Fundraising for Veganism: a Bottomless Pit. (James Aspey & Dr. Greger & DxE)

so a question posed to James Aspie on
his Instagram just lately James Aspie was asked what type of vegan activism are you doing lately and his answer was I made this post on Facebook and now I'm answering questions he's answering questions that people provided below and in response to the image he posted on Facebook and the image is of him eating sushi in a state of undress showing off his horribly mistranslated Chinese tattoos no matter how much or how little money these people are donating to James ASPI in that case the budget is unknown do you think he could bring about the same outcomes for half as much money the most recent figures I've seen for the vegan activist organization DX e to Kardashian everywhere $800,000 for you those are somewhat at a date it's quite possible to Nell over a million for years the level of public support has been growing when you think about what DXE did in the last year do you think you could get that done for $400,000 instead of $800,000 if we just took the budget and cut it in half conversely how much more do you think DXE would accomplish if people donated twice as much money James ASPI same question I'll give you my opinion I think they'd accomplished exactly the same amount if they had half as much money or twice as much money right so this is both a sort of technical and bureaucratic element of politics but it's also an ethical element of politics and it touches us directly in a small movement like veganism or so much of what we do is donation driven it's also part of the critique of how your Rossi's state bureaucracies school bureaucracies like large universities how they spend money when they're given a bottomless budget when they do bottomless fundraising when they do zero base budgeting zero base fundraising okay so we're gonna talk this through briefly sorry to say hey admit it really is a profound element of life in the 21st century as well as a practical concern when you're talking these people face to face and I think there are many people in this audience right now even if only 500 people see this video I'm not joking there are people in this audience who speak to James ASPI there are people in this audience who speak to the leaders of the right to action everywhere I know there are people here who are much less than seven degrees of separation removed from the different examples we're using here and other examples that are just as valid the due to time constraints are not being mentioned right one one final example where I'm very directly aware of the costs and budgeting involved there's a well-known youtube channel run by a guy named dr. Greger all right to my knowledge his budget is now in excess of two million US dollars per year the last YouTube video I made about him I had the annual report from the year before which is 1.5 million US dollars do you think that you could do the same job he's doing here on YouTube for just 1 million for 50% for half of the budget conversely switched around what if we double his budget whatever raises to 4 million how would that change the outcome how would that change the product okay I'm a hundred percent confident that I can do everything James asked me does for less than half the price I'm a hundred percent confident I can do everything that dr. Greger does here on YouTube for much much less than 1 million dollars per year all right now when it comes to DXE direct action everywhere so I'm gonna talk us through a little bit of detail all right there are some real costs all right one of the things direct action everywhere does is host conferences hosting a conference cost money right I proposed to my followers and friends and colleagues here on YouTube a couple years ago that I host the conference I had a little bit of money in the bank I was going to pay for it entirely out of my own pocket all right now let's say we're talking about hosting a conference here in Victoria BC Canada I was gonna say Vancouver but why should I take the ferry why should I travel okay let's say we're gonna host the conference here and let's say I proposed a budget and I asked you in my audience for donations let's say I proposed a budget of $5,000 but we're doing this as project specific funding it's not zero base budgeting it's not bottomless fundraising where I say donate as much as possible right so I'm setting an itemized list of why this costs $5,000 let's just say you know let me just pause the note in Toronto I was involved with conferences that were organized I think they had a budget of $500 I mean I've been involved in some very very humble conferences where the total budget is very very little and that is also possible right but let's suppose when you when you actually budget this out when you actually a project specific funding we say this is what I want to accomplish front does notice it's possible I would even say something specific and say you know what there's something else we wanted to do but that would cost $10,000 and someone might get in touch with me and say you know what I see your vision I see that for an extra five thousand dollars you can rent a sports stadium which we do have a sports stadium here in Victoria that's empty about three hundred and twenty days a year it's a real example do you know what you can hold this in the sports you know I think that's a great idea it's a terrible idea but hypothetically someone might see a specific item and they might say look they have an extra $5,000 they want to pay for that goal they think that's a better way to do it but you know what else happens you also get economization in practice someone might be looking at the budget that's proposed say hey look you're looking at spending $3,000 out of the 5,000 just on renting this space at a hotel you the space where the conference is going to happen you know like an actual boardroom type of setting in a hotel or whatever and they say you know what their family owns a big building here let's say it's a barn say they have an abandoned barn say you know what for just one thousand dollars why don't we just spend $1,000 on IKEA furniture let's just furnish this barn for the conference I do the conference the error and not do it at the at the at this hotel and there could be a savings and it could be charming there could be opportunities to save money that come in right um and I have seen I didn't attend person I've seen vegan conferences that were literally held in barns that were held in abandoned factories it can be done there's no lower limit to the cost for these things just also why it's worth asking could you do this for half as much funny therapy often the answer is yes with maybe some inconveniences if we hold this in a barn where we're gonna go to a bathroom maybe that's why it costs a thousand dollars rather than nothing to have to pay for a portable toilets you know they have to maybe there's some money that needs to be spent to make the barn viable and maybe they have to set up some heating I don't know it too deep into details okay but what I notice and this is the sense in which bottomless fundraising is profoundly corruption but it's profoundly corrupting to human nature it's profoundly corrupting to these projects and in practice all of the conference's I know of that direct action ever hosted they ask people to donate to attend they ask people to donate to participate they ask people to pay money to be one of the speakers whereas when I was inviting a conference pardon me when I was organizing a conference and when other people invited me to speak at their conferences the discussion was always about the speakers or the participants being paid most notably the cost of airplane tickets maybe something for the hotel so if I'm invited to participate in a conference in Europe which has happened once since this channel started the discussion was about them paying for my airplane ticket than paying for my hotel room I was invited to participate in a conference in New York City it's about them paying me not me donate money to them right whereas DXE because their fundraising all the time against a bottomless budget and some infinite horizon right they're turning this into a fundraising opportunity without with realizing it all right um project based funding it might not seem like a standard of moral purity but what's built into this is precisely a deadline an objective standard of adequacy a standard of success or failure when you have a finite project a finite budget you're raising money for you know how much is enough this is a profound ethical importance dr. Greger is asking for more donations right now and nobody nobody except me has stood up and said two million dollars is enough how will he know how will he know when he has enough if you keep giving him more money he'll find ways to spend it and you know again let's be so critical here if I were stupid enough to do bottomless fund budgeting bottomless fund raising for a for a conference and people gave me a hundred thousand dollars I might feel like now I'm in a position where I have to find a way to spend that money you know and for a lot of people psychologically it's more slippery than that oh they just think I'm gonna raise as much money as possible and I'm gonna make this event as big and impressive as possible government bureaucrats do this also right how much money you gonna give NASA whether it's a scientific research organization or a university they get into the mindset of raising as much money as possible and then spending that money often in ostentatious ways often in counterproductive ways to prove to show you where the money went like oh yeah people donated all this money so we had a fireworks display it really it really does go stuff like that people give us all this money so we decided to do something ostentatious so we could try to appear in the newspaper on the TV news or something right we started to get the mentality of oh if people donated $100,000 to us it perverts fundamentally the goal why this conference was being held in the first place right there's some other function there okay and I would say that's happened already with the three examples I've given you of dr. Greger of direct action everywhere and of James SP okay if human nature were perfect this is a more difficult question ask what would happen when those groups doing the fundraising said we have enough I was in that position I did a fundraiser and had thousands of dollars pouring in within just 24 hours and I stopped the fundraiser I stopped the fundraiser the minute it got to enough and had later had to regret that because the exchange rate changed and so on like it was so close to being enough to pay the lawyers fees that was due but was like okay I should have let it go for another 500 bucks or something then all kinds of people said to me oh you're crazy you know you could have got another ten thousand dollars I mean you know donations were pouring in and there was public excitement there was hype here on YouTube people were going to really donate a lot of money for this okay I didn't want a lot of money all right I wanted enough there was a specific function there was a specific court case specific cost attached to that that I was trying to pay for right no more and no less and there shouldn't be any ethical question of how would that court case have gone if you paid twice as much money or half as much money so on and so forth all right if people were perfectly moral what what would James ask me do with the money or donating to him right now and he doesn't disclose how much money is getting it may be very humble I don't know if he's getting five five hundred dollars a month or five thousand dollars a month or whatever it may be I don't know but as soon as we know what his project is what it is you're donating for if you're building a bridge let's find out how much the bridge costs let's find out when it's built and then we can cut the ticker tape and celebrate that the bridge is over with right the problem is when you are funding the permanent vacation lifestyle the budget is bottomless there is no measurable measurable outcome were in to an economic and ethical realm where we're dealing with the infinitude of human greed and self-indulgence right as opposed to the finitude of trying to accomplish something in a specific project all right I know it's appealing to imagine that you've embarked on some mission like feeding starving hordes of orphans and believe me in places like Cambodia and Laos I've seen projects that had extensible goals that were that infinite and engaged in bottomless fundraising accordingly and it corrupted them all so there is a famous case I can probably google around and give you guys a link to to an article here it's a famous case of a woman in Cambodia who started a shelter for female victims of sexual slavery these were in theory girls who were somehow abducted and forced into prostitution and the story she pitched because ultimately a lot of this fundraising takes place in the internet 21st century the story she pitched had a bunch of strange question marks in it if you know anything about twenty three what Cambodia oh there were a number of things that make you raise an eyebrow I think that doesn't quite sound possible or that timeline doesn't quite add up and sooner or later an investigative reporter one of the last investigative journalists on earth went through and proved that every single claim this woman made about her own life was false that in fact she had never been a prostitute she had never been a victim of international trafficking and all of the details at every stage of the story were false now how much money was she raising what was the objective infinite how many victims of safe sex drafting her mother in Cambodia possibly I know a scientist who did research and that quantifying it the real answer is very finite indeed there isn't an ether you're not talking an infinite number of victims of a social problem like that it's a very finite number you can estimate research nobody wants to read but from their perspective for infinite if you give us ten thousand dollars will spit will find a way to spend outdoors and give us a hundred thousand dollars they'll find a way to spend on a thousand again even examples like dr. Gregor he's soon enough got up to millions per year million millions per year doing what oh um then there was a next step of this scandal because of course defenders of this charity said well maybe this particular woman who founded the charity and asked for donations maybe she herself was a fraud but she must have helped countless countless victims of sexual slavery sex trafficking prostitution and you know when the books were finally opened up there were criminal charges involved here and someone the answer was zero there wasn't even one example of one girl or one woman who had ever been helped by this charity who had any history of being sexually trafficked or even just being a prostitute maybe were predisposed to believe in this this mode of donating money with no stated outcome no particular deadline no particular project that the project manager is responsible to institute maybe we're conditioned to accept that because of the last thousand years of Christianity right when you donate to the church what are you donating for to build something in particular there's always something to build to pay for some priests eat lunch or dinner there's always some priest who needs his belly filled right there's no please there's always some orphan somewhere the church can suggest to you that your donations but there's always some good work somewhere and no one wants to actually sit down and evaluate when you pay the church where does your money go what are you really bankrolling and the fundamental question is when will it stop when will enough be enough and the answer is only when people like you and I stand up and say this is enough