SPEAKER_16: Pushkin.
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SPEAKER_11: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Mug Debates.
SPEAKER_16: Not long ago, a few thousand people gathered at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, the fanciest performance space in the city, to hear a debate. Parliamentary style. Opening statements, rebuttals, closing arguments.
SPEAKER_11: So I want all of us to think tonight carefully on our debate motion. Be it resolved, do not trust the mainstream media.
SPEAKER_16: Speaking for the resolution were two prominent journalists.
SPEAKER_18: My name is Matt Taibbi. I've been a reporter for 30 years, and I argue for the resolution, you should not trust mainstream media.
SPEAKER_16: Taibbi was one of the people Elon Musk turned to when he took over Twitter to publish on Twitter the so-called Twitter files, with the intent of showing that liberals were meddling with free speech. Matt Taibbi has a massive online following.
SPEAKER_18: I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter. My stepmother was a reporter. My godparents were reporters. Basically every adult I knew growing up was a reporter. So I actually love the news business, but I mourn for it. It's destroyed itself by getting away from its basic function, which is just to tell us what's happening.
SPEAKER_16: Taibbi's partner was the prominent English journalist Douglas Murray. Oxford-educated, beautiful suit, a certain international man of mystery, Zapp Arfer.
SPEAKER_04: It's a great pleasure to be here, as Radiad said. I've come a rather long way from the front lines of the Ukraine conflict because I like to see these things with my own eyes for myself and to come to my own conclusions. I came out through Moldova the other day through London, then got to Toronto and a friend of mine said, why are you going to Toronto? I said, an invitation to Toronto in late November? Who on earth says no to that? Only a madman would say no to that.
SPEAKER_16: On the other side, defending the mainstream media was the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, a monk debate veteran, one of America's strongest liberal voices.
SPEAKER_05: Think about the big stories of the last five years or so, you know, from the Trump presidency to COVID to the war in Ukraine. Now, if you had just followed the CBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, they all got some things wrong. But in terms of the big stories, if you paid attention to the mainstream media, you were likely to be much safer and much closer to the truth than if you followed the kind of contrarians, if you followed the people who were saying don't trust the mainstream media, trust these alternative sources of information.
SPEAKER_16: Taibbi, Murray, Goldberg and then...
SPEAKER_11: Michelle's debating partner is a Canadian journalist. Yes, I will claim him as one of our own. A veteran New Yorker staff writer, a podcasting sensation who doesn't love revisionist history and an internationally acclaimed author. Ladies and gentlemen, Malcolm Gladwell.
SPEAKER_16: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about what happened when Michelle Goldberg and I attempted to defend the honor of the mainstream media against its many enemies. I entered this battle to cheers from my hometown crowd. I grew up not far away and I went to college in Toronto, about a mile from the theater. This whole evening was putting a pep in my step. I'd met with Michelle that morning at breakfast at our hotel. I said to her, we're going to win this thing. How could we not? This is Canada. If anyone is going to trust the mainstream media, it's Canadians.
SPEAKER_16: I wrote out my opening comments on the plane, had a lovely visit with my mom, put on my snappiest suit jacket, then strode out on stage and warmly shook the moderator's hand.
SPEAKER_11: Because we want to know, are you open to changing your mind over the course of what you're going to hear in the next 90 minutes? Can you be persuaded to move from the pro camp into the con camp or vice versa? I should let you know before we get too far along that I am not someone who gets nervous.
SPEAKER_16: I don't get stage fright. I am the son of a man whose personal credo was nothing bad will ever happen. And that's how I felt on the evening of the monk debate. The room was packed. I felt the surge of love from my countrymen and Michelle was on fire.
SPEAKER_05: However, if you followed the mainstream media, you knew that COVID was airborne. You knew that it was more serious than the flu. And you knew that the vaccines were likely to protect you. The COVID contrarians, the contrarian media, the ones who were saying not to trust mainstream sources of opinion were saying this is just another flu. The deaths are going to be 6,000. The media doesn't want to tell you, I mean, Matt wrote this several times, the media doesn't want to tell you about ivermectin.
SPEAKER_16: She had Taibbi and Murray on their heels.
SPEAKER_05: In the run up to the invasion of Ukraine, again, I think Matt said that, you know, the media is over hyping this, that people are kind of taking stenography from the Biden administration that Russia actually is probably not going to invade.
SPEAKER_16: When it was my turn to speak, I tried to build on what Michelle said. The mainstream media was right about things like COVID in Ukraine because it's a profession with standards and rules and a long tradition of searching for the truth. The non-mainstream media is a set of institutions that are outside of that tradition, that have an open and not a closed platform. And you cannot have an open platform and simultaneously adhere to a strict set of professional norms. You cannot say anyone can become a doctor and then complain when the surgeon takes out your spleen and thinking that it's your gall platter. Right? Now, why am I making such a big deal about this? Because trust is not about content. Trust is about process. I got my journalistic training at the Washington Post, one of the great newspapers in the world. I learned about that process, about what it means to respect the truth from some of the greatest journalists of my generation. This was from the heart. We're nailing this, I thought to myself.
SPEAKER_16: And then...
SPEAKER_04: I can't sit here and listen to Malcolm Gladwell talking about fact-checking and the importance of it. Not to get too mean, Malcolm. I read your book, David and Goliath. The chapter on Northern Ireland is more filled with inaccuracies than any other chapter in a nonfiction book I have read. It is, having written a not very well-selling but widely acclaimed book on Northern Ireland myself, my book on Northern Ireland didn't sell anywhere near as much as yours did, Malcolm. But mine was filled with facts.
SPEAKER_16: Oh, God. All of us have had the dream when we're walking down our high school corridor and we realize suddenly we're not wearing any pants. That was me in that moment, on the stage of Roy Thompson Hall in front of a few thousand people suddenly realizing this is not going well.
SPEAKER_04: It's so strange hearing you debate, Malcolm, because you listen to nothing that your opponents say. It's quite extraordinary. I've met it before, but never quite so badly as it occurs in you. You keep saying things that neither of us have said, and then you try to pathologize what we say. Now, Malcolm, why don't you listen to what comes out of our mouths and try to learn something from it as I am with you this evening? But at the moment, all I get is you dismissing every single story we come up with, every egregious failure of the mainstream media.
SPEAKER_16: A friend of mine afterwards texted me to say, why didn't you tell me you were up against Douglas Murray? I would have warned you to stay home. A simple YouTube search would have shown me that he's a regular at the fabled Oxford Debating Union, a master of the cut and thrust.
SPEAKER_04: But I beg you to actually consider the fact that what we are describing is, even if you think not as accurate as you would like, an expression of a problem that is going on in our societies. Functioning liberal democracies need to have trust in their media. And the best that your side has been able to come up with so far tonight is to say, we get things wrong quite often, but you should trust us.
SPEAKER_16: You can't see it, listening as you are, but Murray had the room in the palm of his hand.
SPEAKER_04: Take the Hunter Biden story. Oh, here we go. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_16: Is there no end to that kind of Twitter stuff? Of course you don't want to hear it, Malcolm.
SPEAKER_04: Of course you wouldn't, because it goes against your ideological presumptions.
SPEAKER_16: In the Munk debate, the audience votes on the resolution once before the debate, and then again after the debate is over. And the winner is the side that causes the most people to change their minds. Remember, the resolution that night was, be it resolved, do not trust the mainstream media.
SPEAKER_11: Let's just quickly review where we started out tonight's debate. It was pretty much a split opinion, if I believe it was 48 in favor, 52 opposed. We then asked you how many could change your mind. So let's see what happened over the last 90 minutes. Did either team of these debaters swing opinion one way or another? There we go. 67% in favor of the motion, 33% opposed.
SPEAKER_16: It was the biggest swing in opinion in the history of the Munk debates. We got cream. I went back to my hotel room, lay down on my bed, stared at the ceiling, and made the mistake of checking social media.
SPEAKER_18: Malcolm gave the perfect talk to show exactly why nobody trusts his media.
SPEAKER_07: Malcolm Gladwell has failed as an intellectual in this debate.
SPEAKER_19: Wow, you got owned, and you were so smug and arrogant as you were getting owned. Be better, you've lost my respect.
SPEAKER_06: This was a funeral for Malcolm Gladwell's reputation. Gladwell's not half as smart as I thought he was.
SPEAKER_19: Just watched Malcolm get his butt kicked by Doug and really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_16: I had hit rock bottom.
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SPEAKER_16: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this? There's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year. 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA, and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly. Eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA, is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly, for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us, oh yes, there is. ZipRecruiter. New hires cost on average $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com. Slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job.
SPEAKER_13: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses.
SPEAKER_20: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now. Until now.
SPEAKER_13: We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists.
SPEAKER_13: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_16: What do you do after you've been humiliated? You call your mother, of course.
SPEAKER_17: Text spoil makes style. In English, it says, when things go wrong, convert them to something that is desirable.
SPEAKER_16: And the first thing my mother did when I asked for maternal reassurance was remind me of an expression from her native Jamaican. This is my mom's first solo appearance on Revisionist History, by the way. What kind of son makes his mother wait eight years for a cameo? I want to go back over the pronunciation of the words in dialect. Pronounce them and then spell them out for me, just so I can see in my mind the expression.
SPEAKER_17: Text spoil. T-E-K. Yeah. It's a version of take.
SPEAKER_16: Take what is spoiled.
SPEAKER_17: Because we do not use the rounded vowels in Jamaica. They're all broad A vowels. Instead of saying spoil, we say spoil. But they're all English words. Take spoil, make style. Those are four English words, but they're just pronounced differently.
SPEAKER_16: It's beautifully economical.
SPEAKER_17: Exactly. It's the economy and also the humor, which is also striking.
SPEAKER_16: Put it in a sentence in your best Jamaican dialect.
SPEAKER_17: We don't use it in a sentence. You use it as a commentary on a situation. Here is someone walking along in a dress that does not fit with what is commonly being used.
SPEAKER_17: And she says, well, me dear, you watch and see. Everybody will be wearing a dress like this soon. Me a text spoil, make style.
SPEAKER_16: This was her moral instruction to me in typically elliptical, choiceclable fashion. Take lemons and make lemonade. Take spoil and make style. So what did I do? I went straight to the top. I got in touch with the local legend of New York debating KMD Colendrea, aka Diko, founder of the Brooklyn Debate League. I told Diko about the very public undressing I had suffered on the stage of Roy Thompson Hall and Diko said, you need to come to Brooklyn. And so I did. All the way to the Crown Heights neighborhood in what used to be the old Hebrew hospital, narrow hallway, cats, everyone eating big bowls of pasta, Franklin Avenue shuttle lumbering along in the background.
SPEAKER_08: What's up, George? No, you can't do that during the podcast.
SPEAKER_16: Diko had put together a dream team of three to analyze my performance. Sasan Kasravi, Jonathan Conyers and Diko himself. Jonathan is built like a linebacker. Big James Harden Beard works as a respiratory therapist when he's not writing books and teaching debate. Sasan is 30-something, extroverted, charismatic. In the John Grisham version of his life, he would be a trial lawyer who would win a $10 billion verdict from the jury in Mississippi. Diko is reserved, studied philosophy at Yale, Irish and Italian in background, and somewhere along the line, converted to Judaism and went to rabbinical school. I sat down at Diko's kitchen table. Each of the three had pages of densely written notes in front of them. They had prepared. Jonathan was to my left. I started with him. Jonathan, can you speak to the, was the tone different from the debates you're used to with students?
SPEAKER_07: So that's a very good question. So I'll answer this in two ways. The tone that you had throughout the debate was very similar to some of the students that I do work with. And that's what I teach them not to do. No offense. I have the thickest skin in the world.
SPEAKER_16: I won't just pile on. Oh, they piled on. Sasan was next.
SPEAKER_09: And I think what I want to explore is the sort of disconnect between the things that you thought should have mattered to the audience and what actually turned out to matter to the audience. What was your strategy?
SPEAKER_08: Why do you think you won? Like if you talked us through like your offense on that debate, like why do you think you won?
SPEAKER_16: I thought that, I mean, it was, to be honest, it began with a certain degree of arrogance that I thought I just couldn't imagine how anyone could legitimately argue that the mainstream media was worse than the alternative. Oh boy, let's start there. If I assume that most people were on my side before I began, then why was I even debating? Debating is persuasion. It's based on the idea that there are people listening who don't agree with you and your job is to change their mind. It's not a conversation. It's not you say what you think. I say what I think. It's a contest adjudicated by a third party. And the winner is the person who does the best job of climbing inside the head of that third party.
SPEAKER_09: Because ultimately, the win condition of debate is the judge circling your name.
SPEAKER_16: Sisan was the first to respond.
SPEAKER_09: Ultimately, it's figuring out what's important to that person and how do I show them that this thing that I'm advocating for functions under a value system that they hold. I think that's what's important about debate and what I'm going to do.
SPEAKER_16: It's an intellectual exercise in empathy. Empathy. I just failed the first test of debating. I should have put myself inside the heads of those in the audience who didn't trust the mainstream media and then try and bring them around. Second, related point. If you watch the whole 90-minute debate on YouTube, which for the love of God, I dearly hope you do not, you will notice that Mr. Murray and I did not get along. At a few points, I called him Doug, to which he took great offense and called me, Malc.
SPEAKER_04: Well, Malc, I'm going to try to take this more seriously than you did in your endless creation of straw men, which just is ceaseless this evening.
SPEAKER_16: After the debate was over, Murray tweeted and retweeted word of his victory 14 times. He's that kind of guy. But my advisors at the Brooklyn Debate League were not happy about my antipathy towards Mr. Murray. If reading the mind of the judge requires empathy, then how is pursuing some personal vendetta going to help matters? How do you engage in the delicate art of persuasion if you're getting all emotional? I tried to explain. I didn't know Douglas Murray much at all, so I did a little research into Douglas Murray. It turns out that Douglas Murray, without meaning, I'm not intending to demean him, but he is someone, he is one of those English people, white English people, who objects to the number of non-white people who have moved to England in the last 50 years. I'm actually not exaggerating here. Let me read to you from a speech Murray once gave. It is late in the day, but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic time bomb, which we'll soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It has to. All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide, such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed.
SPEAKER_16: That last sentence from Murray is what throws me. Immigrants from certain places should be persuaded back to the countries from which they fled. There's a whole thing that he does on Andrew Sullivan's podcast where he talks about his dismay that there are many cities in England now where whites are in the minority. My mother happens to be one of those people who was a black woman who emigrated to England in 1963 or whatever, 62. So she's talking about my mother, right? This is like, it's street for me. That dude is dissing. That dude is one of the, you know, people used to shout the N word at my mom when she walked down the street in England in 1950, whatever. And in my mind I'm imagining he's one of those people, right? So it's like, that's what was happening when I was getting riled up. I was like, I walked in thinking he's a piece of shit. That's what I realize now. You can't do that. If you do that, you've lost before you've even started. This is why in high school debate, you have to prepare both sides beforehand and you find out whether you are for or against the resolution on the day of the debate. They don't want you to be yourself. And again, like, you know, Dico could attest to this more than anybody.
SPEAKER_07: Dico has had students who parents have just been deported or on the verge of being deported and then have to go and speak about open borders and immigration and don't know which side of the fence they have to debate on. That is tough for 14, 15 year olds who after they give a speech have to go cry because they miss their dad or mama. They don't know if ICE is coming or I can't do this, I can't do that. And I get it. I have been there. There were times where I felt racism occurring or people told me you can't use your personal story. That's not fair. This rich kid don't understand what it's like to be poor so don't talk about that. So it happens. We have to come in and understand that debates are not personal and we have to talk about these topics because if we can't have dialogue, if we can't have respect, then all is lost. So I'm going to challenge you, Malcolm, to say if they can control their closure, if they can understand that we can have real conversations, so can you.
SPEAKER_16: Our culture tells us to be authentic and put our feelings first. But if you're trying to win a debate, your focus needs to be on your opponents' feelings, how their mind works. Lesson number one, don't be yourself. It's a dead end. Okay, second lesson. All of my advisors at the Brooklyn Debate League were baffled by a crucial moment early in the debate. This moment in particular.
SPEAKER_04: And nobody is saying that non-mainstream media don't have frailties. Of course they do. The simple proposal in front of the audience tonight is whether or not you can trust the mainstream media. That is that you don't need anything else. You don't need any other information from elsewhere. You can just turn on CBC in the evening and you know you've got your stuff. You can pick up the New York Times, the Washington Post in the morning and you know that there's no spin on the story. It's absolutely accurate reporting.
SPEAKER_16: The debate connoisseur in Sasson loved this little move. What Murray was saying was that if you have even the slightest doubt about the perfection of the mainstream media, then you have to vote for his side. And no institution can meet that standard. It's like saying unless all prescription drugs are guaranteed to act perfectly every time without side effects or complications, you can't trust prescription drugs. It's nuts.
SPEAKER_09: They took this topic, don't trust mainstream media, and made the central question of the debate be are there political biases in mainstream media? As long as that's the question that the audience is asking themselves to make the winner, you lose.
SPEAKER_16: What my side should have said was, wait a minute, the way you guys are defining the resolution makes no sense. Sasson said that then I'd be free to offer a simple alternative. Something like...
SPEAKER_09: In a scenario where a non-mainstream news source and a mainstream news source directly disagree with each other and we have no way of discerning who's right based on what we have available to us, who should we give the benefit of the doubt to? I think that leans a lot more your way.
SPEAKER_16: But we didn't say that. We sat there and let our opponents stack the deck against us. Why? Diko had a hunch. Did you write down any notes while your opponents were speaking?
SPEAKER_08: What were you doing? Well, that was...
SPEAKER_16: I was scribbling furiously. I was the only one who was, but I realized... What they were saying or what you were thinking?
SPEAKER_16: Both. But I realized it inhibited my ability to listen to them. So I was so busy. I was trying to conceive of what I would... how I'd respond in the moment. So while I was doing that, I was missing the next part of the next thing that they were saying. Do you know what I mean? Diko also picked up on what led to my most embarrassing moment in the whole debate. The Walter Cronkite thing. Ay, ay, ay. Cronkite was, as I'm sure you know, the legendary CBS news anchor and wartime correspondent who for decades stood for all that was dignified and trustworthy in American journalism. Matt Taibbi brought him up in his opening statement.
SPEAKER_18: Once the commercial strategy of the news business was to go for the whole audience, a TV news broadcast was aired at dinner time and it was designed to be watched by the entire family. Everyone from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulking lefty teenager in the corner. The system had flaws, but making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits. For one thing, it inspired trust. Gallup polls twice, twice showed Walter Cronkite to be the most trusted person in all of America. That would never happen with a news reader today. With the arrival of the internet, some outlets found that instead of going after the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and try to dominate it. How do you do that? That's easy. You just pick an audience and feed it news you know they'll like. Instead of starting with a story and following the facts, you start with what pleases your audience and work backward to the story.
SPEAKER_16: Back when we had Cronkite, the system worked. I heard that and I thought, give me an effing break. So when it was my turn, I responded. I was greatly amused by the affection Matt Tiabi has for the age of Walter Cronkite, which he seemed to hold up as a kind of golden moment. In that moment, the mainstream media was populated entirely by white men from elite schools. Why you would have had such affection and say that's the gold standard and we should trust the mainstream media precisely at the moment when the mainstream media is least representative is really puzzling to me. Then Douglas Murray chimed in, of course.
SPEAKER_04: Malcolm, you did a little nasty jab there by trying to pretend that Matt Tiabi is desperate for the era of white men in broadcasting. Takes a certain chutzpah to make that claim.
SPEAKER_16: Tiabi then defended himself.
SPEAKER_18: And yes, as I said in my speech, the old system under Walter Cronkite had its flaws, but it did have its advantages as well. Making the effort to talk to everybody garnered more trust in the public. There is a reason why people trusted news people more 20 or 30 or 40 years ago than they do now.
SPEAKER_16: And once again, I got irritated. This time with that phrase, making the effort to talk to everyone. I just wanted to make a short list of the people who were not spoken to by journalists in the 1950s and 60s. And you may want to add some if I miss some. Black people, women, poor people, gay people, people with mildly left-wing views. I mean, words fail me when somebody presented with a critique of his rather idiosyncratic position on Walter Cronkite comes back and says, oh no, no, there's more to my great love of this man. So I'm on my high horse, waiting my woke flag, standing up for inclusion. But wait, first, back to lesson one. Don't be myself. It's not smart. But that's not even the worst of it.
SPEAKER_08: Do you remember the context in which Matt brought that comment up in his opening?
SPEAKER_16: It was, he was talking about how that was an example. The way it was back then was, was worthy of our trust. And it's not like that anymore. Do you remember why?
SPEAKER_08: What he was saying in his opening was not, I am lifting up the 1950s as the golden standard of media and Walter, probably. Yes, that sentence came out of his mouth, but that's not what he was saying. What he was saying was, look to the 1950s, look to the past. When you had a whole family gathered around the TV, watching one show, that show had to talk to all of the people in that room, to the parents, to the kids, to the grandparents, even if they had different interests, different political ideologies, whatever, that one show had to talk to a diverse audience. It could not have an agenda in the same way that it does today, because today it's not talking to a whole family. It's not even talking to a whole neighborhood or a whole household. We all have our individual echo chambers that we lean really hard into, right? What he brought up about Walter Cronkite and about the 1950s was just a detail. Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_16: Diko's point was that the people in the audience, the judges, surely understood what Taibbi was saying, but I didn't.
SPEAKER_08: The main point there was totally ignored. And it was a really important point for the AF offense because their whole argument was you can't trust mainstream media because there are agendas, because they're not trying to give you the truth. They're trying to give you the spin and the story and cater to a, they called it demographic hunting, I think, right? That they're catering to a specific demographic.
SPEAKER_16: The Cronkite bit was a provocation, waved in front of Malcolm Gladwell that sent him charging off in the wrong direction.
SPEAKER_08: It was like a distractor thrown in there, but that worked. You got totally distracted and went down this whole rabbit hole and missed that bigger picture.
SPEAKER_16: Wait, did I do anything well? No, not really. Remember what Douglas Murray said?
SPEAKER_04: It's so strange hearing you debate, Malcolm, because you listen to nothing that you're opponents say.
SPEAKER_16: Turns out he was right. And that was when Dico told me I had to come to Brooklyn again for listening lessons.
SPEAKER_14: And I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again.
SPEAKER_13: I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. There was just something about the way the virus was shaped.
SPEAKER_20: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now!
SPEAKER_13: Until now! We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting, everywhere, wherever it exists.
SPEAKER_13: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_16: Malcolm Gladwell here. Imagine you could rewrite history. What would you change about your current employees' benefits? How could a straightforward change make your life and theirs simpler? Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Of course, you need to be responsive to your customers. But it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees. They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success. So let the experts at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve. The Hartford Group Benefits makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not policies. The best part? The Hartford offers flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the many diverse and unique needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has got you covered. So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. I met with the debate league at Unity Prep, a charter high school in Williamsburg. I sat myself down in a high school classroom for the first time since the late 1970s. Diko, Jonathan and Sasan were all there, along with a dozen or so high school debaters. There was a step class in the adjoining room. I was a long way from Roy Thompson Hall. All right. Open forum, look up. Being able to listen is the most important skill a debater should have.
SPEAKER_07: All right? Stand up. You know the routine. If you agree, you're on this side. If you disagree, you're on that side. Come on, come on, come on. Jonathan kicked things off with a warm-up exercise, open forum. And many debate on the question of the day.
SPEAKER_16: What's more important to a debater? Being a good listener, being a good debater, being a good debater, being a good debater, Being a good listener or a good talker? Agree is always over here.
SPEAKER_07: Disagree is always over there. Being able to listen. I'm so sorry. Being able to listen is the most important skill a debater could have. Being able to listen is the most important skill a debater could have. Being able to listen is one of the most important skills for a debater because the way people read their contentions and their supports,
SPEAKER_03: you want to be able to gain and obtain as much information as you can to fit down in your flowchart. Because debating is not only about using information against information, but it's also about obtaining something and understanding it in order to use information to fight it.
SPEAKER_15: I do agree with what you said. I just feel like you can be a good listener, but what it really takes is when you have confidence and you basically pretend like you know your stuff. But you also said you have to listen to your opponent.
SPEAKER_00: So that's also a very important skill to listen to your opponent because if you don't listen to it and you just jot stuff down, you might say the wrong things or write down the wrong things to what your opponent is saying. So I'm saying that listening is more important because as my other teammate said, Jay, she also referred to how they read their contentions or their sub-points. They read fast. They read fast. And if you can't catch those points, then you're not going to know what you've got to write or what you've got to focus on. Can I say something real quick?
SPEAKER_03: Yes. I've got something for all of you. 90 seconds. 90 seconds. Even though they're all accurate, LJ, to start with what you said, you need to write in order to listen. But it is true. That is true. But listening is a prerequisite to writing because you can write a whole bunch of nonsense, but what if you don't have the right accurate information? You didn't listen to the right numbers. You didn't listen to the right statistics. Then what does your writing have to do with anything? I can sit there and draw a ferry, but that's not going to make my argument any better unless you listen. Then the hard part began.
SPEAKER_09: What is this thing? Sasan was standing at the front of the room.
SPEAKER_16: He told us he would simulate a debate. Our job was to keep track of every argument he made. In the debate world, this is called flowing. Sasan said he would try and make it easier on us with playing cards.
SPEAKER_09: Where I am going to say the name of a card in a deck of cards. And you are going to flow it like it's a speech. So you're going to make a column. So if you have a sheet of paper and we have notebooks for you, you're going to want five columns. And in this first column, top to bottom, you are going to write the cards that I'm going to say out loud. You're going to want to listen carefully because I'm not going to repeat anything. The test is to see whether you're going to be able to write it all down without missing anything. Now if you think this sounds like a silly exercise, I encourage you to pause this podcast, get a pen and paper, and try it for yourself.
SPEAKER_16: Ready?
SPEAKER_09: Hello, my name is Sasan and I'll be speaking on the affirmative today. My first argument is the three of hearts. And we know that's true because of the four of diamonds. You can't forget about the jack of spades. You know a lot of people tell me ten of diamonds. But what those people don't realize is first off, ace of hearts. Secondly, the six of clubs. And finally, the nine of spades. That's it. That's the speech. So you should have these written down. Okay, great. Now we're going to do the negative speech. Check your negative pen.
SPEAKER_00: Switch pen color.
SPEAKER_09: Alright, I'm the negative and I disagree with everything that guy said. He says three of hearts, more like the seven of diamonds. You know, people like to talk about jack of spades, but what they don't realize is king of hearts. Ten of diamonds is okay if you don't remember that the ace of spades is there. And as far as the ace of hearts goes, more like the two of hearts. Finally, they brought up the nine of spades. Nine of spades? Nine of spades? Seriously? Because have you never heard of the queen of clubs? That's my old speech and I'm maybe unnecessarily aggressive here. How did I do? I was terrible.
SPEAKER_16: I could keep up for the first minute or so, then I fell behind. I miss things. Sasan gets up and talks about playing cards and I can't keep up. I got lost. Hold on one second coach. I have a question for you. Is this hard?
SPEAKER_07: Oh yeah. Pico, I have a question for you. Is this hard? Really hard. This is really hard and you guys are doing amazing. I see it all over your face. This is what happened to me during the Munk debate. I was taking notes, but I didn't know how to take notes. So when Murray twisted the terms of the debate, I just missed it.
SPEAKER_16: And when Taibbi made that reference to Walter Cronkite, I heard the name Cronkite, but I missed the context. Am I making excuses for myself? Of course I am. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. Are you making excuses for myself? Of course I am. But what debate tells us is that the failure to listen is not a failure of will or motivation or character. That's what we assume when there's some breakdown in communication. If someone doesn't listen, we assume they don't want to listen. We hear the yelling and screaming on the internet and we see it as evidence of some great flaw in our society. But maybe at least some of the time, the person who doesn't listen acts that way because they don't know how to listen. They haven't practiced. They don't know where to start. Listening is a skill, like playing the piano or learning to cook. I asked Sasan, how long would it take me to listen the way he does, to learn how to flow?
SPEAKER_09: I think if you really focus on it a school year, I think to be really comfortable with it, probably like two school years. Yeah. And that's half of your college competitive career. That's half of your high school competitive career.
SPEAKER_16: A long time. But imagine if we did it. If we all went to debate school, learned those lessons, were able to say to ourselves in the middle of a heated argument, this isn't about me. Learned how to avoid Walter Cronkite sized rabbit holes. Understood that debating is not the art of talking. It's the art of listening.
SPEAKER_16: Oh, and maybe the most important lesson of all. Do you know what they teach you to do at the Brooklyn Debate League after the debate is over? After one side has lost and the other has won?
SPEAKER_07: Alright, you guys know the culture. Tell each other, compliment, why we love each other. Go. Alright, go, go. Compliment. Shout out, shout out, shout out. And all around the room, the debaters shouted out happily to each other.
SPEAKER_16: I like the idea of how you just stick to the attitude, because attitude is like that one word, believe, is a really strong word to use, which gave you such a good lead into my argument.
SPEAKER_15: And I love how you be coming in with your presence, like you're going to clear, you know. So then it amps me up, like when you have that attitude, it amps me up and it makes me want to clear too. So I like that.
SPEAKER_16: Matt and Doug, my Monk Debate antagonists, I appreciate you for forcing me to take what was spoiled and give it new life. Now, one last question. So I approached you with this because, as I said, I had this disastrous experience with the Monk Debate. And so I wanted to use this opportunity to learn to be a better debater. Do you think this is typical of me, that I would, am I a take spoil, make style kind of person in your mind?
SPEAKER_17: You are such a highly successful person that one would not associate with you many occasions in which you needed to do that. That's just a mother speaking. But the fact that you, I beg your pardon. I said that's just a mother speaking. You will not admit to any frailty on the part of your sons.
SPEAKER_17: No, no, not only that. I'm not aware of them so much. But the fact that you have risen above in this remarkable way, justifies my faith in you and my confidence in you.
SPEAKER_16: Ah, that's what I meant by maternal reassurance. Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, Leemon Gistu, Kiara Powell and Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Kechelle Williams and Tali Emlin. We are edited by Julia Barton and Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Sarah Breguier. And engineering by Nina Lawrence. Twitter taunting by Nina Lawrence, Leemon Gistu, Justin Richmond, Ben Toliday, Emily Vaughn and David Jha. Special thanks to the Unity Preparatory Charter School and Brooklyn Debate League. If you're curious about the league and the fantastic coaches behind it, keep an eye out for Jonathan Conyers' forthcoming memoir, I Wasn't Supposed to Be Here, out this September. Jonathan has incredible stories to tell. Most of all, special thanks to my mom, Chai Scleppo. I'm her son. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. Hey, hair enthusiasts. Picture this. Perfect curls at the push of a button.
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