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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Turned out to be J.K. Rowling's reactions to the trans propaganda insanity that plagues our culture in 15 different ways.

Speaker 2 Do you still like her work despite her bigoted opinions?

Speaker 2 So let's get specific though.

Speaker 2 Let's define bigoted opinions. What opinions are bigoted? She has had a history of being extremely transphobic, I've heard.

Speaker 2 And you've heard, so 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.

Speaker 2 So you find that bigoted? What do you find about

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Do you find that transphobic yourself?

Speaker 2 I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm just going with what a lot of other people have said. So let's pause it.
Let's not go with what other people are saying.

Speaker 2 Let's try and learn how to critically think. So let's analyze the tweet ourselves.
So that statement, do you see anything problematic?

Speaker 1 Was shared by Elon Musk among many other people. And as you might imagine, that

Speaker 1 produced an explosive effect on Warren's life. So it happened yesterday.
I was fired from my

Speaker 1 full-time teaching position. That was followed up by a Pierce Morgan interview, which I guess was the secondary explosion in the two explosions that rocked his life.

Speaker 1 I am absolutely surprised by this completely. I never expected this at all.
This came out accidentally.

Speaker 1 We have interactions like this on a daily basis. This one just happened to be captured on camera.

Speaker 1 Which was also quite distressing, as you might expect, given his level of commitment to his teaching profession. I have devoted four years of my life

Speaker 1 to this school. And

Speaker 1 yesterday, it was like being a character in a video game and just being deleted. I wanted to talk to Warren because I liked the video that he made.

Speaker 1 I thought it was remarkable for its sanity, especially given the time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so we sat down for an hour and a half to talk all that through. The consequences of saying what you think when the situation is set up to reward you for maintaining your silence.

Speaker 1 Join us for that discussion. Hello, Mr.
Smith. Thank you for coming in today.
It's an honor. Thank you.
Yeah, no problem. Yeah,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Lots of people who are watching and listening won't know anything about you, so why don't we start from the beginning?

Speaker 1 What was it that brought you to public attention? And tell us the story about your teaching career.

Speaker 1 Well, public attention, it was that video that you're talking about.

Speaker 1 But the beginning, I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot because I've had time to reflect on it more.

Speaker 1 After that video, there was

Speaker 1 a strange experience because suddenly you have one five-minute video and suddenly you have this perceived value.

Speaker 1 But I mean, I was the exact same person as before that video. Now, I mean, it was not, for me, it was life-changing though.

Speaker 1 Suddenly, so I have people, some people wanting to talk to me, which was people that I have genuinely admired. Like,

Speaker 1 I mean, this is a bit

Speaker 1 kind of the

Speaker 1 Dave Rubin, just

Speaker 1 opportunities that I never, just, never expected. And so I've been reflecting on those conversations because I often found myself kind of feeling like I was

Speaker 1 trying to live up to something from that video. 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.

Speaker 1 I have no background in the Socratic method or critical thinking. I was just doing what I thought was sensible in the moment.

Speaker 1 You don't necessarily know who you are. You know, that's the thing.
And

Speaker 1 it wasn't exactly chance that made the video go viral, right? You obviously touched on a nerve

Speaker 1 in a manner that people admired. Tell the story of the video and talk about your work, too.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So after graduate school, I found myself as a public school teacher right up before COVID, the year leading into COVID, just a rate teaching what I majored in.

Speaker 1 And my plans were always to be a college professor. And I teach some courses, but I'm not tenure track or anything.
And perhaps one day,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 I found myself in this unlikely position and I enjoyed it, teaching the same subject matter, video technology, what we're doing right here.

Speaker 1 Two high school kids.

Speaker 1 What was your, 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? 19, 2019.
2019.

Speaker 1 And then you were looking, what kind of jobs were you looking for in education?

Speaker 1 In education, and you landed a job as a high school teacher. I was a high school teacher just by pure kind of just chance.
And I really enjoyed it. COVID hits.
Everything goes ape crazy.

Speaker 1 The school shuts down. They make cuts because of the teachers' union.
All All first-year hires

Speaker 1 are gone.

Speaker 1 So that kind of left a taste in my mouth about unions.

Speaker 1 One of my first experiences with unions.

Speaker 1 And so I started looking for another job and I found a school that specialized in kids with behavioral challenges.

Speaker 1 And this is kind of what I was alluding to at the beginning. There are things that I've not,

Speaker 1 I've wanted to talk about in these kind of interviews that happen or when someone wants to discuss this, they want to discuss the video. And I find myself, you've spoken about when you feel your words

Speaker 1 making you not what you could be or weaker.

Speaker 1 You can feel it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 And that's how you... 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.

Speaker 1 And we can get into that. Okay.
That was in graduate school. Okay.

Speaker 1 But I was feeling that in those conversations, trying to live up to something in a way. I mean,

Speaker 1 it was,

Speaker 1 you're kind of saying that what people want to hear.

Speaker 1 Not trying to sound intelligent, but something along something like that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the reason I bring that, because that is kind of,

Speaker 1 I've never spoken about the reality of the school where I was teaching. Yeah, okay.
Okay. Well, let's go down that path.
So these are kids with behavioral challenges that could not

Speaker 1 other schools could not handle them.

Speaker 1 So they put them all together. It's a last line of defense, sort of.
So they're specialized. It's funded through

Speaker 1 the 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 bullied. Some are the bullied.

Speaker 1 For whatever reason, that school can't,

Speaker 1 they're just not equipped. 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.

Speaker 1 And here I am.

Speaker 1 And you were hired at that school? With COVID going on.

Speaker 1 Did you have any experience at all dealing with behaviorally challenged kids? No. So why'd they hire you?

Speaker 1 I interviewed well.

Speaker 1 I'm going to be, I'm going to strive to be as honest as I can throughout this. So I interviewed well.
Yeah. I think they saw potential.

Speaker 1 I think they were looking for young teachers that could weather that kind of storm.

Speaker 1 Were they mostly boys in the school? Yes. What proportion? I would say 80%.

Speaker 1 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? High school age, whether there are some middle school.

Speaker 1 It was interesting the way the building is divided to where a subset of middle school specialized with one group.

Speaker 1 But because of COVID, it was divided up into pods because they were worried about cross-contamination of COVID. So there was 10 students approximately to one site.

Speaker 1 And I was assigned to one site as the multimedia teacher, teaching the same thing I've always taught. And there was no crossover.

Speaker 1 And then there were three teachers assigned to one site to manage those 10 students, which ratio of teacher to student is quite high.

Speaker 1 That's what their needs necessitate.

Speaker 1 How long did you teach at that school? Up until losing my job. So So four years.
Four years. Okay, so you stuck it out too.
Well, I remember when

Speaker 1 the first speech they gave,

Speaker 1 the principal that hired me, I really was, I'm very fond of, and the assistant principal, they

Speaker 1 are no longer there. 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.

Speaker 1 I remember he, I was in the interview.

Speaker 1 And this assistant principal walks in and he's like dressed. There was really no dress code because

Speaker 1 he walks in and he's like, blow my mind in eight seconds.

Speaker 1 And then I forget what I said. And then he just walked out and didn't say a single word.
And I left thinking, I just blew that interview, but I got the job. So anyways, we're there on the first day.

Speaker 1 And he's like, look, guys, if you're still teaching at this school in four years,

Speaker 1 something's probably wrong with you, or you have some sadomasochistic,

Speaker 1 or you just have some, I think he was alluding to that. There's some reason you have that, like, this is not

Speaker 1 your typical pathway for educators. You're trying to illustrate the reality that most times they get traditional educators that realize where they are and it's too late at that point.

Speaker 1 And then they just vanish. And they're like, I mean, they last a week if that.
We've had teachers come in and last a day, one day, and just get in their car and leave.

Speaker 1 What happens to them? They just, they're like, this is chaos. This is,

Speaker 1 I can't, I can't survive this for a year.

Speaker 1 We're 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, fights breaking out.

Speaker 1 It's not juvy, but it's one step away from juvie.

Speaker 1 Though you also have students that are not headed to juvie, but they're the ones that get bullied.

Speaker 1 Or for whatever reason, they have an IEP plan that

Speaker 1 an individualized education plan. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I have dyslexia.

Speaker 1 Though

Speaker 1 some students would have dyslexia to a degree where they need, it was a special education school and it's designed with, so that we can accommodate everything.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And so the students that are hyper aggressive. are put in one so there's going to be flaws to this logically are put in one um

Speaker 1 like quadrant with one site they were divided into sites one two three four whatnot so that there's no you can't put the bullies with the bullied

Speaker 1 right

Speaker 1 but then you have hyperaggressive people

Speaker 1 yeah a lot of fights right that's the site i was on

Speaker 1 so let's just get this timeline exactly right so you got your master's degree in 2000 at the end of 2019

Speaker 1 19.

Speaker 1 and then you had you had a teaching job in a relatively rigid run-of-the-mill high school right and covid put an end to that And then as COVID lifted, you found a job in this school that was for behaviorally challenged kids.

Speaker 1 And it was a very mixed bag of behaviorally challenged kids, which is also a very interesting administrative decision.

Speaker 1 I mean, 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.

Speaker 1 constitutes a category.

Speaker 1 It's not a category at all.

Speaker 1 And then, well, 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 right there's there's immense clinical literature demonstrating exactly that and you said you ended up with the aggressive kids okay but you also pointed out that you taught there for four years which so it changed it trans the landscape transformed okay those first two years were the most chaotic perhaps that had something to do with covid so because during so during i arrived during COVID, suddenly there's a kind of an outbreak at the school.

Speaker 1 I remember driving into the parking lot one morning, half the staff are coming out of the parking lot, getting into the cars, and they're like, they're telling us to leave.

Speaker 1 So, I'm on site one. For whatever reason,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so I was teaching remotely in my classroom on my computer.

Speaker 1 And I kind of expanded the curriculum to like 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And over the course of the next two years,

Speaker 1 it changed because originally multimedia,

Speaker 1 I was able to grow the program to where I was able to work with the entire entire building. It was no longer just limited to one site,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and a different type of staff and professionalism even, because you can't afford a mistake. It's life or death.

Speaker 1 And I began to work with those students as well.

Speaker 1 And you're always going to have inner politics, office place politics and whatnot. And certain clicks form.

Speaker 1 And I mentioned the principal and assistant principal both just got fired in the middle of the day, same day.

Speaker 1 And they put out a reason, you know, and they're like, oh, they just, they keep it vague. And it was clearly

Speaker 1 There was kind of a, in the first year, the school tried to unionize. There was a movement to unionize.
And that principal that hired me was very against it.

Speaker 1 And I voted against it because my previous experience with unions, I was starting to wake up to the reality of the drawbacks. And I understand the motivation behind unions.

Speaker 1 So there was, my point is the interplace politics, and it took them out.

Speaker 1 But I was able to,

Speaker 1 this new principal arose who was a very nice guy.

Speaker 1 There was originally two assistant principals, and one was the kind of the guy who,

Speaker 1 in my mind, I'm almost positive, kind of led that formation of what caused them to leave and he ascended in power

Speaker 1 became uh 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 but he was a very nice guy though yeah and uh

Speaker 1 for whatever reason if i got moved across the street into a separate building though which i actually liked because it gave me more uh room to grow and so the students would when the teachers I had, all the students would rotate, the teachers would bring them across the street.

Speaker 1 I had this great lab, multimedia lab with a 3D printer. We were investing in new equipment, camera technology, Photoshop.

Speaker 1 I had 11 iMacs running Premiere Pro and Photoshop.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And the kids, were they responding well to what you were teaching? I think that it was really interesting to notice the difference, the students downstairs, the behavioral versus physical challenges.

Speaker 1 The students upstairs were the ones that resonated the most

Speaker 1 with Photoshop, video editing. There was an enthusiasm.

Speaker 1 So a student with autism, something about some of these skills, they just love, you get them going on video editing.

Speaker 1 That's very detail-oriented.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so I had,

Speaker 1 I just loved loved working with those students. And I didn't get to do that until my last two years.

Speaker 1 But it was the first two years with those other students. I still think I was making progress with them, like bringing in digital.
I had, as a teacher, you're not supposed to have favorites, but

Speaker 1 the student that I was probably the most fond of who ended up getting kicked out over something that

Speaker 1 he was. just a brilliant illustrator.
He could draw

Speaker 1 just incredible and came from nothing and

Speaker 1 most of these kids it was the the I think the core issue was just there was no parents the parents I mean we would have open house and no one would show up

Speaker 1 right so they were on their own

Speaker 1 yeah and

Speaker 1 that student in particular I found something that resonated with him we invested in like a crita drawing tablet and he accelerated with that but the problem came in the form i noticed when they would say

Speaker 1 he he's drawing illustrations of samurais in combat. What good is that going to do him? We want him to do projects that are relevant to the school, but then they would give me no

Speaker 1 criteria of or

Speaker 1 set plans. There was no curriculum in place.
I developed it all myself, which

Speaker 1 I wasn't. There's pros and cons to that.
There's a lot of freedom to that, but the challenge is that it allows them to come in at their convenience if they

Speaker 1 leadership uh which I never had an issue with I never had an issue until I published that video okay so well so let's talk about that look tell everybody about what the what the video was we'll we'll clip it into this so that people can see it obviously but describe what why was it that you were posting videos and and and and how did this particular one come about

Speaker 2 so these guys want to talk about jk rowing is that's so what's going on with that what do you want to know?

Speaker 2 She's had a pretty controversial past. I just want to know, like, what are your thoughts on it?

Speaker 2 Do you still like her work despite her bigoted opinions?

Speaker 2 So let's get specific, though.

Speaker 2 Let's define bigoted opinions.

Speaker 2 She has had a history of being extremely transphobic, I've heard.

Speaker 2 And you've heard, so can you give me an example?

Speaker 2 One of these tweets that she came up with in 2019, she said, dress however you please call yourself whatever you like sleep with any consenting adult who will have you

Speaker 2 live your best life in peace and security but force women out of their jobs for starting that

Speaker 2 for stating that sex is real so you find that bigoted I don't really have an opinion on it but I'm just going with what a lot of other people have said. So let's pause it.

Speaker 2 Let's not go with what other people are saying. Let's try and learn how to critically think.
So let's analyze analyze the tweet ourselves. So that statement, do you see anything problematic?

Speaker 2 Force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real.

Speaker 2 So when I hear that, I'm interpreting that as meaning 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.

Speaker 2 That is exactly what she's saying. Is that transphobic to you?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 to me,

Speaker 2 no. So is there anything you disagree with in that tweet?

Speaker 2 Uh

Speaker 2 in that tweet, I can't really see anything that I myself disagree with. 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

Speaker 2 do you think it's fair that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Rowling is transphobic, how do you feel about Harry Potter? Now, retroactively looking at that statement, do you think that that was the best way to phrase it? No, I feel like an idiot now.

Speaker 2 It's okay though, but this is why we do this, to learn how to think.

Speaker 1 I discovered in 2017 a video of a professor,

Speaker 1 low-quality video in this classroom that looked like mine. You standing in front of the classroom talking about archetypes of Harry Potter.
It was you. And I was like, that's cool.

Speaker 1 And this is 2017.

Speaker 1 That was the first video I saw of you. And I went down the rabbit hole caffeine and all that classics.

Speaker 1 And I said to my, I'm going to try this. Because I was teaching students about filmmaking and movies.

Speaker 1 And I was teaching a journalism class. And

Speaker 1 I was like, this is, this ties in directly. And I just, I loved this style.
I recognize, I was like, there. Teaching is a performance.

Speaker 1 There's a performance art element to this because you have to be engaging to be able to stand in front of a classroom and get them engaged.

Speaker 1 There's an artistic element to that that I'm not quite sure how to articulate that. It might not be right.
No, it's you did. It's a performance.
But that's what I saw in your video.

Speaker 1 So I went in, it was probably a few weeks later and I, we have all the cameras. So, and I was teaching a student how to use, I said, okay, now you know how to use the camera.

Speaker 1 Let's try and record this lecture. I saw this thing on YouTube.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I essentially ran through archetypes in Harry Potter and they loved it. And you can add videos on YouTube.
People can watch it.

Speaker 1 No one watched it at the time, 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,

Speaker 1 this is a great, I agree with you that YouTube is a Gutenberg revolution that we cannot comprehend what it means.

Speaker 1 It is massive

Speaker 1 potential and it's exciting.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I fell in love with that aspect of it, started to, because there's teaching portfolios.

Speaker 1 Well, what better way, what better thing to have in a teaching portfolio than you're teaching than a recording of you actually teaching because they ask you to have artifacts provide artifacts of your teaching here's a video of me teaching right beat that it's like

Speaker 1 so that was the thinking and i had been and also in multimedia we would do

Speaker 1 reviews of movies like the queen's gambit did what you know 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 is not a bad substitute because it allows them to watch it back, hear their voice, which at first no one likes.

Speaker 1 It makes causes you to cringe. It's a very interesting response.
Right, right.

Speaker 1 But you can learn so much from watching and those repetitions and doing it again and again. And

Speaker 1 they loved it. Some of the students just really loved it.
So to bring us to that video,

Speaker 1 they asked me to do a newscast. 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.

Speaker 1 But that was a legit newscast that would go out live to every classroom once a week on Friday. They had all this technology to do it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That was the original school. The original school public school.
I can even say that it was the Neshoba Regional High School in Massachusetts.

Speaker 1 So if you go to my Twitter feed, the very only first tweets, they're all just Neshoba student broadcasts because, and the head of my department would ask me to just share them.

Speaker 1 I thought that was just normal.

Speaker 1 And there was no students loved it.

Speaker 1 So how much recording of your teaching were you doing in your classes in the

Speaker 1 second school? 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There was like a culinary teacher

Speaker 1 landscaping and they were always experimenting with the vocations, but music and multimedia always remained consistent. How big a school?

Speaker 1 Only

Speaker 1 downstairs, 50 students.

Speaker 1 Upstairs, 50, about 50 students. Okay.
And how many teachers? Well, the ratio was... You said it was three to one, about a.

Speaker 1 That's what they strive for, but they're constantly battling understaffing because teachers just vanish often.

Speaker 1 Had you done a lot of videos in the build-up to the video that you

Speaker 1 that got so much attention? I had been posting little things,

Speaker 1 like just like what I was mentioning, like reviews and things, but no one was watching them and no one cared. It wasn't,

Speaker 1 you know.

Speaker 1 And working with the music teacher, we would do like the mathematics of the Fibonacci sequence in music, things which are still up there.

Speaker 1 So if you're curious to dig into that, you can, if anyone's watching this, but

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 be the person on camera and just go through, this is what happened in the school this week. So we go in the room, we go to set it up, and he's getting stage fright, camera shy he's just

Speaker 1 and i think it's very important in teaching to lead by example so

Speaker 1 let's just treat let's just do a warm-up 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 warm-up just ask me something that you want to that would interest you okay he hits record All right, so how have your views on J.K.

Speaker 1 Rowling changed given her bigoted opinions? Or how have your views on Harry Potter changed given J.K. Rowling's bigoted opinions?

Speaker 1 Well, first, we need to address that, and then just walk through it. And I thought, that's interesting, you know, and maybe I'll try something new with this YouTube thing.
And I just uploaded it.

Speaker 1 I was like, that's interesting enough to post. I didn't think anyone would watch it.
Walk us through your response. What did you know about you?

Speaker 1 You mentioned watching the Harry Potter, an analysis of Harry Potter I had done. Let's walk through it.

Speaker 1 Well, first, we need to address,

Speaker 1 is she bigoted? That's the glaring crease up.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Right.
So, what do you think? That constitutes a loaded question. Right.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 what are you basing that upon?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, I've heard that she has the tweets.

Speaker 1 Okay, do you have any other?

Speaker 1 I can show you the tweets if you want.

Speaker 1 Sure, let's take a look. Dig some tweets out.

Speaker 1 We read the tweets. Okay, so do you find that what is what about that is transphobic?

Speaker 1 And I don't remember the exact tweet. we clarify it and then he goes oh but she did apologize as well for this other thing there's this other piece of evidence okay let's take a look

Speaker 1 same

Speaker 1 process

Speaker 1 then we so i point out okay so there's really no much difference there's not much difference between you and her you understand that

Speaker 1 she's that she's stating that it's important to her

Speaker 1 her experience as a woman

Speaker 1 She has no issue with someone identifying how they want to identify, but that's not going to change.

Speaker 1 That shouldn't impact her experience and the reality that she's a woman and what that means in reality.

Speaker 1 No, I agree with that. Okay.
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.

Speaker 1 That's okay. That's why we.

Speaker 1 do this.

Speaker 1 And often I would have interesting conversations when they arose, going back to the idea of, and there was some blowback about that: why are you having conversations?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But as we just pointed out, there's extreme.

Speaker 1 If the goal is to use this technology with students in the way that is going to most benefit them,

Speaker 1 well, that should be

Speaker 1 useful. The technology isn't independent of the content,

Speaker 1 especially if you're doing video recording.

Speaker 1 And there's so much utility in

Speaker 1 teaching students how to think,

Speaker 1 how to articulate themselves, how to, and often they have questions about things in the world. I've had students ask me,

Speaker 1 what's a Republican versus Democrat? And you're like, you're a senior in high school. We need to, let's talk about it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So if we're going to say, we need footage to edit, might as well make it interesting.

Speaker 1 And if we can make it, if we can talk about something that actually matters in the world and you can learn something from it, well, why not?

Speaker 1 You can't learn to edit footage without having something interesting that you're interested in because there's nothing to edit.

Speaker 1 And you could just film music videos and things, but

Speaker 1 I see more utility. And if a student wants to discuss something like that, I see, no, that was my reasoning behind it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 debating, or just

Speaker 1 you're learning those oratory skills. You're getting over public speaking

Speaker 1 fright.

Speaker 1 There's more utility, I believe, than simply

Speaker 1 there's nothing wrong if a student wants to do like something like a music video. Oh, you could do something creative too, but even then it's got to have a point.

Speaker 1 Why not encapsulate as much as possible if our objective is to use what we have to help students as best we can?

Speaker 1 Well, obviously also the technique that you were using, so to speak, insofar as it's a technique, is asking pertinent questions.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The whole point of being a teacher is to, or at least one of the main points of being a teacher, is to.

Speaker 1 teach people how to ask themselves pertinent questions and to model that.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 why do you think

Speaker 1 so it's in so so it's interesting that it was the conversation about J.K. Rowling that went viral.

Speaker 1 And she certainly caused an endless stream of political upset in the UK and turned into a quite a stunning advocate for free speech.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I guess one of the things that your video demonstrated was the pertinence of that issue to students who

Speaker 1 have questionable reasons for being concerned about it to begin with. Like, why do you think that this particular student was possessed by the belief that transphobia was a thing to begin with?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Rowling on the basis of transphobia, and you're asking questions about it. Now, is that part of what also got you in trouble?

Speaker 1 It's obviously one of the things that made this school viral, but was it also one of the things that got you in trouble?

Speaker 1 Well, there's no way for me to know exactly. I think that in it,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Given that we're a school where there are some loose practices, there's been things like the two principals just being removed.

Speaker 1 There was a tax of scandal a few years prior to my arrival because we have the way grades are assigned, often it's the site sitting there. It's like, okay, what's Jimmy going to get in your class? Um,

Speaker 1 give him like a 73, and there's no record, there's no reasoning to it, and that's literally how it occurs.

Speaker 1 What so the why did they offer me nine thousand dollars to

Speaker 1 shut up or why to sign this? And

Speaker 1 why do you need an NDA?

Speaker 1 So there was worry about potential public attention.

Speaker 1 Well, you can understand. I mean, the school that you're operating in is insanely complex.
There's absolutely no way to run a school like that that isn't full of trouble.

Speaker 1 Obviously, because the whole school is built on trouble.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's a good point. Well, you mentioned that teachers come for one day and they leave, or they come for a week.
It's just, it's, it's designed, it's a system designed to

Speaker 1 collate chaos and to try to produce some sort of order, but it seems to me to be entirely impossible. Pretty much, no matter what you do, you're going to do something wrong.
It's a figure.

Speaker 1 How the hell could you possibly avoid it?

Speaker 1 Every single one of those kids is a pitfall.

Speaker 1 And I don't mean that in the, in the, what, that's not a criticism. It's just,

Speaker 1 well, the system's designed so that every single kid that comes there is

Speaker 1 trouble on stilts.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I often

Speaker 1 wonder. Yeah, you often,

Speaker 1 I wondered that sometimes. I'm like, why am I here? I mean, the health insurance is awful.
It's like, pay is not

Speaker 1 why, why choose? That's why people leave.

Speaker 1 But there's a lot of good people there that aren't. It's not like this is the bottom of the barrel.
Teachers that can't. There are some of those.
It's like, dude, what are you doing? Right.

Speaker 1 There'd be some of those, yes. But there are also many

Speaker 1 good people that are doing it because there's something fulfilling about it. that I miss, to be honest.

Speaker 1 There's, I miss it.

Speaker 1 Well, 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 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.

Speaker 1 And it was all that contrast that made it fascinating. I mean,

Speaker 1 the fact that that issue even arose in a school is ridiculous under anything approximating normal times.

Speaker 1 And yet you handled it carefully and thoughtfully, and you did it in a way that was obviously of educational benefit to the students. And

Speaker 1 none of that should be surprising, actually.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so, because we're so accustomed to seeing

Speaker 1 crazily woke, ideologically possessed, ranting narcissists acting as teachers, ideologically addling children when they ask questions that they should have no concern about whatsoever.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 17. 17.
Okay. So

Speaker 1 that's just an indication of the state of the school system in general. I don't think he was even accusing her.
I think he was just repeating what he thought was reality. Of course, of course.

Speaker 1 Of course, exactly. Well, you said that as you investigated with

Speaker 1 some relatively

Speaker 1 elementary, but also eminently sane questions, that revealed itself very quickly. He was just spouting the clichés of the moment, right? The radical clichés of the moment.

Speaker 1 And was he doing that because he thought he should? Like, what was your impression of the reasons for his questions? He genuinely believed that that was what the truth was.

Speaker 1 He thought that was reality.

Speaker 1 He articulates that. I've heard many classmates state this, so it must be true.
In the same way, you hear this often with people. I just...
made a critique video of Barry Weiss doing this.

Speaker 1 I was a little hard on her

Speaker 1 on Joe Rogan when she's she's saying,

Speaker 1 it's the same pattern. She's applying this at Tulsi Gabbard and

Speaker 1 he presses her on it slightly and

Speaker 1 it dissolves. And we all are capable of doing, we all do do this in our lives.
I'm not above it, but no one's above it. No one's above it.
We radically seek.

Speaker 1 We seek to establish consensus rapidly and radically.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The antidote to... populist consensus is something like alignment with eternal tradition because it stops the proclivity for rapid consensus from pathologizing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the danger, of course, is a false consensus. And that's obviously what you were questioning.
And

Speaker 1 you did it in an extremely thoughtful manner. Okay, so

Speaker 1 you recorded that. Your students edited it?

Speaker 1 How did it end up edited?

Speaker 1 There was one edit when he takes out his phone because he's like looking for the tech for the tweet for oh yeah okay you maybe a minute and so i cut that out

Speaker 1 and uploaded it to yeah my youtube channel that i was

Speaker 1 i had been uploading everything in the past right so this was just standard practice on your

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 so as you as you also found out And so, okay, so you uploaded this, and I presume you thought nothing of it. Okay, what happened?

Speaker 1 Lay out the story. It started getting a few views, and then it

Speaker 1 got

Speaker 1 13,000 views. The music teacher was telling you about

Speaker 1 who

Speaker 1 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 two of us.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 He texts me, he says, He's got 13,000 views. Oh, that for me, that's whoa.
And over what period of time, maybe, uh, this is probably like a week, okay, two weeks. Okay, okay, right.
That afternoon,

Speaker 1 I get a text from my brother, and he says, Elon Musk tweeted a video of you. Oh, yeah, I thought there's the kiss of death.
Ha ha ha,

Speaker 1 right.

Speaker 1 And I didn't, I hadn't opened my Twitter account since that Nishova school, so I couldn't log in. I didn't have my password and figured it out.
And I was like, let me, anyway,

Speaker 1 oh, whoa,

Speaker 1 okay.

Speaker 1 That was then two days later. Well, then I go to school the next day.

Speaker 1 Don't say a word. I'm like, I'm just going to not say anything.

Speaker 1 Maybe no one saw it. You know, I don't really comprehend what's going on with the

Speaker 1 when you're in it. It doesn't.

Speaker 1 The principal calls me in his office

Speaker 1 he's like

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 not talking about it is not gonna work like everybody's seen the video

Speaker 1 he was um he was on the fence of how to feel about it because he was obviously worried as anyone would be about his responsibilities in getting in trouble with the higher-ups is this against the policy we have he's had we have releases i have the releases where a student there's no student on camera we have an audio release it's it's and you've been doing this anyway i've been doing this for a while like but is that what do we but this is different like and i think it's totally understandable to be to be a little shocked

Speaker 1 we're in new territory here yeah right

Speaker 1 pierce morgan's team reaches out would you like to come on pierce morgan tomorrow uh-huh

Speaker 1 well

Speaker 1 you're i'm at a crossroads It's like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or I recognize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime potentially. I don't know what it means, where it could go,

Speaker 1 but it could be an opportunity. There's only one way to find out, and that's to run with it.

Speaker 1 I know this much from my life and regret. If I say no to this going on, Pierce Morton, which could go badly, I might regret this, but I know I will regret it forever.

Speaker 1 How did you know that? Why did you conclude that? Because I have regretted things in my life before.

Speaker 1 I know that regret

Speaker 1 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, than to refuse to pick it up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you know,

Speaker 1 there is clinical evidence for that. If you ask people,

Speaker 1 older people, to look back on their life and to list their regrets,

Speaker 1 it's much more common for them to have serious regrets about chances they didn't take than failures that

Speaker 1 they experienced. Thing about failure is a weird thing, you know, because my experience in life has been that nothing I ever actually did failed.

Speaker 1 I didn't necessarily, it didn't necessarily produce the result that I intended when I intended it. But if it was a genuine effort

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I think that kind of stands to reason in a sense, too, because the alternative explanation would be that you could

Speaker 1 try to do something difficult well and see it through, and there'd be zero impact of that. Well, that makes no sense.
You're going to learn something.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 what kind of regrets had you had in the past? If you don't mind, maybe you can share some of those, maybe not, but what came to mind?

Speaker 1 My

Speaker 1 original plan was movies.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like they were using the fabric of reality to create worlds which are real when you're watching it. You've explored this idea.
And it was like,

Speaker 1 what else? The logical course of action, what else would I possibly want to do

Speaker 1 than that? There was nothing more exciting. And I was undergrad, one of the top top film schools in the country, UNC School of the Arts.
And I excelled and I hit, I was nailing these opportunities.

Speaker 1 And I was like, it kind of got to my head. I

Speaker 1 found like short film after short film. Suddenly it's in a pattern that had not

Speaker 1 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 we're gonna camp out and everyone's gonna 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 like a half a million dollars in production value if you were to do a one-on-one comparison because everyone was working for free.

Speaker 1 And it, it, it,

Speaker 1 I feel like I blew it a lot. I feel like I blew a lot of opportunities.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 LA is not where I want to live.

Speaker 1 Hollywood is not a game in which I want to participate for the long term.

Speaker 1 So I knew I wanted to get out of that. I didn't know what I would do.
I went to freelance videography and eventually graduate school. So it took me to graduate school.
Then I left LA.

Speaker 1 But those students, the colleagues, the friends,

Speaker 1 making a movie is

Speaker 1 challenging. There's a lot of

Speaker 1 it presses relationships. And this is a, it's a deeper idea of why that is, because often I think there's some people are subconscious.

Speaker 1 They just want it to be over, 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.

Speaker 1 The production itself, a month or two or whatnot, but then it's just like this has to be over. And there's so much pressure.
And then that causes people to kind of dissolve under the pressure.

Speaker 1 And it's like, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We're never going to have all these people come together

Speaker 1 and work for free. Okay, so you saw the same thing beckoning there with the Pierce Morgan opportunity, obviously, that you, and it is the case.
I mean, and this is the case in life, is that

Speaker 1 not now and then something, many impossible things come together and a door opens.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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 Morgan.
So, what happened?

Speaker 1 It was just, it was just me for a 15-minute interview. Okay.
End of a segment. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, I'm in Massachusetts in this little town in the woods. This, I didn't know what to expect.
I was like, is a crew coming? Like, what's going on? A guy in a van pulls up. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 You had to talk directly to the camera, did you? He's like, Harold, I'm going to mic you up. Uh, I don't know what's going on.
No instructions. He's like,

Speaker 1 I jump in the back of a van right after school. So I'm at school talking to the music teacher.
I'm like, dude, they want me to go on Pierce Morgan.

Speaker 1 Do you think I'll get in trouble if I do this? He's like, you got to do it. I'm like, I got to do it.
Right. Right.
And I said the same thing I said to you. And he said, just don't.

Speaker 1 It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission because I knew that if I were to ask for permission and they were to say no, I'd be in a predicament now. Right.

Speaker 1 So I'm not going to turn that down because I know what that feeling would be.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The answer to if you go to an authority, especially a bureaucratic authority, and you ask for permission, why wouldn't they say no?

Speaker 1 All there is in it for them is risk and perhaps jealousy. and

Speaker 1 fear.

Speaker 1 So why would, of course, they're going to say no.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What's the indication that you're required to ask for permission?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, the other thing to understand, too, is that entrepreneurial motivation is relatively rare. It's only about one person in 50 who wants to start their own business.

Speaker 1 I really learned this when I started selling to corporations and dealing with middle management people.

Speaker 1 The fundamental motivation of 95%

Speaker 1 of people in middle management is never to do anything that makes them get noticed for any reason, good or bad. They want to do their job.
They want to do it in complete and utter invisibility.

Speaker 1 And if an entrepreneurial opportunity comes along, they say, that's risky, no.

Speaker 1 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. And their attitude is,

Speaker 1 I don't want to be this marked zebra that the lions cut cut out of the herd. You know that story?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you know the zebra story. I'll just tell it for people who might not have heard it.

Speaker 1 So zebras in principle are camouflaged, but it's kind of a weird idea because they live on the vet and they're black and white stripes and you can seriously see a zebra.

Speaker 1 So the question is, what's the camouflage? And the answer seems to be that it's against the herd camouflage because there's no single zebras. There's herds of zebras.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 lose track.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The lions could mark out the zebra and organize their hunt, and then that was a dead zebra.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the instinct of many, many people is do not be the identifiable prey animal, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so you're going to have to step outside the herd. Now, the question with human beings is, is there advantages in stepping outside the herd? And the advantage is, well, you get notice.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, I'm not saying that everybody should pursue that or that everybody should want it, but

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah, right. The pain of regret is

Speaker 1 a unique form of pain. Yes.
Yeah. Well, it's a kind of self-betrayal, right? Because you had the chance.
You had the opportunity. Yes, that's what the door opened.

Speaker 1 That's what I was trying to put my finger on earlier. And I had no one to blame but myself on how I got it.
That's seriously.

Speaker 1 And that's what eats you. Yeah, right.
Definitely. Definitely.
Well,

Speaker 1 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...
Far worse.

Speaker 1 Definitely, definitely. You know, it's also useful to know, too, that.

Speaker 1 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 for your life.

Speaker 1 You want the risks you voluntarily take and maybe you want high stakes risks you voluntarily take.

Speaker 1 But even more fundamentally, there is no no risk pathway.

Speaker 1 You're screwed no matter what you do. And that's terrible, but it's also freeing.
And so once you know that there's no safety, Well, then you can take the most interesting risk.

Speaker 1 And why not? And then maybe you don't need safety.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you decided to go on pierce that ties directly into what happened on pierce morgan yes okay so 15 minutes and he asked the usual questions you would expect around how was he with you he was really nice he was he was very

Speaker 1 charismatic likable kind and very well he's a funny guy he is he's he's kind of like simon cowell he's in a way you know you 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But if you start playing games, then you're in serious trouble. So he obviously started by giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Speaker 1 He was probably, you know, reasonably pleased with the video that he had seen and thought, you know, that he would.

Speaker 1 be inviting to begin with. So that worked out well.
Okay, so and he asked the question to the last question was interesting. It's the one that stands out in my mind.

Speaker 1 And he is, and all your hair, because he watched the video. Here was producers.
Someone went to the YouTube channel in the research notes. All right, give me something to

Speaker 1 they found the me talking about archetypes in Harry Potter. Ah, that I get from you.
Oh, yes, I see. I see.
And he goes, So, and he thought I was some Harry Potter scholar or something.

Speaker 1 He goes, So, given all your Harry Potter studies,

Speaker 1 what would the best piece of life advice be? And from all your Harry Potter studies,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I said, voluntarily enter the unknown,

Speaker 1 which is what you were just talking about.

Speaker 1 It might be,

Speaker 1 you know, the unknown beneath the surface of Hogwarts. It might be facing the serpent that could turn you to stone when you see it, like fear.

Speaker 1 But you must do so voluntarily in order to save Jenny.

Speaker 1 And it's the voluntary aspect of that that is,

Speaker 1 which is just classic. Everyone echoes that.
They're like, okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, it's a very good thing to know. But it's true.
Yeah, well, it's also true. It's also surprising because

Speaker 1 it belies

Speaker 1 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. It's no,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, the quest has no real deep significance. Okay, so the Pierce Morgan interview, that went well.
That was a success. What was the consequence of that?

Speaker 1 The next day I go back into school. They call me back into the principal's office and they say, dude, you went on Pierce Morgan.
Like, can you at least check in with us before you do Pierce Morgan?

Speaker 1 Those are the exact words that I was presenting. Right, right.

Speaker 1 So at least check with us. Yeah, but you know,

Speaker 1 what you just articulated was masterful, and that's the best logical read that you could provide on that situation, I think.

Speaker 1 All bureaucratic entities will always say no to anything.

Speaker 1 There's obviously benefit to them.

Speaker 1 There's only risk, right? There's only downside. Of course,

Speaker 1 this is partly why I think research has been almost completely stifled in universities. You cannot do risk-free research,

Speaker 1 period. It's not possible.
You can't just do the next safe thing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, you see that in Harry Potter, too, because there's a weird dynamic constantly in the Harry Potter stories that rolling is. She was great at this because Harry's band,

Speaker 1 like they're academically oriented and they're upward striving, but they're always rule breakers. Right.
And the. the grand wizard at the top of the ladder,

Speaker 1 he

Speaker 1 put all the rules that govern the educational institution in place and knows what they are, but is perfectly happy that Harry and his

Speaker 1 band of ethical miscreants break rules. Yeah, and he knows about it almost.
They insinuate that he knows what they're doing. Right, right, exactly.

Speaker 1 And lets it go anyways. Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 that's that constant paradox. It's really the paradox of...

Speaker 1 It's really the paradox of something like liberal versus conservative.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But generally speaking, the conservative types are much more rule-oriented and much less entrepreneurial. And so,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 there's a dance between those two that's absolutely necessary. And there's no getting rid of the conflict because most of the time you should follow the rules.

Speaker 1 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 Pierce Morgan. And so

Speaker 1 I don't blame your administrator for

Speaker 1 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.
Good work. Otherwise, oh, good.
There was that.

Speaker 1 Well, the assistant principal who ascended and led that whole coup and brought

Speaker 1 there was something different about his response, but the principal, the 30-year-old principal, who was always very helpful to me in like

Speaker 1 helping me to get, or,

Speaker 1 you know, like Warren, you should get your license in phonetics and so you can have this new special ed license my first year. He was kind of this, he

Speaker 1 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. Oh, yeah, good.
Literally said, good, good, good.

Speaker 1 So that's the nod and the wink. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Every institution that's going to function needs that, right?

Speaker 1 Because you need the people who impose the rules and the structure, but they need to always be able to say, well, yeah, that there is a reason for not following the procedure in that particular case.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Pierce Morning, I don't know what this, this isn't in the playbook. This isn't right.

Speaker 1 Right. So they arranged for a meeting with the executive director and her team of lawyers.

Speaker 1 There's a board that runs this school. She

Speaker 1 answers to them, I guess. She's not a president.
She used to to kind of have her office over near mine but i hadn't seen her at all this that past year she just said

Speaker 1 and so she uh there was a meeting with her yeah there was i went into a room with that principal um the one who

Speaker 1 and it was a zoom call

Speaker 1 i think no it was 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

Speaker 1 congratulations good luck to you i hope you don't make a mistake right

Speaker 1 to lose you and i thought fair enough i'll take responsibility for anything i say and do and and me and that music teacher were like

Speaker 1 home free but that's it was it felt like that should be the response yeah well that was that's a pretty good response i mean it's not surprising that they looked into it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of the things too that's worth thinking about too is that 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it was just, it was really the same sort of experiment that you ran.

Speaker 1 I'd been, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I made three videos objecting to that and some university policies.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I edited it quite a bit, actually, that one. Interesting.
And

Speaker 1 that went viral. And then I was called

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 daring thing and have a debate on free speech. And so that was a concrete plan, right? And they were looking for something to do.
They didn't know what to do. And that is what they did.
And

Speaker 1 for better or for worse. And that was much better than many of the things that they could have done.

Speaker 1 Now, it still worked out that it became impossible really for me to keep my position there, although I did for about a year.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 hunker down and they're going to dissociate themselves from you if you are deemed to be a risk, especially a contamination risk.

Speaker 1 And so, and the topics you were discussing, especially on the rolling side, would have that element because, of course,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But you weren't. You weren't.
That didn't exactly happen in the school.

Speaker 1 So you said something interesting about, and I agree, that the university, the dean has no right in your own home, what you do with YouTube.

Speaker 1 How does that correlate to the dean's business or the university's business?

Speaker 1 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 this school into whatever a teacher says says politically on social media, if they say, and there's no clear objective definition of what, where that lies.

Speaker 1 Of course, of course. So they just reserve to themselves the right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the College of Psychologists has basically done exactly the same thing in Canada, the people that I'm in trouble for in relationship to my license.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 being accused of breaking them. It's not like they're written down, because of course they can't be, right? And so that's also

Speaker 1 a terrible thing because, and this is something that's happening in our culture very rapidly, and apparently is something that de Tocqueville

Speaker 1 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. Right.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 and those open-ended policies are precisely the sort of thing that they're like, they're like comprehensive traps.

Speaker 1 So they could have actually gone after you. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's not a reality at your average high school. So that stood out to me.
I thought, interesting. Okay.
Well, this is a new world. This is an unusual world that I don't.
So.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you could see also, though, you could actually understand, I would say,

Speaker 1 the reasons for a contract like that at a school like that. Sure.
Because

Speaker 1 so many possible things could go wrong that the rules arguably would have to be more comprehensive to cover any possible

Speaker 1 occurrence. Okay, so

Speaker 1 what happens after Pierce Morgan? Things were different.

Speaker 1 No one ever spoke to me about

Speaker 1 it, again, the video, or I was continuing to make YouTube videos is what I should point out. Okay, okay, so you did continue to make and post them.
Did they also attract more attention after that?

Speaker 1 Now that I had this, I will, you know,

Speaker 1 I'm still doing the YouTube channel and it's, it's grown. It's not, so it wasn't like it was now.

Speaker 1 It's not huge, but it, 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.

Speaker 1 It was his personality type. If you had offered him the chance to swap places with me,

Speaker 1 I really think he would have declined it.

Speaker 1 It's just too much

Speaker 1 exposure.

Speaker 1 You're in the unknown and it's on you when you're entering this. Anyway, but

Speaker 1 every Friday after school, we set up a little studio downstairs in my house.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, that's the voice you hear in those early videos. If you ever look at those videos, that's the voice you hear off camera.
And he didn't want to show his face,

Speaker 1 which is understandable.

Speaker 1 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 state.

Speaker 1 It was so stereotypical, people thought it was fake. They were like, this is a clearly staged, which I take as a compliment.
It's like, really?

Speaker 1 You think the only way we could achieve this outcome would be to script it? Well, that means we're doing something, right?

Speaker 1 So we were making these, and

Speaker 1 things just at the school,

Speaker 1 I noticed I stopped being invited to certain things. There was like a wedding.
I wasn't invited to that. Like, my whole Site One team was, and there was everyone goes out for drinks on Friday.

Speaker 1 There's the bar nearby. And the hero, you know, heroes classic stories often become contaminated by the unknown.
So even in the, in the, in the Lord of the Rings stories, you know, the fact that

Speaker 1 Frodo and Bilbo both know Gandalf makes them somewhat socially unpopular in the Shire, right? Even though they're associated, well, they're associated with magic power.

Speaker 1 And you might think that's all status. It's like, it's not all status.

Speaker 1 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 and so

Speaker 1 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 that's a good point so yeah

Speaker 1 yeah yeah yeah yeah well that is how it felt yeah yeah well, you can also understand that biologically with the zebra analog in a way.

Speaker 1 It's like you don't want to be too close to the target of the predators, you know, 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 proportionate to how well you hide in the herd, obviously

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 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 and human beings really have that choice because we're we're very strange creatures we're predators but we're also prey animals and you can take either of those pathways forward

Speaker 1 It was interesting because this opportunity came along where I was presented with the decision, do I leave the herd and yeah, go into the unknown on this journey and see where it takes me, or do I go back to the safety?

Speaker 1 Okay, so you said now that there was some social consequence afterwards, but that things more or less went back to normal.

Speaker 1 What happened with the students, and then eventually your job at the school did disappear. So, walk us through, walk us through the aftermath of this like flurry of attention.

Speaker 1 The students,

Speaker 1 I think, that the staff

Speaker 1 went to great lengths to insulate the students. That's that student that was the voice in the video.

Speaker 1 He loved it. He was aware of it.
And I, in that meeting with the lawyers, 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.

Speaker 1 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. And the parents were fine with it.

Speaker 1 He already had the releases. It was.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's good. So you had dotted your I's and crossed your T's with regards regards to student involvement.

Speaker 1 So long story short, a few months later, I had well, I had another conversation with that student around communism.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the music teacher was telling me, he's like, look, man, I...

Speaker 1 you got it you've got a lot of eyes on you and it made logical sense that they would they were it that they were looking for any slip up anything that I got the sense that they wanted

Speaker 1 to get rid of it would have been easier to get rid of me if when that video came out

Speaker 1 but there was so much attention around it

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 it would have put them at risk to do so right

Speaker 1 I don't know I'm not saying that there was a plan to wait and let that blow over and then be

Speaker 1 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. And you thought that might happen.

Speaker 1 I thought with 90% certainty that that's what would happen. It would just be, it would make sense.
As you said, it would be the logical sense thing to do. It's in their best interest.

Speaker 1 There's no good to come having one of your teachers out there with

Speaker 1 a growing audience, small, but growing audience

Speaker 1 saying certain things that are examples. It could be troublesome.

Speaker 1 There's no benefit to that.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, the funny thing too is that there's no benefit from a pure analysis of risk but you know you're you're what you did with those videos definitely in my estimation anyways um

Speaker 1 brought credit to the school

Speaker 1 so you know with more imagination

Speaker 1 what you accomplished could have been very useful to the school with more imagination. And that would require them to go public, though, which they were not going to do.

Speaker 1 They don't want that spotlight. That would require people to know what.
Yeah, well, but that

Speaker 1 harkens back to something that

Speaker 1 we discussed: is that

Speaker 1 the default presumption for the vast majority of people is

Speaker 1 no amount of success justifies risk. Right.
And then people ask themselves, well, why am I not successful? It's like, well, because your threshold for risk is zero.

Speaker 1 And zero,

Speaker 1 zero isn't a threshold of risk that's associated with success. success.
So

Speaker 1 if your

Speaker 1 presumption is

Speaker 1 I'll only be successful if I take no risks, that's the bargain, then you've foregone success.

Speaker 1 And the thing about that that's perverse is that that's a risk because we actually don't know how much success we need in order to reconcile ourselves to life. Life is very difficult.

Speaker 1 And so you might need a fair bit of

Speaker 1 actual success and opportunity to offset the difficulty. Otherwise, it's bitterness and regret, which is not a good pathway.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 you know, you're 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 assume that you were going to merely abide in a predictable way by the rules.

Speaker 1 But had they been more entrepreneurial and more open to the idea of opportunity, then

Speaker 1 the school itself could have benefited dramatically from what you had accomplished.

Speaker 1 But that's also, you know, that also would mean

Speaker 1 in the best of all possible worlds that, you know, you might have been able to present them with a plan to make that easy for them. Right.
So. Well, I did see huge potential in that.

Speaker 1 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.
Right.

Speaker 1 I mean, I haven't thought this out in a clear plan, but it was an opportunity. Well, it's an opportunity to have a much more realistic video editing program.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, now we're going to make things that people will want.

Speaker 1 If this had occurred at that first high school, Neshova, where we were already putting things on Twitter,

Speaker 1 they would have, I remember the head of my department,

Speaker 1 we would have, who knows what we could have done with this. Right.
So you think he would have run with it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Tell me what happened. Yeah.
I can put the button on. Well, yeah, what happened with your job?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And how did you reconcile yourself to that?

Speaker 1 I need to run with this opportunity,

Speaker 1 grow

Speaker 1 if I can, with this platform

Speaker 1 in case something happens. It seems like that's a really bad,

Speaker 1 logically, that sounds like a really bad backup plan.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, especially with your broader ambitions, you know, because you were interested in the broader sense in connecting with an audience, right?

Speaker 1 It's like suddenly,

Speaker 1 I mean, who knows what I could do with this? Right.

Speaker 1 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 student who hadn't seen that video.
And I thought,

Speaker 1 because it was just from another conversation, but it was identical. The pattern was so identical.
I thought, this might be worth sharing.

Speaker 1 It's identical to the last one. So, what could go wrong?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, I need permission from your parents, like written confirmation. I need your permission because you're new, so we don't have the releases.

Speaker 1 and so i got that uploaded told the music teacher and he was like

Speaker 1 you know just because we'd been now we'd been going back and forth on what 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 I alluded to the communist conversation with that other student.

Speaker 1 And so I had posted that previously. Two weeks go by.

Speaker 1 In the middle of the day, I get called into a meeting and they say, We've decided to part ways because you uploaded a video to YouTube against policy.

Speaker 1 We told you not to do that.

Speaker 1 I said, You told me not to do that. You congratulated me.
I was like, How was it okay the first time? And I could tell, though, when I walked in the room, their mind was already made up.

Speaker 1 It didn't matter what I said. So I didn't really say much.

Speaker 1 And I said, Are you alluding to this student? I spoke to the parents. And I said, have you spoken to his parents?

Speaker 1 And they said,

Speaker 1 no, we're happy to do an investigation reach out to him if that's what you'd like or you can just agree to leave now and i said could you check with his parents like it seems like

Speaker 1 a factor to take in

Speaker 1 they so i said for sure we'll just do the investigation you know there's like okay go home and

Speaker 1 and hr will be in touch in three days but um i couldn't touch anything they took my computer everything and i was like escorted like a criminal out

Speaker 1 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 Wear side is delve into that in a little bit more detail.

Speaker 1 It'd be interesting to continue the conversation about, well, why your school made that decision, what possible role HR might have 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So for everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us on the Daily Wire side for the remainder of this conversation.

Speaker 1 And for now, Warren, thank you very much for coming in today to talk about this. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, you know, part of your story is.

Speaker 1 What happens when you mess with an incredibly powerful technology, right? Because you're living your normal life and you're playing with YouTube. That is the interesting thing.
Oh, definitely.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, thank you very much for that. Absolutely.
Thank you. And to everybody watching, listening, the film crew here in Manhattan today, thank you guys very much for setting this up.

Speaker 1 And it ran very smoothly, technically, and that's always good. And join us on the Daily Wire side, everyone, for the continuation of this discussion.
Bye-bye.