What Is Happening With Patreon, Gillette and Brexit? - Sargon Of Akkad - #048

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. I am incredibly ill this week, as you can hear by the sound of my nasal tones. I'm like a walking advert for Vic's VapoRub. However, this week, I am sitting down with Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon Of Akkad. He is a very well-known YouTuber with nearly 900,000 subs and a fantastic political commentator. I genuinely loved sitting down with him today. We talked about the Gillette advert, the most recent Gillette advert and its implications. We spoke about Brexit and just what the fuck is going on. We talked about his deplatforming from Patreon and Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson's subsequent exit. It is one of my favourite episodes to date. Thank you very much for coming on, Carl. I will be doing more episodes with him in the future. If you enjoy it, please make sure that you share it with a friend and go and check out Sargon Of Akkad AKKAD on YouTube. His content is absolutely fantastic. So let's get into it.
Mr. Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon Of Akkad, also known as Patreon's number one enemy at the moment. How are you today, sir?

**Carl Benjamin** (1:31)
I'm good. I didn't really consider myself Patreon's number one enemy. I don't know why they're doing this, but apparently Subscribestar has started working for people now, so it's kind of an issue that's passed us all by, I suppose.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
Yeah, it's kind of in and out pretty fast, right?

**Carl Benjamin** (1:49)
Yeah, it's been strange.

**Chris Williamson** (1:52)
For the listeners who don't know what's occurred over the last few months, could you give us the rundown, the zeitgeist?

**Carl Benjamin** (1:58)
Yeah. Basically, Patreon found me insulting a bunch of Nazis on a live stream, on quite an upscale channel, and they took umbrage to the way that I was insulting them, and they decided to delete my Patreon account without warning, which is strange because the terms of service, obviously, don't say that they track down things that you do elsewhere on the internet and use that to judge you, but apparently they do. So be warned if you have a Patreon account.

**Chris Williamson** (2:27)
So Patreon was your way of assisting your channel, Sargon Of Akkad on YouTube, crowdfunding. It allows fans to get like exclusive content and early access to certain things and stuff like that. And by being shut down from that, I'm going to guess that that was a primary source of income that you were driving from your channel, right?

**Carl Benjamin** (2:49)
It was certainly one of the major ways I was monetizing my channel, yeah. The YouTube has a join feature that you can turn on, but I'm really hesitant to do it because it's something like 30% of the money that people donate through it and taken by YouTube themselves. Whereas with Patreon, it's only 5%. And with Subscribestar, it's only 5% as well.

**Chris Williamson** (3:09)
OK.

**Carl Benjamin** (3:10)
just 30%. It's a huge amount, in my opinion.

**Chris Williamson** (3:13)
It is a big amount, yeah. Well, it's obvious that YouTube is starting to see a gap in the fact that if you've got companies that have agendas and who are potentially going to disenfranchise the content creators. So...

**Carl Benjamin** (3:26)
Well, that was the point of Patreon in the first place, that YouTube are the ones saying, we have advertisers, therefore, you can't say certain things or be quite edgy and push boundaries. There are a lot of advertisers, corporate sponsors and advertisers, who don't want you to be too edgy. Not that they really care, I think, in my opinion, but they would end demonetizing certain videos and things like that. And Patreon offered itself as, hey, look, you can keep your content going without advertisers, without having to get these corporations involved, we'll facilitate you doing that. And now they're like, oh, actually, but if you say something we don't like, and you don't apologize, then, you know, we're having, not that we gave them the opportunity to apologize, but, you know, but the, if you say something we don't like, we're going to kick you off. It's just like...

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
So what happens when you wake up on the morning of whatever day it is and you find out your Patreon account is gone?

**Carl Benjamin** (4:23)
It's not a very nice feeling, I'm going to be honest, you know, because, I mean, I was relying on that money quite significantly.
I mean, it is kind of terrifying knowing that you're living under a sort of Damocles. You know, like, every day I wake up and I check that my YouTube channel is still there. I'm not joking, it sounds terrible, doesn't it? You know, it's like, every morning you phone up your boss just to check you have a job to go into. You know, it's like, that's how I feel about it sometimes. And it's my choice, obviously, I'm the one who started doing a YouTube channel. But, you know, it wasn't like this when I started, you know, it wasn't, I mean, like, Monkey Jones was a young comedian who mocks, he mocked Elliot Roger and he actually ended up doing some really good work with it because he went through and read his crazy manifesto and things like this. And he would explain why Elliot Roger was such a, you know, a lunatic and he got his entire YouTube presence deleted for being apparently controversial. And it's like, well, you know, come on, the controversial stuff is the stuff that's interesting, isn't it? You know, no one's just watching daytime television on YouTube, are they? They're gonna go somewhere else where the controversial content goes because that will make that new platform, Cough, Cough, BitChute, Cough, a better alternative. I think BitChute's got a better model because it's stored like Torrents. So it's across thousands of different computers, decentralizing it. And I think so they don't have like, you know, they don't have a giant warehouse full of hard drives to keep everything on. So I think that's the future. It's just YouTube's currently the dominant market share. But anyway, sorry.