Crowd funding - a way to exploit the well-meaning and gullible?

today I want to make an appeal to all my viewers never to stop thinking and to question everything you see and not because people get stuff wrong yes even I want you to question me because yes I get stuff wrong which explains why I have so many captions actually in my videos because I make mistakes but I knew I hope if I if I do make a mistake at least I admit to it so people are fallible and there are people unscrupulous people out there who would will try to defraud you because they're not terribly nice and there are also deluded people out there who might get you embroiled in something the BAPS you shouldn't be involved with because it's never going to work um now recently huh looking through Facebook I noticed that the number of my friends had to draw my attention to something called water seer and loads of people had clicked like and thumbs up and gosh and Wow and and and things like that and I thought okay let's investigate this it's give it the benefit of the doubt so i click tight and watch the promotional video it was a video for an indiegogo campaign to fund something called water seer which is this amazing advanced invention which is going to revolutionize the world it seems by giving up to note up to is a figure that includes naught 11 gallons of clean drinkable pure water to people in in far-flung regions that are off the grid and and where it's dry and arid and they have a big water problem and they showed computer graphics of these machines these water seers supposedly in action but you never actually got to see the real thing it was just computer simulations and you saw these beautiful African women computer simulations of enjoying this this fresh drinking water and everything was just great and I thought yeah right now a few years ago I saw something called a gravity light this was another IndieGoGo campaign and I thought wow that looks really good you see it was a very different campaign because what they were doing was not making huge claims they weren't going to give 11 gallons of clean water to all these people around the world for no energy input whatsoever no instead they were just going to create twenty minutes of one little LED for the effort of lifting a bag of I think it was 12 or 20 kylo grammys it's a metric which essentially it's a fairly heavy bag so what you do with a gravity light as you lift the bag and then you let it go and it falls very slowly and as it does so it whines loads of gears like in the grandfather clock mechanism and these generate just enough electricity to run one little white LED for about 20 minutes and then you have to lift the bag again so if you are off the electricity grid in a little mud hut summer in the middle of Africa that's really good right but you can't light whole cities with it it won't work for that but you know it's better than burning a little kerosene lamp which costs money to run the fuel and fills up your mud hut with fumes now this is this is cleaner and in the long run cheaper and yes you know one person can read a book for a bit buy one of these and then every 20 minutes they have to lift a bag well you know a small price to pay for clean and cheap light so I thought that's a great idea and if you look at the water sea air campaign and the gravity light campaign you will see quite a bit of contrast I want to draw your attention to a number of the things which are different between these two campaigns it's not as though you can't looking at these think oh well you which one do I back I mean they both seem so great no no one of them promises a moderate amount the other one promises a huge amount one of them has a working prototype they showed you all the various this is our first version didn't quite work because of this there were problems but we made this one and this one's stronger and this one works but it's a little bit longer and so forth a they showed you all the stages and the actual physical things in their hands and he showed the designers they were happy to show their faces in public they were proud of what they deceived there are no actual people shown in the water seer production what are they got to hide wouldn't you be talking to a camera about this great thing and wouldn't you show a prototype that's actually working if you had a working prototype you'd show a working prototype wouldn't you I mean you'd be mad not to so in water seer all you get to look at is a computer simulation and with gravity like you get to see the actual thing actually working and then you get to see it in situ in a hut in Africa somewhere actually producing light and someone reading a book by it in going oh wow this is so much better than the kerosene lamp so that's one different difference do you see the actual thing did we talk about the development of it and does it flippin work can you show it working another thing that's different is that in the IndieGoGo campaign for the gravity light if you pay it a certain amount of money there are different levels of backer if you paid a certain amount you would get a gravity light they would send you a gravity light you'll actually have the thing and you can set it up in your home and say to your friends look there's a thing I lift this thing look light last about 20 minutes but it's brilliant isn't it I mean just think if you were African and you're off the grid and Wow and you know so terrific um you actually got a thing water seer you don't get you don't actually get a water see her they'll it'll send you doesn't matter how much money you give them they're not promising you that you will get one of the actual things they'll just be somewhere else doing good somewhere honest and as you pay more and more money you get more and more useless rubbish so for instance you can pay hundreds of dollars and they will give you a downloadable full-color poster that you can print out at home whoopty-doo and if you if you pay huge amount of money they will allow you to name a water orchard ah of water or - doesn't that sound nice I've got a water orchard named after me well I you know I I had a neighbor dr. Mia I named it after my favorite author but I did that and that was me they don't tell you that it's a specific water orchard that's going to be in a particular place you don't get to pick where this one is you don't get to visit it oh no no no just you just get to name this thing what it doesn't cost them very much to just write a name that someone's come up with and maybe email a little difficult there's in theory an orchard named after this name that you've picked if you pay $5,000 yeah you will be honored at a meeting in Washington DC ah Washington DC last night Kevin Love America it sounds so official sounds of governmental because like that's where that's where the government is that's where the president is right you know oh wow Washington DC what's the meeting would that be like well it could be just two blokes meeting in a restaurant because two people that's a meeting right in Washington this is if they bother at all reading out the name a list of the name of all the suckers who paid $5,000 for them to do it and laughing all way to the back doesn't say flights included it doesn't say you you're invited to the party you know where your best bowtie no no it just says you will be honored of the meeting in Washington DC well again what would he do so they're not offering you anything of any use to you at all it's just feel good and they give you wonderful titles like evergreen if you pay $5,000 you get to be an evergreen I'm an evergreen oh yeah they are preying on a number of weaknesses in people they are preying on ignorance they are preying on hope they are preying on well-meaning this and they also preying on self aggrandizement and they know that people want to tell all their friends on Facebook they've backed this project and and they're giving clean water to loads of people in perpetuity but are they let's look at this thing again would it actually work well parrot a number of factors I think you might want to take into account when wondering whether this scheme might actually work or not um is any power involved no it seems that you just build one of these things and just let it go there's no maintenance and it will just generate water just on its own wow that's amazing you don't have to plug it into the electricity or anything so how does it work then oh well at Brown it's wind power these turbines will turn which then turn a fan which then send air down a chute into a condenser and then water will condense in that and then you then pump it up by hand and hey presto you get loads of water okay so what turns the fans a wind right so in dry areas where there is a water problem it's not often but it's really blowing a good breezes they tend to be quite stable hot areas with no cicadas chirping and mosquitoes flying around and it's you know that you're not exactly in a tempest but let's imagine it's a nice day for washing there's a bit of a breeze and it does turn the fans and this hot air is then blown down this tube what does hot air do to think well hair dries oh yes fan heaters yeah I know it heats stuff up so as it goes down it's going to heat up that tube isn't it so you're not gonna get a huge amount of condensation and how are we gonna chill the air at the bottom to to reach dew point so that we can in collect water well all they're saying is they're gonna bury it a few feet down in the ground well is that really going to be an for a start it's going to be warmed as soon as you actually blast a load of hot air down there and second just think how much you have to chill dry air to reach dew point now if you've got air that's because it's so hot it can hold this amount of water but because it's so dry it has this amount of water actually in it then in order to chill it to reach dew point you have to chill it to there now that won't do a thing at all you've got no indeed you have to chill it until it's so cold that it cannot hold that little bit of water that's in it and only then you reach dew point you're going to have to chill that air by a huge amount before it actually yield any moisture and then what's going to happen to that moisture well they're calling to the pictures it's going to be in a big bowl at the bottom with hot air blowing over it now have you ever used the hand dryers in a in a loo somewhere and put your wet hands under and then you blow hot air over it and then oh yeah it evaporates doesn't it and yeah then your hands are dry again how is this thing going to work now if the air is tremendously humid of course then you only have to chill it a little bit and you get a bit of condensation but in areas where the air is tremendously humid like for instance rain forests which are called rain forests for a very good reason there isn't a water problem you have a water problem where it's dry so if you've got hot dry air this isn't going to work maybe just maybe for a few days of a year the conditions might be enough for you to get a tiny bit of moisture out of this thing but this is not going to produce 11 gallons of water a day although it might produce up to which if you remember is a figure that presumably includes not so they don't show you a working prototype presumably because they haven't actually got one that works this I fear is a scam and I make this plea to you please dear viewer look at this thing and if it seems too good to be true think to yourself is this not true because very often it's not going to be true it's too good to be true it's not true is it so if you say that by putting some energy in you'll get a little bit of light for 20 minutes you think that's quite good it's not too good to be true I can believe that and look a working prototype but if you're going to say solve the world's water problems with this magical thing that breaks fundamental laws of physics and that they don't show you working prototype and they offer you nothing beware [Music] addendum I shot the beginning of this video some while ago but didn't edit it straight away and I've since been back to the IndieGoGo site and have noticed a couple more things and had a thought so now one thing I noticed was that whilst they claim to have developed water C in conjunction with UC Berkeley in the University of California quite a prestigious and big and well-known University what they show is interviews with students and it's quite clear from the interviews with these students that they're just mucking around with ideas they're coming up with various concepts for some sort of water collection thing and they don't actually have a working prototype and another thing I noticed is that they claimed to have raised an enormous amount of money in this IndieGoGo campaign and yet if you look at all the various levels of backer and you see how many people have backed each level and you do to do the maths you'll find that it adds up to only about 7% of the total amount of money raised so where did the other 93% come from well some theories one is that possibly they did raise that money from lots and lots of backers of all the various levels but then all those people realized hang on there's something fishy here and they got out just in time possibly and then all the stats were retro actively altered on the site and maybe that happened I don't think so though another possibility is that just one or two extremely generous donors donated far more than the minimum to bring the figure up or possibly the people running the campaign put in a lot of money of their own to make it look as though it was an extremely popular campaign and that loads of people were backing it because the more backed a project is the more publicity it gets and the greater prominence it has on the site of IndieGoGo and then more people will think it all nodes or other people are clearly back in this I should put in some of my own money because I have confidence in this project because so many other people apparently have confidence in it maybe that's what happened I don't know um anyway here's a thought some of you may be worried you may be thinking to yourselves Oh Lloyd are you taking a bit of a risk here I mean what if they sue you for libel or something well they won't sue me for libel because libel is what you write about someone in print but they could possibly try to assume for slander which is something where you say you speak out loud in public it's gonna be difficult because they're American and I'm British so it'd be very difficult for them to use the British slander laws but I'm you know maybe it's not impossible but there are two main possibilities out there one is that water SIA is is a a scam in which case if they take me to court over saying that I suspect it might be a scam all they're going to do is end up paying costs so it's a very expensive way to embarrass yourself in public so they're not going to do that or it is a real thing in which case I make my pledge to the camera now if water SIA is a real thing there really are water orchards that do actually provide good clean drinking water regularly to people in arid poor parts of the earth well then I will take myself to one of those areas poor parts of the earth all the water saying people have to do is just name me just one and learn locate for me just one working water orchard in some poor dry place in the world and I will go there at my own expense I will pay for my flights and my accommodation and I will video the water see is in action and the happy smiling people splashing and laughing because their lives are now just filled with joy because of all this water and I will make a video and I promise to upload it so it'll be win win win win I'll win because I'll get an interesting video and an interesting trip and and also be protecting the reputation of this channel for you know have you caring about the truth and fact checking and so forth my viewers will win because they'll get something interesting to watch and they'll be educated and they'll they'll learn a lesson which they're enormously more likely to remember because of this two-stage thing and all goodness you turned out to be wrong wowie then went to the place it'll be far more memorable for them and the local people they'll win maybe I'll make them so some donation and they get to be on YouTube and and they get to splash around with the war and I feel Italy great they'll win and most specifically you the producers of water say you will win because you will get a huge amount of free publicity publicity far greater than if I had said something nice about what is it if I just made a video in which I mentioned water Syrian said oh there's this thing called water Syrian seems quite good to me anyway swords then that would've been a little bit of good publicity for you but instead and if I make one in which I said you know I'm not sure about this I think it might be a I might be it might be a scam and then I do a follow-up video in which I go and show the actual things actually working and I video myself saying do you know I was wrong if they really do work that will give you enormous Lemoore free an entirely good publicity so what it to be

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 577,463

Rating: 4.9654751 out of 5

Keywords: water, seer, scam, hoax, indigogo, crowd funding, virtue signalling, gravity light, money, raising, investors, gullible, trick, con, kickstarter, victims

Id: 0zfYAXWODUs

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Fiennes]

Great post. Part of me feels this video should be plastered on the sign-up pages of both Kickstarter and Indie-go-go.

But that might hurt their profits.

[u/ifdeadpokewithstick]

Lindy! He's great, does a lot of videos about military and battles from ancient times.

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