504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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Episode: 504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:24:37

Episode Shownotes

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with teacher, filmmaker, and YouTuber, Warren Smith. They discuss his unexpected virality after Elon Musk retweeted a video of him teaching critical thinking. They also walk through the aftermath, Warren’s run-ins and eventual firing by administrative bureaucrats, why asking permission to take on the

unknown is not needed, and how the choice to live a safe life or accept an extraordinary adventure is ultimately yours to make. This episode was filmed on November 21st, 2024 | Links | For Warren Smith: On X https://x.com/WTSmith17 On YouTube www.youtube.com/@SecretScholars On Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/Secret_Scholars

Summary

In this episode of 'The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast', Dr. Jordan B. Peterson converses with Warren Smith about the profound impact of a viral video that showcased his teaching on critical thinking. The conversation delves into Smith's experiences in a special education setting and the institutional challenges he faced, including his eventual firing due to the backlash from the exposure. The dialogue emphasizes the vital role of personal authenticity, the risks educators take in pursuing educational innovations, and the necessity of embracing uncertainty in one's career. Insights on critical thinking, institutional pressure, and the quest for educational authenticity are central themes, highlighting the broader implications for society.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Hello everybody. I had the opportunity to sit down in person today with Warren Smith. Warren was a teacher and he recorded himself having a discussion with a student about a rather contentious topic. Turned out to be J.K.

00:00:15 Speaker_00
Rowling's reactions to the trans propaganda insanity that plagues our culture in 15 different ways.

00:00:23 Speaker_02
Do you still like her work despite her bigoted opinions?

00:00:28 Speaker_04
So let's get specific though and let's define bigoted opinions. What opinions are bigoted?

00:00:33 Speaker_02
She has had a history of being extremely transphobic, I've heard. And you've heard, so what, can you give me an example? In 2019 she said, live your best life in peace and security but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real.

00:00:50 Speaker_02
So you find that bigoted? What do you find about it? It was

00:00:55 Speaker_00
the video, which was remarkable, I would say, for the good sense that Warren brought to it, the calm demeanor, the intelligent questioning of the student, really the professional way that he handled the discussion, which is now so rare among those who purport to be teachers, that the mere fact of its professionalism was remarkable in and of itself, enough so that it went viral.

00:01:20 Speaker_04
Do you find that transphobic yourself?

00:01:23 Speaker_02
I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm just going with what a lot of other people have said.

00:01:29 Speaker_04
So let's pause it. Let's not go with what other people are saying.

00:01:32 Speaker_03
Let's try and learn how to critically think. So let's analyze the tweet ourselves. So that statement, do you see anything problematic?

00:01:39 Speaker_00
was shared by Elon Musk among many other people. And as you might imagine, that produced an explosive effect on Warren's life.

00:01:49 Speaker_03
So it happened yesterday, I was fired from my full-time teaching position.

00:01:56 Speaker_00
That was followed up by a Piers Morgan interview, which I guess was the secondary explosion in the two explosions that rocked his life.

00:02:04 Speaker_03
I am absolutely surprised by this completely. I never expected this at all. This came out accidentally. We have interactions like this on a daily basis. This one just happened to be captured on camera.

00:02:17 Speaker_00
Which was also quite distressing, as you might expect, given his level of commitment to his teaching profession.

00:02:25 Speaker_03
I have devoted four years of my life to this school and yesterday it was like being a character in a video game and just being deleted.

00:02:37 Speaker_00
I wanted to talk to Warren because I really liked the video that he made.

00:02:40 Speaker_00
I thought it was remarkable for its sanity especially given the time and I was very curious about everything that had happened to him in consequence of the viral explosion of what he had done as a teacher and so we sat down for an hour and a half to talk all that through.

00:02:58 Speaker_00
The consequences of saying what you think when the situation is set up to reward you for maintaining your silence. Join us for that discussion. Hello, Mr. Smith. Thank you for coming in today. It's an honor. Thank you. Yeah, no problem.

00:03:14 Speaker_00
Yeah, I probably came across you the way most people did, and I guess that was with the video that went viral that Musk shared, eh? Lots of people who are watching and listening won't know anything about you, so why don't we start from the beginning.

00:03:33 Speaker_00
What was it that brought you to public attention and tell us the story about your teaching career?

00:03:39 Speaker_03
Well, public attention, it was that video that you're talking about. But the beginning, I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot because I've had time to reflect on it more.

00:03:50 Speaker_03
After that video, there was, it was a strange experience because suddenly you have one five minute video and suddenly you have this perceived value. But I mean, I was the exact same person as before that video.

00:04:04 Speaker_03
Now, I mean, it was not for me, it was life changing, though. Something so I have people, some people wanting to talk to me, which was people that I have genuinely admired. Like, I mean, this is a bit kind of the.

00:04:21 Speaker_03
Dave Rubin, just opportunities that I never just never expected. And so I've been reflecting on those conversations because I often I found myself kind of feeling like I was trying to live up to something from that video.

00:04:37 Speaker_03
So this idea of what suddenly I was labeled this kind of like this critical thinking Socratic method guy. And I wasn't intentionally doing that at all. I have no background in Socratic method or critical thinking.

00:04:48 Speaker_03
I was just doing what I thought was sensible in the moment.

00:04:52 Speaker_00
You don't necessarily know who you are, you know, that's the thing. It wasn't exactly chance that made the video go viral, right? You obviously touched on a nerve and in a manner that people admired.

00:05:08 Speaker_00
Tell the story of the video and talk about your work too. You were working as a high school teacher when you released that video. Tell people the story of the video and how it came to be and why it was recorded to begin with. Sure, sure.

00:05:22 Speaker_03
So I, after graduate school, I found myself as a public school teacher right up before COVID, the year leading into COVID, just teaching what I majored in. And my plans are always to be a college professor.

00:05:37 Speaker_03
And I teach some courses, but I'm not tenure track or anything. And perhaps one day I, but. I found myself in this unlikely position and I enjoyed it. Teaching the same subject matter, video technology, what we're doing right here. Two high school kids.

00:05:53 Speaker_03
High school kids.

00:05:54 Speaker_00
Now you had a MFA? Yes. And what was the specialty? Video production. In video production. And when did you graduate with a master's degree? 2019. And then you were looking, what kind of jobs were you looking for? In education. In education.

00:06:10 Speaker_00
And you landed a job as a high school teacher. As a high school teacher.

00:06:14 Speaker_03
just by pure kind of just chance. And I really enjoyed it. COVID hits, everything goes ape crazy. The school shuts down, they make cuts because of the teacher's union, all first year hires are gone. So that kind of left a taste in my mouth about unions.

00:06:37 Speaker_03
One of my first experiences with unions. And so I started looking for another job and I found a school that specialized in kids with behavioral challenges. And this is kind of what I was alluding to at the beginning.

00:06:53 Speaker_03
There are things that I've not, I've wanted to talk about in these kinds of interviews that happen or when someone wants to discuss this, they want to discuss the video. And I find myself, because you've spoken about when you feel your words,

00:07:08 Speaker_03
making you not what you could be or weaker. You can feel it.

00:07:13 Speaker_01
I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak. And what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying.

00:07:24 Speaker_03
And that's how I felt. You've practiced with that, have you? To say that you had an impact on my life, which is why this is surreal, to say you had an impact on my life would be an understatement. And we can get into that if you like.

00:07:34 Speaker_03
That was in graduate school. OK. But I was feeling that in those conversations, trying to live up to something in a way. I mean, it was... You're kind of saying that what people want to hear... Not trying to sound intelligent, but something like that.

00:07:56 Speaker_03
And I never expected anything like this to happen, but I did tell myself, if I ever, by some miracle, had the chance to speak to you, I would allow myself permission to allow my words to have that vulnerability and to go to that place that I have not allowed myself to go to, because I think there is value there.

00:08:14 Speaker_03
But the reason I bring that, because that is kind of... I've never spoken about the reality of the school where I was teaching.

00:08:19 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:08:20 Speaker_03
Okay. Okay. Well, let's go down that path. So these are kids with behavioral challenges that could not, other schools could not handle them. So they put them all together. It's a last line of defense, sort of. So they're specialized, it's funded through.

00:08:36 Speaker_03
public school system. So a student is so challenging, it could be for any reason. Some are involved with gangs, substance abuse challenges, some are bullies, some are the bullied. For whatever reason, that school can't... They're just not equipped.

00:08:52 Speaker_03
They pay, I think it's $50,000 a head, something along those lines, to send them to this school, which is governed by a board and an executive director. And here I am.

00:09:05 Speaker_00
And you were hired at that school? With COVID going on. Did you have any experience at all dealing with behaviorally challenged kids?

00:09:13 Speaker_05
No.

00:09:14 Speaker_00
So why'd they hire you?

00:09:17 Speaker_03
I interviewed well. I'm going to strive to be as honest as I can throughout this. So I interviewed well. I think they saw potential. I think they were looking for young teachers that could weather that kind of storm. Were they mostly boys in the school?

00:09:37 Speaker_00
Yes. What proportion? I would say 80%. Yeah, well, that's what you'd expect if you brought behaviorally challenged kids together, because they'd be much more likely to be boys. How old?

00:09:48 Speaker_03
High school age, whether there are some middle school. It was interesting the way the building is divided to a subset of middle school specialized with one group.

00:09:58 Speaker_03
But because of COVID, it was divided up into pods because they were worried about cross-contamination of COVID.

00:10:03 Speaker_03
So, there was ten students approximately to one site, and I was assigned to one site as the multimedia teacher, teaching the same thing I've always taught. And there was no crossover.

00:10:13 Speaker_03
And then there was three teachers assigned to one site to manage those ten students, which the ratio of teacher to student is quite high. That's what their needs... necessitate. How long did you teach at that school?

00:10:28 Speaker_03
Up until losing my job, so four years. Four years. Okay, so you stuck it out too. Well, I remember when the first speech they gave, the principal that hired me, I'm very fond of, and the assistant principal, they are no longer there.

00:10:46 Speaker_03
They were dismissed a year prior to me, but they are the ones that hired me. So when you ask why they hire you, he's the only person that could answer that. I remember I was in the interview,

00:10:56 Speaker_03
And this assistant principal walks in and he's like dressed, there was really no dress code. And he walks in and he's like, blow my mind in eight seconds. And then I forget what I said. And then he just walked out and didn't say a single word.

00:11:10 Speaker_03
And I left thinking, I just blew that interview, but I got the job. So anyways, we're there on the first day and he's like, look guys, if you're still teaching at this school in four years,

00:11:21 Speaker_03
something's probably wrong with you or you have some sadomasochistic or you just have some I think he was alluding to there's some reason you have that like this is not your typical pathway for educators he's trying to

00:11:38 Speaker_03
illustrate the reality that most times they get traditional educators that realize where they are, and it's too late at that point, and then they just vanish. I mean, they last a week, if that.

00:11:48 Speaker_03
We've had teachers come in and last a day, one day, and just get in their car and leave. What happens to them? They're like, this is chaos. This is... I can't survive this for a year.

00:12:02 Speaker_03
We were walking around with walkie-talkies so that you can respond quickly. We're trained in safety care so that you can go hands-on if needed. I mean, fights breaking out. It's not juvie, but it's one step away from juvie.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
Though you also have students that are not headed to juvie, but they're the ones that get bullied. or for whatever reason, they have an IEP plan. And what's that? An Individualized Education Plan. Yeah. I have dyslexia.

00:12:37 Speaker_03
Some students would have dyslexia to a degree where they need... It was a special education school and it's designed so that we can accommodate everything.

00:12:50 Speaker_03
And so the students that are hyper-aggressive are put in one, there's going to be flaws to this logically, are put in one quadrant, one site. They were divided into sites, one, two, three, four, whatnot.

00:13:03 Speaker_03
So that there's no, you can't put the bullies with the bullied. But then you have hyper-aggressive, bunch of males, a lot of fights. That's the site I was on.

00:13:15 Speaker_00
So let's just get this timeline exactly right. So you got your master's degree at the end of 2019. And then you had a teaching job in a relatively... Rigged as a run-of-the-mill high school. Right. And COVID put an end to that.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
And then as COVID lifted, you found a job in this school that was for behaviorally challenged kids. And it was a very mixed bag of behaviorally challenged kids, which is also a very interesting administrative decision.

00:13:44 Speaker_00
The idea that you would put all the kids with all the problems in the same school is a strange idea. It's not like problems constitutes a category. It's not a category at all.

00:13:56 Speaker_00
And then, while you alluded to this as well, it isn't the least bit evident from the evidence that putting aggressive kids together is anything but a really bad idea. There's immense clinical literature demonstrating exactly that.

00:14:11 Speaker_00
And you said you ended up with the aggressive kids. Okay, but you also pointed out that you taught there for four years.

00:14:20 Speaker_03
So it changed, the landscape transformed.

00:14:22 Speaker_00
Okay.

00:14:23 Speaker_03
Those first two years were the most chaotic, perhaps that had something to do with COVID. So I arrived during COVID, suddenly there's a kind of an outbreak at the school.

00:14:34 Speaker_03
I remember driving into the parking lot one morning, half the staff are coming out of the parking lot, getting into their cars, and they're like, they're telling us to leave. So I'm on site one.

00:14:44 Speaker_03
For whatever reason, all the teachers were sent home on site one except me. Now, there was no students in the building, though, for three or four weeks this went on. And so I was teaching remotely in my classroom, on my computer.

00:14:59 Speaker_03
And I kind of expanded the curriculum to help. They needed me to fill in with other things. I remember that distinctly. And so then we get through that, that might have happened.

00:15:09 Speaker_03
It was like every few months there was an outbreak on this site and they're gone. And so, you know, and you can't walk through these doors for contamination and COVID ends.

00:15:19 Speaker_03
And over the course of the next two years, it changed, because originally, multimedia, I was able to grow the program to where I was able to work with the entire building. It was no longer just limited to one site.

00:15:35 Speaker_03
Which was remarkable, because in upstairs, they have students with severe physical challenges. Down syndrome challenges such as that. And that requires a completely different specialty. No doubt.

00:15:50 Speaker_03
And a different type of staff and professionalism even, because you can't afford a mistake. It's life or death. And I began to work with those students as well.

00:16:02 Speaker_03
And you're always going to have inner politics, office place politics and whatnot, and certain clicks form. And I mentioned the principal and assistant principal both just got fired in the middle of the day, same day.

00:16:16 Speaker_03
And they put out a reason, you know, and they're like, oh, they just, they keep it vague. And it was clearly, it was kind of a, in the first year the school tried to unionize, there was a movement to unionize.

00:16:28 Speaker_03
And that principal that hired me was very against it. And I voted against it because my previous experience with the unions was starting to wake up to the reality of the drawbacks. And I understand the motivation behind unions, but.

00:16:40 Speaker_03
So there was, my point is that interplace politics and it took them out. But I was able to, this new principal arose, who was a very nice guy. There was originally two assistant principals, and one was the kind of the guy who

00:16:57 Speaker_03
in my mind, almost positive, kind of led that formation of what caused them to leave, and he ascended in power, became the only assistant principal, and his good buddy, who was 30 years old at the time, became the principal, which is pretty young to be a principal.

00:17:15 Speaker_03
And he was a very nice guy, though. For whatever reason, I got moved across the street into a separate building though, which I actually liked because it gave me more room to grow.

00:17:28 Speaker_03
And so the students would, when the teachers, I had all the students would rotate, the teachers would bring them across the street. I had this great lab, multimedia lab with a 3D printer.

00:17:38 Speaker_03
We were investing in new equipment, camera technology, Photoshop. I had like 11 iMacs. running Premiere Pro and Photoshop.

00:17:49 Speaker_00
How are the kids responding to this? Well, you're describing a program. It sounds to me like you're describing a program that was successful and that grew. Is that the case? And the kids, were they responding well to what you were teaching?

00:18:02 Speaker_03
I think that it was really interesting to notice the difference. The students downstairs, behavioral versus physical challenges, the students upstairs were the ones that resonated the most. with Photoshop, video editing, there was an enthusiasm.

00:18:17 Speaker_03
So a student with autism, something about some of these skills, they just love, you get them going on video editing. That's very detail-oriented.

00:18:27 Speaker_03
Yeah, and so I had, I just loved working with those students, and I didn't get to do that until my last two years. But it was the first two years with those other students, I still think I was making progress with them, like bringing in digital.

00:18:42 Speaker_03
I had, as a teacher, you're not supposed to have favorites, but the student that I was probably the most fond of, who ended up getting kicked out over something, he was just a brilliant illustrator. He could draw just incredible and came from nothing.

00:19:02 Speaker_03
Most of these kids, I think the core issue was just there was no parents. I mean, we'd have open house and no one would show up. Right. So they were on their own. Yeah. And that student in particular, I found something that resonated with him.

00:19:20 Speaker_03
We invested in like a Krita drawing tablet, and he accelerated with that. But the problem came in the form, I noticed, when they would say, he's drawing illustrations of samurai's in combat. What good is that going to do him?

00:19:34 Speaker_03
We want him to do projects that are relevant to the school, but then they would give me no criteria of, or set plans. There was no curriculum in place. I developed it all myself, which I wasn't, there's pros and cons to that.

00:19:51 Speaker_03
There's a lot of freedom to that, but the challenge is that it allows them to come in at their convenience if they... And who was they? Leadership, which I never had an issue with. I never had an issue until I published that video.

00:20:06 Speaker_00
Okay, so let's talk about that. Tell everybody about what the video was. We'll clip it into this so that people can see it, obviously, but describe why was it that you were posting videos and how did this particular one come about?

00:20:23 Speaker_04
So these guys want to talk about JK Rowling? So what's going on with that? What do you want to know?

00:20:32 Speaker_02
She's had a pretty controversial past. I just want to know, like, what are your thoughts on it? Like, do you still like her work despite her bigoted opinions?

00:20:42 Speaker_04
So let's get specific, though. Let's define bigoted opinions.

00:20:45 Speaker_02
She has had a history of being extremely transphobic, I've heard. Hey, you've heard. So what, can you give me an example? So, one of these tweets that she came up with in 2019, she said,

00:20:59 Speaker_02
Dress however you please, call yourself whatever you like, sleep with any consenting adult who will have you live your best life in peace and security, but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. So you find that bigoted?

00:21:18 Speaker_02
I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm just going with what a lot of other people have said.

00:21:24 Speaker_04
So let's pause it. Let's not go with what other people are saying.

00:21:27 Speaker_03
Let's try and learn how to critically think. So let's analyze the tweet ourselves. So that statement, do you see anything problematic?

00:21:34 Speaker_02
Force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real.

00:21:39 Speaker_04
So when I hear that, I'm interpreting that as meaning

00:21:43 Speaker_03
If a woman says that, you know, saying that there is a difference between men and female and then being attacked as transphobic, I think that's what she's saying by attacking someone for stating that sex is real. That is exactly what she's saying.

00:21:56 Speaker_03
Is that transphobic to you?

00:21:58 Speaker_02
So, to me, no. So is there anything you disagree with in that tweet? Uh, in that tweet, I can't really see anything that I myself disagree with.

00:22:13 Speaker_04
So now that we're looking at it like, oh, there's not much difference between me or her, do you, how, why do you, do you think it's fair that there's a, that she's being attacked by a large group of people and people are calling her, like you said at the beginning of this conversation, you said, given the fact that J.K.

00:22:29 Speaker_03
Rowling is transphobic, how do you feel about Harry Potter?

00:22:33 Speaker_04
Now, retroactively looking at that statement, do you think that that was the best way to phrase No, I feel like an idiot now. It's okay though, but this is why we do this, to learn how to think.

00:22:43 Speaker_03
I discovered, 2017, a video of a professor, low quality video, in this classroom that looked like mine. You're standing in front of the classroom talking about archetypes of Harry Potter. It was you, and I was like, that's cool. And this is 2017.

00:23:01 Speaker_03
That was the first video I saw of you. And I went down the rabbit hole, Captain Devin and all that, classics. But that... And I said to my, I'm going to try this. Because I was teaching students about filmmaking and movies.

00:23:15 Speaker_03
And I was teaching a journalism class. And I was like, this ties in directly. And I just, I loved this style. I was like, teaching is a performance. There's a performance art element to this.

00:23:26 Speaker_03
Because you have to be engaging to be able to stand in front of a classroom and get them engaged. There's an artistic element to that that I'm not quite sure how to articulate that. It might not be right. No, you did. It's a performance.

00:23:39 Speaker_03
But that's what I saw in your video. So I went in, it was probably a few weeks later, and we have all the cameras. And I was teaching a student how to use it. I said, okay, now you know how to use the camera. Let's try and record this lecture.

00:23:51 Speaker_03
I saw this thing on YouTube. Yeah, yeah. And I essentially ran through archetypes in Harry Potter, and they loved it. And that video is on YouTube. People can watch it. No one watched it at the time.

00:24:01 Speaker_03
But it's up there and that's years ago, maybe five years ago. That's how it started. So I started and I was like, this is a great, I agree with you that YouTube is a Gutenberg revolution that we cannot comprehend what it means.

00:24:15 Speaker_03
It is massive potential and it's exciting. So I fell in love with that aspect of it. Because there's teaching portfolios. What better thing to have in a teaching portfolio than a recording of you actually teaching?

00:24:34 Speaker_03
So they ask you to have artifacts, provide artifacts of your teaching. Here's a video of me teaching. Beat that. So that was the thinking. And also in multimedia, we would do reviews of movies like The Queen's Gambit.

00:24:51 Speaker_03
It was just a way to get students to practice articulating themselves. Public speaking, when you don't have a room full of people for them to practice in front of, a camera,

00:25:03 Speaker_03
is not a bad substitute because it allows them to watch it back, hear their voice, which at first no one likes. It causes you to cringe. It's a very interesting response.

00:25:14 Speaker_03
But you can learn so much from watching and those repetitions and doing it again and again. And they loved it. Some of the students just really loved it. So to bring us to that video, They asked me to do a newscast.

00:25:28 Speaker_03
They're like, we want to try a new idea. Can you do a newscast for the school once a week, which is what I was doing in that public school. But that was a legit newscast that would go out live to every classroom once a week on Friday.

00:25:41 Speaker_03
They had all this technology to do it. And they would upload everything to social media. That's why I have a Twitter. That was the only reason I even had a Twitter account at the time. That was the original school? The original school.

00:25:56 Speaker_03
I can even say that it was the Neshoba Regional High School in Massachusetts.

00:26:00 Speaker_03
So if you go to my Twitter feed, the very first, only first tweets, they're all just Neshoba student broadcast because, and the head of my department would ask me to just share them. I thought that was just normal.

00:26:11 Speaker_00
And there was no, students loved it. And... So how much recording of your teaching were you doing in your classes in the... Not much. In the second school?

00:26:21 Speaker_03
Not too much. I mean, I would not, I would, it was more projects like the Queen's Gambit review, I had a colleague, the music teacher, had a passion for camera technology as well.

00:26:32 Speaker_03
And he was my closest collaborator because we were voc teachers, vocational teachers, meaning we worked with the whole building. We were the only ones that everyone else worked with just their sites.

00:26:43 Speaker_03
There was like a culinary teacher, landscaping, and they were always experimenting with the vocations, but music and multimedia always remained consistent. How big a school? Only downstairs, 50 students. Upstairs, 50, about 50 students. Okay.

00:27:01 Speaker_00
And how many teachers?

00:27:02 Speaker_03
Well, the ratio was- You said it was three to one about, eh? That's what they strive for, but they're constantly battling understaffing because teachers just vanish often.

00:27:13 Speaker_00
Had you done a lot of videos in the build-up to the video that got so much attention?

00:27:19 Speaker_03
I had been posting little things, just like I was mentioning, like reviews and things, but no one was watching them and no one cared. It wasn't, you know...

00:27:30 Speaker_03
And working with the music teacher, we would do the mathematics of the Fibonacci sequence in music, things which are still up there. So if you're curious to dig into that, you can, if anyone's watching this.

00:27:40 Speaker_03
But to answer your question about how this video came about, so they asked me to do a news broadcast. We're not equipped to do that, but we tried anyways. And they're like, we want this kid to...

00:27:51 Speaker_03
to be the person on camera and just go through, this is what happened in the school this week.

00:27:55 Speaker_03
So we go in the room, we go to set it up and he's getting stage fright, camera shy, he's just, and I think it's very important in teaching to lead by example. So let's just treat, let's just do a warmup.

00:28:08 Speaker_03
I'll sit on camera, you operate it, let's just have a conversation. Treat it like a podcast real quick. Let's do like a five minute warmup. Just ask me something that you wanna, that would interest you. Okay, he hits record.

00:28:21 Speaker_03
All right, so how have your views on J.K. Rowling changed given her bigoted opinions? Or how have your views on Harry Potter changed given J.K. Rowling's bigoted opinions? Well, first we need to address that and then just walk through it.

00:28:33 Speaker_03
And I thought, that's interesting, you know, and maybe I'll try something new with this YouTube thing. I just uploaded it. I was like, that's interesting enough to post. I didn't think anyone would watch it.

00:28:44 Speaker_00
Walk us through your response. What did you know about, you mentioned watching the Harry Potter, an analysis of Harry Potter I had done. Let's walk through it. So, well, first we need to address, is she bigoted?

00:28:57 Speaker_03
That's the glaring presupposition. Right, right. Right. So that constitutes a loaded question. Right. So what are you basing that upon? Well, you know, I've heard that she has tweets. Okay. Do you have any other? I can show you the tweets if you want. Sure.

00:29:18 Speaker_03
Let's take a look. Dig some tweets out. We read the tweets. Okay. So do you find that? What about that is transphobic? Then I told him the exact tweet and he clarified it.

00:29:31 Speaker_03
And then he goes, oh, but she did apologize as well for this other thing, this other piece of evidence. Okay, let's take a look. Same process. Then I point out, okay, so there's really not much difference between you and her.

00:29:47 Speaker_03
You understand that she's stating that it's important to her, her experience as a woman. She has no issue with someone identifying how they want to identify, but that's not going to change.

00:30:00 Speaker_03
That shouldn't impact her experience and the reality that she's a woman and what that means in reality. No, I agree with that. Okay.

00:30:11 Speaker_03
So now looking back at the beginning of this conversation, that claim you made when you call her bigoted, do you think that was a fair thing to say? No. Now I feel stupid. That's okay. That's why we do this.

00:30:26 Speaker_03
And often I would have interesting conversations when they arose, going back to the idea of, and there was some blowback about that, of why are you having conversation?

00:30:34 Speaker_03
Your job is to teach students how to set up cameras and shoot videos and do photo editing and 3D printing and using this technology.

00:30:45 Speaker_03
But as we just pointed out, there's extreme, if the goal is to use this technology with students in the way that is going to most benefit them,

00:30:55 Speaker_00
Well, that should be. Use of the technology isn't independent of the content, especially if you're doing video recording.

00:31:04 Speaker_03
And there's so much utility in teaching students how to think, how to articulate themselves. And often they have questions about things in the world. I've had students ask me, what's a Republican versus a Democrat?

00:31:22 Speaker_03
And you're like, you're a senior in high school, we need to talk about it. And then we can kill two birds with one stone. And then we'll have stuff to edit, you know, and it's things that interest you.

00:31:31 Speaker_03
So if we're going to, we need footage to edit, might as well make it interesting. And if we can talk about something that actually matters in the world and you can learn something from it, well, why not?

00:31:43 Speaker_00
You can't learn to edit footage without having something interesting that you're interested in because there's nothing to edit.

00:31:51 Speaker_03
And you could just film music videos and things, but I... I see more utility. And if a student wants to discuss something like that, I see, you know, that was my reasoning behind it.

00:32:02 Speaker_00
Well, that's especially relevant with regards to editing because you want to clip and cut so that you get to the gist of the matter. And that means there has to be something there to focus on.

00:32:12 Speaker_03
So if you're watching, if a student is watching, they shoot a music video and they're watching themselves playback dancing and they're editing that. Okay. But when you watch yourself speaking, debating or just... You're learning those oratory skills.

00:32:30 Speaker_03
You're getting over public speaking right. There's more utility, I believe, than simply... There's nothing wrong if a student wants to do something like a music video. You could do something creative too, but even then it's got to have a point.

00:32:46 Speaker_03
Why not encapsulate as much as possible? If our objective is to use what we have to help students as best we can.

00:32:54 Speaker_00
Well, obviously also the technique that you were using, so to speak, insofar as it's a technique, is asking pertinent questions.

00:33:05 Speaker_00
There isn't any difference between that and teaching people how to think, because if you're thinking, you're asking yourself pertinent questions, and you're certainly not going to learn to do that without an example.

00:33:15 Speaker_00
The whole point of being a teacher is to, or at least one of the main points of being a teacher is to teach people how to ask themselves pertinent questions and to model that.

00:33:27 Speaker_00
Why do you think... So it's interesting that it was the conversation about J.K. Rowling that went viral. She certainly caused an endless stream of political upset in the UK and turned into quite a stunning advocate for free speech.

00:33:43 Speaker_00
And she has, in fact, focused on this trans issue, which is likely the most bizarre issue that's ever dominated the political space as far as I can tell.

00:33:53 Speaker_00
And I guess one of the things that your video demonstrated was the pertinence of that issue to students who have questionable reasons for being concerned about it to begin with.

00:34:07 Speaker_00
Why do you think that this particular student was possessed by the belief that transphobia was a thing to begin with, because that's also a bastardization of words in the most manipulative possible way, to take a clinical terminology, phobia, and then to append it to objection to anything that the person who's objecting, or what would you say?

00:34:33 Speaker_00
I can object to something. If someone's irritated about that, they're going to medicalize my objection and describe it as a pathology. That's what happens when you use the term phobia.

00:34:44 Speaker_00
It's unbelievably manipulative, and I would say the radical leftists are stunningly good at that manipulation of language. But now you have a student who is objecting to J.K. Rowling on the basis of transphobia, and you're asking questions about it.

00:34:59 Speaker_00
Now, is that part of what also got you... It's obviously one of the things that made this go viral, but was it also one of the things that got you in trouble?

00:35:08 Speaker_03
Well, there's no way for me to know exactly. I think that in a... I think there's a, as you know, most things in life are far more complex than a singular explanation. I think that a lot of it was the virality itself.

00:35:25 Speaker_03
Given that we're a school where there are some loose practices, there's been things like the two principles just being removed. There was a tax of scandal a few years prior to my arrival.

00:35:38 Speaker_03
Because we have, the way grades are assigned, often it's the site's sitting there. It's like, okay, what's Jimmy going to get in your class? Give him like a 73. And there's no record, there's no reasoning to it. And that's literally how it occurs.

00:35:55 Speaker_03
Why did they offer me $9,000 to shut up or why to sign this? And like, why do you need an NDA?

00:36:07 Speaker_00
So there was worry about potential public attention. Well, you can understand, I mean, the school that you're operating in is insanely complex.

00:36:16 Speaker_00
There's absolutely no way to run a school like that that isn't full of trouble, obviously, because the whole school is built on trouble.

00:36:23 Speaker_00
And so I can imagine that the people who are running the school would be nervous about that, because I can't possibly see that there's any way that you could do it right. Right. I mean, that's a good point.

00:36:33 Speaker_00
Well, you mentioned that teachers come for one day and they leave or they come for a week. It's just, it's designed, it's a system designed to... collate chaos and to try to produce some sort of order, but it seems to me to be entirely impossible.

00:36:48 Speaker_00
Pretty much no matter what you do, you're going to do something wrong. How the hell could you possibly avoid it? Every single one of those kids is a pitfall. And I don't mean that in the... That's not a criticism.

00:37:01 Speaker_00
It's just that while the system's designed so that every single kid that comes there is Trouble on stilts.

00:37:09 Speaker_00
And so, and then you're also going to have the case that many of the teachers who are going to apply are going to be people who are applying to that school because it's a last-ditch possibility.

00:37:20 Speaker_03
And so... I often... Yeah, you often... I wondered that sometimes. I'm like, why am I here? I mean, the health insurance is awful. It's like, pay is not... Why choose? That's why people leave. But there's a lot of good people there.

00:37:40 Speaker_03
It's not like this is the bottom of the barrel. There are some of those. It's like, dude, what are you doing? Right, there'd be some of those, yes. But there are also many...

00:37:49 Speaker_03
good people that are doing it because there's something fulfilling about it that I miss, to be honest.

00:37:58 Speaker_00
I miss it. I think what drew my attention to your video and also what made me want to talk to you is because I think the reason that that video went viral and drew the attention

00:38:12 Speaker_00
of the people whose attention it did draw was because you were obviously very sane and careful in an insane situation discussing something utterly preposterous. And it was all of that contrast that made it fascinating.

00:38:28 Speaker_00
I mean, the fact that that issue even arose in a school is ridiculous under anything approximating normal times. And yet you handled it carefully and thoughtfully, and you did it in a way that was obviously of educational benefit to the students.

00:38:50 Speaker_00
And none of that should be surprising, actually, like the manner in which you addressed it. But it's also the fact that that same response to that question is surprising in the education system that made it go viral.

00:39:05 Speaker_00
And so, because we're so accustomed to seeing crazily woke, ideologically possessed, ranting narcissists acting as teachers, ideologically addling children when they ask questions that they should have no concern about whatsoever.

00:39:24 Speaker_00
It just strikes me as utterly preposterous that a 15-year-old kid would think that it was necessary for him to accuse J.K. Rowling of transphobia. 17, okay. So that's just an indication of the state of the school system in general.

00:39:41 Speaker_03
I don't think he was even accusing her. I think he was just repeating what he thought was reality.

00:39:46 Speaker_00
Of course, of course. Of course, exactly. Well, you said that as you investigated with, you know, some relatively elementary, but also eminently same questions, that revealed itself very quickly. He was just spouting the cliches of the moment, right?

00:40:03 Speaker_00
The radical cliches of the moment. And was he doing that because he thought he should? Like, what was your impression of the reasons for his questions?

00:40:10 Speaker_03
He genuinely believes that that was what the truth was. He thought that was reality. He articulates that. I've heard many classmates state this, so it must be true. In the same way, you hear this often.

00:40:23 Speaker_03
I just made a critique video with Barry Weiss doing this. I was a little hard on her. On Joe Rogan, when she's saying... It's the same pattern. She's applying this to Tulsi Gabbard, and he presses her on it slightly, and it dissolves.

00:40:40 Speaker_03
And we all are capable of doing... We all do do this in our lives. I'm not above it.

00:40:46 Speaker_00
No one's above it. No one's above it. We radically seek, we seek to establish consensus rapidly and radically.

00:40:55 Speaker_00
And if there's no challenge to the consensus, that's good because it means that we're unified, but it also means that we can build a false consensus. And that happens continually.

00:41:05 Speaker_00
And I mean, that's one of the dangers of so-called populism is that it's a false consensus, right? It's a consensus of the moment. It's got no staying power. It can't iterate across time.

00:41:16 Speaker_00
The antidote to populist consensus is something like alignment with eternal tradition, because it stops the proclivity for rapid consensus from pathologizing.

00:41:28 Speaker_00
I mean, it's actually a good thing, all things considered, because if human beings couldn't reach agreement on most things rapidly, all we would ever do is fight. The danger, of course, is a false consensus.

00:41:43 Speaker_00
And that's obviously what you were questioning. And you did it in an extremely thoughtful manner. Okay, so you recorded that. Your students edited it? How did it end up edited?

00:41:55 Speaker_03
And also... There was one edit. When he takes out his phone, because he's looking for the tweet for a few, maybe a minute. And so I cut that out. and uploaded it to, yeah, my YouTube channel that I was, I had been uploading everything in the past.

00:42:13 Speaker_00
Right, so this was just standard practice on YouTube. You have to be very careful about what you upload to YouTube, as I found out in 2016, right? Because it's an unbelievably powerful technology, and you never know what's going to happen.

00:42:27 Speaker_00
So, as you also found out. And so, okay, so you uploaded this, and I presume you thought nothing of it. Okay, what happened? Lay out the story.

00:42:38 Speaker_03
It started getting a few views, and then it got...

00:42:44 Speaker_03
13,000 views, the music teacher I was telling you about, who had been on this journey with me in a way, we were exploring this technology, even making videos where there was no students on our free time, like the Fibonacci sequence in music was just the two of us.

00:43:03 Speaker_03
He texts me, he says he's got 13,000 views. Oh, for me that's, whoa. And over what period of time? Maybe, this is probably like a week, two weeks. Okay, right. That afternoon. I get a text from my brother and he says, Elon Musk tweeted a video of you.

00:43:21 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah. I thought there's the kiss of death. Ha ha ha. Right. And I didn't I hadn't opened my Twitter account since that in the show was cool. So I couldn't log in. I didn't have my password and figure it out. And I was like, let me. Oh, well, OK.

00:43:42 Speaker_03
That was then two days later. Well, then I go to school the next day. Don't say a word. I'm like, I'm just gonna not say anything. Maybe no one saw it. You know, I don't really comprehend what's going on with there. When you're in it, it doesn't.

00:43:59 Speaker_03
Principal calls me in his office. He's like, yeah, not talking about it is not gonna work. Like everybody's seen the video. He was on the fence of how to feel about it.

00:44:15 Speaker_03
He was obviously worried, as anyone would be, about his responsibilities and getting in trouble with the higher-ups. Is this against the policy? We have releases. I have the releases where there's no student on camera. We have an audio release.

00:44:32 Speaker_00
And you've been doing this anyways.

00:44:35 Speaker_03
I've been doing this for a while, but this is different. And I think it's totally understandable to be a little shocked. We're in new territory here. Yeah, right. Piers Morgan's team reaches out, would you like to come on Piers Morgan tomorrow? Uh-huh.

00:44:57 Speaker_03
Well, I'm at a crossroads. Do I run with this as far as, there's two options, let it pass over, go back to my life, or I recognize- Maybe, maybe go back to your life.

00:45:11 Speaker_03
Or I recognize that this is a once in a lifetime, potentially, I don't know what it means, where it could go, but it could be an opportunity. There's only one way to find out and that's to run with it.

00:45:24 Speaker_03
Well, if I say, I know this much from my life and regret, if I say no to this, going on Pierce Morgan, which could go badly, I might regret this, but I know I will regret it forever.

00:45:35 Speaker_00
How did you know that? Why did you conclude that?

00:45:38 Speaker_03
Because I have regretted things in my life before. I know that regret, it's worse to try something and to fail in the pursuit of that. I would rather try and run with this ball as far as I can, take it as far as I can till I get tackled.

00:45:53 Speaker_03
than to refuse to pick it up.

00:45:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, you know, there is clinical evidence for that.

00:46:01 Speaker_00
If you ask people, older people, to look back on their life and to list their regrets, it's much more common for them to have serious regrets about chances they didn't take than failures that they that they experienced.

00:46:22 Speaker_00
Failure is a weird thing, you know, because my experience in life has been that nothing I ever actually did failed. It didn't necessarily produce the result that I intended when I intended it. But if it was a genuine effort,

00:46:41 Speaker_00
and I followed through on it, there was some benefit that emerged in consequence of that, that justified the effort, and sometimes that was quite a long time later.

00:46:53 Speaker_00
And I think that kind of stands to reason in a sense too, because the alternative explanation would be that you could you could try to do something difficult well and see it through and there'd be zero impact of that. Well, that makes no sense.

00:47:09 Speaker_00
You're going to learn something. You're you're maybe what you learn is how you could have done it better or how you could do it better, but you're going to learn something. Okay. So you, you, what kind of regrets had you had in the past?

00:47:23 Speaker_00
If you don't mind, maybe you can share some of those, maybe not, but what came to mind? My,

00:47:31 Speaker_03
Original plan was movies. All I wanted to do growing up was make movies. There was nothing more exciting than seeing people be able to alter time and space. It's like they were using the fabric of reality to create worlds which...

00:47:45 Speaker_03
are real when you're watching it. You've explored this idea. And it was like, well, what else, the logical course of action, what else would I possibly want to do than that? There was nothing more exciting.

00:47:58 Speaker_03
And I was undergrad, one of the top film schools in the country, UNC School of the Arts. And I excelled and I hit, I was nailing these opportunities. And I was like, it had kind of got to my head. I got short film after short film, suddenly it's,

00:48:15 Speaker_03
in a pattern that had not going to LA, like writing and producing a feature film right out of the gate using that momentum with this team of like the students that have come together and become this like pirate band almost that have moved from and we raised $25,000 to make this feature film and as we're gonna

00:48:36 Speaker_03
camp out and everyone's going to work for free and film it on the farm where I grew up so we can get all the locations for free and it would cost at least a half a million dollars in production value if you were to do a one-on-one comparison because everyone's working for free.

00:48:52 Speaker_03
I feel like I blew it a lot. I feel like I blew a lot of opportunities. And I'm trying to think of any specifics, but in general, I don't, I did come to the realization that LA is not somewhere, LA is not where I want to live.

00:49:06 Speaker_03
Hollywood is not a game in which I want to participate for the longterm. So I knew I wanted to get out of that. I didn't know what I would do. I went freelance videography and eventually graduate school. So it took me to graduate school and I left LA.

00:49:23 Speaker_03
But those students, the colleagues, the friends, making a movie is challenging. There's a lot of... It presses relationships. It's a deeper idea of why that is. Because often, I think there's some people who are subconsciously just want it to be over.

00:49:42 Speaker_03
Because when you're making a movie, it takes like a year. And then you have the editor, and he's editing for, you know, that's the part that takes a year. The production itself, a month or two or whatnot. But then it's just like, this has to be over.

00:49:54 Speaker_03
And there's so much pressure. And then that causes people to kind of dissolve under the pressure. And it's like, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We're never going to have all these people come together and work for free.

00:50:03 Speaker_00
Okay, so you saw the same thing beckoning there with the Pierce Morgan opportunity, obviously. And it is the case. I mean, this is the case in life. not now and then, something, many impossible things come together and a door opens.

00:50:22 Speaker_00
And if you don't walk through it, then the probability that those impossible things will come together again is zero. And so, okay, so you decided to go on Pierce Market. So what happened?

00:50:34 Speaker_03
It was just, it was just me for a 15 minute interview. Okay. End of a segment. Yeah. So I'm in Massachusetts in this little town in the woods. I didn't know what to expect. I was like, is a crew coming? Like, what's going on?

00:50:48 Speaker_03
A guy in a van pulls up to my house. Oh yeah, you hadn't talked directly to the camera, did you? He's like, Harold, I'm going to mic you up. I don't know what's going on. No instructions. He's like, I jump in the back of a van right after school.

00:51:01 Speaker_03
So I'm at school talking to the music teacher. I'm like, dude, they want me to go on Pierce Morgan. Do you think I'll get in trouble if I do this? And he's like, you gotta do it. And I'm like, I gotta do it. And I said the same thing I said to you.

00:51:14 Speaker_03
And he said, just don't, it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission is because I knew that if I were to ask for permission and they were to say no, I'd be in a predicament now.

00:51:24 Speaker_03
So I'm not gonna turn that down because I know what that feeling would be, but.

00:51:27 Speaker_00
Well, it's also not the least bit obvious that you're required to ask for permission. Besides that, this is something that everybody who's watching and listening should understand.

00:51:38 Speaker_00
The answer to, if you go to an authority, especially a bureaucratic authority, and you ask for permission, why wouldn't they say no? All there is in it for them is risk. and perhaps jealousy and fear. So why would, of course they're gonna say no.

00:52:01 Speaker_00
Why wouldn't they say no? And so then you think, well, how do you deal with that? The answer is, well, you're a free agent. What's the indication that you're required to ask for permission?

00:52:13 Speaker_00
No, in fact, if it's not illegal, or if you're not violating your, you know, an explicit, and really I mean explicit contract, it's like, Don't ask.

00:52:23 Speaker_00
It's hard enough to convince yourself that you should do it, much less convince someone else who's also not going to benefit from it in the least. You know, the other thing to understand, too, is that entrepreneurial motivation is relatively rare.

00:52:36 Speaker_00
It's only about one person in 50 who wants to start their own business. I really learned this when I started selling to corporations and dealing with middle management people. The fundamental motivation of 90

00:52:52 Speaker_00
5% of people in middle management is never to do anything that makes them get noticed for any reason, good or bad. They wanna do their job, they wanna do it in complete and utter invisibility.

00:53:06 Speaker_00
And if an entrepreneurial opportunity comes along, they say, that's risky, no. And you might say, yeah, well, you know, there's an immense potential payoff. rather low probability, immense potential payoff. That's the entrepreneurial game.

00:53:23 Speaker_00
And their attitude is, I don't want to be this marked zebra that the lions cut out of the herd. You know that story? So, you know the zebra story? I'll just tell it for people who might not have heard it.

00:53:37 Speaker_00
So, zebras in principle are camouflaged, but it's kind of a weird idea because they live on the veldt and they're black and white stripes and you can seriously see a zebra. So the question is, what's the camouflage?

00:53:50 Speaker_00
And the answer seems to be that it's against the herd camouflage, because there's no single zebras. There's herds of zebras.

00:53:56 Speaker_00
And so when the zebras are milling about together in a herd, because the black and white stripes are edges, if you look away and then you look again, you can't tell what zebra you were looking at.

00:54:08 Speaker_00
Now, the reason that's relevant is because lions can't organize themselves to hunt a zebra unless they can identify one. Okay, so you don't want to be an identifiable zebra.

00:54:18 Speaker_00
So biologists discovered this because they were studying zebras and trying to figure out how to watch a given zebra so they could figure out what it was up to, but they'd lose track.

00:54:29 Speaker_00
So they would either clip their ears with a plastic clip or put a dab of paint on their haunches. And as soon as they did that, the lions killed them. The lions could mark out the zebra and organize their hunt. And then that was a dead zebra.

00:54:41 Speaker_00
And you know, you hear that in the natural world that lions often cull the herd and they take the weak and the unfit. It's like, no, they take the identifiable zebra. And the instinct of many, many people is do not be the identifiable prey animal.

00:54:59 Speaker_00
Right. And so if you're going to ask for permission, even permission from yourself in an odd way, the default answer is clearly no. And so, and obviously so, and so you're going to have to step outside the herd.

00:55:13 Speaker_00
Now, the question with human beings is, is there advantages in stepping outside the herd? And the advantage is, well, you get notice.

00:55:22 Speaker_00
And that's not so good if there are predators around, but it's also the pathway to extreme success, which has massive potential payoffs.

00:55:32 Speaker_00
Now, I'm not saying that everybody should pursue that or that everybody should want it, but that's the landscape of risk. So you decided you'd already learned enough in your life to know that you don't casually throw away spectacular opportunities.

00:55:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, right. The pain of regret is a unique form of pain.

00:55:51 Speaker_00
Yes. Yeah, well, it's a kind of self-betrayal, right? Because you had the chance. You had the opportunity. Yes, that's what it was.

00:55:57 Speaker_03
The door opened. That's what I was trying to put my finger on earlier. And I had no one to blame but myself on how it turned out. That's seriously annoying. And that's what eats you.

00:56:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, right. Definitely. Definitely. Well, it's bad enough when someone else gets in your way. But when you get in your way, it's like... Well, how do you score worse? Definitely, definitely.

00:56:21 Speaker_00
You know, it's also useful to know, too, that I think this is extremely useful, is that you have to deeply understand that no risk is, first of all, not desirable. You actually don't want a risk-free life. You want the risks you voluntarily take.

00:56:35 Speaker_00
And maybe you want high-stakes risks you voluntarily take. But even more fundamentally, there is no risk pathway. you're screwed no matter what you do. And that's terrible, but it's also freeing.

00:56:50 Speaker_00
And so once you know that there's no safety, well, then you can take the most interesting risk. And why not? And then maybe you don't need safety. Okay, so you decided to go on Piers Morgan.

00:57:00 Speaker_03
That ties directly into what happened on Piers Morgan. Yes, okay. So 15 minutes, and he asked the usual questions you would expect. How was he with you? He was really nice. He was very... Charismatic, likeable kind, and very... Well, he's a funny guy.

00:57:18 Speaker_00
He's kind of like Simon Cowell, in a way. You know, you can see in America's Got... I mean, they both worked on America's Got Talent and Britain's Got Talent. You can see if Cowell likes somebody, he's really on their side.

00:57:30 Speaker_00
If he doesn't like them, he's really not on their side. And Morgan is like that. And he's also the sort of guy who... He'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you start playing games, then you're in serious trouble.

00:57:41 Speaker_00
So he obviously started by giving you the benefit of the doubt. He was probably, you know, reasonably pleased with the video that he had seen and thought, you know, that he would... be inviting to begin with. So that worked out well.

00:57:53 Speaker_03
And he asked a question, the last question was interesting, it's the one that stands out in my mind.

00:57:57 Speaker_03
And he goes, in all your Harry, because he watched the video, he was a producer, someone went to the YouTube channel in the research and I was like, give me something to, they found the me talking about archetypes in Harry Potter.

00:58:09 Speaker_03
Ah, that I have from you.

00:58:10 Speaker_00
Oh yes, I see, I see.

00:58:11 Speaker_03
And he goes, so, and he thought I was some Harry Potter scholar or something, and he goes, so, given all your Harry Potter studies, what would the best piece of life advice be, from all your Harry Potter studies?

00:58:23 Speaker_03
And he said, voluntarily enter the unknown. Which is what you were just talking about. It might be the unknown beneath the surface of Hogwarts. It might be facing the serpent that can turn you to stone when you see it, like fear.

00:58:43 Speaker_03
But you must do so voluntarily in order to save Ginny. And it's the voluntary aspect of that that is, which is just classic, everyone echoes that, they're like, okay.

00:58:58 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, it's a very good thing to know.

00:59:00 Speaker_03
But it's true.

00:59:01 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, it's also surprising because it belies the, what would you say, the merely objective sense of the real. A situation is the same no matter how you encounter it. That's an objectivist perspective.

00:59:19 Speaker_00
No, a situation is radically different depending on how you encounter it. Kicking and screaming is very different than voluntarily, even if the stressor is the same.

00:59:30 Speaker_00
And there doesn't seem to be any particular limit to that, which is why, of course, all the heroic quest archetypal narratives are voluntary confrontation with truly terrible things. Otherwise, the quest has no real deep significance.

00:59:47 Speaker_00
Okay, so the Piers Morgan interview, that went well. That was a success. What was the consequence of that?

00:59:54 Speaker_03
The next day I go back into school, they call me back into the principal's office and they say, dude, you went on Piers Morgan. Like, can you at least check in with us before you do Piers Morgan? Those exact words that I was presented with.

01:00:07 Speaker_03
Can you at least check with us? But what you just articulated was masterful. And that's the best logical read that you could provide on that situation, I think.

01:00:18 Speaker_00
All bureaucratic entities will always say no to anything that's question related. Obviously.

01:00:23 Speaker_03
There's no benefit to them?

01:00:25 Speaker_00
There's only risk, right? There's only downside, of course. Yeah, this is partly why I think research has been almost completely stifled in universities. You cannot do risk-free research. Period. It's not possible. You can't just do the next safe thing.

01:00:41 Speaker_00
It's too obvious, first of all, and there's no excitement in the discovery. It has to be a risk, and the risk has to be real. And, you know, we don't want to be too cynical about this either.

01:00:52 Speaker_00
You know, it's not obviously the role of bureaucracies to take risks. Right? It's the role of bureaucracies to set policies and strategies and to abide by the rules and move forward.

01:01:05 Speaker_00
Well, you see that in Harry Potter too, because there's a weird dynamic constantly in the Harry Potter stories that Rowling is.

01:01:11 Speaker_00
She was great at this because Harry's band, like they're academically oriented and they're upward striving, but they're always rule breakers. Right? And the grand wizard at the top of the ladder

01:01:25 Speaker_00
He put all the rules that govern the educational institution in place and knows what they are, but is perfectly happy that Harry and his, you know, band of ethical miscreants break rules.

01:01:38 Speaker_03
Yeah, and he knows about it almost. They insinuate that he knows what they're doing the entire time.

01:01:42 Speaker_00
Right, right, exactly. And lets it go anyways. Yeah, well, that's that constant Paradox, it's really the paradox of, it's really the paradox of something like liberal versus conservative.

01:01:55 Speaker_00
You know, the conservatives fundamentally, I hate to call the conservatives the bureaucrats because in our weird political world, things have all got flipped around.

01:02:03 Speaker_00
But generally speaking, the conservative types are much more rule-oriented and much less entrepreneurial. And so, but there's a dance between those two that's absolutely necessary and there's no getting rid of the conflict.

01:02:18 Speaker_00
because most of the time you should follow the rules, but some of the time you definitely shouldn't. And wisdom is the ability to, and daring, that's the ability to tell the difference. Well, so you went on Piers Morgan.

01:02:30 Speaker_00
And so I don't blame your administrator for, Either do I. Objecting. Although, you know, what you would have hoped for is something like a little elbow saying, you know, you shouldn't have done that, but good work.

01:02:44 Speaker_03
Oh, there was. Oh, good. There was that, well, the assistant principal who ascended and led that whole coup and brought... There was something different about his response.

01:02:52 Speaker_03
But the principal, the 30-year-old principal, who was always very helpful to me and like... Yeah. Helping me to get... You know, like, Warren, you should get your license in phonetics so you can have this new special ed license.

01:03:05 Speaker_03
My first year, he was kind of this... a guiding hand before he suddenly had this power. And there was that at the end, and he was like, I would have done the same thing.

01:03:15 Speaker_00
Oh, yeah. Good. Good, good. Good. That's the nod and the wink. Yeah. Yeah, every institution that's gonna function needs that, right? Because you need the people who impose the rules and the structure, but they need to always be able to say,

01:03:29 Speaker_00
Well, yeah, there is a reason for not following the procedure in that particular case.

01:03:33 Speaker_03
And he said, I got to, I need to run this up the flagpole. I'm going to need to call, because this is just getting, I don't know how to respond to this. Pierce Mori, I don't know what this, this isn't in the playbook. This isn't right. Right.

01:03:46 Speaker_03
So they arranged for a meeting with the executive director and her team of lawyers. There's a board that runs this school. She, answers to them, I guess. She's never present.

01:03:59 Speaker_03
She used to kind of have her office over near mine, but I hadn't seen her at all this that past year. She just said, and so she, uh, there was a meeting with her.

01:04:09 Speaker_03
Yeah, there was, I went into a room with that principal, um, the one who, and it was a zoom call. I think, no, it's just audio. And her lawyers were sitting next to her and they just said, well, technically you didn't break any rules. So you're,

01:04:27 Speaker_03
Congratulations. Good luck to you. I hope you don't make a mistake. I hate to lose you. And I thought, fair enough. I'll take responsibility for anything I say and do. And me and that music teacher were like...

01:04:44 Speaker_03
But that's, it was, it felt like that should be the response.

01:04:50 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, that was, that's a pretty good response. I mean, it's not surprising that they looked into it. Yeah. I mean, one of the things too, that's worth thinking about too, is that

01:05:00 Speaker_00
When you're called to account for yourself, when you break a rule, for example, and you upset the normal course of the routine, it's not such a bad idea to present the people who are now cast into doubt and confusion with a plan.

01:05:18 Speaker_00
So for example, I had the same experience as you did, essentially, when I put up the first videos that brought me to public attention surrounding Bill C-16. It was just, it was really the same sort of experiment that you ran.

01:05:35 Speaker_00
I'd put up a lot of my lectures on YouTube and they'd got a moderate amount of attention and a reasonable amount for the time because I started putting them up, I think in 2013 on YouTube. Which was very early in YouTube development.

01:05:51 Speaker_00
But they hadn't attracted anything like viral attention. And then this idiot virtue signaling bill was put into law by our idiot virtue signaling prime minister. I made three videos objecting to that and some university policies.

01:06:06 Speaker_00
That was purely experimental because I was still playing with the technology and wondering what use it was and seeing if I could lay out a structured argument as well. I edited it quite a bit actually, that one. Interesting.

01:06:19 Speaker_00
And that went viral and then I was called

01:06:23 Speaker_00
into the principal's office so to speak at the university which kind of surprised me to begin with but not exactly because they didn't know what to do with this and unsurprisingly I mean whether the dean for example had any right to have to say anything whatsoever with what I was doing with YouTube in my home in my free time is a completely different issue but I suggested to them that the University of Toronto could do the

01:06:52 Speaker_00
daring thing and have a debate on free speech. And so that was a concrete plan, right?

01:06:58 Speaker_00
And they were looking for something to do, they didn't know what to do, and that is what they did, and for better or for worse, and that was much better than many of the things that they could have done.

01:07:09 Speaker_00
Now, it still worked out that it became impossible really for me to keep my position there, although I did for about a year.

01:07:18 Speaker_00
But it is also the case to know that if you're going to step outside of the bounds of normal propriety, it doesn't hurt to have a plan, especially for the people that you confuse, because they also don't know what to do, and they're going to

01:07:34 Speaker_00
hunker down and they're going to dissociate themselves from you if you are deemed to be a risk, especially a contamination risk. And the topics you were discussing, especially on the ruling side, would have that element because, of course,

01:07:49 Speaker_00
to the degree that the propaganda surrounding the idea of transphobia is effective, you can easily be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. But you weren't, you weren't. That didn't exactly happen in this school, so.

01:08:04 Speaker_03
You said something interesting about, and I agree, that the university, the dean had narrated in your own home what you do with YouTube. How does that correlate to the dean's business or the university's business?

01:08:15 Speaker_03
What's interesting is that when you go into the handbook, which after all this occurred, I went and kind of poked into, it's written that they have every involvement at

01:08:26 Speaker_03
this school into whatever a teacher says politically on social media, if they say, and there's no clear objective definition of where that line is.

01:08:38 Speaker_00
Of course, of course. So they just reserve to themselves the right, yeah, the College of Psychologists has basically done exactly the same thing. in Canada with the people that I'm in trouble for in relationship to my license.

01:08:50 Speaker_00
It's like, there are rules apparently about the way I can conduct myself, but the only way you find out what those rules are is by being accused of breaking them. It's not like they're written down, because of course they can't be, right?

01:09:05 Speaker_00
And so that's also a terrible thing because, and this is something that's happening in our culture very rapidly, and apparently is something that to Tocqueville,

01:09:16 Speaker_00
prophesied back in the mid-1800s that if totalitarianism came to democracies, it would come in the form of essentially mid-level bureaucracies invisibly making everything daring illegal.

01:09:34 Speaker_00
And those open-ended policies are precisely the sort of thing that they're like They're like comprehensive traps.

01:09:44 Speaker_03
So they could have actually gone after you. Oh, yeah. It was a unique contract to begin with. And I remember signing that when I first agreed on to that school. It said you could be fired for any reason, no reason, at any time. Yeah.

01:09:56 Speaker_03
And that's not a reality at your average high school. So that stood out to me. I thought, interesting. OK. Well, this is a new world. This is an unusual world that I don't... So.

01:10:07 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, you could see also, though, you could actually understand, I would say, the reasons for a contract like that at a school like that.

01:10:16 Speaker_00
Because so many possible things could go wrong that the rules arguably would have to be more comprehensive to cover any possible occurrence. Okay, so what happens after Pierce Morgan?

01:10:32 Speaker_03
Things were different.

01:10:34 Speaker_03
no one ever spoke to me about it again the video or i was continued to make youtube videos is what i should point okay okay so you did continue to make and post them did they also attract more attention after that now that i had this yeah i'm still doing the youtube channel and it's it's grown it's not so it wasn't like it was now and it's not huge but it's

01:10:58 Speaker_03
It was decent and it was fun. Most importantly, it was me and the music teacher. We were like, okay, we have this opportunity. He didn't want any part of it. It was his personality type.

01:11:08 Speaker_03
If you had offered him the chance to swap places with me, I really think he would have declined it. It's just too much. Too much exposure comes with that. You're in the unknown and it's on you when you're entering this anyway.

01:11:23 Speaker_03
But we every Friday after school, we set up a little studio downstairs in my house and every Friday after school, we would just sit down, record something, talk about whatever we wanted to talk about for an hour and then edit it in an hour and post it.

01:11:38 Speaker_03
So that's the voice you hear in those early, if you ever look at those, that's the voice you hear off camera. And he didn't want to show his face, which is understandable.

01:11:49 Speaker_03
And all those perspectives in there are his genuine perspectives, and he's very liberal. So it was interesting. It was an interesting dynamic. It was like this classic... It was so stereotypical, people thought it was fake.

01:12:00 Speaker_03
They were like, this is clearly staged, which I take as a compliment. It's like, really? You think the only way we could achieve this outcome would be to script it? That means we're doing something right.

01:12:10 Speaker_03
So we were making these, and... things just at the school... I noticed I stopped being invited to certain things. There was, like, a wedding. I wasn't invited to that. My whole Site One team was, and there was... Everyone goes out for drinks on Friday.

01:12:26 Speaker_00
There's the bar nearby, and... The hero... You know, heroes in classic stories often become contaminated by the unknown.

01:12:34 Speaker_00
So even in the Lord of the Rings stories, the fact that Frodo and Bilbo both know Gandalf makes them somewhat socially unpopular in the Shire. Even though they're associated with magic power. And you might think that's all status. It's not all status.

01:12:55 Speaker_00
It makes... It makes the people who want to operate only within the confines of the Shire, let's say, very nervous, and rightly so, because that is a disruptive force.

01:13:09 Speaker_00
Even when Bilbo, yeah, comes back from his initial adventure, he's regarded with suspicion for the rest of his life. Admiration, yes, but also suspicion. And from the more conservative forces, you might say.

01:13:24 Speaker_03
It's a good point.

01:13:25 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, well.

01:13:28 Speaker_03
That's how it felt, yeah.

01:13:29 Speaker_00
Yeah, well, you can also understand that biologically with the zebra analog in a way. It's like you don't want to be too close to the target of the predators, you know.

01:13:39 Speaker_00
And this is a deep biological instinct, you know, that the reason that fish exist in schools and herbivores exist in herds is because if you're with a bunch of other animals of your type and a predator attacks, the probability that it will be you is

01:13:57 Speaker_00
proportionate to how well you hide in the herd, obviously. So, to the degree that you live life as a prey animal, then you're going to hide in the herd. Now, the question you might ask yourself is, do you want to live life as a prey animal?

01:14:13 Speaker_00
And human beings really have that choice because We're very strange creatures. We're predators, but we're also prey animals, and you can take either of those pathways forward.

01:14:24 Speaker_03
It was interesting because this opportunity came along where I was presented with the decision, do I leave the herd, go into the unknown on this journey and see where it takes me, or do I go back to the safety?

01:14:35 Speaker_00
Okay, so you said now that there was some social consequence afterwards, but that things more or less went back to normal. What happened with the students? And then eventually your job at the school did disappear.

01:14:48 Speaker_00
So walk us through the aftermath of this flurry of attention.

01:14:57 Speaker_03
I think that the staff went to great lengths to insulate the students. That student that was the voice in the video, he loved it. He was aware of it. And I went in that meeting with the lawyers.

01:15:11 Speaker_03
I was like, look, so-and-so, I'd be happy to talk to his, like, I think he's going to be fine with it. Like, no one expected this, but he's a good kid. They're like, no, we don't want you anywhere near this. Like, we'll talk to the parents.

01:15:23 Speaker_03
And the parents were fine with it. He already had the releases.

01:15:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's good. So you had dotted your I's and crossed your T's with regards to student involvement.

01:15:31 Speaker_03
So, long story short, a few months later, I had another conversation with that student around communism. We were continuously doing what we had always been doing with the video production. But I was feeling more and more like I got to be careful.

01:15:50 Speaker_03
And the music teacher was telling me, he's like, look, man, you've got a lot of eyes on you. And it made logical sense that they were looking for any slip up, anything that I got the sense that they wanted.

01:16:07 Speaker_03
It would have been easier to get rid of me when that video came out. But there was so much attention around it that it would have put them at risk to do so.

01:16:19 Speaker_03
I'm not saying that there was a plan to wait and let that blow over and then, but I think they needed it good enough. I thought they were just not going to renew my contract over the summer, which is usually what they do. It's very common.

01:16:36 Speaker_03
And you thought that might happen? I thought with 90% certainty that that's what would happen. It would make sense. As you said, it would be the logical thing to do. It's in their best interest.

01:16:46 Speaker_03
There's no good to come up having one of your teachers out there with a growing audience, a small but growing audience, saying certain things that are exam- It could be troublesome. There's no benefit to that.

01:16:59 Speaker_00
Well, yeah. The funny thing, too, is that there's no benefit from a pure analysis of risk, but you know, what you did with those videos definitely, in my estimation anyways, brought credit to the school. So, you know, with more imagination,

01:17:20 Speaker_00
what you accomplished could have been very useful to the school with more imagination.

01:17:25 Speaker_03
That would require them to go public, though, which they were not going to do. They don't want that spotlight.

01:17:31 Speaker_00
That would require people to know what... Yeah, well, that harkens back to something that we discussed, is that the default presumption for the vast majority of people is no amount of success justifies risk.

01:17:47 Speaker_00
Right, and then people ask themselves, well, why am I not successful? It's like, well, because your threshold for risk is zero. And zero isn't a threshold of risk that's associated with success. So if you're...

01:18:04 Speaker_00
Presumption is, I'll only be successful if I take no risks. That's the bargain. Then you've foregone success. And the thing about that that's perverse is that that's a risk.

01:18:16 Speaker_00
Because we actually don't know how much success we need in order to reconcile ourselves to life. Life is very difficult. And so you might need a fair bit of actual success and opportunity to offset the difficulty.

01:18:31 Speaker_00
Otherwise, it's bitterness and regret, which is not a good pathway. So, you know, I made excuses for the administrators at your school, let's say, for being taken aback and said that it was understandable of them to

01:18:48 Speaker_00
assume that you were going to merely abide in a predictable way by the rules. But had they been more entrepreneurial and more open to the idea of opportunity, then the school itself could have benefited dramatically from what you had accomplished.

01:19:04 Speaker_00
But that also would mean that in the best of all possible worlds that you might have been able to present them with a plan to make that easy for them.

01:19:17 Speaker_03
I did see huge potential in that. Suddenly the students, but there's a lot of potential downside and risk to this too, and the students suddenly have the ability to create content that can reach a large audience.

01:19:28 Speaker_03
I mean, I haven't thought this out in a clear plan, but it was an opportunity.

01:19:34 Speaker_00
Well, it's an opportunity to have a much more realistic video editing program. It's like, well, now we're going to make things that people will watch.

01:19:43 Speaker_03
If this had occurred at that first high school, Neshoba, where we were already putting things on Twitter, they would have... I remember the head of my department, we would have... who knows what we could have done with this.

01:19:54 Speaker_00
Right, so you think he would have run with it. Yeah, yeah. Tell me what happened. Yeah, I can put a button on it. Yeah, what happened with your job?

01:20:02 Speaker_00
Like you said, you know, you thought that the most likely consequence would be that they just wouldn't renew your contract. Yeah. And when did you come to that conclusion and how did you reconcile yourself to that?

01:20:16 Speaker_03
I need to run with this opportunity, grow if I can with this platform in case something happens. It seems like that's a really bad, logically that sounds like a really bad backup plan.

01:20:30 Speaker_03
I'm going to make a YouTube channel, but it is something and it's, again, I would have been a fool not to run with that ball as far as I could take it.

01:20:38 Speaker_00
Well, especially with your broader ambitions, you know, because you were interested in the broader sense in... Connecting with an audience, a filmmaker as well.

01:20:47 Speaker_03
It's like suddenly... I mean, who knows what I could do with this? Right. So, but to put a button on this, what happened, I uploaded... I did the same thing. I uploaded a video with a different student who hadn't seen that video. And I thought,

01:21:04 Speaker_03
because it was just from another conversation, but it was identical. The pattern was so identical. I thought, this might be worth sharing. It's identical to the last one, so what could go wrong?

01:21:14 Speaker_03
He was a new student, so I was like, we need to get permission from your parents if you want to have, after it was done. I was like, look, we could upload this. It's identical. I need permission from your parents, like written confirmation.

01:21:26 Speaker_03
I need your permission because you're new, so we don't have the releases. And so we got that uploaded, told the music teacher, and he was like,

01:21:37 Speaker_03
you know, just, because we'd been going back and forth on what to do with the channel, because we knew people wanted that kind of, you know, that's what the audience wanted, to see real students. Yeah, right. But I was, and I had toyed with it.

01:21:51 Speaker_03
I alluded to the communist conversation with that other student. And so I had posted that previously. Two weeks go by, I, in the middle of the day, I get called into a meeting and they say, we've decided to part ways.

01:22:04 Speaker_03
Because you uploaded a video to YouTube against policy. We told you not to do that. I said, you told me not to do that? You congratulated me. I was like, how is it okay the first time?

01:22:15 Speaker_03
And I could tell, though, when I walked in the room, their mind was already made up. It didn't matter what I said, so I didn't really say much. And I said, are you alluding to this student? I spoke to the parents.

01:22:25 Speaker_03
And I said, have you spoken to his parents? And they said, No, we're happy to do an investigation and reach out to him if that's what you'd like, or you can just agree to leave now." And they said, could you check with his parents?

01:22:37 Speaker_03
It seems like a factor to take in. So I said, for sure, we'll just do the investigation. They're like, okay, go home and HR will be in touch in three days. But I couldn't touch anything.

01:22:51 Speaker_03
They took my computer, everything, and I was escorted like a criminal.

01:22:56 Speaker_00
All right, well, look, I think I'm going to end the YouTube side with that, but I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side is delve into that in a little bit more detail.

01:23:04 Speaker_00
It'd be interesting to continue the conversation about, well, why your school made that decision, what possible role HR might've played, and how these things could be managed in general, because, well, people who are watching and listening are going to be interested in, well, what strategy should you adopt

01:23:24 Speaker_00
if you dare to take risks within the confines of an organization and find yourself running afoul of the authorities. And I want to know like exactly how you thought this through.

01:23:34 Speaker_00
So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire site for the remainder of this conversation. And for now, Warren, thank you very much for coming in today to talk about this. So, you know, part of your story is,

01:23:50 Speaker_00
what happens when you mess with an incredibly powerful technology, right? Because you're living your normal life and you're playing with YouTube. I think that is the interesting story. Oh, definitely.

01:23:59 Speaker_00
It's like, look the hell out, because this is a global communication platform that you're publishing on. And so how do you deal with that? Well, no one knows. No one knows. Hence the discussion. So thank you very much for that. Absolutely. Thank you.

01:24:12 Speaker_00
And to everybody watching, listening, the film crew here in Manhattan today, thank you guys very much for setting this up. It ran very smoothly, technically, and that's always good.

01:24:19 Speaker_00
And join us on the Daily Wire side, everyone, for the continuation of this discussion. Bye-bye.