J.K. Rowling & The Cost of Speaking Freely - Warren Smith - #1005

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Before we get started, I'm going on tour this winter around the US and Canada, and you can join me. It's an hour and a half long show. There's a half hour Q&A at the end. There's meet and greet. There's music warmed up before I get started by Zach Talander and tickets are limited. You can get yours right now. New York, Boston, Chicago, Austin, Salt Lake City and Denver still have limited tickets left at chriswilliamson.live. That's chriswilliamson.live.
All right, let's get into it. JK. Rowling is back in the news. How do you feel about her recent debacle?

**Warren Smith** (0:36)
I can understand where she's coming from. I think it was effective. I don't see any problems with it. I can understand why she would say that. I would probably feel the same way if I were in her position, honestly.

**Chris Williamson** (0:50)
Yeah, she's become a lightning rod. For the people that didn't hear, Emma Watson went on Jay Shetty's podcast, said some stuff, and it seems, at least from the outside, like she's starting to row back some of the condemnation that's been there because maybe it's not as trendy as it used to be. This is the big complaint that everybody has. Do you actually stand on this principle or are you just blowing with the fucking wind? I think JK in this big tweet that's had like 46 million impressions, which is enough to get people to take notice. She literally says it, basically, if it wasn't for the fact that she had to say that she loves and treasures me, JK wouldn't have piped up, but she is now beginning to detect this change maybe in the sort of cultural weathervane.
Yeah, dude, be careful what you say on the Internet.

**Warren Smith** (1:55)
Yeah, I think she's just Emma Watson's being opportunistic. It's interesting though that the tide is turning in that way. That's how you can tell that it really is when people start to perform differently like that. It's all for business interests, I think, probably. But JK Rowling, I mean, if it wasn't for JK Rowling, I wouldn't be talking to you right now either. So some of those things applied when I was reading through that tweet. JK Rowling messaged me in the wake of my firing, and that really meant a lot to me. I think authenticity is something that's really important to her. But yeah, she's a remarkable person to do that, to take the time to do that. So I have a soft spot in my heart for her, always will.

**Chris Williamson** (2:43)
Why do you think she's such a lightning rod for this stuff? What's uniquely interesting about her position?

**Warren Smith** (2:50)
Well, I think it's first and foremost that her work is the best-selling book in the world next to the Bible.
For millennials, it's our Star Wars, it's more than that. So she created this, she became richer than the Queen off of fiction. So there's that. But I mean, her position I think is rather mainstream, conventional, it's not risque in any way. And I think that's why, that's one of the reasons I think it's become such a zeitgeist. Just people when they listen to it, it's like, this is very reasonable, it seems very logical. That's part of the reason why that video of me talking to the student did what it did, because it's just so common sense, it seems like there's nothing crazy about her position.

**Chris Williamson** (3:38)
Could you give a 30,000 foot view recap? I know it was a little while ago now, but just for the people that don't know the Warren Smith law, just do the previously on this season.

**Warren Smith** (3:50)
Yeah. So I was teaching content creation multimedia. We were supposed to do a newscast. Student was feeling kind of nervous, so I said, let's do a warm up. I'll sit here in the chair. You, what do you want to talk about? Just ask me. We would do things like this, have a little podcast. He's like, well, how have your views on JK. Rowling changed given her bigoted opinions? It's like, okay, well, when you say bigoted opinions, what are you basing that on? Well, there's all these tweets. She said, I can show them to you if you'd like to see. Sure. Let's pull them up. So he pulls them up. We run through them. The whole exchange was like five minutes.
I didn't think it was that interesting or that crazy, but that's, and then I uploaded it to like my little rinky dinky YouTube channel where I had clips of me teaching. I called it like my teaching portfolio because we had to submit artifacts for teaching our portfolio and I would have clips of me teaching. Someone grabbed it and pulled it over to Twitter, where I was not active on Twitter, and that's where it went crazy.