504. Fired for Honesty and Competence: One Genuine Teacher's Story | Warren Smith
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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 JK Rowling's reactions to the trans propaganda insanity that plagues our culture in 15 different ways. Do you still like her work despite her bigoted opinions?

So let's get specific though, let's define bigoted opinions. What opinions are bigoted? 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." So you find that bigoted? What do you find about bigoted? It was...

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. Do you find that transphobic yourself?

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. Let's try and learn how to critically think. So let's analyze the tweet ourselves. So that statement, do you see anything problematic? It was shared by Elon Musk among many other people. And as you might imagine, that produced an explosive effect on Warren's life. So it happened yesterday. I was fired from my...

full-time teaching position. That was followed up by a Piers Morgan interview, which I guess was the secondary explosion in the two explosions that rocked his life. 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. 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 to this school and

Yesterday, it was like being a character in a video game and just being deleted. I wanted to talk to Warren because I really liked the video that he made. 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. 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. 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. Lots of people who are watching and listening won't know anything about you. So why don't we start from the beginning? What was it that brought you to public attention? And tell us the story about your teaching career.

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. After that video, there was a strange experience because suddenly you have one five-minute video and suddenly you have this perceived value. Mm-hmm.

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. 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,

but 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. 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. I was just

doing what I thought was sensible in the moment. You don't necessarily know who you are, you know, that's the thing. And 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. 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. 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. And I teach some courses, but I'm not tenure track or anything. And perhaps one day 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. High school kids. Now you had an 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. And then you were looking, what kind of jobs were you looking for? In education. In education. And you landed a job as a high school teacher. As a high school teacher, just by pure kind of just chance. And I really enjoyed it. COVID hits, everything goes smoothly.

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. 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. There are things that I've not

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, because you've spoken about when you feel your words making you not what you could be or weaker. You can feel it. 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. And that's how it feels. 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. Okay. That was in graduate school. Okay. 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 what people want to hear, not trying to sound intelligent, but something like that. Mm-hmm.

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. 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. Yeah, 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 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. They pay money.

I think it was $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. And you were hired at that school? With COVID going on. Did you have any experience at all dealing with behaviorally challenged kids? No. So why'd they hire you? 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. They were...

I think they were looking for young teachers that could weather that kind of storm. Were they mostly boys in the school? 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? High school age, whether there are some middle school. It was interesting the way the building is divided to where a subset of middle school specialized with one group.

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. And I was assigned to one site as the multimedia teacher, teaching the same thing I've always...

And there was no crossover. And then there was three teachers assigned to one site to manage those 10 students, which ratio of teacher to student is quite high. That's what their needs necessitate. How long did you teach at that school? 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 give, the principal that hired me, I'm very fond of, and the assistant principal, they 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. I remember I was in the interview, 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. 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, something's probably wrong with you or you have some sadomasochistic or you just have some, I think he was alluding to that there's some reason you have that like, this is not your typical pathway for educators. He's 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 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. What happens to them? They just, they're like, this is chaos. This is...

I can't survive this for a year. 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. Though you also have students that are not headed to juvie, but they're the ones that get bullied. Or for whatever reason,

reason they have an IEP plan that... And what's that? An individualized education plan. Yeah. I have dyslexia. Though 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. Right. 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...

like quadrant, 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. Right. But then you have hyper-aggressive people together. A bunch of males. Yeah. A lot of fights. Right, of course. That's the site I was on.

So let's just get this timeline exactly right. So you got your master's degree in 2000 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.

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. 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 exist.

constitutes a category. It's not a category at all. 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, right? 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. So it changed. The landscape transformed. Okay. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. Yeah.

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. And a different type of staff and professionalism even because you can't afford a mistake. It's life or death, isn't it?

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And I began to work with those students as well.

And you're always going to have inner politics, office place politics and whatnot. And certain cliques form. And I mentioned the principal and assistant principal both just got fired in the middle of the day, same day. And they put out a reason, you know, 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. 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. I understand the motivation behind unions, but... So there was... My point is that interplay is 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...

in my mind, I'm 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. And he was a very nice guy, though. And 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 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 we were investing in new equipment camera technology Photoshop I had a 11 IMAX

Running Premiere Pro and Photoshop. 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?

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.

the student with autism something about some of these skills they just love you get them going on video editing that's very detail oriented they yeah and so i had i i just loved working with those students and i didn't get to do that until my last two years so 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 this 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. Most of these kids, I think the core issue was just there was no parents. We would 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. 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 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 credit.

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. You know, there's a lot of freedom to that, but the challenge is that it allows them to come in at their convenience if they, if they, if they, leadership,

which I never had an issue with. I never had an issue until I published that video. 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? So these guys want to talk about J.K. Rowling? So what's going on with that? What do you want to know? Uh...

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? So let's get specific though. Let's define bigoted opinions. She has had a history of being extremely transphobic I've heard. And you've heard so what can you give me an example? So

One of these tweets that she came out with in 2019, she said, "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? 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. Let's try and learn how to critically think. So let's analyze the tweet ourselves. So that statement, do you see anything problematic? Force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. So when I hear that, I'm interpreting that as meaning...

If a woman says that, you know, saying that there's 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. Is that transphobic to you? 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. So now that we're looking at it like, "Oh, there's not much difference between me or her," do you ha- 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. 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. That's okay though, but this is why we do this, to learn how to think.

I discovered 2017, a video of a professor, low quality video in this classroom that looked like mine. He's standing from the classroom talking about archetypes of Harry Potter. It was you. And I was like, that's cool. And this is 2017.

That was the first video I saw of you. And I went down the rabbit hole, Caffeine and all that, classics. And I said to my, I'm going to try this. Because I was teaching students about filmmaking and movies. 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. Because you have to be engaging to be able to stand in front of a classroom and get them engaged, right?

There's an artistic element to that that I'm not quite sure how to articulate that. It might not be right. You did. It's a performance. 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. 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.

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. 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? 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. 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. It causes you to cringe. It's a very interesting response. Right, right. But you can learn so much from watching it.

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. 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. 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. I can even say that it was Neshoba Regional High School in Massachusetts. So if you go to my Twitter feed, the very first, only first tweets, they're all just Neshoba student broadcasts. And the head of my department would ask me to just share them. I thought that was just normal. 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? 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. 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 sights.

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, about 50 students. Okay. And how many teachers?

well the ratio you said it was three to one about a that's what they strive for but they're constantly battling understaffing because teachers just vanish often had you done a lot of videos in the build up to the video that you that that got so much attention i had been posting little things like just like i was mentioning like reviews and things but no one was watching them and no one cared it wasn't you know um

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. 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...

to 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, and I think it's very important in teaching to lead by example. So let's just treat, let's just do a warmup. 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.

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?

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Well, first we need to address that and then just walk through it. And I thought, that's interesting. Maybe I'll try something new with this YouTube thing. And I just uploaded it. 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 mentioned watching the Harry Potter, an analysis of Harry Potter I had done. Let's walk through it. Well, first we need to address...

Is she bigoted? That's the glaring presupposition. Right, right, right. So what do you base... 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, let's take a look. Dig some tweets out. We read the tweets. Okay, so do you find that... What about that is transphobic? Man, I don't remember the exact tweet. We clarify it and...

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. Same process. Then I point out, okay, so there's really not much difference between you and her. 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 anything.

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. 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 conversation.

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 conversations? 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. 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,

Well, that should be... Use of the technology isn't independent of the content, especially if you're doing video recording. 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? 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. So if we're going to say we need footage to edit, might as well make it interesting.

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? You can't learn to edit footage without having something interesting that you're interested in because there's nothing to edit. 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. 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. 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. 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. Well, you could do something creative too, but even then it's got to have a point. Why not encapsulate as much as possible if our objective is to use what we have to help students as best we can?

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

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. It's unbelievably manipulative. And I would say the radical leftists are psychosomatic.

stunningly good at that manipulation of language but now you have a student who is objecting to jk rowling on the basis of transphobia and you're asking questions about it 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 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. Given that we're a school where there are some loose practices, there's been things like the two principals just being removed. There was attacks 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 gonna get in your class um give him like a 73 and there's no record there's no reasoning to it and that's literally how it occurs what so the why did they offer me nine thousand dollars to shut up or why to sign this and like why do you need an nda it's so it's

So there was worry about potential public attention. 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, obviously, because the whole school is built on trouble. 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 now.

Right. 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 teach.

to 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 fair point. I mean, how the hell could you possibly avoid it? That's a good point. Every single one of those kids is a pitfall. Yeah. And I don't mean that in the... That's not a criticism. It's just... A reality. Well, the system's designed so that every single kid that comes there is...

Trouble on stilts. 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. Yeah, I wondered that sometimes. I'm like, why am I here? 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 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. There'd be some of those. Yes. But there are also many...

good people that are doing it because there's something fulfilling about it that I miss to be honest. There's... 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 of the people whose attention it did draw was because you were obviously very sane and careful and

in an insane situation discussing something utterly preposterous. And it was all that contrast that made it fascinating. 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. 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. And so, because we're so accustomed to seeing crazily woke, ideologically possessed, ranting narcissists acting as teachers...

addling children when they ask questions that they should have no concern about whatsoever. 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. 17, okay. So that's...

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. Of course, exactly. While you said that as you investigated with some relatively...

elementary but also eminently sane questions, that revealed itself very quickly. He was just spouting the cliches of the moment, right? 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? He genuinely believed 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.

with people 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 make it's the same pattern and she's applying this to lucy gabbard and and right presses her on it slightly and and you and it it dissolves and we all are capable of doing we all do do this in our lives i'm not above it

No one's above it. No one's above it. We radically seek to establish consensus rapidly and radically. 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. 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. The antidote to populism

Populist consensus is something like alignment with eternal tradition because it stops the proclivity for rapid consensus from pathologizing. 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. But...

The danger, of course, is a false consensus. 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? 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 my YouTube channel that I was...

I had been uploading everything in the past. 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, 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. It started getting a few views.

And then it got 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 two of us. Yeah.

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. Oh yeah. There's the kiss of death. Ha ha ha. Right. And I didn't, I hadn't opened my Twitter account since that Neshoba school. So I couldn't log in. I didn't have my password and figure it out. And I was like, let me, whoa. Okay. That was then two days later. Well, then I go to school the next day.

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

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 releases. I have the releases. There's no student on camera. We have an audio release. And you've been doing this anyway. 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. Pierce Morgan's team reaches out. Would you like to come on Pierce Morgan tomorrow? Uh-huh. Well, I'm at a crossroads. It's like, 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.

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. 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, but I know I will regret it forever. How did you know that? Why did you conclude that? 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 until I get tackled, than to refuse to pick it up. Yeah, well, you know, there is clinical evidence for that. If you ask people, older people, to look back on their life and to list their regrets and

It's much more common for them to have serious regrets about chances they didn't take than failures that they experienced. The thing about failure is a weird thing, you know, because my experience in life has been that nothing I ever actually did failed. 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...

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. 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. 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? If you don't mind, maybe you can share some of those, maybe not, but what came to mind? My, uh,

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...

are real when you're watching it. You've explored this idea. And what else, the logical course of action, what else would I possibly want to do than that? There was nothing more exciting. And I was undergrad, one of the top film schools in the country, UNC School of the Arts. And I excelled and I was nailing these opportunities and I was like, it kind of got to my head. I got short film after short film. Suddenly it's,

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, that,

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 a half a million dollars in production value if you were to do a one-on-one comparison because everyone was working for free. And 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 did come to the realization that LA is not somewhere... LA is not where I want to live. Hollywood is not a game in which I want to participate for the long term. So I knew I wanted to get out of that. I didn't know what I would do. I went freelance videography, eventually graduate school, so it took me to graduate school, and I left LA. But those students, the colleagues, the friends, making of movies...

challenging there's a lot of 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 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 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 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. Okay, so you saw the same thing beckoning there with the Piers Morgan opportunity, obviously, that you... And it is the case. I mean, this is the case in life, is that now and then, something, many impossible things come together and a door opens. 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 Morgan. So what happened?

it was just it was just me for a 15-minute interview okay end of a segment yeah this va 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 you had to talk directly to the camera did you he's like here i'm gonna mic you up uh i don't know what's going on no instructions he's like 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 do you think i'll get in trouble if i do this he's like you got to do it i gotta do it right right and i said the same thing i said to you and he said just don't 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 i'm not going to turn that down because i know what that feeling would be but 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. 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, of course they're going to say no. 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? No, in fact, if it's not illegal or if you're not violating an explicit, and really I mean explicit contract, it's like, don't ask. Right.

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. 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%

5% 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. 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. 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. So...

in principle are camouflaged, but it's kind of a weird idea because they live on the veldt and they're black and white striped and you can seriously see a zebra. 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. And so when the zebras are milling about together in a herd, it

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Now, the question with human beings is, is there advantages in stepping outside the herd? And the advantage is, well, you get noticed. 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. 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. Yeah, right. The pain of regret is 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 it was. 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 the movie turned out. That's seriously annoying. And that's what eats you. 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... It's far worse. Definitely. Definitely. 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, and maybe you want high-stakes risks you voluntarily take. But even more fundamentally, there is no no-risk pathway. 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. And why not? And then maybe you don't need safety. Okay, so you decided to go on Piers Morgan. It ties directly into what happened on Piers Morgan. Yes, okay. So 15 minutes, and he asked the usual questions you'd expect. How was he with you? He was really nice. He was very charismatic, likable kind, and very... Well, he's a funny guy. He is. He's kind of like Simon Cowell.

In a way. You know, you can see in America's Got Talent, 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. 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. 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. Okay. So, and he asked the question, the last question was interesting. It's the one that stands out in my mind. And he is in all your hair. Cause he watched the video. He was producers. Someone went to the YouTube channel in the research. And I was like, give me something to, they found the me talking about archetypes and Harry Potter.

Ah, that I got from you. Oh, yes, I see, I see. And he goes, so, he thought I was some Harry Potter scholar or something. He goes, so, given all your Harry Potter studies, what would the best piece of life advice be? And from all your Harry Potter studies.

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And don't wait, this offer expires December 18th. I said, voluntarily enter the unknown. Aha. Which is what you were just talking about. Aha. Aha. It might be, you know, 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. Fear.

but you must do so voluntarily in order to save jenny and and and and it's the voluntary aspect of that that is which is just classic everyone echoes that like okay 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 it it belies the what would you say the the merely objective sense of the real

A situation is the same no matter how you encounter it. That's an objectivist perspective. 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. And there doesn't seem to be any difference

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. Okay, so the Piers Morgan interview, that went well. That was a success. What was the consequence of that?

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 presenting. Right, right. Can you at least check with us? Yeah, but you know. What you just articulated was masterful and that's the best logical read that you could provide on that situation, I think.

All bureaucratic entities will always say no to anything that's question related. Obviously. There's no benefit to them. 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. 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. 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. Well, you see that in Harry Potter, too, because there's a weird dynamic constantly in the Harry Potter stories that Rowling is. 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, 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 yeah and he knows about it almost they insinuate that he knows what they're doing right exactly exactly lets it go anyways yeah well that's that that's that constant paradox it's really the paradox of

It's really the paradox of something like liberal versus conservative. 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. 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 because most of the time you should follow the rules.

But some of the time you definitely shouldn't. And wisdom is the ability and daring, that's the ability to tell the difference. Well, so you went on Piers Morgan. And so I don't blame your administrator for 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. 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, 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 and you can have this new special ed license 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. Oh, yeah. Good. Good, good, good. That's the nod and the wink. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, every institution that's going to 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, well, yeah, there is a reason for not following the procedure in that particular case. And he said, I need to run this up the flagpole. I'm going to need to call. This is just getting, I don't know how to respond to this. Pierce, Maury, I don't know what to say.

This isn't in the playbook. Yeah, right. So they arrange 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. She used to kind of have her office over near mine, but I hadn't seen her at all this past year. She just said...

And so she, there was a meeting with her. Yeah, there was, I went into a room with that principal, 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,

Congratulations. Good luck to you. I hope you don't make a mistake. Right, right. I need 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, home free, but that's, it was, it felt good.

Like, that should be the response. Yeah, well, 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

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.

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 really the same sort of experiment that you ran. 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. 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. And

I made three videos objecting to that and some university policies. 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. And that went viral. And then I was called...

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

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 for better or for worse, and that was much better than many of the things that they could have done. Now, it still worked out that it became impossible really for me to keep my position there, although I did for about a year. But yeah,

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

hunker down and they're going to dissociate themselves from you if you are deemed to be a risk especially a contamination risk and so and the topics you were discussing especially on the rolling side would have that element because of course 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 but you weren't you weren't that that didn't exactly happen in the school 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. How does that correlate to the dean's business or the university's business? 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 politically on social media. If they say, and there's no clear objective

definition of what where that line 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 in canada what the people that i'm in trouble for in relationship to my license it's like yeah 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

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 de Tocqueville 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, and so...

And those open-ended policies are precisely the sort of thing that they're like comprehensive traps. 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. 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... 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. Sure. 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 Piers Morgan? Things were different. No one ever spoke to me about...

Again, the video or I was continued 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? Now that I had this, I'm still doing the YouTube channel and it's grown. It's not, so it wasn't like it was now. It's not huge, but it was decent and it was fun. Most importantly, it was me and the music teacher. Yeah.

We were like, okay, we have this opportunity. He didn't want any part of it. It was his personality type. 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. There's a lot that comes with that. You're in the unknown and it's on you when you're entering this. But 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. So that's the voice you hear in those early, if you ever look at those videos, that's the voice you hear off camera. And he didn't want to show his face, which is understandable. And all those perspectives in there are his genuine perspectives and he's very liberal. So it was interesting. It was interesting dynamic. It was like this classic, it was so stereotypical. People thought it was fake.

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? 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. There's the bar nearby.

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So even in the Lord of the Rings stories, you know, the fact that 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. Yeah. And you might think that's all status. It's like, it's not all status. 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. And so...

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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well... That's how it felt, yeah. 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. This is a deep biological instinct. 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. 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? 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. 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?

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. So walk us through the aftermath of this flurry of attention. The students, 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. 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 and the parents were fine with it. He already had the releases. It was fine.

Yeah, that's good. So you had dotted your I's and crossed your T's with regards to student involvement. 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 gotta be careful. 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 to get rid... 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. Right. I don't know. 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. 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. There's no good to having one of your teachers out there with a growing audience, small but growing audience, saying certain things or examining certain ideas. It could be troublesome. There's no benefit to that. Well, yeah. The funny thing, too, is that there's no benefit from a pure analysis of risk, but...

what you did with those videos definitely, in my estimation anyways, brought credit to the school. So, you know, with more imagination,

what you accomplished could have been very useful to the school with more imagination. That would require them to go public, though, which they were not going to do. They don't want that spotlight. That would require people to know what the name is. 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.

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 your 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.

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. 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 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. But that also would mean, 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 i did see huge potential in that suddenly the students but there's a lot of down potential downside and risk to this too and the students suddenly have the ability to create content that can reach a large audience right 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 oh it's like well now we're going to make things that people will watch if this had occurred at that first high school neshoba we were already putting things on twitter yeah they would have i remember the head of my department we would have who knows what we could have done with this 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? 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? 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 idea.

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

Because it was just from another conversation, but it was identical. The pattern was so identical. I thought this might be worth sharing. Yeah. It's identical to the last one. So what could go wrong? 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. Yeah.

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

you know just because we've been now we've 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 and um so i had posted that previously two weeks go by i in the middle of the day i get calls into a meeting and they say we've decided to part ways

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 was it okay the first time? 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. 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? Like, it seems like a factor to take in. So I said, for sure, we'll just do the investigation. You know, there's like, okay, go home and HR will be in touch in three days. But I couldn't touch anything. They took my computer, everything. I was like escorted like a criminal out.

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. It'd be interesting to continue the conversation about why your school made that decision, what possible role HR might have played, and how these things could be managed in general. Because while people who are watching and listening are going to be interested in, well, what strategy should you adopt?

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. 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. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, part of your story is...

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. 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. And to everybody watching, listening, the film crew here in Manhattan today, thank you guys very much for setting this up and 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. ♪♪♪

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