05/02/14 – Jeff Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
So, now to today's first guest.
I hope this works.
Jeff Tucker, are you there?
I am here.
All right, good deal.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
I met you just the other day for the first time.
It was such a pleasure.
Yeah, that was great.
We were at a thing in D.C. and shook hands.
That was cool.
Yeah, it was incredible.
And now I'm seeing you hang out in liberty.me, which is like, you know, those are my peeps.
And so, I'm really excited to see your name pop up there in chat.
That was fabulous.
Yeah.
So, what is, well, I think you just answered my first question.
Is it liberty.me or is it liberty.me?
You know, I've been saying .me.
.me, yeah, that's what I thought.
Do you, are you, are you pretty, I mean, like, you dig it so far?
It looks cool.
I got a lot of questions.
I don't know quite what to do yet.
Go, go, go, go.
You have this advantage going for you when it comes to my participation, which is that I quit Facebook like cigarettes, man.
I'm just done.
And I'm not going back there either.
Yeah, well, I haven't quit cigarettes yet, but, or Facebook.
Yeah, now, I don't want to compare too closely to Facebook, but it's kind of an obvious comparison.
So, why don't you go ahead and differentiate one?
Yeah, people always say, is it on Facebook?
Not really.
I mean, you know, we've got all Facebook functionality.
As of this morning, actually, we have...
Today's the day, right?
It only went live for open access to anyone starting today, correct?
We've been sneakily, you know, making it live over the last three days, you know, just because we didn't want to, you know, crash and burn.
But just this morning, we installed some plugins on the profiles that actually improve on Facebook.
So, I'm really happy about that.
But the point isn't to create a Facebook.
I mean, Facebook has some amazing things about it, social networking, blah, blah, blah.
We've got all that, and that's great.
And there's a real camaraderie, a sense of community there at Liberty Me.
I mean, you feel it immediately when you jump on and get on chat.
But there are other features, too.
Like, I really want you to open up your own publishing site.
So, you could be like Horton or Scott.liberty.me and upload all your articles and control your space without any gatekeepers, you know?
That's what it's all about.
I have my own publishing space, and 600 other people have already done this.
So, it's really great.
So, in other words, where Facebook kind of limits your… I guess they don't really limit your entry.
Yeah.
I mean, the funny thing about Facebook, I find, is that, you know, you kind of put a lot of work into an entry, and you post it, and there's people who chat about it.
And it lasts a couple hours, and then the thrill is gone, you know?
We've got very elaborate forum discussions on every subject, you know, forever, including technology and privacy and foreign policy and all these things.
And there's more of a permanence to the record, you know, so you can actually, you know, search and look up and add to the discussions.
Also, we have real products, right?
So, we have actual, you know, guides to… liberty guides on all sorts of practical topics.
And, you know, already we've opened with, like, 150 books or something you can download and discuss the books as you read them.
Plus, we have a news feed.
You know, all kind of things that Facebook does not have.
So, what I really did, what I set out to do, was combine all the coolest technologies into a single piece of real estate and just devote the whole city to the cause of human liberty.
And that's what we've done.
I mean, I look at it now, and I'm kind of alarmed that I ever thought something like this could be possible.
And I can tell you that, you know, the developers have been burning the midnight oil, you know, for a very long time, for six months basically.
But now we have something, you know, truly spectacular.
It's all come together.
I can't believe it.
It's absolutely the most elaborate web installation on the entire world web.
I can say that with every bit of confidence.
Forget liberty space.
I mean, it's the greatest, most elaborate installation on the web right now.
Well, you know, I don't know that much about computers and this and that, but this thing sure does look like it's well put together.
And of course, I mean, it looks like the project in the first place was to do something so elaborate.
So, it seems like you guys must have really put a lot into putting it together.
Yeah.
And you know what?
The Indiegogo campaign, I was talking about all the cool things we're going to do, but you know, I was a little bit nervous, you know, can this actually be done?
So, it's really neat for me to look at the final product and go, okay, it's like way better than I promised, you know?
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Good.
All right now.
So, what about a possible negative that libertarians are going to sort of close themselves off here and we'll be less accessible to all of our other former Facebook friends and that kind of thing?
That criticism actually surprised me when I first heard it because my driving motivation here was exactly the opposite.
I wanted us to get, you know, get out of obscurity and get out into the public realm.
And we can do this by crowdsourcing the search engine optimization by all landing on the same URL and having, you know, publishing sites, like hundreds of them now.
We actually can achieve a much farther reach than we would on our own.
So, it's a way of kind of combining our collective energies to actually get an audience.
And people understand this.
When they get on Liberty Media, one of the first things they do is they establish their own publishing site and start writing and actually getting attention for their articles.
I mean, there's hardly any article that I've seen go up in the last two or three days that hasn't, you know, already accumulated, you know, many, many dozens of comments and shares and Facebook likes and Twitters and, you know, all kinds of things like that.
So, I don't really understand that criticism.
It took me by surprise because I really did not want us to get, you know, further into a, what do people say?
Something like a garden?
They have some word that they use.
Oh, I don't know.
Yeah.
But it's very strange to me because really the driving motivation was exactly the opposite.
I mean, I want to reach a larger audience and presumably every member does.
And they are.
It seems like one problem might be the money.
Now, I was happy to pay 14 bucks.
I think that's the cheapest kind of subscription is 14 bucks a month.
And I appreciate the explanation there that we're all sick and tired of ads in our faces all the time.
So, that's one way to do it.
And I'm willing to do it at least, you know, to try it out for a while and see how it is kind of thing.
Sure.
But that seems like it might exclude a lot of people because people are just used to everything kind of being for free.
If you look at the Ron Paul TV thing, if they had just gone with whatever money they make from the YouTube ads as the revenue, which YouTube picks the ads at random, right?
If they just gone with that model, give them away and make the money there, then we would have a viral Ron Paul video every day.
But instead, the whole thing got closed off and nobody ever looked at it again.
Yeah, I agree.
If people are going to publish, people on the outside got to be able to see what's published without paying 14 bucks.
Yeah, and that's what's going on.
I mean, every publishing site is entirely public.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
Well, that's good.
No, I mean, it's all public.
The part that's private is the engagement, the community engagement.
That's what you're paying for is the friendship networks and also the publishing space to be a publisher, basically, and to like posts and this kind of thing.
But otherwise, we've already got more free content than most websites out there.
So it's a combination of both.
We thought through this very, very carefully.
And the commercial aspect of it is a little bit tricky.
Like, how do you make money on the web?
It's not about making money, by the way.
It's about coming up with a sustainable business model, really.
And the three ways are to have advertising.
Of course, we know you can look at Ron Paul forums and see what the effect of that is, right?
Or you can just kind of find angel investors and burn through cash until somebody buys you, and then you're gone.
Or our way was to establish a direct relationship between the producer and the consumer.
I think it may well be worth it, too.
I mean, we'll see who all joins and how well it all takes off.
But it sure looks like a great platform to start, no doubt about it.
Well, everybody warned me against it at the outset when I was proposing the idea.
They're like, oh, that'll never work.
But I couldn't get it out of my head.
Yeah, you don't want to necessarily listen to that.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is that anytime I'm at an airport bar, I'll say, give me a martini, and they charge me like $16 or whatever.
And I'm sitting there sucking on my martini, thinking this is going to be gone.
I mean, I love it, but it's going to be gone in no time.
For that same amount of money, I can have 30 days of a real deep community involvement with all my peeps all over the world.
That sounds like a good value proposition to me.
And I just wanted to take it on.
I thought, I think I can provide enough value to make this worth it.
Then people said, oh, yeah, go to Liberty Without Me instead of Netflix.
I'm like, well, I have a Netflix subscription.
I watch one show that comes on.
I watch whatever, The House of Cards.
And I binge watch it.
And it's fun, whatever.
But that's not community.
That's not ideas.
That's not a kind of part of my life.
And it's not going to actually help me become a freer person.
That's just sort of pure entertainment.
I'm all for Netflix.
That's great.
But I think I can do more.
I think Liberty Me does more for people than other subscription services.
And the point is to create a viable business model.
Scott, I really believe in commerce.
I believe in the commons.
I think you're right about the Ron Paul Channel.
That's what I would have done if I had been in charge of that project.
At the same time, I really also believe in commerce as a kind of North Star, a sort of crucible and a test for whether or not what you're doing is valuable in this world.
And I wanted to face that.
I wanted to just kind of put it out there and say, here's my product.
If you think it's cool, let's trade value for value and see where it goes.
And right now, we've got a couple of thousand people already in the sites.
Well, look, I mean, Jeff, I got to tell you, I don't think there's any doubt that this has certainly been worth a try up to and including right now.
And it's worth a try.
It should be, I think, worth a try for libertarians in the audience who want to get connected here.
And, you know, it sure looks like a great project, man.
I wish you the very best of success with it.
I'm going to keep a tab open here and and participate as much as I can and see how it goes.
Yeah, I love to see you.
And I love to see a lot of my I mean, it's so fun for me when I go to chat.
I see all my friends there.
You know, we talk and and I really like the friendly environment.
I mean, you know, I'm kind of I got to go, man.
I'm sorry, Jeff.
I'm over time.
Yeah, that's good.
Thank you so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again.
Bye bye.
All right.
That's Jeff Tucker.
Liberty dot me sign up.
Phone records, financial location data, prism, tempura, X key score, boundless informant.
Hey, I'll Scott Warren here for off now dot org.
Now here's the deal.
Do the Snowden revelations.
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Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
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