners.

It occurred to me this week that with a bit of modification, that can 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 the 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. The system is, because the system is new, but we're going to try to get that rolled out as fast as we possibly can.

And we have a number of people who are interested in hypothetically interested in moving their subscription service over to it. Dave and I are very seriously planning to do this as soon as we can do it in an intelligent way.

And so, yeah, and you know, by the way, one of the interesting things here—we haven't talked about this, but I'm guessing your experience is just like mine—the amount of emails that I have received, and of course tweets and everything else, but mostly emails from developers, from investors, from regular people, from engineers. I mean just anyone going, "This is the one." Because, you know, the issue with all of these free speech things is it's like you don't want to swing too early before you realize that the problem's gotten to critical mass.

But then, most likely, you're gonna swing too late. The lines will have moved so far that we may be on the outside of them. That's why this one, I think, was so interesting because Carl, you know, years ago, five or six years ago, when I started waking up to what was going on with the left, obviously, and all of the free speech stuff, everyone said, “You've got to talk to Sargon of Akkad. He's the guy.”

So this is the guy that's been ahead of all of this. Sargon 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 it’s a real mistake what Patreon has done to him.

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 we have a good plan, and we're gonna try to implement it as soon as possible. So I would ask everybody who's listening to be, you know, reasonably patient. Imagine that this will take somewhere between a week and a month to sort out properly. All we're going to 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. I think we can come up with a better alternative, and that's the plan.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I would say. I would just add that it was like we were waiting for a moment. You know, we've watched these doors slowly closing on all of us, whether it's Twitter, whether it's Facebook, who's getting banned, who's getting shadow banned, payment processing, everything else.

And we are taking this as seriously as possible, of course. You know, Jordan, who's working harder than anyone on the face of the planet—somehow he managed to also partly build a platform over the course of the past year in the middle of all. I knew that this was lurking in the background and that this was going to be a problem.

And Dave, you've spent lots of time talking to investors and developers about building alternatives to these platforms that seem to be willing to throw their weight around in an increasingly arbitrary manner. But it's not like it’s a simple thing to do. People want somebody to say “enough is enough.”

And I mentioned this in a live stream I did the other day, but you know, I've watched my Patreon drop. We've lost around 600 patrons, I think about 5,000 bucks a month. But in a weird way, I've actually been inspired by it because I'm watching… yeah, I agree, 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.”

On the other hand, my business side is going, “That's not great.” But you know, but we will solve this thing. I've lost a thousand subscribers, and I feel exactly the same way. It's like, well, they're telling Patreon to go to hell. And you know, it's not so good for me on the financial front, although that's not too big a catastrophe at the moment.

They're taking the right stand and encouraging us, let's say, or encouraging someone to do something about this. So anyway, ah, 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—yeah, well, we're gonna, or at least we're going to do our best to fix it. There's gonna be some bumps along the way, man, because we're now—we have to speed this process up too. So we'll have to consider this a beta version, but at minimum, we hope to provide an easy way of switching to a new subscription service within the next very short while.

So, and thank you everyone for your continued patience and your continued support and your attention and your thoughts and your reaction to all of this. And 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 backseat to this lecture tour—but man, it’s way the hell up there on my priority list, absolutely.

And it gives us all sorts of flexibility to do all sorts of things. It gave me a little bit of flexibility to join you on this tour. So I'm incredibly humbled and appreciative of everybody that does that. Jordan, I will see you in a couple of days in West Palm Beach.

Please, ladies, steak—I will take you out first.

Good, good, good. Well, I found a good steak place here, so I'm looking forward to seeing you, Dave, and Ewing the two array, because we're gonna continue the tour in California.

Yeah, great. Three venues in California in January, and then the two in Australia, New Zealand. We're gonna add additional dates and hopefully Seoul and Singapore, maybe the Philippines. We've got all sorts of additional things planned.

We doing anything on the moon?

Well, not so far, but I have some connections to Elon Musk.

Okay, man. I'll talk to you soon. We'll get this up right away.

Great.

Okay, bye-bye.