Warren Smith — Filmmaker and former special-education multimedia teacher who went viral filming calm Socratic debates with students, then was fired. He now runs the YouTube channel 'Secret Scholar Society' built around 'the art of critical thinking.'
The gist
Warren Smith recounts going viral for filming reasoned debates with students and then being fired, framing his work around 'critical thinking' as thinking for yourself against the stories that shape the world. He and Rogan range across woke campus ideology, trans-policy debates, Roland Fryer's contested policing research, and a long argument that the LA Palisades fires are a problem of Los Angeles's desert climate and government incompetence rather than climate change. The back half turns to media and craft: YouTube's suppression of the Trump interview, the Daily Wire / Brett Cooper saga, the 'rigged game' of Hollywood, and a deep dive on storytelling, the golden ratio, and Christopher Nolan and Kubrick's mathematical filmmaking. They close on the Elon Musk 'salute' controversy, free speech, DOGE/MAHA, and why Rogan refused to let the Kamala Harris team edit an interview.
Big reveals
- Warren clarifies he wasn't fired for the viral critical-thinking video itself but for posting a similar follow-up.
- Describes a 4-hour Emerson class where white students were told to 'concede their space' and not speak during racism protests.
- Recounts Harvard economist Roland Fryer going under police protection after his policing study contradicted the expected racial-bias narrative.
- Rogan says the Trump interview hit ~1.5M concurrent viewers yet never appeared on YouTube's trending page.
- Claims the Trump episode reached roughly 250 million views across platforms after being hard to find on YouTube.
- Breaks down Brett Cooper's exit from the Daily Wire and how 'The Comment Section' viewership collapsed from ~500k to ~40k under a new host.
- Reveals the 'old' Pledge of Allegiance was performed with an outstretched arm until the Nazi association forced the hand-over-heart switch.
- Rogan explains the jiu-jitsu 'cooking' concept as why he insisted on an unedited three-hour Kamala Harris interview.
Things worth remembering
- Marlon Brando in 'On the Waterfront' is cited as the first actor who sounded like a real human being on screen.
- In Fryer's framing, ~40% of stops recovering contraband across demographics indicates policing done correctly, not bias.
- A 1961 documentary ('Design for Disaster') shows the Bel Air fire raging through the Hollywood Hills decades before today's climate debate.
- Roughly $24 billion was spent on LA's homeless crisis while ~75 fire trucks sat unrepaired in a lot.
- Nolan structured 'Dunkirk' as a Shepard tone across three timelines (one week / one day / one hour) converging via the golden ratio.
- Some studies claim EV brake-dust particulates can be far higher than modern exhaust, partly offset by Teslas' regenerative braking.
- Up until about 12,000 years ago half of North America was under a mile-high sheet of ice.
- A devotee of Lord Shiva who raised his right arm in 1973 has left it permanently withered and frozen in place.
- Stephen King disliked Kubrick's 'The Shining' because Jack Nicholson seemed unhinged from the start rather than descending gradually.
- Rogan notes there are now more US government agencies than there have been years of the government.