Vegans around the boardroom table: activism and democracy I.R.L.

you know i mean that's that's a real ego
trip and that's why i like to me when you get involved with these groups you know you're seeing people who are on that ego trip dominating the student vegan society are dominating the students animal rights group or you know what I mean like it's so petty it's so pathetic to me the side of human nature I don't want to deal with I don't know girls who go to college want guys you know so I just don't ever think that would happen you know sharing my own University friends like I just can't imagine any of them wanting to be with wait a former I don't even know what his charges were like he told something or somebody I can't imagine so I just it is unfortunately dropped out of college because like I think he has a potential two he he talked about it before but I watched his videos he did used to do videos that were more substantial right like not everything he said was stupid i know and i know i know this but look so i'm gonna bring this back to you i'll also say like he's not really the kind of character he plays when your channel was brand new you had like five videos up or something he and i talked about you i've mentioned that before and he and I both said like wow this is such a really positive thing for beginners on youtube and you know we were talking about the fact that you were intelligent you actually had something to say like you know what i mean like we're just I'm of the stuff he never once said like you were hot he never once said something like the way he behaves on his channel you think he's this cave man who has no other interests we had this discussion about you that was just a hundred percent like politics and why you were a positive contrast other people's channels so just say like I know who he really is and I know what else he's capable of and that makes it even more depressing to see what he pretends to be or what he's become but he got sick of it himself right he just quit doing he just quit doing drama in a major way so you know I mean that's funny I mean all those people they've all disappeared Joe vegan went crazy and quit vegan cheetah lost his patience and quit Martin Lewis got his channel deleted you know we don't know till but like all the people are playing the drama game one by one they've actually dropped off the off the radar so now I have nobody to gospel my sex life so I have to do with myself I've gotta cut they're the pot yourself and don't have anyone to be your dirty work for you yeah yeah I'm thinking for us just getting back to youtube I guess I I have been lying to put out a video and he has a sick but I think my video I was like yeah looks like twice a week and then I didn't culture two weeks but I think what i want my next video to be and I'm just kind of struggling with how to even frame it I don't know where my own head of that like I had a series of like experiences just been dealing with universities done regarding like the club the true universi student council and like the clubs like we've had I'm going through the details because it's not relevant but just like with conflict with one of our members right just clarify cuz doing says no so did you have a vegan group or did you have an animal rights group or what was the group it was just the focus was it may give some kind of like activism on campus they're trying to get things labeled like small things I just trying to get vegan options label does weekend we're going to get more options on campus I would you fellas greetings but truthfully the main purpose of the club is to be social but social club movement and also to bring in like people are curious about veganism like it helps teach people right who are already interested in veganism but yeah so we had this conflict with one of our members in just a whole experience I guess you know I to branch off into this local thing like I could branched off into my youtube video in so many different directions I could bring it to like come a commentary on political correctness um I personally think this person got too much favoritism because they have invisible disabilities because anyone else they would have been kicked out of the club no problem but yeah I couldn't actually sir but you just a few people don't know and I don't know either but likes to this club it's a vegan club on a campus like about how many people in total were there and what what would a normal meeting be like did you meet at a restaurant or do you meet in room like I'm sorry that's boring but like it because otherwise people can't really am at like what you mean by a club yeah yeah basically the exec team we would meet once a week Wow okay yeah it's a plan events and there was about 10 of us this year this year there was a lot I actually custom left the club yeah I had a bad experience boy left but yeah we'd meet once a week and then we would put on an event for all general members once a week I usually it'd be like a restaurant outing or a potluck or bar night or film screening etc etc I I do want to hear with oh I'm sincerely interested both on a personal level and on a deacon politics level but I just remind you anything you say if you want me to censor it if you want me to not upload it I can edit things out anything or I can turn off the recording right now I mean you know so it's not required in the first place but I do i do really want to want to hear what happened so I you know I add my own negative experience of that kind to to compare with you also but no I was okay yeah i guess like the hole hold then even then we're gonna I haven't thought about it like there's just so many layers to this hold on so basically this guy got cell rest of the vegan community outside of yunnan university community because we have an animal rights groups that's not affiliated with the university but we talk right so the two groups we talk so he we had like people telling us that we're a bunch of ablest and were like we had a grown man like 40 years old like some Neenah stressed via email and whatnot because we were trying to kick someone off the exact same utter club earth like that you know he was just very not he was very difficult to work with sober it was just not working he needed to get he could go to the club and yeah like the base and everyone was telling us or a bunch of ablest and so we get to the University meeting like what the actual like student council right and to deal with this conflict so the member and question is there and firstly the meeting starts off with I don't have any speaking rights at this meeting because my executive position wasn't elected in i just kind of signed up whereas the other members they were voted in so they have speaking right so i live in even lots of talks which I thought was unfair and I found that even my own members they were there were weren't on our side you know like our own exact team members they were just trying not to get in trouble to get into trouble with bliss a university student council they weren't necessarily speaking up with what they knew to eat right in Newton true in that case so I found that I was just almost like it was like a betrayal of like they weren't interested in helping the club they were just interested in not creating a conflict with the university student council and just just to cover because in Canadian university sometimes his money involved was there money involved in the sense of like was was student council providing funding for the group was that part of the dynamic or no um not really I know I know like the wealth and similar says the member in question who was we're trying to go to the club his mother was very involved in our group which is very strange he was worth group and his mom was involved a lot so she would donate a lot of money to our club and so I guess that made him feel like he had a special position in the club because nothing would donate all this money but it doesn't I totally I totally understand the basis for him getting kicked out of the club was the fact that he had turned the whole community out against us and was straight up lines like slandering our club and was what they do yes you mrs. through Facebook in the Sun I assume it's social media-based slandering it yeah yeah just straight up like straight line calling like telling people it was awful like one of the members involved like on exec team like they themselves have a non-visible disability and this person has been accused of being in ablest it was so ridiculous right and yeah so the fact that the USC was going so easy on the sky anyone else like he wasn't just landed in our club he was Lance slandering the university student council USC right like any other person just lying about the u.s. seen but i'm giving him such a bad name like they would've been kicked out of the club right but i just in so and so unfair so not just that I just as I guess this is what it is I I don't want to deals it's like I don't there's no reason for me to need to deal with this right now oh I quit I just mentioned like okay I'm now 38 I mean back when I was at University of Victoria I was 36 and we were talking before like in some ways I'm a dominant personality and like I dominate whatever room i'm sitting in and people pay attention to me and I'm not bragging like you know that was talked about this on youtube before like I've never had an ego trip from that that doesn't feel good to me but I have experience doing that in a boardroom in a business setting where I'm sitting down talking executives and making a case I have experienced you that an academic context where I'm giving an academic lecture to a group of professors or PhD students but I also have experience doing that in Buddhism in a religious context where its religious authority religious power religious ego trip and if there was anything in me that got like ego gratification out of you know being the center of attention believe me I would have stuck with the Buddhist religious leader thing because you can you know what it's like and you know that you regard like me who talks a good game I can improvise lectures on the meaning of life no script you know what I mean you walk into the room you look at the crowd you make eye contact with people the crowd goes silent you know what I mean you stand up there and say hey here's the meaning of life and yours what we're going to accomplish in the next 10 years in this Buddhist monastery or whatever you know i mean that's that's a real ego trip and that's why i like to me when you get involved with these groups you know you're seeing people who are on that he co trip dominating the student vegan society are dominating the stew and animal rights group or you know what I mean like it's so petty it's so pathetic to me and also for me like that that kind of that kind of role comes to me naturally and I don't it's both that I don't enjoy it and also that I really believe in democratic process and by democratic process I don't mean this kind of [ __ ] you were just complaining about like oh we have to take this piece of paper and give it a student council but just that when you hold a meeting but I'm not the only one talking that I'm not implicitly like I'm not making up your decision for you that you actually are making decisions in a way that that reflects many boys in the room so I just say when I was in Victoria there was a main vegan group and they didn't even call themselves vegan which I didn't like already and then there was there was an attempt at having a student group within the campus and for me it was really funny because my main thing was look I'm 36 years old I'm a student but I'm not a normal age student and I do not want to be the boss to this group look I don't think it's portly I can come I can chat with people like to some extent but where I did not want to play a controlling role because I thought that the young people people who were normal age for university students they should be the ones you know has like to summit I could play somewhere or give some advice to talk to me but I didn't you know what I mean and the irony was my nemesis was this other guy who was exactly the same age as me he was exactly the same age as me and he was also divorced so just by coincidence he was also 36 year old divorced guy and he was not a student I was legitimately university student and he was [ __ ] dominating and controlling the vegan stupid crew [ __ ] for no reason just for his own ego or whatever it's like you say like the moms or something come in it's like dude you're not even a student here why are you here get the [ __ ] out look why are you trying to turn this into your farm club no I just mean he was not a creep he was not trying to get with the the university girls you that wasn't his motivation at all but I remember other people wondered if it was she's like dude like why are you even here like you know he actually that actually wasn't his motivation but when you see these people wear that that ego motive even when it's just a room of like six people or eight people that they want to control that room the side of human nature I don't want to deal with yeah funny you should say that like the sky but you just described as very similar to the guy like I was dealing with he was human of his younger but he was still like older cameras and he wasn't none of us really understood if he was a student or not that was always like it would have been awkward to be like that even like go to the school or what right thank you you got to have yeah so we always just kind of like I think we did ask once or something and he gave us really vague answers over just like okay so yeah just like why are you even here and why is your mom so overlay balls and the thing is he was you know it was one of the first members of a group right and so he did houses like the group with the club was his project he found I think and like he just couldn't move on right and can't have ultimate control over everything so which is like one of the reasons why we wanted to like get him off the exact same he's impossible to work with but yeah it was definitely ego driven it was so abundantly clear it was just like dude like you know you're almost 30 like you don't even going to this school what are you doing here you know so I just saying I respect democracy democracy is based on the idea that everyone there is equal but there also are inequalities like if you're the guy who does all the photocopying if you do all the long hours of hard work I do think your voice counts for more because you've committed the time it was the usual usual situation where Jordan and his girlfriend put a ton of time in to you know making events happen so I really did respect that like I really felt like his voice counted more than mine but at that time already I was a little bit famous on vegan YouTube you know micro Fame and there were students who were like excited to meet me like vegans you know they were vegans or they were vegetarians who cared about ecology or whatever we're like oh yeah he's that guy they know from YouTube you know like they were they were just meet me and the reality was even when so Jordan the kids adult group his crooked ultra if you group that wasn't on the campus the way he chaired a meeting was just that he would sit down and dictate but he would just sit there he's not even aware of it he would dictate from top to bottom what the group was doing and it was so [ __ ] pointless it's just a waste of my time to be there and like so again even stuff like to me is not about ego like okay how much time do you want to spend as a vegan on deer deer culling and on horse-drawn carriages for me the answer is zero but there are a million eight like [ __ ] you I have 500 youtube videos there are so many issues in veganism I'm passionate about and those two are not on the list I do not want to [ __ ] and these guys were doing illegal [ __ ] I do not want to go to jail for destroying a deer trap you know what the traps you know the traps that will be used to like trapped adhere and then relocate them to the forest or whatever because it's like a silly was a government owned property because you're so [ __ ] pissed off about government beer policy like oh my god but like you you if you went to a meeting that was not debated it was not debatable there was no openness to just asking people like hey what are our priorities what do you what do we want to work on in the next six months of the next year there was absolutely no openness which is either you sit down and you one hundred percent submit and conform to this guy who's the self-appointed dictator of the group or you get the [ __ ] out and start your own vegan grip and that's it like [Music] there's a lot of baking groups are like that it's depressing yeah yeah I'm very very aggressive I think I'm someone I think I mentioned him to you before there's like a video clip where you're talking about I mean I don't even run live footage from the Toronto March and I said hey I know that guy you where I live and I think yeah and he's kind of like the present person outside of our student group like any other group that everyone kind of looks up to right and he was actually one of the people coincidentally who sent a threatening emails and he's the one who's leading the local animal rights group and he sends a threatening email to 20 something year old who were just running a student group hey and so that's a level of aggression but I have here in my own no but what do you you know what do you try to win um you know like I really think with Jordan he was always totally comfortable relaxed talking to me one-on-one he like I don't think he had any problem we thought what I want but when we were in that group setting 60 play people I think he was really deeply threatened by the fact that I was just the kind of charismatic self confident person or a different approach to these things and like you know I know I know most left-wing people will laugh if you talk about like corporate governance or like a responsible corporation but one of the main things you learn in a business setting is the type of democracy you have to have in a room with six or eight people who are not all equal like somebody is the owner of the company and somebody's the you know people in ring but nevertheless you have to have a meeting where the people at a lower rank really have the opportunity to report what was successful it wasn't says like even if it's one hundred percent corporate like learning to manage the personalities in a corporate meeting and again you're not all equal ultimately somebody is the owner and somebody's the employee but we're like you can have a meeting we say hey guys okay so looking back at the last last three months what was really successful what was a failure like what do you guys have to report well you're not steamrolling them you're not fortunate to say everything was great when it wasn't and then we say okay what are we going to do different in the next three months that's really the kind of skill you need for a small vegan group even though again like Jordan even though my experience them is really negative um I recognize just because he does the photocopying and he puts in the hours I feel like like he is my boss like I feel like he does have a superior role to me because he and his girlfriend put in all these hours I don't want to put in I would did you ever see I was a student I was a full-time university student I didn't have that much done I was really busy I was busy with you to purchase it yeah office but you know not you know if you got the time put that in I can recognize your spirit of me but I've still got to have that process when you call it democratic or not where I can say look this is not working for me I feel this is a waste of time whereas i feel this other thing is a really good use of time and that kind of feedback so yeah law and the internet makes it worse because so many people are just used to screaming at each other on Facebook and they're not used to holding a meeting and drawing out you know really really enabling people even if they are in a subordinate position to voice their concerns and have a conversation about how to improve operations you know