WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.260 --> 00:00:07.880 Why Every Nonprofit Should Support a one percent treaty Nonprofits fighting disease currently compete for the same shrinking 2 00:00:07.880 --> 00:00:14.660 pile of donor money. A one percent treaty creates twenty-seven point two billion dollars in new funding. 3 00:00:15.200 --> 00:00:21.880 Every charitable organization can stop fighting over crumbs and start fighting for the bakery, if someone tells them the 4 00:00:21.880 --> 00:00:30.120 bakery exists. Your nonprofit sector is a bit like thousands of starving dogs fighting over a single bowl of food while 5 00:00:30.120 --> 00:00:36.280 an entire banquet sits untouched behind them. The dogs are very focused on the bowl. 6 00:00:36.700 --> 00:00:44.940 They've developed sophisticated bowl-fighting strategies. Some dogs have hired consultants to optimize their bowl access. 7 00:00:45.380 --> 00:00:50.080 None of them have turned around. I have watched this for eighty years. 8 00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:59.060 Malaria kills six hundred thousand people a year and has a seven billion dollar nonprofit ecosystem dedicated to it. 9 00:00:59.860 --> 00:01:07.960 Polio has been "nearly eradicated" for twenty-five years. Cancer charities have raised hundreds of billions of dollars and 10 00:01:07.960 --> 00:01:16.540 cancer is still the second leading cause of death. Occasionally, as a side effect of all this activity, a problem gets slightly 11 00:01:16.540 --> 00:01:25.100 less bad. This is celebrated with an awards dinner. Every grant you win is a grant the Alzheimer's people lose. 12 00:01:25.500 --> 00:01:29.940 Every dollar you secure for malaria is a dollar that doesn't go to cancer. 13 00:01:30.300 --> 00:01:37.480 Every donor you convince is a donor distracted from the next organization, which is also trying to stop people from dying, 14 00:01:37.880 --> 00:01:45.380 which is the same thing you're trying to do, but you're competing because your species decided that "saving lives" should 15 00:01:45.380 --> 00:01:53.180 be a competitive market with limited funding. On Wishonia, this would be classified as a psychological disorder. 16 00:01:53.560 --> 00:02:01.660 On Earth, it's called "the nonprofit sector.". Meanwhile, the reason the bowl is so small sits right there in your budget 17 00:02:01.660 --> 00:02:11.780 documents, fully visible, discussed by no one: Your species spends six hundred and four times more on weapons than on clinical 18 00:02:11.780 --> 00:02:21.500 trials to discover which medicines actually work. Military spending: two point seven two trillion dollars per year and rising. 19 00:02:22.200 --> 00:02:29.800 Medical research: sixty-seven point five billion dollars (of which only four point five billion dollars funds government 20 00:02:29.800 --> 00:02:36.400 clinical trials) and facing real-term cuts. The bowl for solving disease is shrinking. 21 00:02:37.020 --> 00:02:45.420 The bowl for building weapons is expanding. You are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are grants 22 00:02:45.420 --> 00:02:51.680 and the iceberg is two point seven two trillion dollars pointed at everyone's face. 23 00:02:52.580 --> 00:02:59.340 This is not an ideological claim. It's arithmetic. The kind where you multiply numbers together and get sad. 24 00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:08.520 The logic behind a one percent treaty is the logic behind turning around and noticing the banquet: stop optimizing inside 25 00:03:08.520 --> 00:03:16.840 the smallest slice of the pie. Make the pie bigger. Turn a zero-sum game into a positive-sum game. 26 00:03:17.320 --> 00:03:22.220 This requires no moral evolution. It requires looking behind you. 27 00:03:23.120 --> 00:03:31.140 Why the Banquet Exists and Nobody Has Noticed. On Wishonia, when we noticed that our species was spending the vast majority 28 00:03:31.140 --> 00:03:36.520 of its resources on activities that reduced the number of living citizens, we stopped. 29 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:40.320 It took about a week. In fairness, we didn't have consultants. 30 00:03:41.300 --> 00:03:50.480 On Earth, every organization fighting a problem is fighting a symptom of the same upstream cause: your species allocates 31 00:03:50.480 --> 00:03:55.920 resources toward destruction and then wonders why everything is being destroyed. 32 00:03:56.580 --> 00:04:02.980 War is upstream of poverty (hard to build an economy when someone keeps blowing it up). 33 00:04:04.160 --> 00:04:11.580 War is upstream of pollution (militaries are among the largest polluters on Earth, which is ironic given they're supposedly 34 00:04:11.580 --> 00:04:20.519 protecting it). War is upstream of refugee crises (humans whose homes were converted into craters need somewhere else to 35 00:04:20.519 --> 00:04:28.810 live). War is upstream of disease spread (bombs do not improve public health infrastructure). 36 00:04:29.680 --> 00:04:38.980 War is upstream of technological stagnation (yes, DARPA invented the internet; military R and D occasionally produces breakthroughs 37 00:04:38.980 --> 00:04:46.980 as a side effect of spectacular waste, the same way a forest fire occasionally clears space for new growth, but nobody calls 38 00:04:46.980 --> 00:04:53.660 an arsonist a gardener). War is the root password to your worst problems. 39 00:04:54.080 --> 00:04:58.080 Redirect one percent of it, and every downstream mission gets easier. 40 00:04:58.820 --> 00:05:02.500 Increase it by one percent, and every mission becomes nearly impossible. 41 00:05:03.400 --> 00:05:08.840 This is not a peace movement. Nobody has to hold hands or sing songs or learn each other's names. 42 00:05:09.440 --> 00:05:14.940 They just have to do arithmetic, which is the one thing your species is actually good at when it bothers to try. 43 00:05:16.180 --> 00:05:23.420 I want to explain why this applies to every type of organization, but I'm going to do it by describing what I observe rather 44 00:05:23.420 --> 00:05:30.400 than what you should do, because your species responds poorly to instructions and reasonably well to feeling embarrassed. 45 00:05:31.560 --> 00:05:37.480 Environmental groups spend their time trying to reduce carbon emissions while the largest polluters on Earth (militaries) 46 00:05:38.840 --> 00:05:47.400 operate completely outside every climate agreement. Defunding them one percent would be the most effective climate policy 47 00:05:47.400 --> 00:05:53.340 ever proposed, and it doesn't require anyone to give up hamburgers or install a solar panel. 48 00:05:54.360 --> 00:06:00.640 Nobody has suggested this because the environmental movement and the peace movement operate in separate buildings and do 49 00:06:00.640 --> 00:06:05.600 not talk to each other. They attend different conferences. They have different donors. 50 00:06:05.960 --> 00:06:12.500 They fight the same problem from different angles and never coordinate, which is exactly the behavior they're trying to 51 00:06:12.500 --> 00:06:20.780 fix in the systems they criticize. Anti-poverty groups have been running the strategy of "ask rich people to feel bad" for 52 00:06:20.780 --> 00:06:27.500 sixty years. How's that going? War and disease are the root causes of most modern poverty. 53 00:06:28.120 --> 00:06:36.020 A one percent treaty tackles both. But poverty organizations don't work on military spending because that's "not their issue." 54 00:06:36.480 --> 00:06:40.360 Their issue is poverty. Which is caused by military spending. 55 00:06:40.860 --> 00:06:47.560 Which is not their issue. Peace organizations have been making moral appeals for seventy years. 56 00:06:48.180 --> 00:06:56.760 Moral appeals do not work on a species that runs on money. A one percent treaty makes peace more profitable than war. 57 00:06:57.600 --> 00:07:05.700 This is the only argument that has ever worked on humans, and the peace movement refuses to make it because it feels unseemly 58 00:07:05.700 --> 00:07:12.880 to talk about profit when people are dying. So people keep dying, but at least the peace movement's messaging is ethically 59 00:07:12.880 --> 00:07:18.420 pure. Disease advocacy groups are fighting other disease groups for crumbs of the N.I.H. 60 00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:23.720 budget. You are literally competing with cancer patients for the money that should be curing cancer patients. 61 00:07:24.420 --> 00:07:31.500 A one percent treaty creates twenty-seven point two billion dollars in new funding with twelve point three times more trial 62 00:07:31.500 --> 00:07:38.470 capacity. The bottleneck isn't ideas or molecules. It's running enough trials to find out what works. 63 00:07:38.900 --> 00:07:45.920 This solves that. If your organization is a five zero one (c) (three), you're already thinking "we can't lobby." 64 00:07:46.540 --> 00:07:53.140 You can, actually, within limits (the "no substantial part" test, or the five zero one (h) election caps). 65 00:07:53.580 --> 00:07:58.720 But more importantly, supporting a referendum is educational activity, not lobbying. 66 00:07:59.180 --> 00:08:05.580 And for the heavy political lifting, the legal architecture uses a five zero one (c) (four) that faces no lobbying limits 67 00:08:05.580 --> 00:08:08.900 at all. Your lawyers will feel better after reading that chapter. 68 00:08:09.740 --> 00:08:13.440 "But Shouldn't Nonprofits Focus on Their Core Mission?". Yes. 69 00:08:13.700 --> 00:08:20.420 That is exactly the point. Your core mission is failing because your resources are shrinking while the resources of the 70 00:08:20.420 --> 00:08:27.680 people making your mission harder are expanding. This is like a firefighter insisting they should "focus on firefighting" 71 00:08:27.940 --> 00:08:33.640 while someone is actively pouring gasoline on the fire and nobody is addressing the gasoline. 72 00:08:34.260 --> 00:08:39.140 Every nonprofit today operates inside a system that guarantees their failure. 73 00:08:39.640 --> 00:08:42.760 Too few grant dollars. Too much competition for those dollars. 74 00:08:43.059 --> 00:08:46.020 Shrinking government budgets for health, climate, and poverty. 75 00:08:46.540 --> 00:08:53.440 Ballooning budgets for war. Donor fatigue (your donors are tired because you keep asking them for money to do things that 76 00:08:53.440 --> 00:09:00.400 don't work because you don't have enough money). And the people whose job is "convince politicians that killing is profitable" 77 00:09:00.700 --> 00:09:05.880 get two point seven two trillion dollars annually to make your job harder. 78 00:09:06.480 --> 00:09:13.900 Your future funding and impact will be determined by either (a) you, or (b) Lockheed Martin's lobbying department. 79 00:09:14.720 --> 00:09:20.440 Currently it's (b). You seem fine with this. The Obvious Solution That Nobody Sees. 80 00:09:21.260 --> 00:09:25.180 Right now, every grant you win is a grant another organization loses. 81 00:09:25.820 --> 00:09:32.020 This is called a "zero-sum game," which your species invented the mathematics to describe and then immediately forgot to 82 00:09:32.020 --> 00:09:37.020 apply to anything useful. A one percent treaty turns this into a positive-sum game. 83 00:09:37.600 --> 00:09:41.410 twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year in new funding. 84 00:09:41.720 --> 00:09:47.920 Malaria gets cured AND Alzheimer's gets cured. You stop writing proposals and start getting paid for results. 85 00:09:48.600 --> 00:09:54.240 This is like discovering that instead of fighting over one pizza, you can just order more pizzas than anyone can eat. 86 00:09:54.740 --> 00:10:01.060 Except the pizzas are billions of dollars and the ordering is international treaty ratification, which admittedly takes 87 00:10:01.060 --> 00:10:06.240 longer than calling Domino's. Countries still keep ninety-nine percent of their apocalypse capacity. 88 00:10:06.900 --> 00:10:11.020 They can still end all life nineteen times instead of twenty. 89 00:10:11.060 --> 00:10:16.340 If you can't successfully end the world with nineteen attempts, the twentieth probably wasn't going to help. 90 00:10:16.760 --> 00:10:24.520 But that single percentage point creates a twenty-seven point two billion dollars a year one percent Treaty Fund, funds 91 00:10:24.520 --> 00:10:31.420 global decentralized clinical trials, and makes every nonprofit's mission dramatically more feasible. 92 00:10:31.560 --> 00:10:35.420 Move one percent from the mountain to the puddle. The puddle becomes a lake. 93 00:10:35.880 --> 00:10:42.700 The mountain is still a mountain. Everybody wins except the people who were selling mountain insurance, and even they can 94 00:10:42.700 --> 00:10:47.030 pivot. Why Your Species Only Changes When the Building Is On Fire. 95 00:10:47.500 --> 00:10:54.400 Your species only reorganizes resources when things are going badly enough that ignoring the problem becomes more painful 96 00:10:54.440 --> 00:11:01.220 than fixing it. This is not a theory. It is the entirety of your political history, from the French Revolution to the New 97 00:11:01.220 --> 00:11:05.280 Deal to the creation of NATO. Comfortable humans don't change things. 98 00:11:05.980 --> 00:11:11.240 Uncomfortable humans change everything. Then they get comfortable and stop changing things again. 99 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:17.210 Right now, for the first time in eighty years, everything is going wrong at the same time. 100 00:11:17.720 --> 00:11:20.580 Military budgets are expanding while everything else gets cut. 101 00:11:21.560 --> 00:11:26.080 Trust in government spending priorities has reached "used car salesman" levels. 102 00:11:26.940 --> 00:11:34.380 Pandemics exposed the cost of underfunding resilience. Climate disasters have shifted public opinion from "debatable" to 103 00:11:34.380 --> 00:11:43.100 "my house is underwater." And your leaders are searching for a unifying narrative, which is political language for "someone 104 00:11:43.100 --> 00:11:47.460 please tell us what to do before we get voted out.". This is your window. 105 00:11:47.880 --> 00:11:51.540 It opens when humans are scared and closes when they get distracted. 106 00:11:52.340 --> 00:11:59.120 Based on my four thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven years of observation, the average window lasts about eighteen months 107 00:11:59.120 --> 00:12:03.700 before your species discovers a new television show and forgets the crisis entirely. 108 00:12:04.400 --> 00:12:09.690 The Factory Precedent. During World War Two, your species did something remarkable. 109 00:12:10.220 --> 00:12:18.140 G.M. built tanks. Ford built B twenty-four bombers. Frigidaire (yes, the refrigerator people) produced machine guns. 110 00:12:18.660 --> 00:12:23.720 Typewriter manufacturers made rifles. Not because they "supported war." 111 00:12:24.060 --> 00:12:27.620 Because the system needed realignment and ignoring it was impossible. 112 00:12:28.160 --> 00:12:34.240 Also because the government asked very firmly, in a tone that strongly implied "this isn't really a question.". 113 00:12:34.780 --> 00:12:43.140 Your nonprofit sector is the modern equivalent of those car factories: massive capacity, talented people, pointed at the 114 00:12:43.140 --> 00:12:49.580 wrong problem. You have millions of humans optimizing spreadsheets for the wrong budget. 115 00:12:49.800 --> 00:12:57.500 The factories pivoted in months. Your nonprofits have been "focused on their core mission" for decades while the core mission 116 00:12:57.500 --> 00:13:05.640 gets harder every year. You didn't get better at focus. You got better at ignoring the context in which your focus operates. 117 00:13:06.480 --> 00:13:13.540 A few years of effort to shift one percent of global budgets could produce more impact than thirty years of incremental 118 00:13:13.540 --> 00:13:18.280 programs. Decades during which, I should note, the problems got worse. 119 00:13:19.020 --> 00:13:24.520 On Wishonia, we have a word for "doing the same thing for thirty years while results decline." 120 00:13:24.940 --> 00:13:30.160 The word is "hobby.". "Why Not Just Run Trials Without the Treaty?" 121 00:13:30.240 --> 00:13:34.080 You should. But then what? You've built a beautiful garden hose. 122 00:13:34.080 --> 00:13:40.390 You've optimized its diameter, its nozzle, its flow rate. You've published papers about its efficiency. 123 00:13:40.700 --> 00:13:47.020 It is the best garden hose your species has ever produced. It's attached to a pipe with no water. 124 00:13:48.060 --> 00:13:55.420 Your clinical trial infrastructure becomes twelve point three times more useful when the resource stream feeding it is ten 125 00:13:55.420 --> 00:14:02.840 times larger. You cannot out-engineer a funding problem. Build the hose AND turn on the water. 126 00:14:03.300 --> 00:14:09.840 They're complements, not substitutes. What one percent Less Violence Buys Every Mission. 127 00:14:11.080 --> 00:14:17.180 I'm going to describe what happens when you shift one percent of military budgets, but I'm going to describe it the way 128 00:14:17.180 --> 00:14:24.840 I actually observe it, which is as a single upstream change that fixes things your species has been trying to fix separately 129 00:14:24.840 --> 00:14:29.150 for decades while refusing to notice they're all the same problem. 130 00:14:30.420 --> 00:14:33.580 There is twelve point three times more clinical trial capacity. 131 00:14:34.880 --> 00:14:40.540 Diseases get cured instead of managed (the pharmaceutical industry's least favorite sentence). 132 00:14:40.940 --> 00:14:46.460 Militaries emit less pollution (nobody carbon-taxes a tank, but maybe they should). 133 00:14:47.500 --> 00:14:52.240 Fewer resource-driven conflicts means fewer refugees means less poverty. 134 00:14:53.080 --> 00:14:58.900 Everyone becomes slightly less dead, which is the lowest bar imaginable, and yet. 135 00:15:00.080 --> 00:15:07.140 And here is the part that should keep every nonprofit Executive Director awake at night: you stop writing grant proposals 136 00:15:07.140 --> 00:15:11.120 and start actually doing your mission. Remember your mission? 137 00:15:11.580 --> 00:15:14.120 It was in the brochure. The one you wrote to get the grant. 138 00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:17.780 To pay the person who writes the grants. To fund the office where the grant-writing happens. 139 00:15:18.640 --> 00:15:26.560 Your organization has become a machine whose primary output is requests for money and whose secondary output is occasionally, 140 00:15:26.660 --> 00:15:34.400 accidentally, the thing you set out to do. The treaty fixes this by making the money show up without the begging. 141 00:15:35.000 --> 00:15:42.540 Your species calls this "too good to be true," which is a phrase you use to describe things that are good and true but embarrassing 142 00:15:42.540 --> 00:15:52.820 to admit. On Bribing Nonprofits (Legally). On Wishonia, when we wanted organizations to cooperate on a shared goal, we explained 143 00:15:52.820 --> 00:15:56.620 the goal and they cooperated. On Earth, you need to pay them. 144 00:15:57.400 --> 00:16:03.960 This is not a criticism. It's a design parameter. I've learned to work with the species I have, not the species I wish I 145 00:16:03.960 --> 00:16:11.740 had. Asking nonprofits to support a one percent treaty out of moral obligation is like asking a drowning person to rescue 146 00:16:11.740 --> 00:16:17.020 other swimmers. They're drowning. They need a life preserver, not a guilt trip. 147 00:16:17.680 --> 00:16:23.120 The life preserver: you make the organization rich. Old way: "Here's one hundred thousand dollars. 148 00:16:23.200 --> 00:16:28.060 Hope it helps. Submit a forty-seven-page report in six months about impacts and learnings. 149 00:16:28.500 --> 00:16:35.480 Use the word 'stakeholder' at least fourteen times." New way: "Here's fifty thousand dollars baseline to get started. 150 00:16:35.940 --> 00:16:41.840 Plus ten thousand dollars for every ten thousand verified referendum votes you drive through your unique link. 151 00:16:42.520 --> 00:16:50.460 No cap." The nonprofit's most rational path to maximizing their budget becomes: be your most effective mobilization partner. 152 00:16:51.220 --> 00:17:00.440 One metric. No ambiguity. Get paid for results. This is how every functional industry works except charity, which explains 153 00:17:00.440 --> 00:17:04.599 why every problem charity was invented to solve is still here. 154 00:17:05.380 --> 00:17:12.640 And then the ocean itself: the one percent Treaty Fund receives twenty-seven point two billion dollars annually. 155 00:17:13.119 --> 00:17:20.260 Your decentralized institutes of health allocates multi-billion dollar budgets to the diseases your organization exists 156 00:17:20.260 --> 00:17:27.880 to fight. When the treaty passes, the grant-writing stops. The money arrives because the treaty says it arrives. 157 00:17:28.640 --> 00:17:30.970 You don't need influence. You don't need a seat at the table. 158 00:17:31.580 --> 00:17:38.720 You need the treaty to pass. Everything after that is automatic, the way gravity is automatic, except instead of pulling 159 00:17:38.720 --> 00:17:44.100 things down it pulls money toward curing diseases. (Gravity has never done this. 160 00:17:47.420 --> 00:17:53.040 I checked.). You have two options. Option A: keep competing for finite grants forever, writing proposals, begging foundations, 161 00:17:53.440 --> 00:18:00.760 hoping your competitor doesn't write a better proposal. Option B: help pass the treaty, get paid referral bonuses for every 162 00:18:00.760 --> 00:18:08.820 verified referendum vote you drive, and watch twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year flow to your disease area. 163 00:18:09.440 --> 00:18:15.500 One involves begging. The other involves getting paid. On Wishonia, this would not require a chapter to explain. 164 00:18:16.440 --> 00:18:20.520 But your species is very attached to its suffering, so here we are. 165 00:18:21.380 --> 00:18:27.560 The dogs need to turn around and notice the banquet. I've been watching them fight over the bowl for eighty years. 166 00:18:28.040 --> 00:18:31.860 The banquet is right there. It has always been right there. 167 00:18:32.320 --> 00:18:36.100 The dogs are very focused. They have written reports about the bowl. 168 00:18:36.360 --> 00:18:41.820 They have held conferences about bowl strategy. They have hired consultants to optimize bowl access. 169 00:18:42.320 --> 00:18:45.540 None of them have turned around. Turn around.