Greed & the Politics of Pandering: James Aspey, Brian Turner, Ice Poseidon.

[Music] what would you in the audience say if i now reveal to you that the budget for this youtube channel is 1.5 million dollars per year i was like oh yeah yeah i actually i haven't it hasn't come up before whoops it slipped my mind actually actually i get more than one million dollars a year in donations any of you would be within your rights to ask and say well where did these donations come from and where are they going you know what do you what you know what how how much did that plate cost what what are the costs well how much did this camera cost how much did that banana bread cost you've been burning through a million dollars a year with this this uh vegan politics thing really really what if i told you it was 15 million dollars a year now some of you some of you might have the very generous attitude hey i don't care if it's 1.5 million and i don't care if it's 15 million this this this boy is our this guy he's a good guy he earned that money i'm not even gonna question it it's all for the best it's all for whatever input output we're not gonna measure throughput you know what i mean he's a good guy i trust him whatever he's doing to get that money whenever he does with him just let him let him do his thing farm animal sanctuary have you heard of farm animal sanctuary total revenue 2019 listed with the government as form 990 14.18 million dollars over 14 million dollars of that 12.5 million dollars in contributions donations now i am not going to sit here and tell you that farm animal sanctuary does nothing for the future of the vegan movement i am not going to sit here and tell you farm animal sanctuary is accomplishing nothing that they have accomplished nothing that they will accomplish nothing i am saying if you think about how much they've accomplished as output and then you think about 14 million dollars in input were led to some sobering reflections some terrifying philosophical questions about the past present and future of the vegan movement now if you've read the title of this video you can see i'm questioning brian turner i'm questioning james aspie i'm gonna say sincerely i think if you gave brian turner 14 million dollars to do figure i think he'd make better use of it i think brian turner is a hard-working guy i do i think he's got aspirations jesus i i'm not what would brian turner do sorry this isn't 14 this isn't a one-time thing this is per annum in one year this is how much revenue they had so i'm sorry it's not exactly the same every year they can make more money one year less when the other especially you know the last couple of years business as usual has been about you know but year after year you can tally this up in just one year 14.2 million in total revenue 12.5 million of that donations what would brian turner do to change the world with 12 and a half million dollars per year what would you do what would i do now i mean i don't have to calibrate this i mean how much of a difference has my youtube channel made for the past present and future of the vegan movement i think it's been really significant i do actually and i think if you compare what i've accomplished on youtube in broadcasting and talking and in listening in uh this peculiar era of social media you know if you compare what i accomplished to what gary francione accomplished with what gary yourofsky accomplished you can calibrate it i mean i'm not saying i've accomplished more than those people but you can look at and say well how many millions of dollars were put in and what kind of political change came out of it what was going on you can calibrate you can ask some of these questions uh here's the thing i'm not encouraging you to think of this as your money and i'm not claiming it's my money if you imagine globally how much money is going into supporting vegan activism of any kind vegan initiatives in the broadest sense the total global budget per annum to pursue this future of a better planet of a vegan world all right some of that money is going to james aspie right some of that money is going to brian turner i don't know how much all right but like i'm doing this to calibrate the discussion of the video i am not saying what james aspie did was a scam and i am not saying what brian turner did was again i'm not i'm saying it's a bad use of money i'm saying it's a bad use of talent it's a bad use of time it's a bad use of resources it's a bad use of your labor it's bad use of your imagination okay but however much or however little money james aspie has taken up and brian turner has taken up and i've talked before about the budget for direct action everywhere and for uh anonymous for the voiceless okay those those budgets be they big or be they small they are very much part of the same grand total with this 14 million dollars farm animal sanctuary right there are only so many millions of dollars there are only so many talented hard-working people with only so many hours to go into this movement it is in that sense that i'm saying to you this is your money this is your movement right and it's my money too right because that's the money we have to allocate i can't say it's the money we have to share within the movement right and there are only so many talented hard-working people if if talented hard-working people are spending their time standing on a sidewalk wearing a mask silently holding up a placard selling homes part of my concern is yeah it is a waste of money and i've talked in the past about just how much the budget is just how many donations are going to that organization anonymous to the voiceless right but the other problem is whether this person is a poet a painter an architect a bike courier a musician this person has some talent some capacity to do something positive for the future of the movement and it isn't standing in silence we're squandering time we're squandering talent and yes yes y'all we're squandering money now i want to be clear 14.2 million dollars that went to farm animal sanctuary i'm not saying it's a scam i'm saying it's a waste i'm not saying the money is being stolen all right i'm saying it's being squandered all right you [ __ ] tell me what difference farm animal sanctuary has made in the world what difference it's made for the vegan movement and what difference it has made in your life you matter too you're part of this test you'll see why i'm emphasizing that what impact has it had on you with 14 million dollars you know let's let's step down and scale here so by the way i might as well i might as well provide receipts as people say there's a link i am there's no point that'll just link you to form 990 showing you the reported revenue for the year 2019 it's easy easy enough for me to share if in case you think i'm i'm not reading the exact figure as it's as it's as it's provided to me i am okay there is a different organization with a very similar name to my knowledge there's no connection between them but if there is it's informal but there are two different vegan organizations with very similar names so i was talking about farm animal sanctuary i am now going to talk about the farm animal rights movement and it is sometimes just referred to as farm or they use initials f dot a dot r dot m farm animal rights movement now i can't send links for all this stuff i got a screenshot here of their announcement of their 40th animal rights conference they call this the animal rights national conference was anybody in this audience there did any of you attend were any of you invited did any of you receive one email did you receive one facebook message to someone saying hey you know what i went to this really great vegan event this year it's been happening every year for 40 years and i've got if anyone if you can tell me you can you know you can send me an email later saying yeah you went to the event that's great and i'm happy for you i'm not saying nobody went to this event i am seeing shockingly few people went to this event and we have to calibrate the claim if i with my zero budget hold an animal rights conference which i've tried to do in the past by the way i invited people to give papers we're gonna do it in vancouver vancouver canada vancouver was in the past a major crossroads okay so i would be doing that with what five thousand dollars one thousand dollars rent a room try to get people together try to have a discussion try to put on youtube and look i mean let's be let's be modest let's be realistic how many people would attend how many people would watch the video if i got people together minimum 500 people would watch that youtube video possibly 2 000 people depends on how intelligent the conversation was how well edited it is but you guys know i mean the total viewing public for in-depth discussions about vegan politics is limited but i have certainly plumbed the depths of that bubble i've earned a certain level of respect and a certain level of notoriety you know within the few thousand people who speak english who are interested in that okay five months ago farm animal rights movement post this video reflecting on 40 years of the animal rights national conference it has 39 views 39 views on youtube okay this is how i know you weren't there this is how i know you didn't receive an email from a friend yours who was there right again i wasn't invited go ahead ask you i'm not on a crazy ego trip do you really think do you really think there's a long list of better speakers than this to invite to your [ __ ] animal rights national conference really go ahead and make a list okay there's me there's james aspie there's brian turner and i'm not even against those guys we could all be on the same [ __ ] stage together i can do a push-up contest with [ __ ] brian turner for all i care to save the animals i don't even do a push-up contest with brian turner against global warming i could do a [ __ ] boxing match with brian turner and james aspie at the same time like you know i don't really care i'm assuming this is something philosophically substantive and politically important we're talking about but even if this is just a crazy person okay you know make a list how many really great speakers were there to invite over the last 40 years over the last eight years that i've been on youtube i've never been invited once right if if you guys if there hadn't been any talk any positive impetus behind this just from the people who attended it and participated sending a facebook message to their own friends and family and saying hey look i attended in person this really great lecture this really great event and yo you gotta see it it's you have more than 39 views on youtube just from that alone and in this case i'm going to get to the budget we're talking about a multi-million dollar foundation that has been doing this for 40 years and you don't have 40 people who are interested in what the [ __ ] you have to say all right so yes you know i am raising questions here about james asking a hammer raising questions here about brian turner i am raising questions about the way greed is being pondered to in you know propping up and promoting vegan political activism they're they're important questions we're gonna get that but let's contextualize this how much money has has brian turner [ __ ] up i've used the broadest how much money in the game what percentage of the pie we think about all the millions of dollars going into being actors what percentage of the money has james assby [ __ ] up i cannot imagine they're in the ballpark of 14 million dollars i would be surprised if they're in the ballpark of one million dollars like it's it's probably a really small amount of money and there is this sense in which i'm saying to you this is your money too this is your generation and this is our opportunity to yes yes y'all save the planet have our decisive influence on the trajectory of global warming have our decisive influence on the suffering and needless death of millions if not billions of animals blah blah blah i don't have to go over the basics with you guys right okay and that opportunity is being squandered who is it being squandered by yes james aspie the squadron's opportunities you made terrible decisions we're going to talk about this yes brian turner has made terrible decisions it discredits him and described it's big there are problems here discrediting okay but on a much larger scale farm animal sanctuary is the problem okay farm animal rights movement is the problem and you guys know me if this is the first video you've ever [ __ ] seen on my channel you at least get the sense i'm kind of passionate about this i'm kind of highly motivated and i would grant that to brian turner too and i would grant that to james asked me to i think they're passionate highly motivated people okay what the [ __ ] do you think i do with 14 million dollars you think you wouldn't have heard about it you think millions of dollars would get funneled through this channel and there'd just be no outcomes to show there'd be no like what really think about it even if you've never met me before this is the first time you've heard my voice and some of you now you've heard me for eight years so you you know what i don't know what kind of thing i do with the money i don't have to digress into a whole bunch of examples here but you know in the past i've talked about uh trying to make an illustrated children's story book well if you have a bigger budget that can be an illustrated cartoon it can be a cartoon on netflix you can have a video game that's linked to the storybook and link to the cartoon you can make a you know kind of educational video game whatever you want to say if you're going with some redeeming qualities you can put together a package it's going to have an impact and you'd [ __ ] hear about it there'd be someone sending you a link on facebook or an email or whatever you use an instagram dm saying oh hey did you hear about this crazy vegan guy he made this cartoon and a storybook and this video game and you know did you hear this and you'd say like yeah yeah i already heard yeah you're the tenth person to tell me but you have some for 14 million oh yeah you know what let's go into animation let's go into an animation studio and say we're trying to make this work with about 12.5 million per year sinking but that's our sinking budget for the but yeah we've got 12.5 million this year and then we're gonna have to wait a whole [ __ ] year before we have another 12.5 million us dollars okay if right now you go to the youtube channel of farm animal rights movement again not to be confused farm animal sanctuary okay they have a video up from two months ago it's an hour long it has 21 views okay they have a video up from three months ago it's 52 minutes long 30 views okay so i gotta get the to the money now all right the most recent budget i have for that same conference so i can't say they spend the same amount of money every year maybe some years they have a bigger conference maybe small maybe the budget okay but the budget they reported for the year 2018 for that conference was 338 477 us dollars i'll just type that out so you spent three hundred and thirty eight thousand four hundred and seventy seven dollars on that conference again from year to year maybe it's more maybe less you've done it for 40 years and these are the outcomes we're talking about i'm gonna be honest with you so i've been rolling heavy with the vegan movement about eight years you guys can figure out okay i might say rolling heavy i mean like every day having email with people or instagram messages people just connected to and talking to people sometimes whatever you know skype you know making youtube videos like there was a time when i was strictly vegetarian before i came vegan and there was this time when i became vegan but i wasn't really on the internet yet okay but at least eight years i've been rolling heavy in veganism nobody has ever once mentioned to me this conference not by email not by nothing i've never heard it mentioned i've never heard anyone say to me they went there or that a friend of nothing i've never seen like i've never seen any acknowledgement of its existence not even a blip on the radar so now i'm to be clear i'm not saying it's a scam i'm not saying it's theft i'm not saying the money is being stolen how the [ __ ] do you spend more than 300 000 us dollars on a conference that has no impact no ripples it's such a total failure year after year after year that like it's hard to even find evidence substantiating that it ever existed okay now you know if you were into little league sports you were into small local sports like let's say soccer and then someone tells you oh but haven't you heard of this whole other soccer league that is a multi-million dollar per year budget and you know they spend three hundred thousand dollars just organizing one game just one match i assume it lasts one day i don't know i don't know if it lasts for several days they're not alone their conferences but like okay there's this one event and you say what how is that possible for all these years i've been involved with organized little league sports i've been involved with organizing and following and being a fan of and being a coach so you also coach the sport uh small league soccer and now how is it possible all right i'm not saying it's a scam i'm saying this is a kind of failure that really matters and [ __ ] everybody's ignoring it i can say to you now also in the audience do you know of a single youtube channel other than a balacial that has ever discussed this you know maybe you do that's great james askme doesn't talk about it oh brian turner doesn't talk about it like there's a really strange lack of candor about this i mean one of the only examples i can think of is when joey carbstrong got got cornered on the question of the funding going to uh anonymous for the voiceless that was a big controversy he and he didn't want to talk when he said on camera i really don't want to talk about this but this is this controversy involving more than a million dollars and blah blah blah he got into the budget so that was one of the rare circumstances where a personality conflict basically uh dragged out into the light dragged out into public view some of the talk about money that's going on behind the scenes okay so very briefly farm animal rights movement for the year 2017 1.8 million dollars in revenue precise figure 1 million 794 702 us dollars okay so let's let's round off 2017 1.8 million the year 2016 1.8 million the year 2015 1.35 million okay 2014 1.2 million revenue it's money coming in it's not stat it's not a savings account with money they're maintaining more than a million dollars a year coming in year after year after year i'm asking you where does the money [ __ ] go and what so i'm going to say i'm going to say it disappears without accomplishing anything i'm not saying it's stolen i'm not saying i'm not saying it's a fraud i'm not saying it's a scam i'm saying it's a failure like but a failure of a type that's it's the enormity of the failure the depth of the the the holoness of the enterprise of vegan activism it's just unfathomable that this money disappears and we have nothing we can point to nothing we can we can show for it right that's the that's the context uh for this discussion now you can go to again i'll just provide a link i think if you click through here you can get as many details as they're publicly available um this is the american government irs form 990. and okay well maybe this is the better like to give so this is their uh okay this is their uh formula 990 return for the most recent year on their own on their own website so you can go through there you can look at revenue you will see in this year the amount of money they're making dropped i assume due to global [Music] global global economic uh issues but they're reporting here prior year 1.4 million dollars in contributions and grants so that's a lot of money and then they say current year uh 570 000 now if you had that kind of money what would you do if i had that kind of money if i had 10 of that money what do you think i would do with it and let's be real most of what you have seen going on on social media including james aspie including it's a competition for those millions of dollars it's people putting themselves forward and saying me me me i should be the one to get a million dollars i should be the one to get the donations i should be the one to get the trust and to some extent it's a competition for talent i should be the one to get the volunteers or other or other support okay now that ain't new i think what's new is precisely what ice poseidon james aspie and uh third guy [Laughter] that's why i have melissa here thank you my sweet james aspy and brian turner are bringing the equation so guys welcome to the show if you have a moment hit thumbs up it helps more people discover the conversation while it's happening i i promoted this one so far in advance that probably some people have forgotten it's happening today i could i can post it again instagram let people know where you're doing it if you hit thumbs up it helps more people discover the live stream while it's happening and also later when it's when it's archived but if anyone has anything intelligent to say uh i'm i'm happy to you know let you join the conversation at your and your comments criticisms your perspective whatever and you know you're all involved you're all implicated you know what i mean like even if you've never donated anything in charity and even if you've never received any of this money from anybody what i mean uh even if in that sense you've had nothing to do with it you know we're all implicated and we're all i mean we're all dealing with the consequences of what these foundations do with those millions of dollars and we're all dealing with the consequences of what they don't do right whether you're looking at someone like aaron janus or you're looking at someone like james aspie like we're living with the advantage they took of the opportunities offered to them in life like you know even aaron janice extraordinary opportunities and all right the very few of us will ever have right and we're living with the consequences of the opportunities they've squandered right like what what they didn't make of those opportunities and indeed there are only so many so many millions of dollars to go around so again so i'm just showing you guys i am reading your comments and i'm going to hear what you have to say and respond to it as you can see i i choose to pause at different points if i'm in the middle of saying something i'm not going to interrupt myself in sense uh junebug says quote money goes into the animals and then they die plus staffing uh um but i'm i'm dubious even about that right like um well you know for example the second example i gave uh farm animal rights movement more than three hundred thousand dollars just on having a conference so what is that i'm asking i do not know the answer question this is just a speculation does that mean first class hotel rooms for 100 people is that is it first-class airplane tickets for 100 people real question do they have even 100 people attending this because if so they're not even getting the level of social media react you'd get from 100 people sharing the link and saying hey i had a first first class airplane ticket and went to a conference center and so i know so i'm just going to just going to post that to instagram in case anyone's forgotten um you know so you know obviously i understand the kind of generous assumption that they are doing something good and positive with the money like buying bales of hay to feed the cows or something but it's actually not easy to make that assumption not when you're dealing with this these levels this scale of um donation collection and what have you now look just to be uh i don't know just just to be provocative let me just point out i'm doing a fundraiser right now and i've received one thousand dollars you get the exam sorry maybe it's one thousand and thirty three dollars but it's right now it's just about one thousand dollars i'm going to tell you guys exactly what i did with the money like i'm gonna say oh yeah i bought the air i'm gonna have to pay for a hotel room and a taxi i the airplane ticket alone could be more than a thousand dollars in this case that's about it uh i i wouldn't call it a fundraiser but you know uh when i uh when i asked sorry when i gave t-shirts to my viewers so i'm just wondering what verb to use here i asked them to pay the postage handling i said look i'm going to print it for free like the actual cost of the t-shirt and the printing is going to be free but i want you to donate money to cover the postage handling and i photographed the receipt i went to the post office i sent them the t-shirts i photographed that's it so they knew exactly how much they'd paid and you know often there was a rounding error involved like they'd send me 15 and the receipt is actually 14.76 because you know the mechanisms of these things and i could have lost money in that i mean i think definitionally i did overall i'm just saying uh you can do transparent accountable fundraising at any scale so i won't go on and on with these examples my point here is not to have many examples i think you guys see the principle the thing and i've communicated that you know passionately enough but um so i'm just posting this to instagram with a very simple uh statement right now there you go a rare moment of silence in one of my lessons normally i just give people the heads up moments before going live but today you guys had a whole day of advanced warning and yeah sadly i do think it's a really important discussion for us to have um an important discussion for somebody someone have um [Music] someone says the goals of vegans do not necessarily align with the goals of their funders that's it's an interesting suggestion but i'm sorry i'm getting overheated i'm gonna have to take no no it's oh is it on okay all right thanks man uh maybe i'll have to strip down to fewer and fewer layers as the broadcast goes on um look the people who are donating money to those two organizations i just named what do you think they want what do you think they're paying for i mean another example that i've mentioned in the channel in the past is the enormous budget for dr greger's youtube channel and people have donated millions of dollars to this youtube channel where do you think the money goes is that money being used effectively obviously i think it's a you know horrible waste of money i'm not alleging a scam i'm not alleging fraud i'm just saying really think about the millions of dollars going into this and then what outcome if any you can show for it but um no i mean i think people who donate money to dr greger the people who are the funders their goals are exactly the same as dr burns i think they know exactly what they're paying for what they want him to do they're donating millions of dollars i'm just saying we have nothing to show for it in terms of outcomes you estimate what is the budget to do what dr greger does i could do it for ten dollars a month or something sort of the cost is is nothing to get to to download and read a pdf and then come on camera and chit chat about uh medical study it costs nothing and he's he's got a budget in the millions per annum so sorry in prior videos i've gone through the actual filings of exactly how much money he's collecting and spending i'm not doing that in this video so i'll just say if you want real figures that's a speculative million dollars but you can get the real the real numbers in earlier videos have done or you can again get a form 990. so no it's a totally well-intentioned uh comment but when you look at farm animal sanctuary or you look at farm animal rights movement or you look at james aspy or you look at uh brian turner i think people who support them people to donate to them people who are involved shall we stay in the broader sense involve financially with them i think there's there's no uh disconnect between what the the donors want and what what vegans want i i don't think that's case at all you know the question is what do you want to do to get it and you know i i know obviously it's not one person donating a million dollars but ask yourself if you donated one million dollars to dr greger do you think you're getting your money's worth if you donated more than hundred thousand dollars for that one animal rights conference would you feel you were getting your money's worth or would you feel you're taking this money in and flushing it down the toilet and you know what were you hoping to be the outcomes of supporting this movement of this particular organization or this or this particular event but no way sorry i don't i don't think that's the that's the issue um so junebug says also there's no consensus on what the actual future of veganism will be politically right but that's what makes it exciting you know what i mean i'm sorry but that's i mean i'm sorry that's molten metal versus cold steel that's exactly when people want to get involved let me ask you something about are you really tempted to get involved with irish politics oh really why probably because you don't think you make any [ __ ] difference in the future of ireland you know this is not a moment in history this isn't sorry use your phrasing this is a time in history when there is a consensus on the future of ireland that consensus it's it's cold steel it's not molten metal it's not being forged it's not being reformed you know what i'm saying and it'd be very hard to budge people out of that consensus now you can travel back in time there have certainly been moments in history when it was molten iron when it was was really not clear what the future of ireland was going to be and people were fighting and dying over it right okay so you have a consensus that's why irish politics are boring ireland almost never gets mentioned in the international news if you don't live in ireland nobody cares nobody pays attention now okay you might be tempted instead what is the future of libya going to be like their what is the future of myanmar gonna be right now that's molten iron right so it's funny but i think you're misperceiving strength as weakness and weakness of strength here there isn't a consensus about what veganism should be or should represent what the future move your what the political significance of veganism right and that's what makes it so exciting that's why we should have a conference i mean this this [ __ ] organization they've had 40 conferences but there's actually a lot to talk about it's a lot to plan there's a lot to make happen right like you know great you know so what's up there's so much to say eight years i've never run out of things to say you know now we don't have a lively ongoing uh world of publications for veganism uh we don't have a discourse even about how to proceed in terms of activism we really don't but we should um because in this sense you know in these debates and these discussions they're still going to win it's like that there's a sense in which the the definition of the future is still up for for grabs as you say because there isn't a consensus yet you know now is the time when people should get involved people should pour out their money and people should pour in their their talent their genius should pour in their hard work uh precisely to give a sense of of direction and purpose to the movement now look i'm sorry again i don't i'm not saying this to brag when i first got involved in the vegan movement it was completely routine for vegans on the internet to include palm oil along with meat as something they refused to eat as vegan that was standard and people were shocked and horrified when i challenged them on this that no ethically there's no argument against vegans eating palm oil and here's why now i'm just being real with you i don't know a single other person who fought on that issue in the last eight years and i know someone i i influenced directly was joey carbstrong joe garcia talked to me about it we spoke directly about this because he said to me look i know you've done videos about the palm oil issue and he said vegans are still coming at him and attacking him over palm oil this way i think it was vegans not meat eaters that his problem was with so how do i approach this how do i talk about it now look this is a holotype this is one one example but there aren't we're not talking about a really huge ocean we're talking about a small pond with only so many fish in it and joey carpstrom is a big fish so you know i do think i was one of the few people who uh significantly influenced the way vegans think about and talk about palm oil now i'm not delegitimizing the issue like i'm saying that's an example of there is no consensus it's molten iron and i really challenged vegans and said look are you against wood right now this video is being challenged it's being recorded on a wooden table do you think wood is immoral because cutting down trees it can kill an owl it can kill it can habitat destruction can kill innumerable animals there are animals that live on the tree like is that actually the argument you're making here because palm oil and the continuation of an already existing palm oil plantation how does that compare to a pearl farm are pairs immoral because there could be a jungle there could be an attack ecosystem instead of a parafarm and you know talking this through with people i'm sorry this is not really an issue where there are several equally valid perspectives there's only one valid perspective and it emerges inevitably from people reflecting on it but you know my point is you know you're right there is no consensus but that's not a weakness that's a strength that's exactly why i've been so passionate about what i've gotten involved sorry so again i i could go on and it's not the title of this video but i think it probably is useful for you guys to hear some of this stuff you know um the concept of animal rights itself i have stridently and passionately opposed what was the single most influential paradigm for vegan activism the so-called citizenship approach the citizenship approach claimed that rats rats living in an urban area have animal rights they're also very big on claiming that household pets like dogs and cats have animal rights that's the so-called citizenship approach so that was an academically respectable well-funded uh you know widely followed approach to veganism and animal rights when i first got involved in this and i came out and said look this is all this is all nonsense isn't it now okay obviously i have a more sophisticated uh you know critique of it than that but um you know let me just ask do you want to be a part of a movement do you want to be a volunteer do you want to participate and move and pour your limited time and energy and talent into a movement that goes around saying to people like unironically passionately sincerely that is going around preaching to people that rats have the same rights you do and that if you discover a snake in your basement or if you discover a bunch of rats living in the basement of your own home it should be a crime for you to kill those rats that was the mainstream dominant position in animal rights discourse about eight years ago when i first got involved okay so now look i don't want to donate money to an organization says that i don't want to volunteer for them i don't want to work with them i am vegan and i'm willing to say that is insane and i'm willing to say that is so insane that you know it discredits us like you're dragging the name of veganism the mud that's right again i can go with many many examples but i mean obviously one of the ones all of you were touched by i mean i asked before so there was this conference with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the budget did it actually touch you did it touch your lives anyway well there was this conference in chiang mai 2014 2015 2016. in chiang mai thailand there was this this vegan event vegan conference that touched us all organized by frilly and durianrider now their doctrine for one thing it included the claim that garlic is a neurotoxin that nobody should eat garlic it was an anti-garlic vegan diet now there are many many many absurdities built into their their model of activism and i made many videos addressing them well again for for just a couple of years like 2015 2016 maybe 2014 also that was the dominant paradigm in vegan activism that was a huge audience huge amount of money huge amount of success and on many different levels it was absurd and the actual diet is anti-scientific or pseudoscientific there are you know the the i the assumption that the way to promote veganism is through diet and weight loss and personal vanity and sexual attraction so on there are many assumptions built into it about how they're going to change the world that had to be challenged now again um look can you name other channels that did what i did i'm not saying there were zero but yes a battle of sale during these eight years and guys i've looked at the publications there's not a lot on paper and it's really pathetic you know if you look at magazines or journals academic journals okay so on all of these issues and about a hundred more you know uh at a time when there was no consensus of what the vegan movement should be and what the future should be about let's see how the youtube channel with zero budget i mean i don't have a multi-million dollar budget you can go to patreon right now and see how many hundred dollars i'm getting in donations per month with a very very low budget right i i waited on this and i i had my influence on the past present future of the movement and yes that's all just possible because we're talking about a stage where it's it's molten metal it's molten iron it's not cold steel yet and i think that's this is this really important process of separating sense from nonsense and yes you're partly challenging and debunking myths and you're partly creating new myths you know like i yes i'm interested in the truth rather than mythology but i understand that the truth in politics uh to some extent you then need to package and present that people in a in fiction that's why i talk about creating a children's storybook if you want to get across the ethics and philosophy of veganism a children's storybook an animated movie you know there's a kind of creation of new myths that comes out of it but i mean you guys know this anyone can say anything if they want me to explain something further obviously one of the greatest myths of all was the idea that social progress would only be achieved and could only be achieved through quote unquote disruption so direct action everywhere embrace that extinction rebellion embrace that uh anonymously voiceless embraces that so the model of disruption and then there are these really pseudo-scientific claims drawing from social sciences not medical sciences to try to to back that up so again over the last eight years who else do you know who's challenged that i can't say i'm the only one but i'm one of very few and i think i'm by far the most influential one you know and i by the way i tried to work with the few other people who were challenging that paradigm the few other people who were challenging the so-called effective activism paradigm and the disruption paradigm and so on um but you know i i'm not quite a solitary voice but i'm a unique and uniquely influential voice on that so now again my point is here that was a myth that was a myth about what the vegan movement is and what it ought to be and it was an attempt to create consensus about the future of the vegan movement and then ultimately an attempt to solicit donations people to get their share of those millions of dollars right and obviously part of what i've been doing is challenging that and sure i'm i'm challenging it partly with a very dry sense of the truth of what's merely true but i also acknowledge you take steps forward that involve the creation of a new kind of mythology in the pursuit of new methods of of changing the world so that's what's going on and i'm going to be honest i can't believe more people don't want to get involved you know i just can't believe it i'm just astonished at how little talent there is in the game i'm just astonished at how little passion or vitality and louis say this also you know like i sympathize with people like brian turner and i sympathize with you know james aspie because they are trying to change the world and they're trying to do something new and different like i can criticize it i can find faults with it but i also i very fundamentally sympathize with them and even admire them for putting their neck on the line for putting their real name on the internet their real face you know they're they're taking a risk and they're making a commitment now i can insert a lengthy criticism of both of them but there's a very fundamental sense in which you know i i don't just sympathize with them i even have some admiration for what they try to do now our position is in 2022 to step back have some detachment look at what the movement has done in the last five years analytically and then talk about the next five years and say we can't do this [ __ ] again now this is maybe the most flattering um intro i can give to the critique to what these guys have been doing financially lately shall we say i think the most flattering thing i can say is these are guys who were probably frustrated with what vegan activism is or what it has become um and they're looking around saying what's new what's different how can i change the world now the answers they've come up with i think are totally utterly wrong and they're deeply immoral but i relate to it someone like james aspy very much lived through and was very directly influenced by the rise and fall of freelee the rise and fall of during writer if you don't believe me freely herself was personally responsible for a lot of james aspey's fame it's not the only source he also did uh interviews with the news in uh australia he did appear in newspapers and he still does amazingly his his latest involvement with cryptocurrency which we're getting to title this video it was covered in mainstream newspapers to my surprise so he he gained some level of notoriety in the mission press but there can be no doubt that freely interviewing him and encouraging him was part of his rise to fame so he was someone who was influenced by this short-lived period of lifestyle activism the short-lived period that i referred to as the permanent vacation model of of vegan act okay and in some ways james aspie is still on permification we've heard from his own mouth that what he wants to do is present himself as this kind of bruce wayne character so if you don't know who bruce wayne is he is a fictional multi-millionaire now he tried to do this very briefly in his most recent uh venture i didn't say scam i said venture his most recent venture in cryptocurrency with an organization called taco cat okay so with this very strange sense of grandiosity he declared to the world that he was going to have a live stream once a week every week for six months and every live stream he was supposedly going to be giving away more and more money to charity it started with five thousand dollars for live streams so five thousand dollars a week being given a charity and then it was supposed to increase as this cryptocurrency taco cat became more and more successful so we have someone laughing in the audience uh quote this is not financial advice well look let me listen this is financial advice this whole video i'm not a coward this is financial advice and the first piece of financial advice i've given you is don't donate money to farm animal sanctuary don't donate money to a farm animal rights movement don't don't donate money to james asked me this is this is financial advice you can sue me if you think it's bad if later on you think i'm giving you bad financial advice go ahead and take me to court i'm committed guys okay um okay so this is the the it's a fundamentally grandiose delusion now i'm not saying james aspie is poor but i've never i mean he basically hasn't had a job in many many years he's been living on permanent vacation uh with the freelancer writer model he's been living off of um the revenues of social media and donations from his audience which is you know uh entails its own problems that i've discussed in other videos ethical problems strategic problems political problems again not a scam but it's a problem put it that way um [Music] the theory or the assumption was that this new cryptocurrency would be so successful so quickly that he was going to be able to come on and do this weekly live stream starting at five thousand dollars given to charity and then week after week this was gonna get more and more as it was more successful they made two live streams they gave away five thousand dollars in the first live stream they gave away five thousand dollars in the second live stream a week later and then the third live stream was canceled they promised or he promised james aspie promised that we're going to be back real soon it was going to resume as soon as possible when the trading volume for this currency picked up and it never happened now should i provide a link for this or not the first venture james askbe promoted this is now getting very closely comparable to ice beside him i have links in the description if you don't know who is you don't know what the uh what the scandal is there the first venture he was involved with was called ewt so i guess i can so this is energy web token now i'm going to give you guys a link if you don't believe me you can't visualize it you can click on this link and then you can look at how the price of the energy web token has changed in the last three months in the last six months in the last year now i'm not alleging that uh james aspie has been involved in a scam i'm not and i would not even allege that james aspie has personal personally gotten rich off of this i yeah the three-month chart is harrowing to look at there for the value of energy web okay so james aspie agreed to promote this cryptocurrency to pump this coin in the province over time he did for a very short time and then he stopped did he make money or did he lose money i don't know right now if he's true to his word if he did what he said we'd have to assume james aspie lost his shirt that he lost a lot of money there's no reason to think he made money there's no reason to think he scammed anyone in this sense there's no reason to think he benefited he may well have himself been duped or you know talked himself into something optimistically that wasn't remotely true okay but then what did he do after that he got involved with the second venture tacocat i'm going to send you the link to the current price of taco cat you can look at the three-month chart you can look at the six-month chart it's horrifying to behold it's a red line going down people okay um again it's just mind-blowing to me that he did this twice in succession and you know i don't know he didn't see anything wrong with it so yeah click on the there's a little button that says 3m for the three-month chart and you have a horrifying jagged red line going down down down with no half with no hope of it of it coming back no hope of it of it improving and why would it improve now look um again we know what james gaspi's fantasy was about this we know what he was dreaming about and to be fair i'm not just saying this flare he was dreaming about a new and different and better way to change the world he was dreaming about effective activism he was dreaming that he would become this multi-millionaire that he would lead a crowd of grateful donors who would join him and generously support supporting these various charities he had this whole elaborate fantasy both about ewt um energy web token and about taco cat what was the commitment that he made to his audience and what was it what was the commitment that he broke there right now ice poseidon is a very good comparison for this ice poseidon said to his audience that he had a long-term commitment to supporting a particular token it was called cxcoin to supporting a new cryptocurrency and that cryptocurrency had a specific use in mind that this cryptocurrency was going to be used to allow viewers to make donations to live streamers so this is going to be uniquely marketed or actually unique in function a form of cryptocurrency used on you know this way no he is a live streamer he can accept donations using this cryptocurrency and he said again and again this wasn't a short-term thing this wasn't going to be a so-called pump and dump scam he wasn't going to mislead people and that he was really going to commit to marketing and supporting this cryptocurrency now if you don't know my own analytical position on cryptocurrency my claim is not that it's impossible to make money trading cryptocurrency that would be ridiculous my claim is that the significance of cryptocurrency is similar to collectible baseball cards or comic books that we're talking about something that has almost zero utility value it's desirable and it's valuable only because people perceive it as being valuable now again too clear that doesn't mean it's evil that doesn't mean you'll lose your money some people get rich from baseball cards some people get rich from comic books it's possible you can run a comic book store you can be a comic book collector it's possible but you know there's a new spider-man movie coming out that will actually increase the value of certain collectibles like comic books connected to the history of spider-man a better example right now would be a comic book character who hasn't had a movie for a long time so the punisher or moon knight these if you don't know these are just complicated they're no different from spider-man or superman or batman okay so for a long time nobody paid attention to moon night it wasn't that successful wasn't that famous okay if you have moon night comic books from the 1970s and they're sitting in your attic or a basement they're not worth anything oh and then in the last couple of years a bunch of interest in moon night new comic books come out they start making a movie uh you know i think it's actually on disney plus so what i want to say the 21st century equivalent to a movie direct to direct download uh cinema they start making a kind of tv series for moon night oh now those are worth more why just because people perceive them as having value it's not evil but it's kind of dumb it's kind of pointless right and what if you want to read those comic books well as you probably know you can read them on the internet you don't even need to have them on paper like it's not really utility value there so this is part of what makes the quote unquote pump and dump phenomenon interesting why was ewt valuable well the perception of it being valuable the perception of it even being a morally virtuous thing to invest in was actively created by james aspy and his friend randy they actively promoted this and they gave this really weird ecological and vegan argument for why it be virtuous to invest in this why make the world a better place that is and it's completely legal there's nothing illegal about this but that is creating the value for this particular type of cryptocurrency this obscure cryptocurrency ewt and altcoin that's creating the value in the same sense that indirectly a new movie about moon knight creates value increases the value of an old moon knight comic book from the 1970s that until recently might have been worth five bucks you know it could be in the bargain bin and then oh everyone gets interested in collecting moon knight in half and even just having that on their wall that's what collects up with having a wall book having a comic book that hangs on the wall like a like a portrait you know and you know so there is no contract there isn't an agreement between ice poseidon and his audience that he is going to create value basically through marketing to make through making this prominent through making this scene desirable to invest in and in a very limited sense desirable to use like in the same way like why do you use this comic book well there's a little bit of use there's not a lot of utility there it's not really a function for it's not like buying a car why okay there's a good comparison why is a car desirable well partly just because the brand name is perceived as desirable the style yes there are some little elements of that but predominantly a car is valuable because it you can drive it places you can you know you can buy your groceries with it et cetera et cetera so the amounts the extent to which something is desirable just due to perception and cultural value as opposed to some kind of actual utility some kind of actual use right if you think of this as two two different levers or two different uh ratings you know um what happened with ice poseidon and his promotion of cx coin is unsurprisingly as soon as he stopped promoting it the value fell to almost zero well why well cx coin is not batman and it's not superman and it's not spider-man and it's not even moon knight it's something nobody had ever heard of and nobody would care about if it weren't for ice poseidon pumping it promoting it making it seem valuable and interesting but you're really creating something new a new kind of product which again it doesn't really have any function in your life but by investing in it or attempting to use it you know uh you're participating in this this thing that your favorite streamer is promoting now i just mentioned as a footnote there was a marketing budget for cxcoin ice poseidon was supposed to recruit other live streamers other internet personalities to also pump and promote the coin reportedly that didn't happen so either that happened to a much lesser extent than was planned or hoped for or it just didn't happen at all after only a few weeks according to besides he gave up he stopped promoting this he stopped pumping it now again this is why it's so closely comparable to james asked me for how long was he pumping uh ewt before he just stopped and we never got an explanation this is the main thing i want to get into with brian turner my second and final example of this video we never saw him just come on camera and in an honest down-to-earth way say that he lost his money say hey he invested this or maybe he'd say he was quitting he took his money out he invested at this point maybe he made a modest amount of money like you know i don't know it's sheer speculation because he's never talked about it now again in terms of the running joke about this is not financial advice how like we don't have a contract for this we don't have an obligation there's nothing in our constitution saying that maybe we should maybe we should pass a new law pass a federal law or pass a uh you know past a article in the constitution united states america if you endorse an investment whether it be a stock on the stock market or cryptocurrency anything else you must publicly state this is how much money i put into it and this is when and this is the price and then this is when i got out like maybe maybe there should be a not just a moral obligation you but a strict legal obligation to report publicly if you're going to pump a stock if you're going to pump a cryptocurrency even if you're going to pump real estate if you're going to come on here and say to people hey you know what's a really great idea swamp land in michigan real estate values are going up swamp land they got oh you think michigan doesn't have swamp they got some real nice freezing cold swamp in michigan and house prices are cheap i've seen them going up you know invest in real estate michigan well maybe if you say that maybe there should be a legal obligation to disclose what you've done with your own money and if you're responsible for other people's money if you're managing a fund what you're doing with their money just mention real briefly you know uh there's this woman uh carrie wood right a good name kathy kathy wood sorry uh right anyway kathy wood this investment guru and i think her advice is laughably terrible again this is investment advice i am telling you kathy what is giving you benefits trust me not kathy wood but it's kind of hilarious to me no matter how bad her advice is no matter how how often she's wrong and you in her case you can look up her uh her etf you can look up her fund and you can see the red line going down there you can see how badly it's doing and people still adore her people still worship her advice and her opinion you know it seems to never end people never seem to shake out of this once they've established this kind of trust with the live stream or with the broadcast with with broadcaster with whoever it is so it can be very powerful these guru-like relationships between financial expert and audience financial analysts and those who have their analysis done for them um okay a comment from do you want to give me a kiss in the audience quote there is another aspect of crypto's popularity lack of trust in established institutions such as banks central banks and parliaments uh okay um so look i think this is this puts it into a very palpable comparative context so if you are marketing cx coin that's the cryptocurrency that was briefly promoted by ice poseidon and where there's now this kind of ethical and political scandal about it okay why would it be more efficient for me to donate money to a live streamer or donate money to a youtuber by taking money converting it into cx coin converting it into a cryptocurrency sending the cryptocurrency and then at the other end them converting it back again all right that's actually a very difficult argument to make that there's an increase in efficiency or an increase in utility over using cash if that's too hard for you to visualize what if i announce a brand new cryptocurrency called applecoin i say hey aren't you tired of paying for apples with cash aren't you tired with paying app for apples with your credit card well we created this great new blockchain technology it's going to allow you to take your cash convert it into these digital tokens buy apples maybe order apples deliver your door on the internet and then the the farmer who grows the apples he converts it back into his local currency at the u.s dollars or whatever it is now i'm not saying that's impossible all right but like the margins you're talking about the efficiency you have to beat so by the way in case you guys don't know this movie i pay child support okay sending child support money internationally it's it's not free there are inefficiencies in the system but i was saying to melissa the other day look this shows what a joke cryptocurrency is it's not more efficient for me to pay child support using bitcoin let alone an obscure currency like cx coin or uh taco cat the reality is today the technology does not work as a service in that sense you're not providing a service people that's really useful and look i just say if there are exceptions to the rule i'm willing to hear it like if someone can put together a case that you know oh no look it actually is more effective to give tips to live streamers using cx coin but you know as far as i can see and if it were actually more efficient to buy apples this way that'd be interesting here uh it is not more efficient to for me to send a ch okay compare sending a paper check in the mail which is from currency to currency to the cost of doing that transaction the cost and the difficulty in cryptocurrency right and by the way there's also questions of security and reliability and fraud there are other other questions you know built into that is it really preferable for me to pay child support with any of these new technologies now reciprocal with this i've already explained to you the sense in which cryptocurrency is desirable it's like collectible baseball cards it's like comic books now i i want to point this out what if you buy a set of the first 12 issues of what's the common character's name moon moon night what if you buy the first 12 issues of moon night one year run today you say you know what this mazda guy gives me an idea i'm gonna i'm gonna sell my car and i'm gonna buy the first printing first edition of moon knight that comic book character is going places okay because it's got a brand new tv show there's hype right now now i don't think you can get a chart for the value of this comic book but theoretically right okay so maybe it's possible that you are buying moon knight when he's just at the beginning of his fame increasing maybe after this moon knight and then has an animated series and moon knight has a video game and moon knight mania takes over america and people forget all about superman batman goes out of style and moon knight becomes the most dominant cultural icon in the next 20 years and you made this investment now you're sitting on a gold mine so you bought it today and the chart was going up and you got in at the right time and then 10 years from now you get to sell those comic books and they're worth way more again they don't produce anything it's not like investing in a company it's not like putting your money into apple computer on the stock market where you're loaning money to a corporation that's actually producing computers or producing cars there's nothing productive about it okay that's the bet you made you know what it's very likely that if you buy this set of 12 moon night comics from the 1970s right now it's very likely that right now moon night is at its peak value the peak of public interest and then after this it's going to go down doesn't mean it's going to drop suddenly me it's probably going to stagnate you know maybe moon night season 2 comes out or moon night the big budget movie goes oh yeah yeah moon knight that's not new and exciting anymore you know yeah right it's just another noise in the cultural cacophony you know what i'm saying do you really think do you really think the fame of bitcoin in our culture in our economy the desirability of bitcoin thought of this way like a comic book do you think that can increase more than it did when elon musk first tweeted about it you know when elon musk tweeted about dogecoin and then there was this explosion of interest in dogecoin you think that's going to happen again is this going to happen on a bigger scale do you think it's going to go up how much how much greater can that level of hype be in a context where one by one people are figuring out that these cryptocurrencies they have either very very little utility or or none at all right again can you actually today can you use cxcoin to donate money to live streamers i'm sorry i have read some articles about this i looked it up there were bugs in the programming a lot of the cryptocurrencies have problems security flaws one way or the other uh so people don't like you know they were getting false messages oh this person donated fifty thousand dollars but actually they donated uh one dollar and they there was some hack some exploit that lets them misrepresent that is you know there were these there were problems there were bugs in the system which i believe why to my knowledge based on what he said himself that's why ice poseidon lost interest and lost patience with the product um lost patience with the project i should say you know and and moved on um okay this is my digression on cryptocurrency here i'm talking about the politics of these vegan leaders pandering to the audience's greed you know and you know sorry i know pandering is a bit of an overused uh word in english okay freely and durianrider who very much created the model for vegan activism that both brian turner tried to emulate and james asked me tried amen right they were pandering to your vanity and i've known people who had the honesty to say to me that that was what got them hooked i knew one guy in no offense he's a dumpy middle-aged balding man i think he's the same age i am but he looks 20 years older than i do i mean he's a real unimpressive unsexy looking guy no offense he's got a big gut and just just he has a grandfatherly look to him he could be santa claus or something but he doesn't look youthful or vibrant or athletic or sexy or anything and he i remember he had the honesty to say to me that's what spoke to him the idea that he could become athletic that he could maybe not recapture his youth i don't think he was very fitness youth but that he could transform himself into being someone who ran around on the beach with his shirt off and felt proud of himself felt beautiful and felt attractive to women i do not know he did not say to me he wanted to sleep with other women he was a married guy but i you know that obviously wouldn't take a lot of imagination i think that's that's part of it too so you know freely and durianrider took it pretty far just appealing to vanity just pandering to the audience's vanity all right now the paradigm i'm addressing in this video this is instead pandering to the audience's greed and it's interesting in james ashby's case it's explicit it's saying don't you want to be like bruce wayne don't you want to be a millionaire philanthropist who gets rich and makes the world a better place and is even morally superior to others by getting involved with this venture you know i think okay let's let me mention a critic if james asked me there was another youtube channel called maggie sargent and i've quoted her on the channel before and at one point she said about james asked me she said look these people are already so insufferable james aspie and other vegan activists like him people on permissions but you specifically talk about james asking these people are so insufferable living this life of reckless self-indulgence opulence wealth i would say permanent vacation but she said you know they're filming themselves at the beach and at a five-star hotel and eating in these restaurants they're showing off this life of opulence all the time luxury how much worse is it going to be if this plan works how much worse is it going to be if they really do become multi-millionaires to this cryptocurrency venture what if it works out well then what then they're going to be kind of rubbing our faces in how rich they are and how leisured they are and this again the quote-unquote lifestyle activism supposedly exciting envy as their incredibly indirect method of of saving the world okay interesting point do you think james aspy ever once thought through what he would do if instead he made these investments and he lost all his money i already sent you the links you can click on the chart you can look at what happened to the value of ewt you can look at what happened to the value of taco cat now james asked me swore he was not doing pump and dump we're going to come back to this brian turner right well we'll say just a second he swore he wasn't just investing for a short time in the now no and thus he was encouraging you in the audience to not just invest for a short time now well if that's true if he has held on to these investments for just the last three months he's lost a tremendous percentage of his principle he's lost a tremendous percentage of his investment there's not one word out of him about this now i would just like to suggest to you if he had gotten rich don't you think he'd [ __ ] tell you what if he had doubled his money what if he had quintupled his money what if he had gone up by quote-unquote 10x he had 10 times the money you don't think he'd be making instagram posts and youtube videos jumping up and down saying see i told you so i told you to invest and i invested this time and now look at all this money right you don't think he'd still be doing the the weekly live streams boasting about how much money he's donating to charity that week week after week even if it's only five thousand dollars five thousand dollars a week starts to add up he was supposed to do that every week for six months right like the the grandiosity of this is astonishing okay so it's speculation speculatively maybe the reason he isn't boasting about how much money he made out of this is because either he didn't make any money at all he made very little money or maybe he actually lost money in these ventures and again guys if you don't believe me you can click on those links you tell me how it would have even been possible for him to make a whole lot of money out of these are these particular business now brian turner in some ways similar in some ways different and i've made videos already talking about brian turner so i can do this quite briefly you know he swears passionately again and again that he's in this long term not as a short-term flip on the stock and one of the sort of one of his big investments is bitcoin so this is again cryptocurrency but the other one is virgin galactic right so they have in common they both talk about and they may be exaggerating for dramatic they talk about the extent to which they've taken their whole life savings and invested in this in uh james ashby's case he uses that phrasing james aspie talks about his life savings he talks about selling his van which was his only worldly possession to get more money he sold his van that he invested his whole life savings that he asked for donations from the audience so that he can invest more okay and again he wasn't in short term he didn't just pump and dump allegedly so if that's true right we should be hearing that james aspie is now flat broke right just look at the chart wow how how would he have gained money out of this venture if if that's true now if it's not true that's also interesting if he turns around and says oh that he actually gained money because he only invested for this really short time and then he dumped you know he he hyped it up and then dumped and then with a second currency then with taco get first legal team okay well that's different all right brian turner it's it's parallel but imperfectly parallel okay he swears to you that uh the transaction the investment he's making in virgin galactic is not short-term it's long-term he swears to you the investment he's making in bitcoin is not short-term long-term and he emphasizes what a huge percentage of all of his worldly wealth he's put into this and i have heard him again it's kind of half joking but he's talked about selling everything else sell the car i think he said something like sell the car sell the cat like sell everything you can so that he'd have more money to invest in these things so i mean i know he was joking around when he when he made that i don't think he's actually sold his car or i don't i could i could tell from his tone of voice but he talked about the possibility of selling everything so he could invest as much as possible because he believed so much in these two investments now okay should i provide you guys the link for this or not okay i guess i might as well see as we're doing this here is the value of the stock known as spce um okay we'll use yahoo i guess you can take a look at how that again you can click on the six six month line or three month line and see the trajectory of that and uh i mean bitcoin is the easiest statistic to get off the internet yeah yeah whose interface is not terribly aesthetically pleasing there you go so you can take a look at the value of bitcoin and you can take a look at the value of this particular stock virgin galactic spc and you tell me there are two possibilities here one he lost a tremendous amount of money he made the wrong bet and and everyone in his audience who took his advice everyone who joined i mean with both these then that's the further dimension same thing with ice beside them right okay well what about all the people you misled not just with this advice but with the commitment you made to pumping and promoting this right like okay because it's different kind of thing on here as they say like creating the value of a comic book talking about these altcoins the whole the what is the desirability of taco cat why would anyone want to invest in target why would anyone have even heard of toggle gap what is the desirability of ewt right in this sense you know this is this is different from uh it's different from but it's parallel to what brian turner was doing i mean people would have already heard of virgin galactic without brian turner but still specific people took your advice and made the commitment you were saying by the dip when it was at its peak and now it's crashed i made videos already talking about that why is it you know um why is it you haven't come on and talked about how you lost your own money it seems to me there are two possibilities one they have lost a lot of money they're ashamed and humiliated they're being silent about it or two they didn't lose money and they're ashamed about that because if they admit that they didn't lose money it will reveal that they have been dishonest in exactly the same way that ice poseidon has been dishonest okay so in that portion of the conversation i mean look so guys i'm happy now is a good time welcome to the audience down below we're having her for you in ages good good to see you now uh i can still bench press more than you dom and it's because i do more push-ups it's because i do more inclined push-ups dom still and you've never shown up you never showed up for that boxing match dom who would be tougher in a boxing match don bauer james aspie or uh or brian turner i'll take you all on all at the same time anyway it's a good it's a good time for you guys to to come and talk with us look i care a lot about economics i've cared about economics since high school or earlier but i really remember very clearly caring about it a lot during my high school years and i thought about for years my own career being in economics and majoring in university and so on so forth and i have never bought a single stock in my life but because i care so much about politics i do follow the stock market i think about the stock market with the stock market and the thing is this when i make predictions when i make recommendations when i give financial advice right i also reason through what the rationale is on what basis am i making this prediction so i'm going to give you an example now something i just said to melissa nobody else has ever heard this a prediction i made that turned out to be wrong being wrong is different from being stupid being wrong is different from being insane and being wrong is different from being immoral too right like it's not always because you're a bad person that you're wrong we have to ask this question now about james aspie we have to ask this question brian turner i think we have to ask this about more and more leaders in the vegan movement as lifestyle activism adapts and things like cryptocurrency and trading on the stock market becomes part of the lifestyle that they're marketing they're not the first not the last to do this but um back when donald trump was president of the united states some of you aren't old enough to remember back when donald trump was president of the united states uh there's an enormous corporation in saudi arabia called saudi aramco and it was struggling to raise more capital investment to have more people invested and support the company now there were reasons why they were struggling the most obvious being the ongoing war in yemen so the whole economy of saudi arabia is you know messed up and involved in that war it's it's it's deleterious to their economic situation you know okay so i look at that situation and i say to melissa okay donald trump is president united states when before donald trump was elected he promised that he was going to end the alliance with the saudi arabians you might not be old enough to remember that once he was elected he completely dropped that notion he did a 180 and i'll always remember this his wording about it was he said well the world looks different once you're sitting in the white house your view from the white house is different he also hilariously made the statement that the reason why he likes the saudi arabians likes working with the saudis uh is that they pay in cash they spend millions of dollars on american manufactured hardware meaning military equipment and they they pay and cash so donald trump was completely open about the fact that this was basically agreed and his incredibly uh caveman-like approach to foreign policy but yeah he promised he was going to end this special strategic relationship in the united states and saudi arabia and instead he uh he reversed policy on that universe course okay so i look at that situation and i say to melissa look the war in yemen is not going to last forever the alliance between the military alliance the united states and saudi arabia i was hoping it would end when donald trump was elected but nope that looks like it's going to go on forever too whoever is president after donald trump whether or not it's joe biden you know because at one stage he didn't know it was going to be joe biden or bernie sanders or whatever but you know it wasn't clear they're gonna continue politics as usual the way relations to saudi arabia were under bill clinton and obama so it's just a matter of time before the stock value of saudi aramco goes up because guess what they're selling the only thing on planet earth that we're more addicted to than cigarettes gasoline gasoline it makes you feel young and sexy and needed it's invigorating gasoline you know you don't really you know you don't really need to do a lot of advertising for saudi gasoline you know they can just sit back and wait for you to buy it you know what i mean have you ever seen a tv commercial for saudi saudi gas nothing burns cleaner nothing gets you to work in the morning like saudi arabian gas when you turn on the heat in your house that saudi gas put your trust in saudi aramco the best gasoline money come by you don't you know it's like you got to advertise cigarettes you got to advertise whiskey you don't need to advertise gasoline in general i looked at this situation in the last few months or whatever the last year of donald trump's presidency well yeah it wasn't that soon before the end but last year of donald trump's president i said well look this is the situation for saudi arabia as a country politically this the situation with the war in yemen this is the president of states why wouldn't you invest in saudi aramco it's totally unethical or amoral but isn't it inevitable this is going to make money well there are some very intelligent people who work in economics in the united states and they knew something i don't know i didn't know sir i know it now they knew something i didn't know there were people who knew that if joe biden is elected when joe biden is elected he's way more anti-saudi arabia than donald trump is i had no idea i can ask did anyone know what uh you know did anyone know what what what is what his agenda was or what what joe biden was going to do the minute he came to office i was totally stunned with that i had no idea now some somebody knew some if you have your millions of dollars involved that's something you should research you should do really say oh okay well what is u.s foreign policy in saudi arabia how is that going to change once joe biden replaces donald trump and then you'd know the right bet to make okay so the recommendation i made which was only made to melissa the only person i gave financial advice she wasn't investing i was just talking about it theoretically the only person i gave that financial investment advice to is melissa you can look up right now the chart for saudi aramco it hasn't crashed to zero or something it hasn't declined but it it's stagnated it's done it's done poorly and indeed the po that is because the political situation the saudis iran has can has continued to be uh one of turmoil and uncertainty and it's uh again u.s foreign policy changed so see that see that i was wrong i lost zero dollars nobody else lost any money because of this economic analysis and i was wrong in explaining to you that i'm wrong i was wrong i think you get the point i wasn't crazy i wasn't irrational there was a rational you know there were reasons why i came to conclusion i did and the conclusion i came to was wrong and i have the personal integrity to say that and i have the personal integrity to learn from my mistakes you know because i because i can reflect on it that way so this is the shocking and bizarre thing whether you're looking at brian turner or where they're looking at james asby whether you're looking at these multi-million dollar uh vegan foundations that i open the video criticizing or you're looking at people who are just scraping by with a few thousand dollars in donations who is there out there who is willing to just even [ __ ] hey hey guys what did we do with 1.4 million dollars last year what we took in all this money and donations what are the actual welcomes what are we doing wrong how can we change yeah that's one kind of reflection on failure what do you do well i don't know how much money is involved with people like james asksby i don't know much money's involved with uh brenter i i don't know how much money is involved with uh ice poseidon but it's over 300 thousand dollars uh it's been established maybe some people say five hundred thousand dollars half a million dollars but whatever no how how are we supposed to learn how are we supposed to adapt if we don't have that most basic kind of uh personal integrity uh commitment to to the truth you know dealing with consequences so i've got beard talk coming in from uh from don bauer dom look you can look at my recent videos i have some very recent videos with a beard i periodically grow a beard and shave it off i feel that whenever i start looking persian i should get rid of the beard you know and when you let it go too far i start looking like sargon of a cad and i don't mean the youtuber sargonica i mean the ancient you know [Laughter] anyway no so i uh i do i do periodically grow a beard and periodically uh shave it off again yeah well so look i know this may seem like a shallow thing to respond to but let me respond to this from dom too um uh don bauer says lifestyle activism has truly died all of them have been shown to be frauds mentally insane or fake well look you know dom i i've been thinking about this a lot lately so dom you may not know you may have donated but i just did a fundraiser because i'm still in court with durianrider sorry dom this might be the first you've heard about it just say but don bauer was involved way back in 2016. i'm going back to thailand the court case is still going on um so you'll if you haven't already seen that video dom go take a look and by all means if you have a few bucks donate to the fundraiser yeah i'm gonna spend all the money just on the airplane ticket and hotel room and things uh the lawyer has already been paid as you might have heard the lawyer is not asking me for more fees which i certainly appreciate because i've gotten like five years of work sorry sorry this is a uh this is a digression um okay so dom just says most these people turned out to be frauds or insane or something okay i remember people used to attack me by saying you think you would be a better leader for the vegan movement than your competition than these other people you criticized i mean here we are in the year 2022 like would would i have to be an egomaniac to say back yeah i think i would be a better leader for the vegan movement than james assby yeah i think i'm a better leader for the vegan movement than brian turner yeah i think i'm a better leader for the vegan movement than durianrider and i'm sorry people but who else do i have to compete with gary yourofsky maybe mail that to 2014 like you know some of these people just eliminated themselves who do i have to compete with gary francione again i mean that guy's a burnt match whatever he had to contribute it's already contributed and it's done and it's over with and i have made videos by the way talking about both the positive and the negative of gary francione's contribution to veganism not i'm not saying it's nothing you know and sorry so dom you weren't here when we opened the video but i talked about two very specific examples okay farm animal sanctuary 14 million dollars from memory uh farm animal rights movement 1.4 million dollars from memory we gave you the precise figures and you can scroll up and get them if you want the exact amount okay you know and i've argued at length it's very hard to show palpable positive outcomes from what has happened with these millions of dollars per annum would i have to be on some kind of insane ego trip to look at this and think i can organize a better conference for 300 000 per year you have a budget of more than 300 000 to organize a conference an event a vegan event that's going to make some difference in the world that's far m's budget farm animal rights movements budget you know like i i'm just saying like there was a time when people would insult me this way and a lot of the time i didn't i didn't have false humility in response there was some real humility where i'd look at these people i can remember saying well look you know a guy like wayne siong if you compare me to him he has some advantages and some disadvantages like this is way back when i was first criticizing wednesday and i look at him and say well this guy doesn't understand politics and he doesn't understand history he doesn't know anything about mahatma gandhi honda's gandhi what are you going to say he's talking about gandhi and martin luther king jr and he doesn't know what he's talking about but i used to look at that guy and say well he has a certain kind of talent he has some advantages in life i don't have and that's why he's able to go out and you know kind of marshal the interests of these people and gather these donations to my knowledge again they're above one million dollars a year it's like well you can see there there are some things he's good at that maybe i'm not good at or something so that wasn't false humility or something in the past i'd look at some of these people and say well they they've got advantages you still look at maddie burner there's there's an i use people who say well look these people they're doing something right you know for veganism and for themselves and that you know there's some things they can do i can't do like even kind of really terrible people like lynn burner even freely if you guys are really watching my videos there were things i gave freely credit for say look there's some things she's doing she's doing right um but yeah at this point you know long story short you know i i don't think it's unreasonable at all for me to just say directly and this is after years of study like you know and you know really rolling heavy with this movement and so on no of course you have to say you know we're competing for a finite amount of talent and a finite amount of money and yeah i mean there's just no no hesitation in mind to say of course i'd be a better leader of course i already am a better influence on the vegan movement than these other people who've competed with me whether or not you regard them as frauds insane or fake as as don bauer says and look sorry so guys just to bring it back to what i'm saying here i don't think james aspie is a fraud i don't think he's insane i don't think he's fake i think he's a terrible leader for the vegan movement i don't think the other guy brian turner i don't think he's a fraud i don't think he's insane i think like it's it's not that far all right so guys you know uh the ultimate scarcity is time i didn't feel this way 20 years ago because it was 20 years ago right but the reality of global warming the reality of acid oceans for example acid oceans being the increasing acidity of the ocean as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere this is one aspect of global warming you know the reality of the ecological crisis facing the current generation and the next generation i think there is a very meaningful sense in which we're running out of time so yeah money is scarce you know um talent is scarce time is scarce not just in the sense of you guys don't have time to watch a two-hour long live stream on my youtube channel time is scarce in terms of looking at that great big deadline that global warming imposes on us all there's another kind of deadline you guys will know about which is that every day how many million animals are living in a cage and having their throats lit and suffering terrible unspeakable conditions how many people are dying from needless heart attacks and even worse health conditions that come from there are other kinds of deadlines that are relapsing every day there's a body count for both human beings and animals every day and you guys you guys know that yeah dom says attention is scarce right but when you put this in the context of that big red deadline of global warming we're losing the icebergs you know we're losing the ice mass for the north and south pole and we're facing acid acidification and irreversible rising carbon levels in the atmosphere that puts these quaint little debates about the future of the vegan movement the immediate future in a very different context so what did we do with the opportunity we had as a generation you know we squandered it watching freely show off her ass we squandered it donating money to james aspie so he could show off his muscles and go swimming diving off the side of a yacht and show you his girlfriend in a bikini and his wife in a wetsuit you know his different girlfriends and different wives different times you know that's what we did with it and when you look at the supposedly serious and supposedly academically respectable leaders facing down the climate crisis when you look at roger hallum for extinction rebellion i mean this sincerely roger hallum is worse extinction rebellion is worse as tough as i am when i'm criticizing the leaders within the vegan movement even someone like paul beshear you know people i really do despise intellectual i think publishers and imbecile i think joey carmstrong is an episode i know he means well but he's a [ __ ] idiot you kidding me i i utter let's be real morally and ethically i also really know that joey carver strong is a terrible person these are bad people they're stupid people and they're the wrong people and in a word they are leading the movement nowhere i wish i was not burdened with the awareness that this is going to have dire long-term consequences for the future of humanity on planet earth but i am burdened with precisely that sense of purpose that sense of urgency and that sense of alarm