Speaker 1: I almost lost a $1,000 scholarship because of plagiarism. Let's talk about that. Purr-di-purr-di-purr-purr-purr-purr-purr-purr-di-purr-di-purr-purr-purr. Plagiarism. Adverb. The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. Just the word plagiarism sounds like a crime. Racism, Sexism, and Plagiarism. I'm not here to talk about people who repost my comics, JFagged, cut my name off and have the audacity to put their own watermark on, No, no, no, no, not that kind of plagiarism. I'm gonna tell you about all the times that I plagiarized in school. And, okay, just off topic, I want to address something publicly. I don't go looking through other people's comics and go, Oh, this comic's funny. I'm gonna redraw it and pass it off as my own. No, I'm not about that life. But some of my comics have been very similar to other people's comics. I read a lot of comics, so it's possible I saw them and then repressed them in my memory and drew them again. Or it's possible that it's all a coincidence and me and someone else just came up with the same idea. That happens all the time with other cartoonists, not just me. Again, I don't purposely take comic ideas and try and pass them off as my own. Whenever people point out that my comic is a lot like someone else's, I get really sad. So you guys should check out these other cartoonists. They're really good. Anyway, I just wanted to say that at the beginning of the video because I'm gonna be telling you about times that I actually did plagiarize. But that was just in school, okay? I keep plagiarism off the internet. Isn't that right, Matthew? I cheated a bit in school. An occasional glance at my partner's desk. Maybe jot down that important equation on my hand. Nothing too big. I had a math class where we went to lunch in the middle of the class, and whenever we had tests, the teacher wouldn't split the test into two parts. Do you expect us not to exchange notes? The first time that I got caught cheating was in ninth grade. And if you stalk me and watch my old videos, you know that I went to a preparatory school my freshman year. And in preparatory school, the amount of work they gave you as kids was just stupid. So cut me some slack. In one class, we had to write an essay about something historical or something, and I chose to write about the Berlin Wall, specifically about people who escaped across the Berlin Wall. Now, I chose this topic because, I don't know if you know this, but there's a National Geographic documentary about this exact topic. So I didn't copy and paste anything into my essay, per se. It's just I told the exact same stories in the exact same order as the documentary, and, okay, I might have wrote some things down word for word. But at least I didn't plagiarize it from Wikipedia, okay? So I didn't copy and paste anything until I had to write the conclusion of the essay. And I found this article talking about it, and the article said some things that would have been perfect in my essay, so... Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. I turned it in, I didn't think too much of it, but then when I got it back, the conclusion paragraph had been highlighted, and a see me was written next to it. So I had gotten in trouble for plagiarizing the conclusion. Just the conclusion. Nothing else. To be honest, I'd kind of forgotten that I copied and pasted the conclusion. I thought he knew that I basically turned in a script of a documentary. The teacher, who we'll call Mr. Batman, it makes sense if you knew him, he took me outside of the classroom, he told me that it was bad that I plagiarized, and he called my parents that freaking snitch. My parents got mad at me, too. He gave me a chance to rewrite the essay, and I remember just being so traumatized and stressed out that night. I kept thinking, what if he finds a documentary and sees that I practically plagiarized the whole essay? I ended up rewriting not only the conclusion, but the whole freaking essay. I turned in the new essay, and I don't think he ever found out that I copied the whole thing. Except, I did just admit it, and he watches my videos. Seriously, in April, he emailed me and asked if I was the same James that was in his class. He's the only teacher to ever reach out to me, and even after all those years, I still didn't tell him that I plagiarized the whole thing. So... Hi, Mr. Batman. Uh, you can't change my grade now, can you? But that was a good experience for me to have. It taught me a valuable lesson, because I didn't plagiarize a single essay for the rest of high school. But, then, community college rolled around. I did community college for a bit because I couldn't afford a university on a subway payroll. I took honors and AP classes in high school. I was a relatively good student, except I didn't take any of the AP tests. So when I went to community college, I had to take classes that were a step below the classes I took in high school. What a great way to spend my time. Senior year of English, we were writing essays analyzing poetry. Freshman year of college, we were writing movie reviews. And the teacher didn't even like me. She thought I was a slacker because I was never paying attention. I didn't take community college seriously, but it was so easy, I was still getting amazing grades. On the third semester of community college, I took a public speaking class. Now, I might be an introvert, but I don't have a problem with public speaking. That's part of my job now. I took the class because it would be an easy A, and I needed a communications credit for my major. I wanted to be a math teacher, and you may not have noticed, but they publicly speak all the time. So I take the class. I'm like the best person in the class, right? And for the final, we had to give a persuasive speech in front of everyone. Oh, and by the way, I didn't learn, like, any tricks to help with public speaking. The whole class was literally just us giving speeches to each other over and over. So three semesters of doing easy classes and wasting my time, my apathy meters were just off the charts. I didn't want to work too hard, so I chose to do my speech on why we should get rid of the penny. And I don't know if you know this, but there's this YouTube video made by CGP Grey that makes great arguments on why we Americans should get rid of the penny. Again, I didn't copy and paste anything per se. It's just the speech I gave had the exact same arguments in the exact same order as CGP Grey. Okay, it was pretty much a one-for-one recreation of his whole video. I'm sorry. I thought we were getting graded on public speaking, not writing original speeches. The teacher caught me, I guess she's a fan of CGP Grey, and gave me a zero on the final. So I ended up getting a D in the class, and that was the worst grade I got in community college. Part of me was like, Pffft. Whatever. I don't- I don't care. This next semester, though, I wanted to go to a real college. And still trying to be economical, I found that it was actually cheaper for me to go to an out-of-state school than to go in-state. At this school, they gave scholarships to out-of-state students who had high enough GPAs and enough credits. It would have saved me thousands of dollars. And I had family living in this state, so that was another reason why I wanted to go to that school. But here's the thing. Even with that D, I still had a high enough GPA to get the scholarship, but since I failed, it didn't count as a credit, so I ended up being one credit short for what was required. Plagiarizing was gonna cost me thousands of dollars. My options were either stay home and do a one-credit semester of community college, or beg the university to give me my scholarship anyway. During Christmas, my family visited the state the school was in, so me and my dad got the chance to go to the school and basically talk our way into getting the scholarship. We talked to five different people, now that's public speaking. I had to use my persuasive talking skills that I would have learned. And all of them were telling us, there's nothing we can do. But we were talking to one lady, she was telling us the same thing about not being able to do anything, she looked at my transcript, she said, oh, you failed public speaking. She looked at it for a bit, she typed something on her computer, she printed out a piece of paper and handed it to me saying, it's okay, I'm not good at public speaking either. She- SHE THOUGHT I WAS BAD AT PUBLIC SPEAKING. SHE THOUGHT I FAILED CAUSE I WAS INSECURE OR SOMETHING AND NOT CAUSE I DID SOMETHING WRONG. Oh, uh, y-yeah, I'm- I'm just terrible at speaking to the public. So really, there was something you could do. I got the scholarship because a lady wearing a lot of eyeshadow took pity on me. But, I only ended up staying a semester and a half at that school because my YouTube kicked off. And now I'm doing that full-time. But, I'm still thankful I got the scholarship. I hope my public speaking teacher could see where I am now. I speak in front of millions of people for my job. I mean, I can't see them and I'm just reading everything off a script in my closet. And I didn't get punished for plagiarism. I didn't learn my lesson. And I didn't learn anything in your class.