Vegan Cheetah is Wrong: What Patreon Means to Me & the Vegan Movement.

to me one of the more hilarious sort of
unintentionally ironic criticisms of my channel is that I don't listen to criticism and I don't respond to criticism I don't know any other channel into vegan demi-monde that spends more time not to listening responding to criticism and that that complaint was leveled at me for example in the context of my dispute with a natural vegan which is a dispute about the nature of domestication of animals castration of pet dogs the kind of things I provided video after video long substantive videos and in-depth discussions in response to criticism on that point I responded to criticism from durianrider you can look at how many papers and papers spots those criticisms and even the Nina and Randa thing I mean I think I've I think of one video in response to my presumed critics on that issue um I you know it's ridiculous to the people say that but about beyond that I do actively seek out a criticism and I get it including from my my patreon supporters people who pay the one dollar to support me on patreon um now there's another kind of hilarious unintentional irony there because a guy you may have heard of called the vegan cheetah he has repeatedly claimed that my patreon is only full of people who agree with me that there's no dispute that there's no debate we're having now what Charles is doing there is really very insincere you can actually hear Charles and videos on my channel um I guess Muslim our list now and in the podcast he did with me um that he doesn't actually have anything against people using patreon this is for some reason a pose he's adopted I guess just to generate controversy at a thin air but he doesn't actually have any moral opposition to using patreon as opposed to any other website for socializing with your followers which is what it is in partner minutes apart away from people to actually support me financially because I need the support and it's all just wave people interact with me double talk to me you know people talk to me right now I'm streaming this right now on you now attacks people on YouTube and I have a huge number of videos during me talking to people via Skype and the he goes into podcaster videos so right of all the channels to criticize on this front one of these always said to people don't act like it's hard to find me everybody who's wanted to criticize me including Jeff Nelson that's a very easy time getting in touch with me and criticizing me I maybe not think their critiques have merit but I hear the criticisms I respond to their criticisms I don't think Jeff Nelson is happy about that actually Jeff Nelson's wife actually made a copyright complaint against my video in which I call Jeff Nelson a jerk and to me that was hilarious and by the way YouTube dismissed her copyright claim but like so what's what's the what's the mirror to the claim is the point you married him so you invented this you know I me like hey who are you to call my husband a jerk I invented this you you're violating my copyright I've got a copyright on calling Jeff Nelson an [ __ ] like but she did Jeff Nelson's wife made a copyright claim against my video that was discussing my you know extremely shallow conflict with Jeff Nelson but in all those cases I heard criticism and i replied to criticism and engaged whether it's deep enough for you or shallow enough for you or whatever I engaged in different kinds of debate with my viewers and with people of other channels etc etc so um what an intro um anyway I guess I'll just before I get on to the main topic of this video um it is insincere a lot of what cheetah does is insincere he's lying and he knows that he's lying I'm you know this stuff he says about my core case the stuff he says about my private life the study says about my divorce and my family life he has lied about many many things things he says about my love life and he knows that he's lying and I'm in a unique position because I know that he knows that he's flying um but some of these things I think he kind of starts off in a more of improvised manner and then he may be forgets why he's doing them I noticed in his most recent video like he's repeating this notion that he came up with that veganism is not actually healthier than a meat-based diet than a diet including meat and dairy and eggs now he's been playing with that notion for a long time he would normally kind of skate up to the edge of saying it and not quite commit to the concept and you know he also very vaguely suggests that it is unscientific to suggest that you know to claim that veganism is healthier than a standard diet based on meat dairy and eggs um his level of research I mean like some people complain that vegan gains doesn't do enough research to support a stuff as well okay if you give vegan games gains at seven out of 10 for his level of consulting you know peer-reviewed scientific sources vegan cheetah gets a zero out of ten I remember this part of his conflict with the redheaded vegan you know uh was that he was actually claiming that veganism won't help you avoid getting cancer would help you avoid getting heart attack and I really know that kind of thing where does it come from I think on some level he just spontaneously in a matter of improvisation he comes up with something like that and he gets positive feedback from his audience I mean I guess for that one on some level maybe he wants the argument for veganism to be purely ethical to not be health based or what have you but then he he pretty soon forgets why he said it in the first place like sorry why are you claiming why are you actually claiming that a diet including eggs and cheese and meat is healthier than aveda whatwhat's [ __ ] for that um is not hard to refute that claim and cheetah if he did any fact-checking whatsoever he could refute his own his own claim um but he's not into that so in the same way I mean I think at some point he just came up with this idea that he could insult other vegans on YouTube that he could say they were fake activists and so on by saying that they're on patreon and therefore their moral imperative again when he talked to me privately he never out that way when he talked to me publicly in videos on my channel and on the podcast did together he was totally supportive II thought it was a totally good thing I mean again maybe I wonder maybe there was an impulse that made sense there at some early stage he's just forgotten what it was like maybe an earlier stage his point was that people who claim to be doing activism on your behalf are doing something immoral and that was the case with amin yeah so someone just mentioned the example of that vegan couple and in the old days I remember the old description from vegan revolution where he was saying he was going to do some kind of edgy in-your-face activism with your donations a boy sir there was one other example at in mind but it's just slip on mine now oh yeah right so so Joe vegan himself Joe vegan his claim has changed his description right Joe vegan used to say if you donate money to him he was going to start this farm Sanctuary as soon as he was getting six of dollars a month and he has changed that I the other day I checked out his description now just more vaguely says that you're donating money and eventually he wants to start a farm Sanctuary no longer suggests that when he gets the six hundred dollar threshold 600 hours per month threshold that he will move to Portugal and start this farm sanctuary so yeah people can make misleading promises on patreon and I've known some others who were criticized okay what are their names happy healthy vegan they were criticized I think you know rightly or justifiably because they they were promising that if you donated money to them above a certain amount five dollars or tendo I forget but if you donate a certain meta money that they would promote you on their channel that they would give you a shout out thus promoting your YouTube channel so for a lot of people that was enticing and from what I hear on what I read they did not deliver you know people were donating money and they were not getting what they expected in terms of actually having a shout out supporting their channel on on the happy healthy vegan channel chaves is a larger your base you um yes you know are there I mean again like I wonder on some love when he started playing this game maybe cheetah had a point you know the same thing with like the ridiculous health claims like claiming that veganism doesn't give you an advantage in terms of cancer or heart attacks at some point I don't know six months ago maybe he was saying so it made sense maybe he was challenging some over-the-top health claims from freely or other die große I don't know you you get the feeling that this is an echo of what was once a rational thought it's it's echoed back and forth of nature that so many times that's become completely irrational and practically meaningless right um in the same way whatever his criticism was of patreon as a website or is something that vegans do um maybe at one point he had a specific criticism made sense whether it was for that vegan couple or for happy healthy vegan or for somebody but his criticisms do not make sense when applied to me and he does like to repeat the Vatican I don't know how many times he's made this argument that somehow what I'm doing on the internet uh is evil because I have a patreon and in his opinion I don't respond to criticism now in this very video you're about to see me respond to some criticism or some contrasting disagreeable Apes but actually so what I have way more than 400 videos on my youtube channel we're coming up pretty soon it's gonna hit 500 hahahaha and if you just scroll down for those videos actually quite a few of them are me responding to criticism I respond to criticism ever Steve in written form I respond to criticism I getting patreon comments I respond to criticism where it's an actual debate or dispute with other vegans you many many times I've done that and you know it's not the case it's a cheetah's phrase that he's so so proud of what is it is not the case that my patreon is an intellectual ghetto now just today I got a comment taking the opposite direction so can I have some videos that are uploaded now but they're not published yet so patreon subscribers have seen them but they're not yet on YouTube for everyone to see by of a video up in someone within patreon wrote to me and said look you know why do you even spend the time replying to your critics most of these people and he was referring to a certain kind of credit we said most of these people they're not interested in the truth they're never going to know the truth when the truth is proving them they disregard it's just you know why why even bother um you know interesting point but my reply to him keeping it a hundred percent real was poverty if I had more money I wouldn't reply to some of this criticism he was referring to stuff like people who are calling me a fraud which includes cheetah people who claim that you know my fundraising campaign was anything other than exactly what it was but amazing paint but raising campaign let's be clear many other vegans have done fundraising that did not go to plan where things did not turn out the way people planned it things did not turn out the way they wanted it Aaron Janice whom you know I'm basically a fan of shut up to Aaron I mean I just like her as a person and obviously she's made some good videos she's made some good videos that reached a really large audience so by the way I'm hands-free some people also used to complain that i'm always holding the mic sometimes i don't hold the mic and you can knock the mic over that way anyway but you know Aaron Janice did a fundraiser uh trying to save zero and a donkey and there were all these complications and it didn't work out it wasn't a scandal it just didn't work out it did not go to plan my fundraiser went one hundred percent the plan raised the money paid the lawyer got the paperwork going I there's a lot I can complain about but you know lawsuits or whatever was a naive a lawsuit legal cases are never fun but you know um whenever people say what happened the money what happened the money is exactly what the [ __ ] racer said what happened to the money you know so anyway to me that's that's ridiculous but the question was asked why do you even bother replying to these people yeah fundamentally my reason is poverty and my reason for being on patreon is poverty I mean it is interested me cheetah doesn't really ask this question but he asked about some of the more successful youtubers why are they on patreon if they're so wealthy if there's a successful if they have so much income in some cases that may be a worthwhile question with durianrider for years he was saying how wealthy he was he was saying that he lived like one of the richest people in the world he had some caveats in there but he would say that he had a better lifestyle than doctors and surgeons and lawyers you know he i just mentioned durianrider would really make a great show of how wealthy and successful he was and he would have himself filmed getting into a I think a Lamborghini or a Ferrari some very expensive car he represented for so long that he had more money than he knew what to do with and then durianrider opens a patreon asking for donations well well it's it's a bit I'd it's a bit questionable and I mean if if he just said he was broke I'd understand it and I wouldn't have any questions so yeah sometimes there are questions there in my case currently my income is zero I've absolutely no income in a couple of months i'm supposed to be starting a new job in China being a teacher on a university campus if you want to say that's a university professor you can I mean the reality is from the students perspective my job is being a university professor I relate to them I might duties my responsibility to them or just as serious as any other university professor but in most Western countries instead of Professor you'll say instructor if someone is at a lower level so whatever I will be a university instructor and that pays five thousand Chinese un so 5,000 units of the Chinese currency per month so you can look that up with your exchange rate right now that maybe seven hundred fifty dollars a month maybe six hundred dollars a month I think in Euros it's about 600 right now I don't I don't follow the exchange rates but it is shockingly little money and so I've been able to say even if my patreon just generates 300 US dollars a month for me that is very significant because my salary will be solo here in China and I may be in china for years then if i can earn three hundred dollars on patreon that means a lot to me means a lot to me in other ways too uh yeah i could talk about that there ought to be a different topic for a different video maybe that should be the topic of this video what does patreon mean to me you know what let's change topics now 15 minutes in the video i was good i was going to respond to a set of criticisms that i have here from emails and i think I show them yeah they're all emails from patreon subscribers the message is sent within patriarchy but you know what i can i can upload that as a separate video what does patreon mean to me you know a lot of the measurements here on YouTube are meaningless to me how many subscribers do you have even how many views do you have you know what patreon really lets you have is a much more meaningful interaction with your audience for one thing there's a barrier to entry the barrier to entry is one dollar per month by the way anyone can sign up if you want to come in and have a look around if you actually believe any of the crazy theories that people like vegan chi to circulate that there's something mysterious or uh I don't know morally odious about my patreon group if you sign up now you don't pay the same day that you sign up you get a number of days for free before you get billed even that one dollar so you can pay nothing and just come in and have a look around and what you're going to find is I post the videos that you see here on YouTube and people comment and I see those comments and the other subscribers see those comments and they can reply and chat with each other which was for me always one of the meaningful things about patreon the idea of creating a crossroads where like-minded vegans could hook up with each other and start to make something positive happen whether you call that activism or not so you know the one dollar barrier to entry which isn't even immediate but once you enter you can stay for a number of days for free and then patreon will send you an email saying we're going to start billing you on this day if you stay in um you know I get messages from people on patreon about exactly how my work has positively impacted their lives I've always been working with an audience that is narrow but deep it needless to say a small number of people want to hear what I've got sympathy can fault text a fish for ages all kinds people including cheetah himself back in the a cheetah Jason Posey no Aaron Janice a lot of people have sent me messages trying to coach me on how to have a bigger channel and one of the things I've always said challenging them in response was how big do you think this channel can really get and you know there's actually saying that originally comes from Buddhist philosophy got picked up in Europe by Vic and stein and other people which is that you know the ladder isn't useful in itself so you know when you get to the top of the ladder or kick it away this kind of image this does actually come out of Buddhist philosophy many Europeans don't know that but you know for a lot of people you have to remember veganism is a fundamentally simple concept and even if they find my channel useful or inspiring at one stage of their lives they don't want to continue in that debate or that dialogue forever I think there are a lot of people who come to my channel they watched some videos for a couple of weeks they say yeah that's something to really think about and then they go back to their lives and quite possibly they go back to their lives as vegan activists or as vegans who are just busy with full-time jobs and are not activists um but it's like Ethan like the potential number of viewers who might watch a couple of videos and then walk away okay you can estimate that number but the number of people were going to come back again and again day after day week after week I don't illusions this is a small number of people and I appreciate that for that small number of people you know my influence on them is deep now among the examples of people i have really deeply influenced is vegan cheat himself Charles Marlow he went through a period and a lot of people I think who remember it will laugh at him for this he went through a period where he was really imitating the style and the tone and many of the topics on my channel where many of his videos were directly responding to my material he still picked up some of his vocabulary some of his turns of phrase you can tell he's imitating stuffy see how much I always influenced by it consciously unconsciously and he changed everything he was doing in his life dramatically he enrolled in university decided to go back to school because of some things that he saw me say on on my channel and he I think the videos are still up where he talks about that dramatic change 10 minutes left guess what he's not the only one I mean there are a lot of people have had that kind of meaningful impact on their lives so patreon opens a door where those people can impact my life and you know in a meaningful way it's one dollar and again there's nothing nefarious about it if you look at the comments section like in terms of those there's an open comment section on patreon where you know people chat and oh it's it's not completely open to the public but any of the other members can see it and then also they have the ability to send me private messages and I do get really meaningful private messages from people up frequently disagreeing with me frequently criticizing me you can see that in the public comments as well and many many many of my videos are replies to questions post on patreon debates that have kind of happened within my patreon page um the irony is the reality of what patreon is for me is almost exactly 180 degrees opposite to what cheetah complains it is because cheetahs complaint is that I'm making a silo that I'm creating a Necco chamber that I'm creating a what does he say closed intellectual ghetto where only people who agree with me can be heard and nothing could be further from the truth and as I say if your complaint is that this channel doesn't spend enough time responding to criticism I just got one message within patron today not really complaining but suggesting to me that I should I was spending too much time responding to criticism because I do I respond to criticism incredibly stupid criticism claiming that I'm a member of the CIA that I'm secretly trying to destroy theism from the inside criticism that you know financially what I'm doing is a fraud etc etc and I respond to some really meaningful criticism so I guess right now after I wrap this up I'm gonna record some comments on that we've just been a debate lately uh it started in the pages of my patreon and is now on YouTube about minimalism the interaction between vegan and minimalism and you know veganism versus minimalism and the past you as you guys know there were the debates about pet ownership and so many so many topics so many gray areas that you know what is the status of wild animals and hunted animals um so anyway and there you go I've just spent 21 minutes responding to yet another criticism that I do think fundamentally is both stupid and misguided but uh cheetah I mean I guess it is just part of his act some of these things as I said with his call on nutrition the science of nutrition and that his claims veganism is not healthier for you than a diet that includes me Terry and eggs um at some point maybe had some idea maybe he had some kind of incisive and critical point to make but i think i think if anyone on youtube is suffering from the echo chamber effect it's him because he says that and he gets hyped up he really cares what his audience thinks about him and if he gets positive feedback even from meat eaters in his audience if people saying to him yeah yeah you tell him you know he gets positive feedback for any of these kind of memes he creates on his channel he then seems to repeat them and repeat them um trying to get that same positive reaction of his audience and he seems to forget why he was even saying it in the first place is there room for criticism of particular vegans what they're doing on youtube what promises they're making whether or not to deliver this but yes absolutely I'm sure that's that's very important and I showed it a channel i can remember i don't know six months ago because they criticized happy healthy vegan on that the happy at the beacon we're making promises then we're delivering on sure great uh what is my patient fifth flipper on its promises nope unlike other many other patrons channels recommend that you donate as much as possible and i do the opposite i tell we're donate the minimum possible i say don't give me ten dollars a month because then you'll be disappointed give me one dollar a month and um you know let's try to uh let's try to set the basis for a long-term meaningful set of friendships because one of the themes have come back to again and again on this channel is that i do think that all political activism at bottom it is built on friendship it's built on relationships of trust and respect and you know you have to set up a basis for cooperation with people and do i believe that patreon can play a positive role in the vegan movement in that way yes absolutely and you know the quality of interaction you get with people who have just made that commitment to pay one dollar instead of 0 the youtube is free it's a huge difference and I'm not the only one I think there will be other people who are sincerely trying to build the constituency trying to build try to build a community let's use that word community trying to build a network of people who can really cooperate it make something positive happened long term and there's no doubt to me patreon is a is a very powerful tool it's a very worthwhile website and for anyone out here who's keeping it real I encourage you I encourage you to try to do the same thing