Goodbye to Patreon

Hello there, Mr. Rubin.

All right, JP, January 1. We got anything good for the people?

Well, I don't know how good it is. I guess we're gonna find out how good it is. It's not something I'm thrilled about by any stretch of the imagination. So, you and I have been talking for a couple of weeks now. Ever since this scandal around Carl Benjamin, or Sargon of Akkad, broke, we decided a while back that we were going to do a variety of things, right? We were going to announce our departure from Patreon, which is what we're doing in this video. I'm going to leave Patreon January 15th. I also am going to leave Patreon on January 15th, which, by the way, we should just be clear, this is not something that we wanted to do.

We were both perfectly happy on Patreon. Patreon, at least for me, has been the backbone of my show. I mean, that's somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of our funding is through Patreon. So, this is not something we wanted to do. I know we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of things in this recording, but that New York Times article that came out, the implication was, oh, we're doing this for money. It's like, we're taking a major hit right now and opening ourselves up to all sorts of risks. So, I'm going ahead and doing that because I believe we can do something better. We've got to figure out exactly what that is, and that's what we're working on.

So, we can say two things. I mean, I'd also like to thank the Patreon people for what they did in the past because they provided me with a tremendous amount of—or the ability, the opportunity to generate a tremendous amount of financial support at a time I really needed it. And so, I'm not happy in the least with what has happened. I have thought about it a lot and believe that, given Patreon’s proclivity to censor and the reasons that they're doing it, especially as I've looked more and more deeply into the reasons, particularly with regards to my discovery of the website "Change the Terms," I've become increasingly convinced that it's unethical to continue my association with the company.

I also agree with Jack Conte's comments in that New York Times article, trying to justify Sam Harris’s departure and our threatened departure, that it was motivated primarily by financial gain. And, like, look, I've got nothing against financial gain. You know, I've said that from the beginning. If things that I'm doing generate an honest amount of money that I can put to reasonable use, then so much the better. But this is a major financial blow. I'm using the Patreon money for a variety of reasons, most particularly to support this educational endeavor that I've talked to people about, right? Our attempt to build an online education system. And so, like, it's a major hit, yeah.

And, of course, you know, just to be clear, it’s like when we're doing my show. I mean, I don't have to tell everybody about YouTube demonetization, but, for example, in my show a week or two ago with Imam to Edie, it was demonetized by the algorithm, then demonetized further after manual review by a human. So, it's Patreon. It's the supporters, the individual people that allow us to go ahead and do more of these controversial, so to speak, episodes. So, yeah, just nothing that we're doing right now is against the people that have supported us or our patrons or anything like that.

So, this is about making a stand against this ever-moving encroachment on free speech, on free expression, and the rest of it. And it's like this is one that we just feel is the right one to make the move on. The reason we jointly decided on January 15th, well, there were a couple of reasons. The first was that we thought that we might have something approximating an alternative potentially available for preliminary launch on that date, although we've decided to delay that because the user interface needs work.

Because that's the other thing, right? There needs perhaps to be a replacement for Patreon if that's a possibility. Like, it's not obvious to me that corporations can run platforms for untrammeled communication successfully on the net in today’s climate. Yeah, would anything I might design? But let's not gloss over that. I mean, it might be possible that the Patreon method is not what's needed exactly for the future of the Internet. I mean, this is what we're trying to figure out right now, which is why we've got every engineer. I mean, people from Google and Facebook and Yahoo, everybody reaching out to us because it's like everyone's trying to solve this problem.

And it’s still—I mean, one of the things we've been talking about now for the last, well, it's really for the last year, but intensely in the last month, is what actually is the problem itself? Because until we really figure out what the problem is...well, I think the problem is how to regulate an incredibly diverse range of opinions, if such regulation needs to be instantiated. We could take a limit case, for example, the desire of companies like Facebook not to have their platforms used for recruitment for ISIS. It's hard to make a case that that's not a reasonable restriction, right?

But then the next issue is, I think you could make an exception there because maybe you consider that a wartime exception or something like that. But then the fundamental problem to me seems to be—and I'll return again to that Change the Terms website—that a whole variety of companies and organizations spearheaded, not least by the Southern Poverty Law Center, that hateful organization—yeah, the worth that has decided that they're going to compel or encourage what they deem perhaps companies that don’t band together to regulate what they see as hate speech.

Yeah, and this is where, well, this is where the moving line is the key part of this because you can always find the most fringe cases. You can always find ISIS on one side and, you know, the most fringe KKK, white supremacist group, or whatever you want to call it on the other side. But let's not forget the Southern Poverty Law Center. They've written things about you. They've written things about me, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Maajid Nawaz, and Sam Harris. Sorry, and a litany of Majid sued them too and actually won. So, there is a pushback, but this is just another level of the stand. It's like they cannot be trusted to be on the boards of any of these organizations that are deciding what terms.

Yeah, but they are. Should have access? It's really—who should have access to the Internet? No, it's worse than that, Dave, because when they start to pressure the credit card companies—and I would consider this a warning to everyone who's listening—is like, okay, let’s think this through. So, the New York Times last week wrote an article about the credit cards' complicity in loaning money to that terrible tiny minority of people who engaged in mass shootings, right, stating that it was the responsibility of the credit card companies to monitor and potentially prevent those activities.

Like, okay, so what's this? What's the idea here? The idea is that the companies to whom we have entrusted our monetary system in large parts—that would be the credit card companies—now get to review our spending patterns to determine if what we purchase is in accordance with what they regard as morally acceptable, okay? And we think that's a good idea? Now that’s where we’re headed. And MasterCard and Visa and PayPal are already starting to block people.

Like, they brought—MasterCard was instrumental in blocking Spencer, Robert Spencer. Right? It's Robert Spencer or not Richard Spencer. Yes, it's a best-selling author and the guy who runs Jihad Watch. MasterCard required Patreon to de-platform him. And just to be very clear, they sent out a tweet, which everyone can find. I'm shocked that they haven't deleted it yet, where they said that they—and they used this word—which I think is the key to the whole thing—they said that they unfortunately had to delete his Patreon because of MasterCard. So, what are they actually saying there? Are these Patreon saying, “Oh, we didn't want to delete your page, but MasterCard forced our hand”? I mean, that is some deeply scary stuff.

Yeah, well, and we have to talk about hate speech because, you know, I think the whole concept of—look, obviously there are people who can be very nasty when they communicate. But the idea that there's an identifiable category and you can put boundaries around it and term it hate speech, and then you can produce committees or deal with people on a one-to-one basis as Patreon is doing, without any central policy, or let’s say despite their central policy, or that you could turn that into an algorithm that could validly identify hate speech without producing false positives, right? Without accusing people who shouldn't be accused of violating—all of that’s just completely—it’s just Baker’s the imagination as far.

Of course, and you're also just opening a Pandora's box from hell because just in the last couple of days, I don't know if you saw this, but the Women’s March in California canceled their rally because they felt that it was too white.

Yeah, now imagine if they canceled their rally because it was too black or to anything else. It's like, so does that now count as hate? Are you guys now being racist against white people? No, no, that wouldn’t be a problem for these guys. One of the things that I can't fathom in some sense is the lack of imagination on the part of the people who are engaging in censorship of what they regard as hate speech.

Like there’s an old military adage, which is that if you invent a weapon, it will be used by your enemy within 15 years, okay? So why—what makes the people who are on the left, because they're the ones who are doing this, well, as you can clearly see in the Change the Terms website—what makes them so sure that exactly the same tactics won't be used against them, like at the drop of a hat, once the tactics have been validated and put in place?

I think it's either just very short-sightedness on their part or they think that they can actually stamp out enough hate within that very small window before it would turn on them—or they just don't think these things fully through. But yeah, yeah, or there's another possibility too, which is that they're so opposed to the fundamental structures of the West that, let's say—and regard them as so patriarchal, oppressive—that they'd be willing to take the risk of sacrificing their own free speech just to have their destructive way, something like that.

We should also acknowledge that in the New York Times piece that was written—written by Nellie Bowles, who wrote the now infamous piece about you and enforcement...ah, gimme that—the quote that Jacqueline Hart, who is the head of Trust and Safety over at Patreon, the core—there's no hidden—who is no grounding in soul coffee or any of the background training that might be necessary to even remotely begin to participate properly in such a thing? No, of course not.

Quite so. The quote that she gave Nellie in the article said that you can't say these—I'm loosely quoting this now—you can't say these words on our platform, referring to Karl referring to him saying the n-word in that video, yeah, which we know they were using out of context and all that, but he never said it on their platform. He never said it on Patreon. He didn't even say it on his own channel—that was, you know, using Patreon for the funding.

So there was a—it's almost the entire story was built on quicksand—that he—that tried to put out there on the New York Times now. Of course, myself and many other people tweet the hell out of it and get hundreds and thousands, probably of retweets and comments to Nellie, and she doesn’t respond, nor does the New York Times issue any sort of correction about the most fundamental piece of the story was a lie. And I don’t have—I don’t have a problem doing that, so that's why this is so layered about speech and finance and journalism.

It's so amazing to see journalists take the journal. If one of the things that happened in Canada to me was that, you know, after I made the initial videos that caused such a political furor was that once the main journalists in Canada sort of figured out what I was doing, they all came out in my support.

Like the Postmedia group, which is 200 newspapers, all came out to support what I was doing because they realized that, oh, they’re journalists. Apart from comedians, there isn't anybody who relies more on the principle of free speech to justify and allow their occupation even to exist. For the New York Times not to understand that this threat is also a threat to everything upon which their entire organization has been predicated is also an indication of that same kind of willful blindness that we've already been discussing.

But having said that, I would still like to say that I think the biggest danger here, I really—and it’s just made my jaw drop over the last couple of weeks thinking about it—is the fact that the credit card companies are now taking it upon themselves to potentially police the activities of their users. It's like, my god, is that really—I just—I just can't believe that any sensible person would think that through and then want to live in a society where your spending habits are being monitored by the company that basically produces your money.

Yeah, well, think of anything more totalitarian than that. So, loosely quoting our friend Eric Weinstein, should Republicans be allowed to use roads? That’s sort of where we’re headed here. That every public good will be eventually decided—can access to it? Will you have access to water? Should—should an avowed white supremacist right now that is potentially watching this or lives in America somewhere—one of the 42 of them—should they have access to water at their home? Should they be allowed to be—a get electricity at their home or phone lines or all of these things?

I mean, this is where we're headed, especially when you ever expand the definition of hate. That person is complicit! They won’t in China, right? You know, that's where they're going, right? So is that the test case? Well, I think it's an indication that the fact that the Chinese have been tempted into this is also an indication of the temptation that’s intrinsic in the technological power.

The credit card companies are in a weird situation, as far as I’m concerned, because the only reason they work at all is because people actually trust them completely. It remains like, oh, you're just a proxy for money, like, you're a proxy for cash. In fact, that's basically how good MasterCard advertises itself, right? So you’re a proxy for cash, and the government doesn't watch what you spend your money on except in extraordinary, extraordinary limited cases.

I mean, their money laundering laws and so forth, but that's a direct violation of a law, right? That's part of tracking down criminal activity. Now, it has nothing to do so far with hate speech, which, by the way, is protected by the First Amendment, yeah? So, or which means in some sense that it doesn’t exist, you know, as a legal concept right now.

This is like—which is right. We shouldn't gloss over that fact too because, you know, Jordan, we just did however many countries in Europe, and we're gonna go back this spring, and it's like everybody that we met was jealous of the freedoms that we have in the United States relative to speech. You know?

I mean, everybody that would come up to us after the show, "Holy cow! I wish we could say that," and "I wish we didn't worry about this or that or jokes or the rest of it." We did that video in Oslo where you talked about Angela, and it's like they're jealous of our freedom.

So, we should be very clear here, though—you're right—because we now have a payment processor issue which is in indirect connection to whatever it is that we're trying to build out here. And we're still, it’s a little amorphous at the moment, yeah? That it's changing because a lot of people are saying, "All right, you guys really want to solve this, then you have to go full critical."

Yeah, the promo video has to be hosted crypto. Yeah, the finances have to be hosted or have to be done via crypto. Yeah, all these things, these are major, major things that we're trying to figure out on every front. Certain payment processors are a little more willing to stand up to the mob than others, so have different people, I mean really going on every front here.

That's right. Well, the tentative platform that we're trying to build and to build carefully will provide the possibility of multiple payment portals in the hope that the creators will be less susceptible to being rapidly shut down or perhaps shut down at all. But, you know, only a fool would say that that problem is going to be definitively solved.

I have some real and increasing sympathy for the cryptocurrency types, you know, but the problem there is that as far as I can tell, their solution is still sufficiently technically complex to keep it out of the mainstream use and also not sufficiently liquid to actually constitute a realistic current replacement even for credit cards.

Right, so one of the things we've been discussing is that it’s almost like we have to have several markers down the road to figure out what the real solution is because not everything can be solved in terms of service tomorrow related to everyone that exists. Not everything can be solved tomorrow related to the payment processors. Maybe crypto really is the ultimate answer, but it's not the answer tomorrow for everything.

So we’re really—we're plotting out a lot here, but it seems like a fresh and sort of fitting way to start the year, I think so. And so for January 15th, I mean, part of the reason that we picked that date, as I said before, was because we thought we might have something to announce with regards to an alternative platform, but you know, saner heads have prevailed in that commerce.

Yeah, yeah. And also we wanted to give people an opportunity to decide what they wanted to do without just springing it on them. I mean, I have some real admiration for Harris for acting so immediately and definitively.

Yeah, and it’s funny, you know, I saw some criticism. It’s like, “All right, well, Sam dropped immediately, and look, you and Peter said you’re still there, and you’re talking about this whole thing.” And it’s like we all have different things to consider. We all have different family situations, different business situations, different livelihood situations—everything.

So it’s like we were really trying to just plot this thing out properly, and to be very clear, we’re still in the process of that, yeah? So for any of surf, for anyone watching this right now, if you’re supporting Jordan on Patreon or you’re supporting me on Patreon or both of us or whatever it is, it’s like now we’re trying to shift people because, at least by getting off Patreon at the moment, we’ve removed one of the middlemen.

And you can now go directly to JordanBPeterson.com or DaveRubin.com, and you can at least, if you want to donate, you can do that for now while we figure out everything else. And that way we've removed one of the pieces here because there's just too many pieces here that are creating this mess.

I think it's too much to hope for a perfect solution to a very complex problem, and we're muddling through the best we can, and hopefully, people will regard our joint decision to leave Patreon as a step in the right direction, however imperfectly taken.

Yeah, well, look, I think I said it before, but I really think that—and maybe this will be the defining idea of 2019—is that I think we're basically at the point where people have to decide what sort of internet they want.

Yeah. And it's not only what sort of internet, it's really what sort of freedom do you want in a digital world? And either—or, do you want any? Or do you want any, and maybe you don't, or you don't want to think about it, and you just want to play Fortnite at night and watch porn and never think it through?

But assuming that you’ll be allowed to watch porn, right? For that matter, right? So the games of violence should be allowed? What makes you think that credit card companies should allow you to use their funds to purchase first-person shooter games, for example? Or any game where anyone is killed?

No, no, you're totally right. That's it. I mean, that sounds completely dystopian, and yet it seems like that would just be the next encroachment that we would see here.

So the point at the end of this is, I think everyone, for 2019—since it's the first day of the year—it's like you have to think about what type of internet do you want? What type of ability to communicate with other people do you want? And if you want something that's a little better than what we've got right now, we better stand up quick because this window, we know, is closing slowly, but we never know when it's gonna really slap shut quick.

So, we're working on it. And I think people are ready to stand up with us. I really do.

We might also suggest to people—and this is, of course, up to everyone who's viewing this to decide—but, you know, a couple of them, thousand letters to MasterCard, and PayPal, and Visa indicating pronounced displeasure at their plans to become custodians of the monetary supply for ethical reasons might also be in order.

You know, these companies are responsive to public pressure, which is perhaps partly why they're determining to play the role of censor to begin with. You know, they're facing pressure from these, let’s call them activist interest groups, who, again, are outlined on Change the Terms, on the website Change the Terms.

And they're responding to public pressure, and to sum it—that’s understandable. It’s understandable, but inexcusable in a certain regard. But the right way perhaps to begin to push back is to let the credit card companies know that there's our constituency on the other side that, I suspect, constitutes the vast majority of credit card users—the silent middle majority of, let’s say, Western society who were neither radically right nor radically left, who would just as soon not have their spending habits monitored by giant corporations.

Nobody to that the left is so opposed to corporate entities, you know, on principle—especially the sizable ones—and, you know, have a certain justification for being skeptical about the moral direction of very large organizations are so eager to hand over the reins of social control to precisely the companies you'd think they would be least likely to crawl into bed with.

I mean, really, MasterCard, Visa—it’s like right, or at the same time, they’ll—they want to hand over more control to the government to handle these things. And we should be pretty clear that, in the last couple weeks that we've been discussing this, every single discussion that we've had about this, I don't think once did we entertain the idea of, "Oh, we’ve got to get the government involved to fix this thing."

I mean there could be, as you referenced earlier, there could be specific legal issues that pop up related to collusion and a couple other things, cartel development—yeah, like that sort of thing.

Yeah, but the beauty of this, and again why I'm sowing some—watching my monthly rev up, my company go down, even though we're making some of it back—but as I'm watching that happen, as I said to you last time, I’m incredibly inspired right now because literally thousands of emails are pouring in from people that want to work with us, that want to help us, that want to figure out how to fund things or that want to work as engineers or the rest of it.

And that tells you that people are afraid and they see this problem, and they just want some solutions. And maybe there isn’t any solution, as you said. I've also been talking with you online with a whole bunch of the people who've been loosely aggregated under the aegis of the intellectual dark web, and that's probably 30 people that we've been communicating with, with a variety of peripheral people.

And it’s also useful to let people know that every one of those people is unbelievably concerned about what happened to Carl Benjamin, too, serious scars going, and even more so dumbstruck by the collusion of the payment processing companies and the emergence of this activist infrastructure online that's devoted specifically to the suppression of free speech.

Yeah, well, and also we should also note that within that group of, say, 30 or some odd people, we all sort of look—we agree on basic fundamental principles related to free speech and things like that, but there’s a lot of disagreement on how to move forward with this.

I mean, we’re talking it out respectfully, as we always do, but some people are saying stay and fight on Patreon because this is how, you know, they're small enough, say, that you might get them to change. Some people are saying you gotta go, and some people are saying some version of, you know, mixing those two, and nobody's clear about the proper pathway forward.

Yeah, but that's—again, I mean, I think this is what the brilliance of human ingenuity is all about. It's like, well, there are gonna be some pitfalls in front of us, and staying would have its risks, and leaving would have its risks, and we’re all gonna do what we think is... Why we’ve already discussed about two writers. Then there's no risk option here, and like—and so we're taking the risk of leaving, and then we're gonna make the best of it.

I mean, often when you take a risk, you often—in life, all you have is a choice between two different risks, and sometimes neither of them are risks you would like to take. But then in the aftermath of the decision, a new field of possibilities opened up in front of you—and whether or not you made the right decision is actually a consequence of how well you manage the aftermath of the decision.

So we’ll keep talking over the next couple of—like, I've got good people working on this alternative, you know, which was, as I mentioned in other places, started seven months ago or so, and good people supervising it.

Whether it'll turn out to be a viable product and whether or not we can figure out how to implement it in a sustainable way that actually addresses these issues in a reasonable manner remains to be seen.

Yeah, hey, on a personal note, just because, you know, I got to see you a couple days before Christmas in West Palm Beach, and we had dinner with your family and your kids and everything. Hasn't it sort of been nice because I did a week with my brother and sister and nieces and nephews over Christmas, also sort of circling back to family on some of this?

It's given me a lot of perspective, you know? It is, I mean, because I'm getting—I’m getting reached out by so many different people on all different fronts, but then to have sort of a close-knit group of people that really do have your interests in mind and all those things, you know, there’s family with your kids at dinner. It was like, oh, these are good people too.

Well, there’s unanimity on the part of the people around me that the proper thing to do is, well, twofold: one is to separate myself from Patreon in accordance with our discussions, and the second is to proceed with exceeding caution and not over-promise or try to deliver too quickly a solution, although to work on that carefully. So that’s what we’ve decided to do.

Yeah, so let’s just be crystal clear on that latter part: we are working on this. We're gonna be deliberate. We're gonna be cautious. We understand that it can't be solved tomorrow. We understand that there's a financial part, a free-speech part, and everything else, and we're just gonna lay these things out in front of us.

And we’re gonna keep working through them with a lot of the people that you guys know and trust. Yeah, and with some other people and hearing from random people that have given us ideas. I mean, I've been forwarding you emails left and right where people are like, you know, this might be the pressure point you might want to go after. So we're just gonna keep going.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well I got a couple of things to end this, I guess. Let’s summarize, and then I’ve got a couple of things just to let people know about.

Sure. Ah, well, the first is, so we’re both leaving on January 15th. And the second is we’re working on this platform. And the third is a warning to people to keep a close eye on what the credit card companies are up to because that’s a really bad thing in my estimation.

I guess that's probably it on my front. I have a talk coming up in Zurich. I have a couple of talks in California in January.

Yeah, I'll be with you on those. Yep, and the tickets to those are available on my website at JordanBPeterson.com. The final thing is I also set up, with my partners, as a New Year's token, let's say, that Future Authoring program from the Self Authoring suite—we put it up at 50% off with the code NY2019. And so if anybody's out there and wants to make some personal—what do you call those?—resolutions for the new year, again, this program is an ideal way of doing that, and so that’s also partly a thank you to everyone who has been so supportive and interested in the last year.

And so I think that's basically it.

What do you?

All right, no, I think that's basically it. So I’ll just quickly, you know, give a shout out to DaveRubin.com/donate and what we're trying to do— and I know you're trying to do this as well— is that for whoever signs up now, and we’re taking it’s one-time and monthly donations that you can do there are gonna be ways that we think once we build out whatever it is we're working on that it'll all be able to be flipped into that.

So it's not like we're gonna have people constantly having to start new accounts or, you know, sign up for new things or anything like that. We’re trying to make this as easy as possible for everybody. Look, there's gonna be some bumps. But this is it—that's one to say about 2019. There’s gonna be—there's gonna be some bumps.

Well, I don't know if you know this, Jordan, but we got an American election coming in the year after that.

So, okay, Mr. Rubin, happy new year.

All right, happy new year, brother. Healthy, and in Cali in a couple weeks. Bye for now.