The Viral Educator: Warren Smith on Wokeness, Campus Culture, and Losing His Job

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Conversations With Coleman

Episode: The Viral Educator: Warren Smith on Wokeness, Campus Culture, and Losing His Job

Date: November 24, 2025
Host: Coleman Hughes
Guest: Warren Smith (professor, filmmaker, content creator)

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Overview

In this episode, Coleman Hughes interviews Warren Smith, a former special ed and Emerson College instructor whose Socratic, open-minded style of teaching recently went viral—particularly the video where he respectfully questions a student about labeling J.K. Rowling a transphobe. Smith discusses the repercussions of going viral, his subsequent firing, and the ideological climate on elite college campuses. Together, Hughes and Smith compare campus experiences from 2016–2020, analyze the rise of "wokeness," and discuss challenges for higher education reform, including both policy and teaching culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Warren Smith's Viral Moment & Firing

• Origin of the viral video: Smith recorded a spontaneous Socratic dialogue with a student about J.K. Rowling—a conversation intended as a classroom warmup (03:21).
• Going viral and what followed (05:54):
  • Smith never expected the video to become public, but someone uploaded it to X (Twitter), catching widespread attention.
  • He describes feeling at a crossroads: “A door kind of opened. You kind of reach a fork in the road…this is never going to happen again. So I’m going to try and make the most of this.” (03:21, Smith)
  • After appearing on national media, such as Piers Morgan, Smith was fired by his school, not for breaking any written rule, but due to concerns of “liability” for the school’s reputation and community backlash. (06:01)
  • The school attempted to get him to sign an NDA in exchange for severance, which he refused. Legal help came from Peter Boghossian, but Smith decided not to pursue litigation (08:46).

2. Campus Culture: “Wokeness”, Race, and Status

• Coleman and Smith recognize striking parallels between Emerson College (Smith) and Columbia (Hughes) in 2016–2020—particularly the dominance of progressive ideology and identity-based status hierarchies, dubbed the “oppression Olympics.”
  • “The trans black disabled woman is at the top of the hierarchy… [and] the straight white male is at the bottom.” (12:41, Hughes)
• Smith describes how campus protests, faculty fear, and anonymous bias reporting shaped everything from grading policies to classroom discussions (15:02).
  • Example: A professor tells Smith not to “hold [students] to account” if they are black, defining this as “taking into account…their lived experience...That’s why they weren’t coming to class and didn’t do any of their work.” (16:05, Smith)
• Hughes critiques the “bigotry of low expectations” and how the incentive structure can undermine achievement and integrity among minority students (17:08).

3. Narrative and Victimhood

• Smith explores why these narratives are so persuasive:
  • “We are narrative creatures…when you’re being sold this story and everyone around you is buying into it...It feels good to be a victim.” (19:08, Smith)
• They discuss how campus activists ask white students to “just don’t talk” and “cede your space” instead of providing concrete policy solutions (20:29), a stark contrast with historical civil rights movements.
• Hughes critiques the shift from solving real, material inequities to a focus on subjective, unprovable mental states and “microaggressions” (24:24).

4. The Underbelly of Elite College Life

• Hughes analyzes how affirmative action and cultural/social differences can create real, if complex, feelings of alienation among minority students—leading some to blame the institution and peers for low status (25:23).
• Smith describes actual discrimination faced as a white, Southern, male student within classrooms heavily dominated by international students and progressive orthodoxy (29:38).

5. Suppression of Dissent & Academic Indoctrination

• Both share vivid stories of classroom environments where (non-ideological) dissent is unsafe, and challenging core concepts or assignments leads to ostracization (32:34, Smith recounts being alone on a thesis project).
• Hughes and Smith recount reading figures like Foucault and Marx—“dead white males” who are oddly immune from the supposedly anti-canonical critiques levied at others (50:44).

6. Postmodernism as Root Issue

• Smith: “People’s eyes glaze over because [postmodernism] can be so difficult…Everything’s malleable, there’s no objective truth” (52:44).
• The dangers of “there’s no objective truth”—Smith and Hughes agree this undermines both moral clarity and social cohesion.
  • As Hughes says, “Postmodernism actually refutes itself. It is an incoherent philosophy.” (54:57, Hughes)
• Smith: “Morality is superstition…That’s the sentiment on campus…That’s the mainstream majority thought at my college.” (55:15)

7. Reactions to Political Life and Cancel Culture

• Discussion of campus reactions to major political events—including selective outrage at violence or death, depending on political allegiance (56:50).
• Hughes bemoans the lack of principle: “Either it’s true that we shouldn’t celebrate someone getting killed, or it isn’t, and you should be consistent with that principle.” (57:32, Hughes)

8. Fixing Higher Ed: Reform or Rebuild?

• Hughes describes his positive experience at the University of Austin—a new institution dedicated to heterodoxy and open dialogue. He highlights its contrast with legacy institutions’ inertia and credibility.
• Debate: Reforming from within (restoring classroom norms, fixing perverse financial incentives, e.g., student loans), versus building new institutions from scratch.
  • Smith: “Honestly, I don’t think it’s that difficult to return to [open dialogue], but there are other problems at play…My personal advice is…nothing will improve your life more than living in accordance with the fabric of reality.” (69:52, Smith)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You realize it’s one of those moments. It’s probably a once in a lifetime opportunity to try and make something of it...So me and one other teacher set up this space where I am now. And once a week we would just kind of record and try to see where it would take us.” (03:21, Smith)
• On his firing: “They were like, congratulations, you didn’t break any rules. You handled it well...But that’s not how it felt. It felt like something else...They wanted me to sign an NDA. And then they were like, we’ll pay you if you sign this NDA. But you could never talk about being fired.” (08:46, Smith)
• “There is a way to get within their good graces if you’re a white guy, but...you’ve got to condemn yourself first on the basis of your race...I respected more the white people that didn’t do that.” (34:38, Hughes)
• “Morality is superstition...That’s the sentiment on campus...That’s the mainstream majority thought at my college.” (55:15, Smith)
• “My view is...[that] if you give [students] a total pass to get a good result without putting in any of the work, most people will go down that path.” (17:08, Hughes)
• “Postmodernism actually refutes itself. It is an incoherent philosophy.” (54:57, Hughes)
• “Nothing will improve your life more than living in accordance with the fabric of reality.” (69:52, Smith)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Segment | |---------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 03:21 | Warren Smith describes the viral J.K. Rowling video origin story and the aftermath | | 06:01 | The firing: legal, ethical, and reputational dynamics | | 12:41 | Hughes introduces “oppression Olympics” and race-based status culture | | 15:02 | Emerson’s culture: anonymous bias reporting, faculty fear, protest stories | | 16:05 | Example of professor excusing black student’s lack of work on race grounds | | 19:08 | Why victimhood narratives are so persuasive | | 20:29 | “Just don’t talk”—being told to cede space as a white student | | 24:24 | Microaggressions, post-criminalized evidence, and subjective oppression | | 29:38 | Smith on being a cultural minority at Emerson and facing social/ideological exclusion | | 32:34 | Lack of peer support for non-conforming academic projects | | 50:44 | Hughes introduces the paradox of "dead white males" in the canon, focusing on Foucault and Marx | | 52:44 | Postmodernism's attack on objectivity and classroom consequences | | 54:57 | Critique of postmodernism’s logical incoherence | | 55:15 | Smith on campus morality and the consequences of postmodern thought | | 56:50 | Consistency and partisanship in moral judgment: Osama vs. Thatcher, Kirk’s death | | 66:27 | Hughes on fear of expressing dissent in class, even as a “speak my mind” student | | 69:52 | Solutions: reforming classroom culture, financial incentives, and technological impacts |

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The Takeaway

This episode is a vivid, firsthand dive into the ideological transformation of college culture, the fragile state of academic freedom, and the complex roots of campus “wokeness.” Smith’s and Hughes’s reflections are illuminating for anyone interested in education, free speech, or the challenges of building healthy academic institutions. Their personal stories of alienation, courage, and relentless inquiry offer not only critique—but hope that a return to genuine, open-ended learning is both possible and necessary.

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Follow Warren Smith:

• YouTube: Warren Smith, Secret Scholar Society
• X (Twitter): @WTSmith17

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Warren Smith. Warren is a professor, filmmaker, and content creator. He bursts onto the scene with a viral video that you may have seen in which he asks a student to explain why J.K. rowling is a bigot and ends up changing that student's mind simply by asking questions.

[B]

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, no, I feel like an idiot.

[A]

Now, he was subsequently fired from that teaching job. So in this episode, we begin by talking about that fiasco. Then we move on to compare notes about what it was like to be on a college campus between 2016 and 2020. Warren was at Emerson at that time, and I was at Columbia, but our experiences confronting wokeness were remarkably similar. So it was fun to reminisce about some of those crazy stories. We also talk about Trump's attempts to bend the character of elite colleges to his will. And finally, we talk about what can actually be done to fix higher education. So, without further ado, Warren Smith.

[B]

What.

[A]

Happens when education is built around conversation, not debate? When every student is treated as a source of insight and community, as a path to wisdom? At St. John's College, students read the great books together, from Plato and Aristotle to Wolfe and Du Bois, discussing humanity's hardest questions. In small seminars, they learn to listen, question, and think together across perspectives. It's hard. It's human. It's St. John's College. The education students deserve at SJC. EDU. All right, Warren Smith, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[B]

Thanks for having me.

[A]

So, you know, like many people, I think I first encountered you in your J.K. rowling video. This video I think people will remember. You are basically doing a kind of Socratic dialogue with one of your students at the time who believed J.K. rowling was transphobic. And you modeled the perfect example of how a professor should lead you down a conversation like that. And it turned out this student really hadn't thought so deeply about whether Rowling was actually transphobic. And it went fairly viral, I think, because it was. It just stood. It stood out by contrast to the current online culture of just hurling insults without much deep thought. So I think it would be good for my audience to get a sense of, like, who. Who were you at that Time. And also, what's your backstory? How did you get to be the kind of professor that engages that way? And then how did you get to be sort of putting this content on the Internet?

[B]

Sure. So I was teaching at a special ed school for students struggling with behavioral challenges. I still teach at Emerson College, one course a semester. But at the time, yeah, I was teaching full time students that had been the public school system couldn't handle them for whatever reason, so they would send them here. So I was working in kind of a therapeutic way, teaching multimedia content creation, video editing, photo editing, 3D printing. And so we would often be having conversations and we were doing a newscast at a student. They'd requested a specific student. That student was feeling nervous. So I was like, let's just do a warmup, kind of like what we're doing now. And I said, just what do you want to talk about? And the student asked to talk about J.K. rowling specifically because I think he knew I was like a Harry Potter fan. And that's. So we just hit record and that's where that came from. And I had uploaded it to my teaching portfolio, I kind of would call it, which was my YouTube channel, which no one was really watching it, so I didn't think anyone would see it. And some people did see it and someone pulled it and put it on X, where I did have an account. I wasn't really active on X. And that's where people saw it. And a door kind of opened. You kind of reach a fork in the road at that point where it's like you realize it's one of those moments. It's probably a once in a lifetime opportunity to try and make something of it. I make very little money as a teacher and every two weeks I would get a check for $1,400. So there was always this kind of looking for something, writing. My background's in filmmaking. I was always working on projects in some way to try and connect with an audience. So it was pretty interesting and to be in that position. And I'm genuinely a fan of the space. So I've been watching many of the people I've gotten to speak to at this point. I've been watching their content for years and I never expected to actually get to talk to them. But I felt like the door was kind of cracked open and it was like, this is never going to happen again. So I'm going to try and make the most of this. So me and one other teacher set up this space where I am now. And Once a week we would just kind of record and try to see where it would take us. And that went for about two months. And then I got fired, so. And then. Yeah, that's really how. And then I just went all in after getting fired.

[A]

So you got fired from the special ed school?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What was. Can you talk about that? What was the reason for the firing and how did that go down?

[B]

Yeah, I think it was primarily a lot of. There was a lot of people that were coming up to. To me in the hallway the next day after that went viral. They were like, how are they? How are you still? How have you not been fired already? And I just kind of acted like it didn't happen. I didn't know what to do about it. There's no putting it back in the bottle, so. But that didn't work. Piers Morgan wanted to have me on and I was in this mindset of like, am I going to go through the door or not? Just like, sure, I'll go and Pierce Morgan. And it was just like a 15 minute one on one. And the next day after that, I think that kind of pissed them off. And because then I had to. Then the principal was like, I don't know what to do about this. Like, I don't blame you for doing that and wanting to do this. He's like, this is beyond me. I don't blame you. The head business person who makes all the decisions, because this is a business. It's not like most public schools was like, yeah, we need to have a meeting. She called all the lawyers and we had a meeting and essentially they said, well, you didn't break any rules. I have all the releases. We have students put content online all the time. It would be in my mind. It's like, logically, it's no different than music teacher who was helping me set up the space. If a student and him were to record a song and that song were to go viral, it's. There was no student on camera. It's just their voice. But the subject matter, there was concern around, oh, well, if. If there's mean comments and things like that, that there's no way to control that. And I think so. They. They told me, like, congratulations, you didn't break any rules. You handled it well. And we know you're going to probably want to make the most of this. And I think they were just trying to handle it legally. And so I did. I tried to make the most of it. And I guess there was like a rule change, but I. Things were just shift it's just a, it's just a game, you know, or like, I can understand why they would want to be like, this might be a liability. Some people don't like what you said in there.

[A]

The problem with that is, you know, if anyone, people should go back and watch the video. It's very easy to find on your YouTube channel. But you, you put them in a pickle because you were so respectful and restrained in how you led through the conversation. You weren't foaming at the mouth with any kind of bigotry. You were literally asking Socratic style questions to the student and leading them by the hand to think about the issue more deeply. So there's just nothing in the video where you can say, okay, this guy was being nasty. And so that put them in a. It would have been easier for them, I imagine, if you had said something actually, you know, mean.

[B]

Yeah, they could have. They, they had every right to fire me. I mean, because at that school, you sign a contract, you can be fired for any reason and it's. They have the right there. It shouldn't be forced to pay me if they don't want to. So. But I honestly, I think there was a big component of. As the channel was getting some, some traction. It wasn't like what it is right now, and it's still pretty small, I would say. But I think it became kind of this, this is a liability type thing. It's just easier to get. And they were just looking for a way to make that move. And they finally. And I think there was also a component of kind of waiting for the storm to pass because the public eye to move on. And so that's what happened. And I can understand where if they were just like, yeah, it's kind of a liability. It's just not. We understand you want to do this YouTube thing. It's kind of hard for us to take it on at the same time. So we, we got to part ways. Fine. But that's not how it felt. It felt like something else that was. It was like they wanted me to sign an NDA. And then they were like, we'll pay you if you sign this NDA. But you could never talk about being fired. You can't. And I couldn't afford a lawyer, but I managed with. I think. I don't know if you've spoken with Peter Bogosin before, but yes, I have. Yeah, he was like the person helped. He'd reached out to me and he was kind of this voice of reason. He helped me find a lawyer. And there was this whole potential path that I could have gone down. Like, yeah, you'll be able to do these podcasts if you sue the school and take legal action. And. But I don't think there was a road to go. It also, it just didn't morally feel like the right thing to do. But also, I don't think it would have ever worked. But there was that moment of, like, what do I do? And. And it's interesting, like, the day after Piers Morgan, that I came home because I. I did Pierce Morgan, and I had to go to the fire department to do this certification training, like, directly from the van. I got out of the van and, like, jumped in my car to go. And then I got home from training and I got a call from the Free Press, a reporter that claims they worked at the Free Press. And the article never came out. I don't know what. But it was interesting, the questions that she was asking. She said she was based in la. It might have been someone completely faking it, but they were asking me questions like, why would the school care? Why would they be worried about this? And this was literally the day after it just happened. Well, I mean, some people are not going to be happy about this. You know, it's.

[A]

So anyways, so I. I heard you on Joe Rogan. I don't know when that was. Maybe like a. A year ago or half a year ago. And you, you talked a lot about what it was like to be at Emerson. I guess you were you in a grad program there starting around 2016?

[B]

Yeah, graduate student. Getting my master's for three years.

[A]

Okay, so what you said on Rogan, it struck me as so similar to my own origin story. So I was at Columbia undergrad. I was two years older than the other undergrads, but I started in 2016, same year as you were at Emerson. And presumably, I mean, you know, I don't know the culture of Emerson, but from what you described, it seemed extremely similar to the culture at Columbia, namely, extremely progressive wokeness is the water that pretty much everyone swims in. There is a certain. What people used to call the oppression Olympics, this sense that the more racial and identity cards you had to play, the higher your status. Right. Like the proverbial the trans black disabled woman is at the top of the hierarchy simply by virtue of her identity cards. And obviously the straight white male is at the bottom of the heap. Kids would claim to be oppressed by white supremacy, right? They would claim white supremacy is everywhere on campus. It was the exact same at Columbia. It was literally people writing in the newspaper that I, as a black student, encounter white supremacy every day on this campus. And I was on the same campus as an equally black student looking for this alleged white supremacy and not finding it, and finding, in fact, that places like Emerson and Columbia are some of the most progressive spaces in the world with respect to being pretty hardcore against anti black racism. You know, it's one of those things that if you haven't been on a college campus in the past 10 years, it can just sound alien to you. It can sound like we're making it up, but I got you. Yeah, it's actual. I guess I wanted to know, like, what role did you, being you in that kind of environment play in your political evolution?

[B]

As you said, unless you've seen it, it's difficult to describe it or for people to believe it, which is really. If I were to boil down what I'm trying to do with my work now, that's really. Cause you can show it. You can't describe it really. But if there's video clips of it, you can analyze those video clips and kind of shine a light on it. But that had everything to do with it. That and then talking to people in my own life at home as well, they were still echoing the same ideas. So it was larger than just college campuses. It was mainstream thought at that point, I would describe. So that was weird, too. Like Jordan Peterson kind of dropped on the scene, right? And that was. I remember, whoa, this is really interesting. And then trying to point that out to friends that I grew up with, hey, have you seen this guy, Jordan Peterson? I'd play five minutes of the Kathy Newman conversation, and they're literally recoiling from it. And I thought, that's really interesting. That's strange. No, it's so bizarre. You have to see it to believe it, because Emerson College is not. It's definitely one of the most liberal. I can't imagine a campus being more liberal. I mean, but I haven't been on all the camp. I can't compare them in that way, but it was extremely liberal.

[A]

You've never been to Barnard then?

[B]

No, I haven't been to Barnard, but. But Emerson is up there, man. I could. I would. I would guess. And yeah, they had students protesting that Emerson was too racist and they wanted. They had specific demands. And I saw the faculty kowtow in fear for their careers. And that was when I was trying to transition into teaching. I was doing a lot of TA work, and I was scheduled to start teaching my first class not as a ta, but actually teach the course with undergrads. Yeah. And I remember one of the pref. They had this webs. This Facebook group was the only shred of evidence they had. And they would just. I mean, there was things at Emerson like anonymous bias reporting. There's this social justice center, literally, called the Social Justice Center. They recently rebranded that to the Office of Equal Opportunity, which is interesting because they're starting to. It's still this kind of a charade, but they're switching up their lingo. And there was anonymous bias report. People were putting things on this Facebook group. And this teacher who was. I had been taing for and she wanted me to teach her class, was one of the professors that had been some. Something she said that someone didn't like. And I talked to Rogan. I think I told Joe Rogan about this briefly, but this student had not been coming to class or doing any work. And she was talking to me about this just before the protest, like, yeah. So, Warren, remember, when you're teaching this class, don't let the students run all over you. Like, be fair. Hold them to account. Then there's the protest right after it. She's like, yeah, Warren, remember that conversation I had? I was wrong. I forgot to take into account their lived experience and the fact that this student is black. So I wasn't taking into account how difficult it is to be black at Emerson. And that's why they weren't coming to class and didn't do any of their work. And so, yeah, I was wrong to say you should fail them. There's exceptions that can be made. I remember that moment specifically. I remember where I was standing. It was a strange culture.

[A]

Yeah. What she's saying is that it's okay to lower your expectations for this student because of their race. And that's the phrase for that is the bigotry of low expectations. And I think there. You know, what I never understood about this way of thinking is why it is so comfortable with allowing giving people a pass to take advantage. Because if you understand, like, if I'm a black student at an elite school like this, and I understand that my professors will actually let me off the hook for doing no work and not showing up to class. And all I have to do is play up my sense of victimhood and trauma as a black person, that is extremely tempting. Like, you are dangling. Like, my. My view about this is that human beings are mostly by default, lazy. Like, this is just my memory of being a student. I happen to be a very good Student. But if you told me you don't have to go to class today, if you say this one thing and there's no penalty, I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to stay home and do something way more fun. If you're telling me I don't have to study for that test, I don't have to turn in that essay and all I have to do is perform this set of words. Well, I mean a lot of people are going to do that. And in my view it's like this sort of failure of putting yourself actually in the shoes of another self interested human being and understanding having this totally weirdly naive view that like my view is, as Zora Neale Hurston said, black people are no better and no worse than any other people and human beings. If you give them a total pass to get a good result without putting in any of the work, most people will go down that path.

[B]

Yeah, people are like water. You're right. By and large, people are going to take the path of least resistance. It's easier to be foolish than to be wise. We see this throughout history. It's why it's easier to fall in line with these very appealing narratives. My theory is that we are narrative creatures. We make sense of the complexity of the world through stories. And when you're being sold this story, that everyone around you is buying into that. And it feels good to be a victim. And the story tells you that you're a victim and that you're being oppressed in this. And it's all a power game. And it's. And the stakes are high for. And that's the core law of narrative is that conflict drives story. You need the stakes to be high for a story to be successful. And those components all fall into, I would argue it is postmodern thinking. Though most of these students would never be able to tell you what postmodernism is. But they're just echoing the story at that point. But we can trace the thinking back and see the components very clearly.

[A]

And am I right that there was at Emerson when you were there something similar to Brett Weinstein's fiasco at Evergreen College where white people were expected to be silent for some period of time?

[B]

Yeah, so the day after the protest I was taking a pedagogy course taught by the dean of undergrad, this undergrad student body. So it was great opportunity, great class, met once a week. It was a four hour class. And we were joined that night by the head of the social justice center. And there was also the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which they have since changed the name. And I remember because I'd never met them before, and they were sitting there. There was probably 10 students in this room. And the whole point of the class, pedagogy, the philosophy of teaching, the art of teaching, techniques for teaching. And the entire four hours were spent addressing the crisis on campus around racism, because the protests had just happened. So they devoted the time to allowing the students to voice their grievances so that we could remedy them. But when I spoke up, I asked the only thing I said, what can I do? Because at that point, I was new to all this, too. I've thought, just, jeez, genuinely, there must be a problem here. What can I do? I remember feeling to this one guy, he was talking. I was like, I had no idea you felt that way, that every time you come to class, you feel essentially victimized in a sense, what can I do as a white person? Right? And the response I got was, just don't talk. Secede your space. Give your space to everyone else, and just for the next four hours, just listen. So it wasn't comparable to what Brett went through at Evergreen, but there are components of that still. It's the same ideology. It just played out differently. But, yeah, I was told point blank to just not talk and to listen and to give up my space based upon the color of my skin. And then they were also talking about decolonializing the canon, because I rode elevator down after class with the dean. It was just me and him in the elevator. I remember him. He was frustrated, but there was the sense of fear, like he didn't want to show it too much. But I remember him sighing and saying under his breath, decolonialize the cannon. Like, shaking his head like he was not happy with it, but he was still going along.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I find that very interesting, because if you went back to the civil rights movement, say, and you said to Martin Luther King or Bayard, Rustin, I'm a white person. I'm hearing you, like, what can I do? They would have pulled out a list of 10 things you could do today. Concretely write a letter to your congressman saying, we want to get rid of the Jim Crow laws that prevent us from riding wherever we want on a bus. Write a letter to your congressman in support of the civil rights legislation that. That has been proposed that would do this specific thing that would outlaw literacy tests for. For voting rights. Like, they would have a very specific program of complaints and very specific ways you could address each one. Concretely. And they did that because the oppression they faced was actually real and rooted in legal boundaries that circumscribed their life and could in principle and in practice be changed. But if you go to these, you know, these activists at Emerson or any, any similar college, and you say, okay, I'm hearing your pain. What can I do? And instead of giving you a list of policies that are harming them directly, they say, well, what I need you to do is to be silent. Like to actually silence yourself.

[B]

Well, because they're claiming that the. My racism is subconscious, so it's coming through microaggression. So there's no need for real, objective evidence. They would argue that it's no less real, though the oppression is no less real. It's just systemic. So, yes, yeah, there are not laws in place that I can point to, like the busing laws, but that doesn't mean that the dynamics are no less real. I disagree with that. But that's the argument that you're gonna, you're gonna face. And once it becomes subconscious, I don't, I'm not even. So you're telling me, and this is the argument that's made, you're telling me that I'm so deeply racist that I can't even see my own racism, so I don't even know when I'm being racist. That therefore the need for evidence goes out the window. It's a very effective. But they genuinely believe it, though it is also convenient because it's impossible to. It's not impossible, but it. Because it's not built on logic.

[A]

Yeah, I think, you know, I've always felt that part of what is going on in those cases at this is specifically at elite universities, a place like Emerson or Columbia is that some of the black kids there and Hispanic kids, some of them feel genuinely socially alienated from their environment. And there could be many reasons for that. So one reason could be if you are an affirmative action admit. In other words, if. If the average SAT score of the kids sitting next to you in class is like 2200 and yours is like 1900, then you are going to feel stupid compared to the people you are around, even though you are like way above average intelligence in the general population. So what happens is like, as you know, teachers by default teach towards the middle of the class, wherever that level of preparedness is, wherever the level of, of natural smarts is. You're going to tend to teach towards the middle because you don't want to teach too slow for the smartest kids or too fast for the kids that are struggling. So if you admit systematically which affirmative action does a particular group of students, whether that is student athletes, children of professors, or black and Hispanic students, under a lower set of guidelines, they're going to be finding themselves towards the bottom of every class. Now, that's a very hard thing to face, right, because you're constantly feeling stupid, even though you're not stupid, just because of the level of the kids that, that are around you. And then on top of that, if you come from, you know, if you don't come from all the same sorts of networks of private schools, feeder schools and stuff that tend to feed into these colleges, well, maybe you don't really socially mesh. Like, maybe you want, you really would like to get into that like, sorority. But they don't, like, they don't really like you for some reason. And it's not because you're black, but it is correlated with like, you know, the black girls aren't going to get invited to that sorority, not because they're black again, but it's like it can feel that way if you're from a kind of a socially and culturally different part of the country than most of the kids around you. That's what it is to be, to come from a minority culture, right? Like, by definition, you're not being represented as often. You're not seeing, you're not seeing yourself in the mainstream culture. So then you put that all together and you have black and Hispanic kids feeling socially alienated. And then, you know, I forget whose quote this is, but like, given the choice between blaming yourself and taking responsibility and trying to take good steps and blaming the world for your bad feelings, most people choose to blame the world, blame some aspect. So I think part of what happens is, is there, what they're telling you is like, I feel alienated. Like, I feel low status here. Like, I feel like a low status person here at this school. And there is no specific policy of the school that is creating that. And there's also no genuine animus or racial animus towards me. But I still feel low status. And I'm going to basically blame whiteness around me, you know, the white culture. And I think that's sort of where some of it stems from. And so that gets translated as this language of racism, because that works really well. Like, if you say the word racism, the white liberals around you will suddenly pay attention to you and perk up and be like, wow, like it's, it gives you enormous power. But you know, I think some of it is actually downstream of those very liberal policies that are intended to. To help black people.

[B]

Yeah, but it's straight because it's a strange dynamic. Because at the same time, looking back at my time at Emerson, I would claim that there was real racism. It's as a. Just as a numbers game, as a white guy. I was a minority. First of all, the. The majority were actually Chinese students. I had several classes. Every class. This is not an exaggeration, and most people think it is. Most classes were over 50% Chinese. Most of them would probably be around 75%. I had several where I went in. And I was not the only non American. I was the only non Chinese student. They were all speaking in Mandarin or whatnot. And that was very challenging. But no, I would say that there was real racism at Emerson. There was that dynamic that you're describing that is the result of policies. There was this, like. I was trying to make a. I did make my thesis around World War II. I originally was going to do it just on Winston Churchill. And I was told, while Winston Churchill is racist, I was writing a movie about a guy who built a flying machine that looked like a gypsy wagon. I was told, well, that's racist. You can't say. Or it was politically incorrect. There was a real sense of if you're a white male, you have to dance a specific dance to be included. If you don't, then it's not political. I wasn't political. It was just the housing fair. When I first arrived, they go around and did pronouns, and I'm dyslexic, and I could not remember what a pronoun was. I had never heard of this before. And they were going in the circle. I was trying to pick up on the pattern of, like, what are they doing here? Like, literally this. And when it came to me, I feel stupid now because it's so obvious what a pronoun is. I said something ridiculous like, yeah, my name is Warren Smith. I'm from North Carolina. It's like, us all. I said something and I don't remember. And everyone, like, stared daggers at me. And I had no idea what was happening. And I quickly got this reputation of, like. Because I did a little documentary about. With the Chinese students, like, what made you want to come to Emerson? I just thought this was really interesting that there was so many Chinese, like, directly from China just to study here. And this was not unique just to Emerson. And so I did a small documentary about that. And there was this, like, I could not get a single student to work on My thesis film, I did it all by myself outside the school with my own equipment, with someone from North Carolina when I went home over the holidays. Filmed it.

[A]

Why? Because they didn't want to be in the film.

[B]

No one would. Yeah, they didn't want to work with me on it. It was.

[A]

Why was that?

[B]

I don't know. I don't know, honestly.

[A]

Is it part of that you had some kind of reputation from your other.

[B]

There was definitely. Yeah, there was. There was this one class. It was. I still have the textbook. Cultural Media Studies. Chapter one. In this textbook is literally Karl Marx. And it's talking about the power dynamics of. Of. At this. Studying this at an art school of how the audience consumes media content art and how that's used in the power dynamics of the West. Chapter one, Karl Marx. And we were talking one day about can we control the Internet? And 80% of the students are Chinese. In the class, 15 students. And I remember I said, that's really interesting. Well, I'm not sure that we can. The government can control the Internet. I'm not sure that would work in America. We can ask, like, what do you guys think? How's it working out in China? And the professor goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, can't say that. And like, literally stopped it right there. I thought, what are we doing? This is a graduate level class talking about this topic, but we can't talk. Talk about that. Someone told me, Warren, you were born in the wrong century. I feel like. I don't know why.

[A]

Because of that comment.

[B]

Not because of that comment. It might have been because of my interest in Winston Churchill, who was. I was told point blank by people that my approach to Winston Churchill was flawed because he was racist and represented. He's one of the figures that is a great villain of the white male, you know, the colonial apparatus. So I don't. And it's been so many years. This was 16, 17, 17, 18, 19, and graduated in 2019. But those are just some examples that pop to my mind.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have. We've had very similar experiences. I mean, it's.

[B]

It's.

[A]

In some way the attacks on me were a little different because I'm black and Hispanic, obviously, so no one was calling me a straight white male. And I was under no pressure to condemn my own identity. Like you mentioned that there is a way to get within their good graces if you're a white guy. But what you have to do is like, put down white guys. You have to be like, you have to be very like I'm guilty. Yeah. Disparaging towards yourself as your ticket in the door and accept a certain level of subordinated status, which is a really unnatural thing to do. And I always felt I respected more the white people that didn't do that. Because in order to, if you do that, what you're basically saying is that you are so desperate to be liked that you're willing to just accept blanket discrimination against your identity as, as the price of entry into this room of like, being liked. And I always thought there was something really disgusting about people that did that. Like, if you really believe all this stuff, it's like, okay, you're a true believer and then you could actually have an interesting conversation. But if it's clear you're doing it as, as just the method of being liked in this particular weird environment you find yourself in. I found that to be very off putting. And I more the people that were like, no, I'm not doing that. Why would, like, why would I ask anyone of any race, any, for any from anywhere in the world to say the price of entry into this social club is you've got to condemn yourself first on the basis of your race. Like, it's, it's so, it's, it's, there's something really sick about it. And so that was all around Columbia too, when I was there. I'm curious if you pay much attention to what President Trump has been doing vis a vis Harvard and Columbia and other, other schools in order to try to pressure these schools to, to reverse all this stuff. Do you pay much attention to that and do you have an opinion on it?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I'm not enough to be able to, I can share my thoughts on it. I have real concerns around taxpayer money going to these universities. I'm trying to remember if Emerson is taking any of that money. I don't, I should know that, but I know Harvard is and the justification you're going to get if you debate this is, well, they're conducting important research. But then when you talk to professors there, and I worked at Harvard as a videographer recording classes. I'm not like faculty there or anything, but I've spent a lot of, I did my thesis at Harvard, spent a lot of time in the archives there and have spoken with many professors. Some admit that a lot of this research is, it's not going, it doesn't really justify the taxpayer money. And I agree that if, if there's actual. And what I, I would argue that you would see actual racism is just, it's just the opposite of what they think it is. Like, if you're telling people that your value and your ability to get grants for films, or, for example, if your race is playing a role in that, if you're implementing equity, there's a real. It's just illogical. And I think you could make a very strong case that you should not be getting taxpayer money. I understand the concerns around freedom of speech and the concerns around Israel, Palestine. And if that, I don't know what is true. We could come at this as if X then Y now. So if X is, well, there, there are students that are sharing their opinion on Palestine or whatnot, I'm against that. But if there is what we're describing with this racism towards white males or white people, if that's going towards Jewish students as well, there's a real problem there. So I think you could make a strong case. And how Trump goes about many of these things is going to be like the bull in the china shop. And I'm not going to agree with everything he does and how he does it.

[A]

But.

[B]

But the underlying problem is there. I've seen it, and it's strange. So I can understand the argument. But does that answer that question?

[A]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, that's similar to my opinion. I think it's a real problem. And if Trump limited himself just to the reasonable version of a response, then I would be behind it 100%. But he tends to find the reasonable version and then blow past it and do something else.

[B]

Yeah. So, like, a good example I use is the. I haven't talked about this publicly, but the alligator Alcatraz is like. To me, I was like, what are you doing? And the fact that you're bragging, it's me. Like, one thing. If you were to. We have to build this facility and it happens to be in a swamp. All right, that's one thing. It's another thing to brag about how efficient it is to use alligators as prison guards. And it's free labor. They're highly effective. They just sit there. And then if someone does what they're. They make great prison guards, you know, so we're going to incorporate that into our brand, what we're going to even call it. And then we're going to make T shirts. It's like. So, yeah, to me, I was like, oh, but there's going to be things like that. And I think that's kind of what we're describing with the, the, with Harvard and the other. There's real problems with the Ivy League dynamic. That's a really interesting conversation to be had around that. I really fell into a really deep hole. That was very interesting though, which is what my thesis was on in the lead up to World War II. The role that Harvard played in World War II where Roosevelt used James Brian Conant, the president of Harvard, to go meet with Winston Churchill because he couldn't do it because he was up for reelection for his third term. Third or fourth term, which is a crazy thought. And so the president of Harvard flies to meet with Churchill in the middle of the blitz and then they smuggle back all this intelligence, build a secret lab and start. That led to Oppenheimer. And we saw that movie, we saw how that story went. But that was all going way before Pearl harbor ever even happened. There was this entire secret gear up. They knew war was inevitable. And you find all of this written and then looking at it through the lens of the student body was really interesting. But what really interested me was the power concentration of how many senators sons were there. The president of the student body was godson to Roosevelt. His roommate was John F. Kennedy. His older brother Joe was at college at the same time he was supposed to be president dies in the war. JFK later becomes president and it's just. This wheel is unseen but has. It's a strange. It's a strange state of affairs that we are in today. I don't know how to get back from it. I don't know how to save it. At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach.

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[A]

What role do you think professors are playing in all of these problems? Because I remember, you know, I tried to pick my classes wisely so that I was avoiding most of the classes with indoctrinated professors that were basically woke ideologues. But I did end up taking some of those classes, not only because I was curious, but because, you know, whatever. My friend wanted to take it with me. So I've been in the class with the professor who is literally the caricature of what Fox News believes woke professors are down to the look and the beliefs and the style of teaching. I even wrote like one of my first articles. I talked about how I was in two different classes reading Foucault. So I think it was probably History of Sexuality or one of Discipline and Punish, whatever, one of Foucault's famous books. And in one class I had a great professor and we were allowed to disagree with Foucault if we thought he was full of shit. We could point out his logical flaws. You could agree with it if you wanted. You could say anything you wanted as long as it was based in the text and in some kind of good faith engagement. Professor didn't, similar to what you did in the J.K. rowling video, would ask you critical questions about how you're thinking through your opinion and hopefully lead you to a more interesting resolution. This other class, we read the exact same book and she was teaching it as a preacher would teach you the Bible, you know, like the most doctrinaire form of religious instruction. Like this book is true. Everything Foucault says about sexuality being constructed is correct. And if you don't agree, you are part of the problem. These are the kinds of things she.

[B]

Would say and that filters into the consumption of art. So modern art, for example, I was taking that course and her husband was taught by this professor. Her husband has a power position, was like the assistant dean of the program. So if I was going to teach, I had to be on his good side. She was a cool teacher. She was cool, fun, but she was indoc. She was pushing a doctrine like it was. And this was modern art. Yet that's still reflecting Foucault and postmodernism all the way through to the. Because it's really attack on them. There's no standards. Everything's a social construct. The modern art, the banana nailed to the wall, is beautiful. It's just a matter of perspective. There's no such thing as right behavior versus wrong behavior. There are no objective lines in life. And we can see how this echoes through all of these subjects. There were some cases where I would have, yeah, it's totally fine if you want to. It's important for students to talk about postmodernism, Marx and All of these things, but do it like you were describing in a way where you can challenge things. But when I'm in the class, that professor that shut that conversation down when I asked about the Chinese students was like, how is it working in China? Like, what are you genuinely asking it? Like that. He was like that caricature he read. He. I don't know if he's still doing. Probably is. He was running this thing called the engagement lab. And this is an example. This is what Emerson's research would be. We were talking about Harvard, and that's the justification for the tax money. This is what Emerson would describe as their lab for research. And it's just researching how people engage with content. There's no re. And money is going towards that. There's no real. There's nothing tangible that's beyond. It's just reinforcing these ideologies. That's the kind of. So even if that professor had not shut down that conversation, and he would not. He would challenge me on certain things. And I was always one to, like, just call out the logic when I see it. And I think that's what kind of led to that. The students kind of othering me. It's not that I was political. I was just like the banana on the wall, nailed to the wall. That's not art. Like, I'm sorry. Like, this is stupid. Like, in more words than that, you would actually kind of get into the theory of it. But if you were to say that banana is not. I don't. I think we're going down a weird road here. And this is why, even if the student, the professor allows that conversation to occur, all the students in the class are like, oh, this is because it's going against this deep story that they've. You think that there is a right way to behave. You think that there are beauty standards. These are oppressive ideas of the. Of the social construct of the west, which is just reinforcing. And of course you do. You're a white guy. You're a male too, and you're straight. So it's like. So there's no. There are good professors there. One professor who retired, he got fed up with it. But he has appeared on my YouTube channel, has helped. But I just got off the. Off a call yesterday with Sam Richards and his wife at SOC119. He's the professor I told Joe about, Joe Rogan about this. I was like, this is the only guy who's actively teaching that I see doing this online. They live stream everything. He teaches sociology at Penn State. And I've made a couple videos on him. But the day after Charlie Kirk got shot, he talked to his students about it in a way that was real. And he's really trying and he's pushing them and he's doing it in an effective way. And that was the video that. I've never had a video perform like that because it was. So it's the conversation that needed to be happening with the students, which your people are. It's like a window into the sausage being made that you can't find anywhere else. And the whole theme of the call was like, how do we keep this from getting shut down? His wife is like, I don't know how the college is even letting Sam do this for all these years. She's like, I'm amazed that because it's the same philosophy that got me shut down because it's a liability. And what the. There's potential for bad comments, things like that. It's just easier for the college to say it's, no, we're not going to allow you to live stream this. And I think that's why no one else does it. But that's. Honestly, if you took what Sam is doing and you did that at every college, I personally would be like, I'm paying 60 grand a year. I don't want to. It feels like a waste of money for me to be. But a lot of those students need to be challenged on these topics. And I think. I think a lot of them are taking it because it's just. They view it as an easy grade. But when you watch the videos now and then, he really does do something important. So they're out there, is my point. The professors are out there, but they are far and few between.

[A]

Yeah. One thing I've always wondered is there is this constant dismissal of straight white men. And when it comes to the canon. You were mentioning Deke decolonizing the canon. And this is a debate we had every single year at Columbia. We. We have a sort of. We're sort of famous for h. Having the. What we call the core curriculum, which is one of the school, like the central selling point of the school relative to the competitors like Harvard and Princeton and Yale, is that Columbia has had the same core curriculum roughly for, you know, whatever 200 years. Like, we're reading the same people that whoever went to Columbia 100 years ago read. And that puts you in part of a tradition. And that's kind of a story that the school sells and tells. And that core curriculum is like constantly Constantly under attack every single year for having too many dead white males.

[B]

But it's so dumb.

[A]

One thing that I was. So we've talked about like Foucault and Marx in this conversation, right? Foucault wasn't straight, but they're both dead white males. In Marx's case, he is like on record having called black people the N word in German or the equivalent. Obviously Foucault has a dodgy, quasi pedophilic history in certain ways. Why is it that those two people have escaped this criticism of being dead white males?

[B]

Because they can. Their defenders claim they're misunderstood and that we are not accurately representing the vast complexity of their ideas. And it's a tactic that's often used you over complicate to obfuscate. It is you just put so much out there. There's a number of YouTube channels that are defenders of these ideas and they all, they love to attack Jordan Peterson and the common attack is always he's not accurately representing these ideas. My favorite, personally, my favorite video I've ever made was looking at Joe Rogan talking to a postmodern professor, a professor who specializes in postmodernism, so that it removes that tactic from the table because you're hearing the words come directly out of this person's mouth. So I'm not really critiquing Foucault or Marx. It's like he's literally claiming that morality and ethics are superstition, everything ultimately, because knowledge, because we don't have absolute knowledge and knowledge is going to change. We're going to gain new knowledge. Therefore there's no such, really such thing as knowledge. And we've seen where this goes, that he's literally in the same video, he's claiming that, yeah, male, female, they're social constructs. Penis is just a word, therefore it's. You can't make it up. And it, that's why it does well, it did well because of that, but that's why it's so that video meant so much to me because it's so important. It really goes to the heart of everything I've done. Two on that professor. One is him debating. I'm. I'm forgetting the other professor's name. I'm sure you've seen his work. He's talking to Peterson a number of times. It's just the same tactics. It's the same problem of why it's so difficult to challenge postmodernism because people's eyes glaze over. Because it can be so difficult to wrestle with because everything's malleable. There's no objective truth. So when you're talking to someone like that, it can go. It feels like it can just go anywhere. It feels like they're. And you're not standing on a foundation. I describe it in the most simple form as postmodernism claims that there is no such thing as objective truth. That objective truth exists. We're constantly trying to map onto it and reach. And reach it. We're trying to understand it. And that's what we describe as knowledge. And yes, that's going to grow. And that's why what you said is so important about the canon. We can trace back the first century all the way to the first century. How that null. That map of the fabric of reality has expanded and expanded. And then postmodernism comes in and just completely upends that. It claims that there's no. Even if we don't. Even if we can, it's true. We cannot articulate. We don't fully understand objective truth. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

[A]

Right. Have you heard of Thomas Nagel's book the Last Word?

[B]

No.

[A]

So, yeah, this philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who's fantastic, he has a short book called the Last Word, and it is a masterful refutation of postmodernism. I mean, one point he makes is if you're going to argue there is no objective truth, that you're open to the question, well, is that itself an objective truth?

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so he's not the only one to make this point. But it's. Postmodernism actually refutes itself. It is an incoherent philosophy.

[B]

Yeah. They would counter that by claiming. No, I'm not claiming an absolute truth claim.

[A]

Then why should I take it seriously?

[B]

Right, right, right. I'm just saying that all of our understanding is flawed in some way. And all. It's true that language is a social construct. Literally, it's created by human beings. Their words are. Every Italian is different. An Italian came from somewhere, but they take that to the next level. It's like, therefore, all words are malleable, but words are so. Because words are the tools. That's why they're important. Because that is how we map onto reality. We see where this is going today. We've seen the consequence of this. It's the source of endless debate because, well, we can just change what that word means. And that's postmodernism in a nutshell. It's like, it means what we say it means. But what's really getting concerning is when you take it to ethics. Morality is superstition. He says that line, you will hear him say that sentence. And that echoes directly to what we're seeing today in the response of Charlie Kirk's death, where it's. It's just a matter of perspective. Yeah, like people celebrating his death. People at Emerson were throwing parties celebrating this. And that's the sentiment on campus. It's not like I'm going out and Sherry picking cases. It's like, that's the mainstream majority thought at my college. Like, and I claim, like, that's, that's objectively. I can say that's objectively wrong behavior. And this is, this is why, even if we can't quite articulate it, I believe that we can feel it. There's something ingrained within us that echoes, that mirrors that fabric of reality. But that's kind of a spiritual idea. And postmodernism was like, absolutely not having that. So I think we're in a real state of affairs today.

[A]

I remember one of my favorite posts from Scott Alexander, who was a great writer. He used to go by Slate Star Codex. Now I think he goes by Astral Star Codex. He has one of the best blogs on the Internet, in my opinion. I remember a long time ago he had this post where he just, he made the very simple observation that when Osama bin Laden was killed, whenever that was in Obama's, at the end of Obama's first term, you know, the thing that liberals and progressives said was essentially, look, no one should celebrate a death. Like, obviously, Osama bin Laden was a terrible guy and a mass murderer, but we shouldn't be so glib. And so we should never be celebrating anyone dying. Right. Even if it's a bad person. And then shortly after that, Margaret Thatcher died, and all the same people were like, dancing around singing Ding Dong, the witch is dead, you know. And he made this point because it was such an obvious example of how partisanship blinds you to simple principles. Like, either it's true that we should never celebrate someone getting killed, or it isn't, and you should be consistent with that principle. Now, my view on this is like, I guarantee I condemned Charlie Kirk's death in the strongest possible terms. And I guarantee you, if the left wing equivalent of Charlie Kirk was assassinated tomorrow, I would say the same exact thing. I would not mince words about it because I really do try to, to the best of my ability, not be sucked in by the vacuum of partisanship and actually think first about what my principles are and then Try to apply them in a nonpartisan way. Now, I'm sure that I'm not perfect in that, but I make an effort at least. And I think it's very important to make that effort.

[B]

Yeah. What's really been disturbing to me beyond obviously celebrating his death is wrong, but it's disturbing to me. The people that don't celebrate it and they're like, no, political violence is bad. Of course this is really the dominant sentiment because most people aren't stupid enough to openly admit that they would celebrate it. But many people will say it was bad, that it happened. What's your main concern? Well, my main concern is that someone will come along and pick up his mantle and carry on his ideas. What's really bothering me are people that are. I think you could make a logical case they're blatantly lying about many things that he has said. And most people, because they're viewing it through the partisan lens, they don't take the time to really delve into the logic of what he's saying around black pilots. Like they're going to. That's blatantly racist, they claim. And it's, it's really frustrating because it's just, it really bothers me when people are like misrepresenting what is. And it goes back to the idea of it's all just a matter of perspective. So I've been trying to kind of like shine a light on that. But like my immediate response when it happened, my brother called me and he was like, yeah, this isn't about. This is the response of most people. I think it was like, this is not left versus right. This is like good versus evil. But then I'm like, wait a minute. That's the exact sentiment that caused someone to shoot him. They thought they were genuinely fighting evil. We have to be very careful about that. But that doesn't mean evil doesn't exist. Like a really good question for a postmodernist is, is evil a social construct? And see how they respond to it. Because I think the capacity lives within all of us. It's ingrained within that fabric of reality.

[A]

No, but I think Steven Pinker has made a similar point that let's imagine that you have a politics of anti racism, very progressive, very left wing core to your politics are going to be certain objective truth claims like slavery was a real thing and slavery was bad and the slaves weren't happy. That's just one example. Right. If those are your politics, you're not going to want slavery is bad to just be an opinion it has to be a fact. It has to be a fact that you can demonstrate, right? And so it even refutes the political instincts that people on the left have if they say there are no objective truths, because there's got to be objective truths even for your own politics to be persuasive to anybody. The Holocaust really happened. That's not an opinion. That's an objective truth that can be demonstrated. And so all of these political projects rest on top of claims about objective truth that are like the engines of the emotionality of that. That. That project. And so you can't actually even just in their own self interest, they should not want to get rid of objective truth. I mean, I just. I just. Let me tell you one other story that. It just came back to me when you were talking earlier. I remember in college being in this class called Philosophy of Feminism, and this is the class where we were reading Foucault, and it was the professor that was teaching it as gospel. And obviously this professor believed that gender is a social construct. We were reading Judith Butler, I think Thomas LaCour, all these people. And keep in mind, like, I am absolutely terrified to speak my mind in this class. Like, fucking mortified. No, Nobody. Nobody ever challenges the professor in this class. Nobody challenges the texts we're reading. Nobody says, I disagree. Because it is literally just like, everyone is just silently nodding along and suppressing whatever critical thoughts that they had because this professor is just so intimidating, right? So for some reason, I got the nerve to, like, make a comment at one point, because I just. I don't know. I guess I had enough of sitting through all of this without ever being able to have an interesting discussion. But I was very clever. So I tried to figure out, like, how could I possibly make a point about gender being real that a woman like her might possibly accept? So instead of citing all the research on biological gender differences in humans, instead of saying that all of our closest animal cousins, including chimpanzees, have obvious behavioral differences between the genders that can't be a social construct because they're chimps. They're not. They don't have culture, really. They. They only have their hard wiring. All that stuff I knew she would, like, dismiss as bullshit and sexist bullshit meant to uphold a blah, blah, blah. So my idea was, okay, what if I just cite the fact that when transgender people begin hormonal interventions, like when a. A female. A natal female, begins taking testosterone, their lived experience is often that their psychology and their emotions change. They find themselves getting angry a little bit More quickly, for instance, they find themselves being a little bit more irritable. They find themselves being a little bit more aggressive, being a little bit more assertive. Right. And so my idea was, what if, like, if trans people are reporting as their lived experience that when they start taking testosterone, it starts affecting their emotions and their personality, why would it then not be true that the half of the human race that naturally has those hormones more won't exhibit similar differences from the other half? Right. And I thought this was very clever because the argument is resting on the lived and reported experiences of transgender people, which in her worldview, she has to take seriously. Right.

[B]

What'd she say?

[A]

She had some kind of hand waving response where she was like. And I framed it. I was careful to frame it as. What would Foucault say to someone who said this? Because, you know, like, this is the layer of defenses I had to put on my argumentative fort in order to, like, get it through. And she goes, well, you know, Foucault kind of has a way of dealing with that, but rest assured that.

[B]

He.

[A]

Thought of that and he has a good response. Anyway, moving on, like, she had no answer. Then Foucault has no answer, obviously. But I tell that story only to say that, like, you know, I'm, I'm not. I'm like, as far as human beings go, I'm a little bit more of like a speak my mind person. Obviously, that's, like, why I'm in this profession. But even, even me, I was so afraid to simply raise an objection that I had to, like, invent like, the most circuitous, like, you know, possible argument that could fit into this tiny opening in her worldview. And I was even terrified to do it. And like, this is the culture of elite college campuses.

[B]

Yeah, it's people. It's just listening to that, it's part of it. I just wish I could sit down with that person. Now, when you're a student in the moment, you're not making content. There's no camera. I wish I could sit down with that person on camera. If people don't, they're going to listen to that, think it's. They don't understand that it's real and how, how many people there are that there's no way to the fact that you're right. They. They don't respond. They just hand wave it away. Someone asked me just the other day, why is it that people constantly just shut down the conversation with various forms? And that's really why. Because it's not built. I Think that's why it's not built on logic. That's all they can do is do some form of hand waving, say, well, she thought about it, or he thought about it. Foucault thought about it. It's like, you know.

[A]

Yeah. So before I let you go, I want. I want to get your thoughts on sort of like, how, how we fix this, because it's a. It's a big problem. Trump has his approach to fixing it, which we both agree is like a bull in a china shop. And in any event, Trump will only be around for three more years, and if history is any guide, he'll probably be replaced by a Democrat. Because Americans, we always vote for the opposite of whatever we just had. So there's like, kind of a debate between people in my world who all agree about the problem. That debate is, do we try to fix the institutions that we have, or do we just say, screw it? They're like, they're, you know, they're. They're gone. That ship has sailed. We have to create new ones. And to be clear, you can do both at the same time. But I have taught at University of Austin in Texas, the new university started by Joe Lonsdale, Barry Weiss, among other Neil Ferguson. And what they're trying to do there is very successfully, in my view, is build a new kind of college that basically puts the healthy software into its DNA right from the start. So I taught a course there about, called the Legacy of Slavery for three months. And, you know, the course was literally, we're going to read half what liberals have to say about the legacy of slavery and half what conservatives have to say about the legacy of slavery. And I'm going to try to pick the highest quality on both ends, and we're gonna talk about it. And you're allowed to agree with anyone. You're allowed to disagree. And I'm, you know, I have my own opinions, but mostly I'm going to try to be leading. Leading you by the hand into the best version of your own opinion, whatever that is. And so it's an example of, like, starting a new institution. There's always a worry, a concern with that, that, like, you know, it's hard to start stuff from scratch, and it can feel fake until it feels real. Whereas these institutions that have been around for 300 years have, they just have a certain level of credibility in the bank, no matter how much they mess that up. So that's all to say. What do you think people who care about this issue should do? Work within the system or Try to create new alternatives.

[B]

The solution for the dynamics in the classroom is what you just described. And that's what people like Sam Richards are doing. And honestly, I don't think it's that difficult to return to that. But there's other problems at play. I think it's a real problem that student loans are issued at the rate that they're issued. There's clear incentive structure. There's nothing else that you can apply for in that way. And you'll just be given the money like that. And it creates this vicious cycle that, yes, these places are businesses. Then we bring in the tax issue that we discussed earlier. I don't think many people realize just how old colleges in America are, though. And I don't want to lose that because it's similar to. I don't want to. For the same reason, I don't want to throw out the canon or decolonialize or decolonize the canon. I mean, Harvard is older than America. The first universities were established in the, in year 1000 AD and it's Oxford, Cambridge, a little bit after that. But it's. I. So there's these components, these financial components that we've. That need to be fixed. There's that, there's the dynamics in the classroom. We can fix that. It's absolutely possible. The third component is how technology and information is changing all of this. Things like YouTube and we don't even really understand the impact of these technologies and how like it's this exponential growth that's. I mean, it's just going to shoot up. And you could say maybe AI is the end point. We don't even know what's going to lay beyond that. But the ability for human minds to propagate all of that information that was established through that university system. It used to be you had to go to university to go get access to the libraries, to get access to the information. Now all this information is flowing in a way that it's never been flowing before. We don't know what the psychological impacts of that are. What, so it's this perfect storm. My personal advice to anyone listening is that I think this is what Jordan Peterson tapped into and why he caught lightning in a bottle, is that he was trying to remind people of this truth that we all already know. That nothing will improve your life more than living in accordance with with the fabric of reality. That thing that we've been talking about that postmodernism is completely contradictory to. Imagine two boats, one boat is sailing in accordance with the tides, the winds, the fabric of what is. And then you have a boat that's like there's no such thing as currents and wind. And we can strap an outboard motor on this thing and just force our way through on this. It's a. Which boat do you think is going to get where it needs to go more efficiently and faster? So be that boat. Right. And that is what the universities need to return to. It needs to the entire canon. It seems that's what it originally was in the pursuit of. It was all in the pursuit of how to live in accordance with what actually is. And how do we increase our map of knowledge, our map onto what actually is. And I did. It's just absolutely contradictory to this incredibly persuasive narrative that is far more saturated than people realize. Most people realize. Unless you have seen it, which is really the big takeaway from our entire conversation, I think.

[A]

All right, thank you. Warren Smith. Can you tell people where they can follow your work?

[B]

Yeah, it's mostly just on YouTube. Warren Smith, Secret Scholar Society. But I'm Also on exit WT Smith, 17 yeah.

[A]

All right, thank you, Warren.

[B]

Thanks for taking the time. This was cool.

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