Money & Racism: Joey Carbstrong vs. A.V.

so the issue is financial transparency
from the time that they started donating it kept changing so like you said the first time they donated was basically just covering the cost of like a mobile phone a couple of laptops things like that as well as a very small salary for me and you then they said so that was a red flag right obviously there's more to the story here yeah and then they said so from the money how how much do you pay for like salaries to people that work with av and we said this much per year and they said oh so from that how much do you take personally so on that call there are other people and to ask the question like that so how much poor how much do you take how much do you take and we were just shocked this ain't rocket science if you're going to spend other people's money you have an absolute moral obligation to explain to them why it is you're taking their money what it is you're spending on and how much you stand to profit yourself it just blows my mind that people like paula nassau the leaders of anonymous for the voiceless people like earthling ed people like james aspie lack this concept i was just talking to my girlfriend about it i had to reflect nobody ever taught me this concept like this idea of transparency and accountability my parents didn't teach it to me my high school didn't teach me we never studied it or talked about university so i don't even know where i get this from it's something so simple that i think it is supposed to be self-evident to people but whoever it is you work with i mean whether it's on a charitable basis or a collaboration you better explicate this you better talk this through openly with your friends with your colleagues what does transparency and financial accountability mean to you and you and you what does it mean to me and what does it mean to us now i have absolutely never been in a situation where i had to pay myself a salary from donations i think i currently receive 150 dollars a month on patreon and also thank you to my supporters people buy me books via the amazon wishlist and when they buy me the when people donate a book to me the only thing they're expecting in return is that i'm going to read the book which i got to make time for that's a significant that's a significant moral commitment on my part that if i ask you to buy me a book i'm going to read the book that could be hundreds of hours it's like be a lot of work um i've never been in this position look you make simple clear comprehensible accountable verifiable decisions about money about where it comes from and where it goes and then nobody has any basis to complain so if i were to collect donations uh in order to print a vegan children's storybook something interesting and maybe we're going to pursue not just publishing the book but getting it made into an animated cartoon uh let's say let's say it's an animated movie for children let's let's think big here okay full length feature film animated film whatever okay um you can write into the plan from day one uh that you're gonna pay everyone involved a salary that is commensurate with that is equivalent to what they would earn if they were a full-time employee at starbucks in their jurisdiction so you say okay in this thing like maybe this grows out of control like when we began we thought there were only going to be two employees there's me and one other person but you know then we end up hiring someone in australia and everyone says oh well why are you paying this guy uh sixty thousand dollars a year or something it's like well we made the decision that if we're taking up all your time this is a full-time job for you is helping our charity or whatever that we were gonna pay you as much as a full-time employee at starbucks and we looked it up and here's how much you earn serving coffee at starbucks in melbourne australia or whatever we got the numbers off the internet this is what it is so this is how much this person gets paid and if you see this works in more than one way let's say that person is unhappy with their wish they're asking for for an increase you say them well look if you were working at starbucks this all this time after two years or three years you get this much of a raise at starbucks so you know what i can offer you a 15 raise because that's what you get after working at starbucks for three years like but unless you calibrate what's happening with the money in all directions it's sorry it's so simple but it's just mind-blowingly dishonest to me when james aspie comes on camera tells you to donate more and more when there's no accounting for what happened with the past five years of donations nobody knows where that money went what was that what was spent on him being in vacation in bali indonesia him going surfing him going on cruises all this shitty that's all you do see james asked me when you see his lifestyle you see his you know you see him on permanent vacation and he comes to the camera and he says hey you should donate more because you know he makes a lot less money than you think he does he says oh people say he's a millionaire i wonder how people got this idea that he's familiar so well you know he makes more less money than you think it is why wouldn't you say the amount of money why wouldn't you just say this is how much people donated this is how much went to these project goals this is how much went to salary that's it just break and say what your standards are if james aspie believes he should make more than a surgeon i think that's [ __ ] insane but maybe he has donors who say you know what i feel james aspie is doing something that's just as important as performing surgery in hospital so if a surgeon earns a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year then okay i'm i'm comfortable with james aspie paying himself 150 dollars if you're just accountable and transparent they can make that choice now stick with my own hypothetical scenario i start my own foundation i'm paying people this let's say there is a medical doctor let's say it's someone who's actually a vegan heart surgeon and he or she is willing to come on and join our vegan organization and start advocating for and talking about veganism and they want to join what we're doing as a full-time job i'm probably in a position where i have to say to them and i have to say to the donors look i can't pay you as much money as you would make as a surgeon also the nature of the work is not as hard you don't have to wash your hands this often you don't have to be up at four o'clock in the morning in hospital performing this surgery okay so here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna look at how much a full-time nurse in a hospital would make they're not going to pay you 50 of that and i'm going to tell that to all the donors i'm going to say look i can't pay this guy or this woman the same amount i'd pay an employee starbucks like i'm going to pay this person more than i'm paying myself because the reality is this person is a surgeon and they represent a certain level of you know scientific literacy background education they're bringing specialized expertise and skills to organization so i've got to pay them more and i was looking around for a metric for how much more and i decided i'm going to pay them 50 as much as a nurse would make full time because what they do here is maybe relatively easy this is what i'm proposing and they've accepted so this is how we're moving in and then the donors can talk back to you maybe some of the donor stuff you say no they believe that this person shouldn't get paid more than a starbucks employee maybe some of them say look if you want to really keep this person on for five years you have to pay them more than that so you know we're like maybe their donors say look why don't you bump it up to being a hundred percent of what a nurse would make in a like even though they're a surgeon maybe they should make as much as a nurse you know those are the kinds of discussions you can have if you just fundamentally subscribe to this bedrock notion of transparency and accountability because what you are doing in the charity a non-profit sector is spending other people's money and why why it's not so you can go on vacation in valley indonesia it's for whatever purpose advocating veganism so on and so forth so look uh the details of this fracas between paul and assal and joey carbstrong are not that interesting to me personally this fundamental question of democratic accountability is interesting and then there's this other interesting thing that shareholders democracy you know brings into businesses and you know even in the case of this this you know crummy two-person board of directors they repeatedly say they do have a board of directors but only two people sit on it paul beshear and his girlfriend assal great call that a bomb director but they said important writers like two people on it you know as soon as you open up your organization to even just a little bit of democracy this way like whether it's a company that has shareholders that has investors or you're a charity that has donors who start to play the role of an investor what you get is that democratic element of debate of new ideas coming in and of people saying to you hey maybe you don't have a monopoly on good ideas it's quite possible this youtube channel and the discussions we had about what av is doing right and what they're doing wrong mostly what they're doing wrong it's quite possible that the critique of this youtube channel influenced these discussions because one of the ideas that came up in these in this confrontation between the donors and the directors of this charity he said hey look you know what having a mask having people wear a mask that shows a white male face with a mustache and beard doesn't make a lot of sense i i think my youtube channel was the first youtube channel to discuss this i i don't think anyone else even on a podcast discussed it if i'm wrong credit to whoever else points out i'm not making the accusation of racism that's simplification and i think people would call my argument as about right of allegation of racism in order to discredit it or in order to simplify it to the point of absurdity what if you have a group of black people in jamaica carrying out this form of pro-vegan activism this type of street protest they're all black people wearing a mask that makes them look like a white man with a mustache and beard what sense is that what does it mean and the crowd in jamaica probably 90 percent to a hundred percent of the people who are going to see this worse are also black it's jamaica it's not racism it just doesn't make sense it's just bizarre it's just when like people say what what is this about why are you black people dressed up as white people what i mean depending on what the protest is i can like you know if you're a black person and you're dressed up as donald trump and you're wearing a donald trump mask okay you know everyone understands what you're representing what what you know this is what the narrative function of this costume is you're black people protesting against slaughterhouses and for veganism and you're wearing this white man's mess it really doesn't make sense it's really incoherent japan i spoke to i had a very unpleasant conversation with some av protesters based in japan i talked to i heard people from japan with different uh perspectives of this different aspects within japanese culture this is really [ __ ] up it's really distracting it's really counterproductive and among other things in case you know japan has a massive culture of dressing up in costumes in so-called cosplay it trivializes the the nature of the demonstration many ways the way other japanese people react to this is like oh you guys are like fans of a tv show like again it's not as simple as racism but okay you're a bunch of ethnically japanese people wearing this mask of a white man with a beard with these tvs showing this clip and then there's a crowd of people that's getting 90 or 100 percent ethical japanese and you know ironically this this movement uh av anonymous for the voiceless it began in chiang mai thailand because it was linked to durianrider and paul bashir going to chiang mai thailand and trying to directly imitate durianrider's very lucrative permanent vacation model of vegan slacktivism and you know again what is the meaning what is the significance at that time thailand was a military dictatorship they've now returned to semi-democracy they have elections again they have a mix of democracy and military dictatorship today to be brief but they've taken some steps towards return to democracy in town but at that time a bunch of white people in chiang mai thailand wearing this mask sorry yeah it was it was white people protesting in front of a crowd of thai people wearing this mask and they're not even thinking through the absurdity of well if you start recruiting and involving local people so then it's thai people or it's incoherent it's bad it's wrong the fact that you have seats at the table that some donors are allowed to have a voice are allowed to negotiate with you means that new and different ideas start to come into the organization in this case the donors were so upset fundamentally with the lack of financial accountability with the fact that they didn't know how much power to sell we're making let's let's be clear for me the laugh out loud hilarious point in this video perfectly parallel to james asked me saying like oh i'm not a millionaire i make less money than you think paul and a sal sit there and deadpan sirius say that they decide to pay themselves a very modest salary okay what's your idea of modest do you think you should make as much as a surgeon do you think you should make as much as a full-time employee at starbucks and nobody else gets to be involved in that conversation this is something you decided for yourself we all have to assume that you know you are good-natured enough you are detached enough you are professional enough to not pay yourself twice as much as you deserve and who's involved in that debate as to how much you deserve just by keeping this private just by refusing to discuss and publish openly how much you are paid and how you justify that just just do that one act alone inevitably your own donors are not going to trust you your own followers your own collaborators your own volunteers are not interested because they're going to be standing there saying hey look i'm working for free i'm volunteering i don't know how much you're making and i don't know what percentage of the donations are going into your pocket and all of those questions can be answered like with one click of your mouse it's sitting on your hard drive it's probably sitting on your desktop the excel file of your names paul and a sal and your 28 other employees i have no clue how they how do they manage to employ 30 people in total in organizing silent vigils okay how much is that worth silent vigils you're organizing people standing in silence you're not publishing a children's storybook you're not translating into 20 languages you're not creating an animated film you're not creating a documentary you're not performing surgery you're not even giving away free vegan pancakes or vegan hot dogs or manufacturing vegan chocolate bars all kinds of things we can put a price on what is the price you're gonna put on silent vigils and paul and assal being the [ __ ] who sit in a microphone and make excuses for one shitty scandal after another because you keep saying politically offensive insensitive things on instagram what's that worth how much should your salary be you say you pay yourself a modest salary and james aspie says he makes less money than you think don't leave it up to my imagination let's let's not get into a contest of who what what i think would be a modest salary for you what i think you're worth as opposed to what you yourself think you're worth and in this case your donors kept demanding to know how did you set these up how do you decide how much and they got so upset with you you so totally discredited yourself that they walked they canceled their support they called in joey carbstrong to be an auditor they're frustrated with your answers and they let do you think there's a lesson for all of us to learn here paul do you think there's a lesson for the future of the vegan movement first things last last things first this basic concept of transparency accountability of just being reasonable with your donors i don't know where i got i don't know where came from my parents didn't live that way my parents didn't teach me that was never discussed in school what's the opposite of transparency concealment what's the opposite of accountability if you're not interested in transparency and accountability what are you interested in huh paul i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you we basically received almost half of it and um as of recently and that's when the donor approached us and they were saying that they had some issues with us and they wanted to clarify some things they apparently were receiving emails and messages from people we don't know how people knew who this donor was because we never this is the first time we're talking about this i think i think in the past we have said we do have a significant donor who does contribute in a big way to av but we've never really talked about it so we don't know how people found this person's contact well we have our suspicions right but we we do know that people were emailing and messaging them and saying that for example av doesn't send chapters any money or av is well let's be specific about what we heard right we only heard that what you just said and also av is racist yes because we have a white mask right the guy fawkes mask that is one of the let's be specific about the claims that we heard so what um also it's a guy yeah a white man is sexist as well as racist and then also racist because of the blm post we made where we called out the protesters for holding a decapitated pig at their protests promoting anti-oppression with oppression right we felt as animal rights activists we felt like we have to say something we do need to yeah in future we will yeah what we went back on and apologized for was the nature of how we addressed it because we felt we could have shown some warmth towards black rights yes there was a request that felt like a demand actually it wasn't as seriously delivered as the swearing point and the post but it was a very stern request and the request was for us to have a board of directors replace the way that av is structured currently so that you and i would only have a seat at the table of many so we do have a board of directors right now it's just two people on it right yeah yeah right exactly instead of 20. no one person makes the decisions no so the issue is financial transparency