After I've gotten up in the morning, one of the things that I typically do is check for memories in my Facebook account, because I've been posting things in there since 2009 when I got on Facebook. Quite often the memories are interesting or telling or they bring up something that I'd entirely forgotten about. And that was kind of the case for a memory from yesterday, which has to do with what we could call my origin story as a public philosopher on YouTube.
So if you've been following me for a very long time or you've heard me in interviews, you know that I originally got started uploading videos not in my own channel, but in an institutional channel at the place that I was teaching called Fayetteville State University down in North Carolina. And they were from my last semester teaching there in 2011.
I was teaching four sections of critical thinking, which was a typical load for that place. We didn't have a philosophy program, and critical thinking was a required class for all students in the university, so we taught a lot of sections.
And I thought that I would start video recording using a flip cam, and what you call a spider tripod, a little tripod that you can arrange things. I would put it down on a desk and just start it at the beginning of class, turn it off at the end of class. Occasionally it would get bumped by a student and you would see students walking past it. But for the most part, it would take in the entire desk, chalkboard, and me giving a lecture. And it would pick up the sound from students asking questions or making comments quite well.
I've told the story a number of times how my then fiancée, now wife Andi was absolutely instrumental in getting me to try it out and she said what do you have to lose you can record the lectures could be a useful resource for your students. And if you don't like them, you can always get rid of them later on.
So I was originally - as I found out, I'd totally forgotten about this - I was originally planning on taking the video recordings and uploading the files into the course management system, which was called Blackboard. It's still around today. And I found that Blackboard at that time, at least, it might be able to now just could not handle long video files. You couldn't upload them into it effectively. So there wouldn't be any useful playback for my students.
So we started having to think, OK, where can they actually go? I thought about uploading them into a personal YouTube channel. But back then, YouTube first was only allowing you to upload videos that were 10 minutes long and then 15 minutes and then 20 minutes. So if you look at old videos from about 15 years, even 13 years back, quite often what you would see is that they're broken up into chunks.
The exception was if you had an institutional account. So Fayetteville State University had an institutional account, and that's where those critical thinking videos actually live. It's kind of a fluke because I don't think that I would have thought to upload them as a resource for the general public who is interested in critical thinking, let alone my class and the way that I work.
This was very fortuitous because what ends up happening, again, you may know this from me talking about it elsewhere, when I first started putting videos out, these critical thinking videos, and then later when I moved to Marist College and I was teaching Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics every semester and then occasionally some other classes like Religion in American Culture or Worldviews and Values.
With all of these classes and all of the videos that were recorded in them using lecture capture. Very low production. The sound quality isn't good. The lighting is not optimal. There's all sorts of weird interruptions, pauses. It's not scripted or anything like that. People really liked it.
There were a lot of responses that I got in comments that were, for me, quite telling and rather affirming of what it was that I was doing. It gave me the idea that maybe this is actually a good thing to do because I thought, nah, nobody's going to watch my stuff. I'm, you know, kind of an unknown, a nobody teaching at these places, not very well-known high-tier institutions.
And there were videos out from, for example, Shelley Kagan teaching his course about death at Yale University, if I remember right. And those were getting lots and lots of views. And I was like, ah, people aren't going to watch my stuff. But people did. And they said a lot of interesting things.
The number one thing that motivated me was people who were thanking me and saying, I'm in a critical thinking class, or later on I'm in an intro class or an ethics class or something, and this video that you recorded is really helpful for me because my instructor doesn't explain things, or isn't a very good teacher and you know refuses to help us out with understanding the concepts, the material, the arguments. And so you saved my grade or you've allowed me to understand things.
And I thought, yeah, that's actually quite helpful. That's wonderful that somebody who is not getting what they're paying for and should be getting from their instructor is at least getting it somewhere from somebody else.
Another kind of comment that I got that was, again, very, I'll use the word affirming, were from people who said, I really like watching these videos because it is like being in a classroom again, and I had to drop out of college. Or I wasn't able to go to college because I have to work for a living, or my life situation doesn't allow it. Or I went to college, did graduate. I'm now working somewhere and I miss it. So, you know, that was kind of a cool thing.
And video of that sort, just like videos of people, I suppose, whitewater rafting. You've done it before. You watch somebody else doing it and you're like, oh man, that's really cool. I remember when I did that or sledding or knitting or whatever it might be, right? So that was another good sort of comment.
And over time, I got a lot of other types of comments as well. People asking questions, wanting to go a little bit further into depth, requesting videos of different sorts that led me down other paths. But when I think about where it all got started, the initial impulse did in fact come from my wife who was pushing me to just try it out. Because I can be a bit conservative and curmudgeonly when it comes to trying out new things, maybe less so now than I was when I was 40 years old.
Isn't that funny to think about that? That 14 years has made such a profound difference when it comes to openness and willingness to experiment. So she was the one who got me to actually start recording. But then we had this bottleneck, this problem. How do you actually put it out there?
And I didn't intend to try to acquire an audience online. I was thinking just in terms of my students and the fact that the course management system that we had, which probably should have been better and would have accommodated me if it had been, and then I might have left those videos in there, and never reached anyone outside of the places where I was teaching unless somebody convinced me to actually put them on YouTube.
If that had been the case, then I think my career would be very different. YouTube allowed me to reach a worldwide audience. My videos have been viewed millions of times by people of all different ages, with all sorts of different motivations, sharing them with each other.
And, you know, not everybody likes them, I suppose, but it seems like at least most of the people who do watch them find them of some value and recommend them to other people. And if it hadn't been for that one circumstance, perhaps none of that would have happened.
So it's a great example of what we call contingency in life, or as the ancients like to call it, the role of fortune or chance. And I'm going to close here by bringing up something that perhaps I'll talk about a little bit more in another podcast, because it is a topic that deserves a lot more attention.
Recently, I've been rereading Cicero's work on the ends for a variety of different projects, and I teach portions of it. And there's a lot of discussions in there about the degree to which we have control over the kind of life that we live.
Is it going to be a good life? Well, how do we conceive of the good life? What is the goal or the end of human existence? And there's a lot of different candidates out there. You may be familiar with the genre of literature that says, let's survey everybody's viewpoints on this. For example, in Cicero's work, but also in Augustine's City of God, and Boethius we find similar discussions happening where people want to survey it.
Theophrastus who was a both friend and follower of Aristotle, and who is you know pretty consistently Aristotelian in the books that we have of him, he's sort of following in his footsteps. He appears to have thought that fortune plays a more significant role in our happiness than do a lot of other ancient philosophers. And I'm not going to say that he's actually completely correct about that.
But I will say that I've developed a much stronger appreciation for the many different ways in which factors have to come together in order for things that matter to our lives to really work out.
And I could give you the example as well of how Andi and I wound up being together, connecting through Facebook, or rather reconnecting after not being in contact for time decades, because you know that we met in high school, but we didn't date in high school. She actually dated my archrival and then we lost track of each other. And then we crossed paths again in the mid 1990s and lost track of each other.
And then in 2009, at the very end of the year,I sent a Facebook request because now she was being suggested because we had that old boyfriend of hers as a mutual friend in common on Facebook. And she accepted. And within a couple months through writing to each other, we fell in love and decided that we wanted to get married. All of that is a matter of chance or fortune.
You could also look at it if you want to as providential. If you think that there is some mind who's organizing things behind the scenes, which certainly could be the case. But so many things in our lives turn out to be rather fortuitous, contingent. And we probably should develop a healthy appreciation for the fact that it is so possible in so many ways for things to go quite differently than the story that we actually know and remember.
So here's where I'll stop with these reflections. Perhaps I'll follow these out a little bit more in some subsequent podcast episodes.
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