#1032 - Colin Moriarty

I'm good, man. How are you?

Good, thanks. What's going on? What's cracking?

Not a lot. It's an honor for you to ask me back. I appreciate it.

Oh, my pleasure, dude. I had a great time with you last time. It's good to see you, Ben.

Thank you. Good to see you too. Congratulations. You were just showing me around the space.

Thank you.

Very cool.

Thank you.

I'm very excited for you.

I'm excited too.

I bet.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Jamie's moving shit around. What happened? All right, I was out of line, so welcome. And how's Collins last stand going?

It's good. It's fun. I always describe it's not big, it's just got its little slice of the Internet and it's attracted videos do 2030, 40, 50,000 views.

That's a good spot. That's a good place to be.

Yeah, I'm happy with it. And I have like 4500 people on Patreon supporting me and I don't serve ads on anything I do. So I'm just trying to make it organic and see how far I can take it and then go from there.

Sam Harris does his entire podcast that way. He doesn't have any ads, which I think it's amazing.

Yeah, it's know I worked at igen for a long time, the video game site and my old company, so we had ads and I have no problem with them. But I was trying to just kind of say, I don't need more than what you're giving me. This is plenty and I'm doing fine. Maybe I'll do ads on future products, but not with this.

Well, yeah, why not, right? If you're enjoying it, you could do different products, you could do different projects. Rather, you could do it different ways. Yes. It's interesting now to try to figure out what's the best way for people to put their stuff out there. I know a lot of people in the podcast world. Some people use Soundcloud, some people use other things. Some people just go straight to YouTube. There's a lot of experimentation going on now.

Yeah. And I'm always fascinated by that particular thing about how I do a podcast now just on the side called Fireside Chats, where I just have random people in to talk about random things and similar, but not nearly as good as your show. And I'm always amazed that people are like, why don't you put this on YouTube? And I'm like, you just want to stare at a static image on YouTube. I don't even have it on video. It's just about how people consume the content. So maybe, like, a spreadshot approach is probably the smartest idea.

Well, if you could hire someone to do images that represent the conversation, maybe that would be a reason to have it on YouTube. But I hear, yeah, it's. People just get excited about a platform. They get locked into a platform, and then they just digest everything in that platform, whether it's Snapchat or Instagram or it's. And it's weird with Jamie and I have been talking about this a lot lately about what makes it through. How did YouTube become the only one where people upload videos? That seems insane. That seems so straightforward. You have it so people can upload videos. You put ads on those videos, and that's it. I mean, it seems like there would be hundreds of those sites.

Yeah, I think they were just first, and it was, like, ubiquitous quickly. So I find that with a lot of social media, too, you think about Snapchat's really faltering now because Instagram's basically stolen its entire platform, and it's all about kind of these little monopolies that exist. Monopolies for pictures, monopolies for video monopoly, for interacting with friends and family on Facebook and stuff like that. Think about it. There's no.

I mean, Facebook seems to me to be a more indulgent medium, though. It seems like I read some. Sometimes I'll see people's Facebook posts, and I just see the first paragraph, and then I'll see how long it goes. I'm like, fuck reading that. Just keep moving.

It's just too find. My girlfriend just deactivated her Facebook account, and I was like, I don't find so much utility in it. I. Especially after the election, I'm like, everyone hates each other on here, and it's not fun. I already have Twitter for that. But, like you're saying on Twitter, you can't go on and on and on and on about how much you hate Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. So there was, like, no way to retreat. I find that I don't even use Facebook that much anymore.

I use it because my Instagram posts directly to Twitter and to Facebook. That's how I use it. But it's interesting that it shows that and the amount of people that engage, like, my Facebook has a fraction of what everything else has, and I think it's because I don't use it.

Yeah, I think algorithmically, the more you use it. Probably the more it massages you to the top of a person's feed or whatever, because that's what's annoying about Facebook, is you can't put anything in order. You have no idea what you've seen already. I was just talking to someone the other day. I only have like 700 friends on there or whatever, a lot of people from college that I might have had a class with or something, and I'm like, why do the same 15 mean people just show up on that? I don't even interact with these people, so I feel like I'm missing a ton of stuff. And I still find Twitter is the most useful for me.

People love Facebook, though, for arguing. They fucking love it, man. I've gone over some political arguments that people have on Facebook, and it's like, Jesus, how do you have the time for this? Do people have other things that you enjoy?

Yeah, no.

There's something about that sort of tit for tat verbal exchange, like trying to one up someone and trying to make a better point. And I feel like it's replaced sport for people. For some folks, I feel like it's a game in some sort of a way. Like a text based video game or something.

Yeah, like an old text adventure or something like that. Yeah. What I find one interesting thing about Facebook that I think is worth noting is that it's typically real people with real names and real pictures, so at least they're putting themselves out there as opposed to Twitter, kind of the anonymous nature of that. So I respect that for the most part on Facebook. But again, I agree with you. It's like, no one's winning this argument. It's just a repetitive. How many times am I going to see the same thing over and over again? I've kind of just withdrawn from that.

Well, you know, I wanted to talk to you about Internet controversy because when we had you on the first time, it was kind of just after your whole thing had happened with this, you had made this one incredibly innocuous tweet. It was like a day without women or something like that. Silence. What was that tweet?

It was peace and quiet, hashtag a day without a woman.

Yeah.

Which is like an Al Bundy joke, maybe.

Yeah. But the thing is, if that happened today, nobody would give a shit. It's weird. It's like then it was a boiling controversy. Like the first bubbles of just social media outrage, it seems like. Or you were one of the first bubbles.

Right. Like I explained to you originally, I feel like it was partially a political hit because of the industry I worked in and all that kind of stuff. But also, like I was telling you before we started, the more I've had time to think after all these things happened, I launched a new company. I was working 70 hours a week. I had no bandwidth to really think about what the hell happened. The more I think about it, the angrier I actually get about how I had to go through that and watch other people also kind of go through similar things as the outrage machine just eats people and spits them out as they go along.

When you stop and think about what you actually said and what that actually caused, that actually caused you to stop working with people. Like this one silly joke, they don't know you. They don't know you. No, that one joke, that one thing that you said is so awful and outrageous that all of our years of collaborating, working together, trying to do projects, trying to be creative, having fun, all the conversations we've had about life and about humans and politics and men and women, those are all out the window, man. You made a joke that I find marginally offensive.

Maybe on a certain day, marginally offensive.

I don't even think it's. If it was a woman, if a woman said that, like a day, like peace and quiet, a day without men, I would go, yeah, that's what I would go.

I'd go, and move on with your.

Life with the idea that, oh, I got to get this lady fired. She's a terrible person.

The only thing that I can think about is that I was at least in a position where it didn't destroy me or whatever I actually am doing financially better and feel happier in what I'm doing now. So it kind of backfired on the people that were trying to do whatever they were doing to me anyway. But I feel for the people that find themselves in similar situations that don't have some sort of Internet clout or some sort of community that can rally around them and lift them up, which is what my community did to me, which I'm so appreciative of. So I just think about how it's just sad. I don't know that I've ever been so offended by something someone has tweeted or even said that, like, went out of my way to make it personal and try to destroy them. I'm not saying people don't do terrible shit. Happens all the time. We're seeing that play out with Harvey Weinstein and all these kinds of things. Absolutely awful. Really awful things, right? And I feel like people are kind of like being distracted by the shiny object in the corner when they're losing sight of what's important.

Well, today it feels like there's blood in the water. It seems like there's so many people going after so many people. People are running around looking for targets the way I imagine. I imagine, like, the Internet and people on the Internet being like an angry mob running to the streets, frothing at the mouth, just looking for somewhere to point their gun. I mean, that's really what it feels like. It feels like there's definitely some real targets out. Some. This Kevin Spacey thing is a scary thing. I mean, apparently Rosie O'Donnell started tweeting that he had been doing this forever and that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there's a bunch of boys that he went after. I don't know what's true, what's not true, I'm assuming, but that's real. That's a real horrible thing. That's not a joke. It's not someone with an innocuous, maybe off color joke. I mean, this is, like, real stuff, right? So I think the good part is all this awful. You know, all the Harvey Weinstein and whatever else, there's probably a million other ones, right? That stuff's going to get exposed. But it seems like the negative part about it is that people are looking for targets.

Yeah, well, that's what kind of scares me. I was