Episode 103 - Dave Rubin on Launching Locals and Taking Power back from Big Tech
Dave Rubin stops in to The Local Maximum to discuss his new venture called Locals, a subscription-based community solution that gives power to creators, not platforms. He discusses the current problems with our online platforms and communication systems on “big tech” and his approach to fixing it.
About Dave Rubin
Website: daverubin.com
The Rubin Report: rubinreport.com
Dave Rubin is a talk show host, comedian, and TV personality. He is the host of The Rubin Report, a talk show about big ideas and free speech, heralded for it's politically incorrect and open approach to discussing complex issues and current events. The show has garnered a huge fan base from across the world, by having honest conversations about important topics in a thoughtful and candid manner rarely seen in mainstream media. The show is a top political YouTube channel and leading political podcast on iTunes.
In addition to hosting The Rubin Report, Rubin started his career as a stand up comedian and still performs around the country highlighting our increasingly polarized political landscape. He recently accompanied Dr. Jordan Peterson on an international speaking tour, and his highly anticipated book Don’t Burn This Book, published by Penguin Random House, will be released in April 2020.
Links for Locals
You can visit the locals website to find out more at locals.com
Watch Dave Rubin announces Locals.com on the Rubin Report
Rubin Report interview With Bridget Phetasy, who will start the second Local
Related Episodes
Episode 91 on Ad Tech Intrigues
Episode 61 on Facebook’s Shadow Banning
Episode 50 on the Dave’s exit from Patreon and Bypassing Gatekeepers
Episode 9 on Fixing Facebook and the Folly of a Universal Moderation System
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to Local Maximum Episode 103.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: Welcome everyone, welcome! You have reached another Local Maximum. You are going to love my guest today. Someone is actually doing something about the quality of our conversations online and in a way that I think makes sense. So first, I want to say that the last episode, Episode 102, that—you know—the math one, when I started out, I said that there was a lot going on in the news cycle at the beginning of 2020. Even though things have been quiet on the tech side and boy, was that an understatement now that we're another week into 2020, we should keep focused on the tech news, though, and on the tech landscape and on the internet landscape, because I believe that the year 2020 is really going to be seen as kind of a turning point on for the way the internet works.
And it's kind of happening right under our noses, the types of projects that have been funded for the last 10 years, the centralized big tech systems, they've resulted in a few increasingly regulated big companies. And they've sucked all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to their business models. And they become increasingly stale. And that is all going to change this decade. And it's really going to start to ramp up this year.
Now today, we're going to talk about one specific aspect of this. And that's the way that we communicate with each other online and the way creators can get their content online. I actually kind of hate that word content, I usually say I know, it sounds so corporate. It sounds so I like the way creators get their thoughts online, their writing online, their ideas, their art, all that stuff, and the way they interact with the people that they're trying to reach. So the way it works now on Facebook, on Twitter on YouTube — totally broken! I haven't met anyone who disagrees. And you know, I think we can agree on this. I don't know, if you disagree, let me know, because you're the first one I've heard.
But I know that everyone talking about, first of all, everyone talking about politics, you know, left and right, they think the algorithms are biased against them. And everyone has a point in certain respects, there are many aspects of these algorithms that are just completely broken, and still on fixed. And in terms of the non-political creators, you still have to worry about a central point of failure, a third party company that owns your data, owns your audience. One small change on their part can just destroy your business or it can decide your success or failure.
One bad actor in your field that's kind of adjacent to you, whatever that field might be, it could just ruin it for everybody. You know, we saw this. I mean, you know, maybe the example of cryptocurrency on Facebook and YouTube for a while they sort of demoted it, and then they upvoted it. And you can never tell depending on what mood they're in. But, you know, it could be for something even less controversial than that. You can see these swings in the algorithm.
Remember, in Episode 91, we talked about Ad tech and all the shenanigans that go on with that. So now we go, I want to go all the way back to episode 9 of this program before I start the interview. Episode 9, this is 103, but in episode 9, that was April 2018, I laid out what my plan would be for fixing Facebook. And I just want to say that I am delighted to have that statement age well. You know, not everything you put out on the internet ages well, that Facebook and Twitter are trying to create a universal discussion, moderation platforms for everybody is just unworkable. They haven't even come close to fixing the easy stuff.
One example I give—there are a lot of great things about living in New York about living in Brooklyn. But every once in a while, you have to deal with groups of people shouting nonsense to you on the street, just when you're trying to get from point A to point B happens all the time. Maybe it's not as bad as on the West Coast I—you know, sometimes worse on the west coast. But people shout at you all the time here on your way to work, on your way to CVS, whatever and it's kind of annoying.
Sometimes it makes you want to move, sometimes you can't listen to your favorite podcasts because someone on the subway decides that their performance is more important than what you want to listen to. But look, when it's crazy people shouting at you online. They're just completely inescapable. You can't go inside your home. It's like these people climb into your work meetings, they climb into your coffee shop. And well sometimes they climb into your coffee shop anyway.
But you know, they climb into your home, into your living room, into your bedroom for God's sakes, because wherever you invite the internet, call them trolls but you can add ads to that or people who are just confused. They come rushing in and you know wherever you have an internet connection. So my guest today is working on a platform to address this problem in a novel way. He is the host of the Rubin Report, a talk show about big ideas and free speech. He is a media personality who has turned to technology to address the problems that he sees with our current platforms. Dave Rubin, you've reached the Local Maximum. Welcome to the show.
Dave: Max. I believe I've officially made it.
Max: Yeah, exactly. It's all
Dave: It's all downhill from here, man.
Max: Well, I mean, that's what happens when you reach a Local Maximum, if you know the, if you know the reference. So all right. Before we get into Locals, maybe you could tell me a little bit about the problem that you're trying to solve. We're having all these online discussions in places like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. What has gone wrong in your view?
Dave: Sure. Well, boy, I mean, almost everything has gone wrong, in my opinion. I think in almost everyone's view, I mean, look, you know, we're only 20 years into this technological monster that we've created. And, you know, there's so much beauty to it. There's so much incredible stuff and connections and ability to share things and communicate. I mean, there's just an endless amount of good stuff. But if you notice, I started the sentence by saying monster, because at the same time, we were handed the world, and we're children with the world, we did not know what we were being handed.
And, you know, not only we were being handed something by companies that were growing super, super fast. But we were also signing away our privacy, we didn't know what we were doing related to surveillance or how search algorithms were going to affect us or a series of other things. So for me, as someone that creates a show on YouTube, you know, I've sort of especially because I talk so much about free speech, I've really been right in the center, I would say of what some of these big tech problems are, whether they're algorithmic, algorithmic manipulation, of when you post a video to YouTube, and I have, you know, something like 1.2 million subscribers, and maybe 5% of them see the video, or there's shadow banning on Twitter, which is now actually in the Twitter Terms of Service. They are allowed to deboost certain tweets, we know about deboosting, we know about unbiasing in search results.
All of these things on top of the fact that creators don't own their content. We've also just sort of centralized all the power to three or four big companies between Google, Facebook, and Twitter. And, you know, we're all all of us that not only—that create content, but that consume content. We're all sort of sitting ducks with these companies—where on any given day, if they decide to get rid of any of us, or or make it so that people can't find your content or whatever else. You really have no recourse.
I mean, have you ever tried to email someone at Google? I mean, if you can find an email, it's a miracle. You know, I have a pretty successful YouTube channel. And it's only in the last year that I've even gotten a human contact there. So for five years, I had a TV quality show. I mean, my show could be on HBO tomorrow. And I couldn't even get a human over there. So there was a litany of problems. And then suddenly, I started seeing all these conservatives calling for government intervention, which generally conservatives are against. Right? Conservatives don't want regulation.
Yeah. And that really was what led me to start local. So it was sort of a, it was a five-year adventure in just being a creator and seeing the problems and relating them back to free speech and the issues that I talked about on the show. And then it became a very personal problem, because we realize, you know, I don't own my digital assets. And I'm sort of a sitting duck like everybody else. And that that's what got us to ultimately create Locals, which we started about a year ago.
Max: We did you have when you started seeing these problems, was there a point when you were like, "Oh, man, these companies are annoying, but hey, you know, this is new technology, maybe they'll get better"? And maybe was there a point where you said, "Oh, no, this is something's got to be done about this."?
Dave: Yeah. Well, you know, everybody, I think, has felt the first part of your question, which is is: “Ah, something's not right. Oh, I just, you know, click sign and accept all of these Terms of Service that I don't know what the hell they're doing.” I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't keep a lawyer on retainer that's sitting with me every time I download an app, and yet you sign away pages and pages of stuff just right then and there. Right? So we had all sort of seen that there was a problem, and everybody was complaining about it.
And as I said, suddenly, the conservatives were then calling for regulation, which they're not supposed to. And then you've got the lefties that love regulation. And they're calling for it too and I thought, well, now we've really got a problem, because now both sides are calling for regulation. And that's just centralizing more power to the government. I mean, do you want to give, if you're fearful of the power of big tech. Well, then why would you combine its power with the power of the government and just make that power that much bigger? So there were a couple sort of seminal moments. I would say the key one was a little over a year ago.
At the time I was funding my show via a subscription on Patreon, which a lot of subscribe, a lot of creators use. And a guy by the name of Carl Benjamin — who goes by the YouTube moniker of Sargon of Akkad — he was one of the sort of first kind of breakout political youtubers years ago. He was doing an interview not on his YouTube channel, nor on his Patreon page. He was on a third channel with someone else being interviewed. And he used the N word not as a racially pejorative phrase, but to actually mock the type of people that use that language.
And Patreon decided to kick him off their platform for doing that with no recourse even though it wasn't on their platform. Nor was it on the—his YouTube show, which he was using Patreon to fund that struck me is such a bridge too far that something had to be done. So within a few weeks, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, myself, and I think a couple other people, we all decided to leave Patreon. I felt, I just thought, there has to be a better way to do this. And if we don't start standing up, we're all going to get crushed.
And on January 15 of 2019, I officially left Patreon. I was generating about 30 grand a month at the time in Patreon. And when I left, I still had 10 grand a month sitting there, even though I repeatedly told my audience to please leave and leave your accounts. But you know, sometimes people sign up for things and forget. So if I was dishonest, I could still be cashing all of that.
Excuse me. But in essence, what I did was, I created a subscription service on daverubin.com, my website. And by being brave, by just taking that step of bravery, our revenue jumped by about 30%, which was pretty awesome when you consider when I was on Patreon, I was giving rewards.
And I was doing Google Hangouts with people and giveaways and all sorts of things. But once we moved into my site, we actually stopped giving the rewards. And what that showed me is—it's that people want to pay for good content. It's not necessarily the extra perks or you're going to get a hat or a shirt or a sign mug. It's that they want to support people that are doing things that are interesting. And in this case, I think, you know, a little bit brave, I suppose. And that was really the beginning of when the idea of Locals really started to crystallize.
Max: Yeah, so it's interesting. So you've seen a lot of these companies, including Patreon. But also, you know, the socials, sort of, you know, screwing up a little bit, treating people unfairly. It sounds like they never actually targeted you personally, right?
Dave: Well, I've never—well, it depends what you mean by they, in that I've never been deep platformed sorry.
Max: Right, right. You've just observed it happening to a lot of people. And it's like other people, and it kind of hurt the quality of what the internet is supposed to be, I guess you could say.
Dave: Right. So it's like, Look, I'm not here to defend every single person that's been deplatformed. My personal preference, just philosophically would be that as long as you're not breaking the laws of the United States that you should be allowed to be on these platforms. That being said, these platforms are private companies, I think there's, there's some questions, because now they have so many high level connections with governments and things of that nature that I think there is some question there. But basically, the point is, I'm—while I'm not here to defend everyone who was the platform, what I realized was when Sargon got deplatformed. From Patreon, I thought, this is a massive move of the line. So it's like, this guy is not a racist, this guy's fighting for individual rights and freedom, and all of those things, he's a bit of a troll. He's, you know, he may use language that you don't like, but if this guy can't be on a platform, then you and most of the people, you know, can't be on a platform. So it wasn't about me being hit directly. Although that being said, you know, there was some self-preservation here because I thought, if he could be kicked off, I could be kicked off. So I better make a preemptive move here.
Max: Right, but good thinking. Alright, so when you say you're, when you tell people you're creating, like, you know, an alternative to some of these platforms, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, I think a lot of people have said, "Oh, you know, I already know an alternative. It's X, you should use Y, you should use Z." Did you look at some of these alternatives that already exist? And where do these currently existing alternatives sort of fall short of what you're trying to do?
Dave: Sure. So there, there are a couple things out there. So like on the video side, you know, there's BitChute, which is decentralized video, and they've got a pretty slick video player that works pretty fast. You know, there's Gab obviously, which has attracted a lot more. Let's say, further-right, people.
Max: Oh, yeah. We—I tried to go on there to promote the show. And then I realized what it was, and it wasn't my thing, wasn't your thing, right?
Dave: And I don't begrudge any of these people, any of the projects that they're working on. But what I realized was I wanted to do something that was completely different than anyone else had done, which is everyone wants to create platforms, meaning top down platforms where the same set of rules apply to everybody. And that there's really centralized power within the platform. I actually wanted to do the reverse. And this is what we've done with Locals. So with Locals, we are creating communities for creators. So now first off, you own all of the content that you put on there, right? So YouTube could kick me off tomorrow, my content would be gone. And not only would my content be gone, I would have no way of even reaching my audience, but I don't have email addresses or contact information for my 1 million plus subscribers.
So you own the content, you own the user data. So if you leave us with Locals, you get the user data — we're gonna give it to you. Those are two huge differences. Another difference is we're creating communities. So we have iOS apps, we have a desktop version. We've got an Android app. And we have a news feed that is unmanipulated. And you can post video and you can post audio and pictures and all that people can like people can comment, people can communicate with the creators directly. This is all subscription-based as well. And for my local — Rubin Report Community — you can pay as little as $5. And people do that and some people pay me hundred dollars a month, you—so it's subscription-based, which by the way gets rid of most of the bots and the trolls. Because trolls aren't going to pay you to troll you. But now here's another real key that I think we've changed the game with on this, which is that let's say it someone's trolling me or in there to really raise hell and just be awful. Well, they have to pay me to do it. And I can decide whether to keep that money or not.
But if I want to boot them out, I'm not deplatforming them the way if you kick someone off Twitter, they've been deplatformed off the platform. If I kick them out of my local, they can still go to anyone else's local. And this is — so there's no deplatforming, because you can set your own rules in your local. So someone may not want speech about this, someone may not want pictures about this, that's up to every creator to set their own rules. We have a TOS the terms of service across the board, you know, you can't break the laws of the United States, but we're handing all the power back to the creators.
You know, we have things like you know, you'll get push notifications that are not manipulated by algorithms. And you can sell tickets if you're if you're a comedian, or a speaker, or an author or whatever else. So I think we've solved 95% of the problems for 95% of the people, you can also connect communities. So if you subscribe to a few people, you can either have as many apps on your phone as you want. But if you want to do it all through one app, we've got a really cool way, sort of the way Slack, you can jump from group to group, you can actually jump from creator to creator. So I think we've built something that's really cool. And most of my day right now is about fundraising for our next round, which I'm glad to say is going really well. But as I'm sure I don't have to tell you, you know, it's just a lot of talking to a lot of different people and sort of herding cats to get everybody on board. But-
Max: Yeah, maybe there's someone listening right now.
Dave: Yeah!
Max: Who might be interested.
Dave: Yeah, we're raising a $2 million round right now. And it's going pretty well. So I'm not even concerned on that front, I think the pieces are falling into place. You know, I'm not taking a dime from the company. By the way, I take no salary or anything like that. I put in a tremendous amount of sweat equity, and I've put in some money. And you know, if we blow this thing up, which I think we will, obviously I'll make some money on it. But I'm not looking to profit on it or take a salary or anything like that, I think we can build something here, I will not think we have built something here that is really cool. That I think is solving most of the problems. And, you know, we're just gonna push it as far as we can.
Max: So one of the things that resonates with me that I actually—I talked about on this show two years ago was that Facebook and Twitter and all these things are trying to create like a single, standard, you know, rules of engagement for the entire world for literally everyone in the entire world, which seems to impossible question and they are impossible problem. And their attitude is no, our problem is we just can't be everywhere at once. So we just have to put more firepower to it. And eventually we'll solve this problem of creating rules that work for everyone in the world, which, to me sounds kind of crazy.
Dave: Well, I totally agree. I mean, not only does it sound crazy, but it's unsustainable. And it's they can't even pretend that it makes sense, right? So it's like, you know, Hamas can be on Twitter, but then we'll take out this white nationalist or, like, there's a million examples of the incongruity that goes along and the way that they selectively apply these rules. So I think people are just sick of it. And that was another reason that we thought, all right, well, let's hand the power to the creator, you set your rules. And if someone you know, it would be, it's like this related to free speech. I'm all for anyone saying whatever they want, walking down the public street, but I don't invite everybody in my house to say whatever they want. So there's a reason you have a fence at your house or a lock on your door.
And I think by dealing with this in a little more mature way. And but and by the way, by having a subscription model where you're keeping the trolls out, it also incentivizes people to behave a little bit better. And that's what I'm so enthused about. Because we've got thousands of people in my app right now and we're having no problems whatsoever. It's really quite amazing actually.
Max: So when someone starts a new community on Locals like are they going to have to watch very carefully to, you know, monitor what's going on on their site? Like, how? How difficult do you see that being for like an individual creator, or a moderator? Are they going to have some help in doing this?
Dave: Yeah, so moderation is part of our services. So it really just depends what level of moderation you want, you know, some creators May, some creators may want just like a total free for all. And again, as long as it's not breaking the broader TOS, that'll be just fine. Some people will want more help. And then, you know, we have as part of our packages, ways that will help you moderate content. So it really, again, it's handing the power back to the creator. And it really depends. So it's like, you know, somebody that's maybe more in the free speech space, where I am, is gonna have a pretty open ended policy or as open ended as possible. But you know, we might, we want all sorts of people to be on here, not just political people, we want gamers to be on here. And I want knitters or a chess group, or anyone that's got any sort of interesting content, and certain groups may want more specific rules and may need help doing it. And we're gonna offer that as a service. Yeah.
Max: Cool. So is this your first time running a tech company?
Dave: It is my first time. And I can assure you that the last thing I needed in my life was a third job, because-
Max: Tell me what was the learning curve on that?
Dave: It's been pretty amazing. And I gotta tell you, I really do enjoy it much more than I thought I was going to enjoy it. I have a great partner named Assaf, who is a development guy, who's been a product development guy for about a decade. He's Israeli, and really has that as that notorious Israeli fire and coordination and upfrontness. And he's just great at moving things forward. And we've, I've enjoyed being in all these meetings, I've enjoyed learning. I've enjoyed seeing the good parts of Silicon Valley and the bad parts of Silicon Valley. Yeah. You know, it's also a really interesting time right now, because there is such a need for this thing. And yet, everyone's been so afraid to make it. So I think we've also, you know, when I talk to people, we get very, when I tell you truly, we get almost no pushback on any of the technical things that we built. That really is the truth. It's just a matter of people being brave enough to put their money where their mouth is.
Max: Yeah. Well, my advice would be find engineers who are enthusiastic about the mission, and just let them go build stuff.
Dave: Yes. Well, I totally agree. And by the way, my three original investors were all fans of mine from Patreon, who I got to know over the course of a couple years who all said to me, you know, Dave, if you ever build something, let me know. And they all immediately jumped in as investors. And several of our programmers, and some of our behind the scenes people are also mission aligned, sort of fans of the show and fans of what I do, and people who've been creating interesting things. So yeah, getting, finding some mission aligned people. And you know, let's say people who are a little more libertarian minded, or just open to thinking about things in a more decentralized way, they're out there. And we're going to collect as many of them as possible.
Max: So one of the things that I've noticed, you know, building all these products over the years, whether it's, you know, Foursquare or Marsbot, my audience knows about that stuff. I always find that when I put something out into the public, there's always people always tend to use it in ways that I wasn't expecting. And that's one of the most exciting parts about building a product tech product, I think. Have you had any surprises so far? As people start to use Locals? Have someone done something where you said, "Hey, I actually wasn't expecting someone to use it that way?"
Dave: That's a really great question. You know, so the Rubin Report community again, it's a rubinreport.com. And you can just search in-
Max: Right, so you’re, the first user is you so.
Dave: I'm the first creator, as we.
Max: The first creator.
Dave: As we take this today. Tomorrow, we're going to announce the second creator. And we, he’s a fairly well-known name, and we've got a couple other big names coming over the next few weeks. Our biggest problem right now is that it grew so quickly. And when I did the livestream announcing locals. We thought we’d get maybe 200 leads, we have over 5000 creators right now that are waiting for us to build them communities.
That's why we had to move our fundraising up so quickly, because we're just inundated right now. And we just need more staff. But to specifically answer your question. So because I'm the only creator, I haven't seen any shocks on the creator side. What I can tell you is this, if you look what's happening in the community, that type of conversation, the way people are connecting with each other, talking about meeting in real life, and having dinners together and let's do group meetups and let's do a book club in a movie night and share these ideas with people all over the world. I think it's offering some, we thought that social media was going to create community and it did for a while and then that community melted down because of a lot of bad actors.
And what I'm most enthused about about the community isn't necessarily that we can secure your video and make sure that we can sell tickets and And all of those things, what I would do is that is that it's giving people an internet that they like that when you open the app, it's not it's not “Oh, this is Twitter, what's going to happen next?” So that's the part I'm most excited about. I haven't seen anyone use it in an inherently bad way yet, but you're — some of that's going to come down the pipe no matter what.
Max: Yeah, so. So you have the second, I don't know if you call it local, like is that your individual local, your individual community? Do you call it one local or, how does that?
Dave: Every creator is opening their own locals. You're-
Max: Right, right. So you have one local now that’s yours.
Dave: Local community, yeah.
Max: Right. and by the time this goes out, by the time this episode goes out, you'll probably have one more. This goes out on Monday.
Dave: Yeah, we're announcing today's Thursday. So we're announcing the next one tomorrow. Friday.
Max: I'll come on at the beginning of the show. I'll talk about — I'll say what that is. And, yeah, so how many do you expect? You said you had five thousand? I know Local Maximum is one of them, which is actually, it's pretty fortuitous. If I ended up getting one, I don't have to have like, I could just use the name local, like just say, like maximum.local.com.
Dave: That's. So one of the things is people will be able to do just that that way or, you know, we can flip everything over to your website, however you want to do it. And the more of these communities that we grow. Eventually there'll be a discover engine and the rest of it. But you know, one of the keys here is that I'm not telling people to leave YouTube. I'm not telling people to leave Twitter. Use those things, leverage those things, so that you can build your audience so that you can build your community so you can figure out a functional way to monetize your content. And I really do believe that subscriptions are the future, you know, we thought everything was free, except they were charging us our soul. And I think it's time that we take a little bit of the power back to ourselves.
And to directly answer your question, I mean, in terms of how many we could build out and how quickly, it really depends on how quickly we can close this round of funding, which quite literally until the moment I got on the phone with you, I was on call with investors. And the second I get off with you in a couple minutes, I'll be back on the phone with investors. And it's and it's all going well. And you know, once we're taken care of on that front, we can really blow this thing up.
Max: One thing I'm intrigued by is the idea of connecting communities. So let's suppose that one day, Local Maximum grows, I have my own Local Maximum local. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, I want to connect communities, what's that going to be like? Like, who would I look to connect with?
Dave: So, look, the idea here is, it's a sort of very libertarian principle that you know, you create relationships that hopefully are beneficial to both you. So if let's say you have a friend, that's a creator of any kind, let's just say he's a video gamer, it doesn't even matter. You could start telling people that your friend, whoever this video gamer is, has their own local community. And by the way, we have a really great referral program, because we want to incentivize creators on the platform to bring on other creators. So there's a nice referral fee that you get for incentivizing that. And then within the app, sort of the way they have it on Slack. You can actually, so that way, you know, some people, if you want to have 10 different apps for 10 different creators you support, that's just fine, you can do that. But within the app, you'll be able to actually change feeds. So let's say someone's, you know, the Dave Rubin superfan. But they also subscribe to you and they subscribe to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro or whoever else may be on there, they can find all of their feeds within the app, it within one app, say my app or any of the other apps. So that's a nice way of creating just a more streamlined system. And again, it's still we're not creating a full on platform, we're just creating ways for communities to interact with each other.
Max: So you talk a lot about, you know, people owning their own data. What, what does that functionally mean for the creators? What can you do if you own your own data that you couldn't do? Say in our, you know, in our current world?
Dave: Look, I mean, the easiest example of this is right now, you know, most YouTubers, you upload something to YouTube, and YouTube can shut you down at any given moment. I mean, every few weeks, we hear another one of these that YouTube gave somebody three strikes out of nowhere, the account is gone, and their videos are gone. You know, most people don't have servers, most people don't upload all their stuff to the cloud, or all these other places. We're also looking into some decentralized storage, which I think is also the future of all of this. That's not— we don't have that right now. But we have a couple interesting companies that we're talking to on that front. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah, well, because the idea here is I don't want to own their storage, I want to make sure that people own their own storage, own their own content, we just want the vehicle to be able to do it. So you will not only own your content that you if you upload something to your local community, it's your content. It's not ours, it's yours. And not only that, as I said before, you own the user data too. So instead of the million people that I can't reach on YouTube, even though they've subscribed to me, you're gonna have email addresses and whatever other contact information people provide. And by the way, if you as a user leave locals, we delete all of your information. We're not looking to sell information, the only thing that we keep is your at handle in case you ever want to, you know, join back on locals, but everything else has gone.
Max: I see. So you are looking for ways to. So it sounds like for now you might host something, but you're looking for ways to even offload that. And also-
Dave: At the moment, there isn't a financially sound way to do the full decentralized storage thing.
Max: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's a tough problem.
Dave: Yeah, but it's on the horizon. And we're talking to a lot of interesting things. And there's all sorts of crypto stuff and we're figuring out some other payment processors, I mean, all of Look, there's a ton of issues here, right, we could talk for, we could talk for 20 hours non stop about all of the different issues that different people are having, whether whether it's storage, or free speech related or payment processors, and, and trust me, we've, we've worked through as many of these as possible, you just can't launch them all at once, as you know, so we're gonna roll out different things over the course of time.
Max: All right, well, I will certainly keep up with it. And I will, I'll join the—I have joined the Dave Rubin Local. So I'll try to participate a little bit more and see how that goes.
Dave: Yeah well, you know what? Post this link there. And that's how you'll, you'll get some new fans. And that's how these things work you know? It's like I want, one of the things that I really want is other creators and other people. And I've seen this, by the way people have advertised for their restaurants on there, they've talked about, you know, they sell, you know, shirts online, or whatever it is. It's like, that's what interesting community is. It's like, we're all coming together. Because we kind of like free speech, we maybe have some libertarian beliefs, you know, we want to solve some of the problems of the day. And then it's like, let's really find out about people as opposed to Facebook, where we all connected with all these people that we don't care about. It's like this monster that we can't control anymore.
Max: Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's people who I care about in one aspect, but I don't necessarily need their opinion. And then yeah, yeah, other people. I want their opinion, but I don't really want to see their cat you know.
Dave: That. Well, that's exactly it. I mean, Facebook is making, all social media in many ways is making us hate people we used to like, and like people we used to hate. So it's like, I think there's a better way to do this. And I think that's what we've built here.
Max: Alright, so the new service is called Locals, you can check it out at locals.com, very good, very good domain name. And if you want to hear more from Dave, you can check out his very popular podcast and YouTube channel, the Rubin Report. Dave, there's a lot of engineers and designers and product professionals who are listening to the Local Maximum right now. Let's say they want to help out where would you send them?
Dave: Yeah, well, listen, guys, we're hiring: jobs@locals.com. We're mostly looking for developers and product people. But you know, we're gonna be onboard people and customer success and, and all sorts of stuff. So, you know, every now and every now and again, I tweet out the link, and then our email gets blown up. But if you've got some interesting skills, if you're—feel like you're mission aligned and passionate about this stuff, jobs@locals.com. Right now we have an office in New York. Most of our developers are in Europe.
Max: Oh, what neighborhood in New York?
Dave: Our awesome office. Let's say Westside. Okay.
Max: I don't. I mean, it could literally be right around the corner from here. I don't know.
Dave: Yeah.
Max: I often find that it is because we're in Flatiron.
Dave: Right. So we're not in Flatiron. But in Manhattan. We've got an office over there. And we just hired some more people this week. So jobs@locals.com and hopefully we'll hear from some of your listeners that have some passion and want to fix some of this stuff.
Max: Alright, sounds great. Dave, thank you for coming on the show.
Dave: Max enjoyed talking to you.
Max: All right, a few follow ups first, the second Local I know I said that. I would. I would come on before the show to talk about it. But I guess this is after show. So this is first first second local. This is my first announcement after the show. But the second person that Dave Rubin announced that he signed up over the weekend is comedian Bridget Phetasy. I'll link to that. I also will link to Dave's episode on the Rubin Report that act, that announces the creation of Locals and all the links at localmaxradio.com/103. A few past episodes of Local Maximum which are relevant. I actually try to do this on every show notes page I linked to previous episodes that kind of have lived led up to it that are relevant for this episode. I want to talk about them in the episode right now, because they are really relevant.
Obviously, there's episode 9 on fixing Facebook where I kind of laid out the problem that Dave was just talking about. Another good one to reference is Episode 50 on bypassing gatekeepers, and this was last year where Aaron and I actually covered the story of Dave Rubin leaving Patreon with all those people so this is a great follow up. Episode 61 — I spoke to Facebook content creator who was demonetised and essentially deplatformed by the company. This happens again and again and again. And finally Episode 91 with Shoshana Wodinsky on Ad Tech Intrigues. And I want to point out this one to you, because I want to make sure that I'm not coming at everything from one side politically. But yeah, all sorts of nonsense is going on when it comes to the ad side of thing, which is very important to businesses. And to us, the people who are subjected to these ads, and Shoshana is really on top of that. So I'll link to that. I'll link to all of that on the show notes page for this episode, which you can get at localmaxradio.com/103.
Next week, I'm hoping to do another news update with Aaron. These are always fun and badly needed right now. It's like, there's a good chance we'll probably talk for four hours straight and we'll have to put out bonus episode after bonus episode, but we'll see.
Max: All right. Have a great week, everyone!
That's the show. Remember to check out the website at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host or ask a question that I can answer on the show. Send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. The show is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher and more. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe to the Local Maximum on one of these platforms and follow my Twitter account at Max Sklar. Have a great week!
