Malcolm Goes to Debate School

What do you do after you've been humiliated at the Munk Debates? You call in the A-Team. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the Monk Debates. Not
long ago, a few thousand people gathered up Roy Thompson
Hall in Toronto, the fanciest performance space in the city,
to hear a debate parliamentary style opening statements, the buttles

(00:40):
closing arguments. So I want all of us to think
tonight carefully on our debate motion. Be it resolved, do
not trust the mainstream media. Speaking for the resolution were
two prominent journalists. My name is Matt taibe I've been
a reporter for thirty years, and I argue for the

(01:02):
resolution you should not trust the mainstream media. Tayebee 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 Taibee has a massive online following.
I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter,

(01:24):
my stepmother was a reporter, my godparents are reporters. Basically
every adult I knew growing up was a reporter. So
I actually love the news business, but I'm mourned for it.
It's destroyed itself by getting away from its basic function,
which is just to tell us what's happened. Tibe's partner

(01:46):
was the prominent English journalist Douglas Murray, Oxford educated, beautiful suit,
a certain international man of mystery. Thanks Yapo Fair, it's
a great pleasure to be here. As about Yad said,
I've coming a rather long away 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

(02:08):
other day, through London, then got to Toronto, and friend
of mine and 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. On the other side, defending the
mainstream media was the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg,

(02:31):
a monk debate veteran one of America's strongest liberal voices.
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,

(02:53):
the BBC. They've 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 then if you followed
the kind of contrarians, if you followed the people who
were saying, don't trust the mainstream media, trust these alternative

(03:16):
sources of information. Taibe Murray Goldberg, and then Michelle's debating
partner is a Canadian journalist. Yes, I will claim him
as one of our own, veteran New Yorker staff writer,
a podcasting sensation who doesn't love revisionist history, and an

(03:37):
internationally acclaimed author. Lads and gentleman, Malcolm Cladwell, 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

(03:58):
against its many enemies. I entered this battle to cheers
from my hometown Craft. 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've met with Michelle that morning at

(04:19):
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.
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

(04:41):
the moderator's hand 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 ninety 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. Then I am
not someone who gets nervous. I don't get stage fright.

(05:05):
I am the son of a man whose personal credo
was nothing will ever happen. And that's how I felt
on the evening of the Monk debate. So the room
was packed. I felt the surge of love from my countryman,
and Michelle was on fire. However, if you followed the
mainstream media, you knew that COVID was airborne. You knew

(05:28):
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 one who were saying
not to trust kind of mainstream sources of opinion. We're
saying this is not this is just another flu. Deaths
are going to be six thousand. The media doesn't want

(05:48):
to tell you. I mean, Matt wrote this several times.
The media doesn't want to tell you about Ivermectin. She
had Taibe and Murray on their heels. 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.

(06:09):
When it was my turn to speak, I tried to
build on what Michelle said. The mainstream media was right
about things like COVID and 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

(06:31):
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 in thinking that it's your gall pattern right now,
Why am I making such a big deal about this,

(06:52):
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.

(07:17):
And then I can't sit here and listen to Malcolm
Gladwell talking about fact checking and the importance of it
not to get to 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 non

(07:37):
fiction 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. Oh God, all of us have had

(08:00):
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, the stage of Roy Thimeson Hall,
in front of a few thousand people, suddenly realizing this
is not going well. It's so strange hearing you debate, Malcolm,

(08:23):
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 of our out of our mouths

(08:45):
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. A friend of
mine afterwards texted me to say, why didn't you tell
me you were up against Douglas Murray. I would have

(09:07):
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.
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

(09:28):
problem that is going on in our societies. Functioning, functioning
liberal democracies need to have trust in their media. And
the best that your site has been able to come
up with so far tonight is to say, we get
things wrong quite often, but you should trust us. You

(09:53):
can't see it listening as you are. But Murray had
the room in the palm of his hand. Take the
hunter Biden's story. Oh, here we go. I'm sorry. Of
course you don't end to that kind of course. Of
course you don't want to here at Malcolm. Of course
you wouldn't because it goes against your ideological presumptions. In

(10:18):
the Monk 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. Let's
just quickly review where we started out tonight's debate. It

(10:42):
was pretty much a split opinion. If I believe it
was forty eight in favor, fifty two opposed. We then
asked you how many could change your mind. So let's
see what happened of the last ninety minutes. Did either
team of these debaters swing opinion one way or another?
There we go sixty seven percent in favor of the motion,

(11:09):
thirty three percent of post It was the biggest swing
in opinion in the history of the Monk debates. We
got cream. I went back to my hotel room, laid
down on my bed, stared at the ceiling, and made

(11:31):
the mistake of checking social media. Malcolm gave the perfect
talk to show exactly why nobody trusts his media. Malcolm
Gladwell has failed as an intellectual in this debate. Wow,
you got owned and you were so smug and arrogant
as you were getting known be better. You've lost my respect.
This was a funeral for Malcolm Gladwell's reputation. Gladwell's not

(11:56):
half as smart as I thought. He was. Just watched
Malk get his butt kicked by Doug and really enjoyed it.
I had hit rock bottom. What do you do after

(12:23):
you've been humiliated? You call your mother? Of course, Tex Spoile,
Max style. In English, it says when things go wrong,
convert them to something that is desirable. And the first

(12:45):
thing my mother did when I asked her maternal reassurance
was remind me of an expression from her native Jamaica.
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 pronounced

(13:09):
and then spell them out for me, just so I
can see in my mind. Okay, the expression take spoil
t e K. Yeah, it's it's a it's a version
of take, yeah, take what is spoiled? Because we do

(13:29):
not use the rounded vowels in Jamaica. They're all broad
a vowels. We instead of saying spoil, we say spoil. Yeah,
but they're all English words. Take, spoil, make style. Those
are four English words, but they're just pronounced differently. Yeah,

(13:52):
it's beautifully economical, exactly that. It's the economy and also
the humor, which is which which is also striking. Put
it in a sentence in your best Jamaican dialect. We
don't use it in a sentence. Can you use it
as a commentary on a situation. Here is someone walking

(14:14):
along in a dress that does not fit with what
is commonly being used, and she says, well, midair, you
watch and see everybody will be wearing a dress like
this soon. May I take spoile make style. This was

(14:39):
her moral instruction to me in typically elliptical choice Glabo 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 K M. D. Collendria aka DICO, founder of

(15:04):
the Brooklyn Debate League. I told Dico about the very
public undressing suffered on the stage of Roy Thompson Hall,
and DICO 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 bulls of pasta, Franklin

(15:25):
Avenue shuttle lumbering along in the background, George, Oh, you
can't do that. During the podcast, really, Dico had put
together a dream team of three to analyze my performance.
Cesan Kasabi, Jonathan Conyers, and Dico himself. Jonathan is built

(15:47):
like a linebacker. Big James Hardenbeard works as a respiratory
therapist when he's not writing books and teaching debate. Csan
is thirty something, extra bird charismatic. In the John Grisham
version of his life, he would be a trial lawyer
who would win a ten billion dollar verdict from the
jury in Mississippi. Dico is reserved, studied philosophy Yale, Irish

(16:11):
and Italian in background, and somewhere along the line converted
to Judaism and went to rabbinical school. I sat down
to Deco'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,

(16:33):
can you speak to the Was the tone different from
the debates here used to with students? 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 I have the

(16:55):
thickest kit in the world. Now I want to just
pile on Oh they piled on Sissan was next, 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. Bendico, what was your strategy? Why

(17:17):
do you think you want like if you talked us through,
like your offense on that debate, Like why do you
think you won? I thought that. I mean it was,
to be honest, begin 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.

(17:40):
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,

(18:01):
I say what I think. It's a contest adjudicated by
a third party, and the winner is a person who
does the best job of client coming inside the head
of that third party. Because ultimately, the wind condition of
debate is the judge circle in your name. Cissan was
the first to respond. Ultimately, it's figuring out what's important

(18:22):
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 an empathetic It's an intellectual exercise and empathy. Empathy.
I just failed the first test of debating. I should

(18:45):
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 ninety minute debate on YouTube, which for the
love of God I dearly hope you do not, you
will notice that mister Murray and I did not get along.
At a few points. I called him Doug, to which

(19:08):
he took great fence and called me Malk. Well, Malk,
I'm going to try to take this more seriously than
you did in your endless creation of strong men, which
just is ceaseless. This evening, after the debate was over,

(19:29):
Murray tweeted and retweeted word of his victory fourteen times.
He's that kind of guy. But my advisers at the
Brooklyn Debate League were not happy about my antipathy towards
mister Murray. If reading the mind of the judge requires empathy,
then how is pursuing some personal vendetta going to help matters?

(19:49):
How do you engage in the delicate utter 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, and it turns out the
Douglas Murray without meaning. I'm not intending to demean him,
but he is someone. He is one of those english people,

(20:12):
white english people who objects to the number of non
white people who have moved to England in the last
fifty years. I'm actually not exaggerating here. Let me read
to 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 will soon see a

(20:32):
number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities. It
has to All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop.
In a 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

(20:55):
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.
That last sentence from Murray is what throws me. Immigrants
from certain places should be persuaded back to the countries
from which they fled because the whole thing, as he

(21:18):
does with on Andrew Sullivan's podcast where he talks about
his dismay that many there are many cities in England
now where whites are in the minority. Now, my mother
happens to be one of those people who was a
black woman who emigranted to England in nineteen sixty three
or whatever, sixty two. So she's talk in the fifties.
He's talking about me. So he's talking about my mother, right,

(21:41):
So this is like it was It's it's street for me.
It's like that dude is that dude is one of
the you know, people used to shout the end where
to my mom when she walked down the street in
England in nineteen fifty or whatever, and I'm 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 rolled up.

(22:01):
I was like, I walked in thinking he's a piece
of shit. That's what I realized. Now. You can't do that.
If you do that, you've lost before you've even started.
This is why I'm 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.

(22:24):
And again, like you know, Deco could attested as more
than anybody. DECO has had students who parents have just
been deported or on the verge of being report they
didn't have to go and speak about open borders and
immigration and don't know which side of defense they have
to debate on. That is tough for fourteen fifteen year
old who after they give a speech I have to
go cry because they miss their dad or mama. They

(22:46):
don't know if ices come in or I can't do this.
I can't do that when 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

(23:07):
these topics because we can't have dialog, we can't have respect,
and all is loss. So I'm going to challenge you, Malcolm,
to say, if they can control the appoliser, if they
can understand that we can have real conversations, so can you.
Our culture tells us to be authentic and put our
feelings first, But if you're trying to win a debate,

(23:30):
your focus needs to be on your opponent's feelings, how
their mind works. Lesson. Number one, don't be yourself. It's
a dead end. Okay. Second lesson, All of my advisers
at the Brooklyn Debate League were baffled by a crucial

(23:53):
moment early in the debate, this moment in particular. 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 else where. You

(24:14):
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. The debate connoisseur and SSAN loved this
little move. What Murray was saying was it, if you
have even the slightest doubt about the perfection of the
mainstream media, then you have to vote for his side,

(24:36):
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 they talk to this topic don't trust mainstream media,

(24:56):
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 audiences asking themselves to make the winner,
you lose. What my side should have said was, wait
a minute, the way you guys are defining the resolution

(25:18):
makes no sense. Ssan said that then I'd be free
to offer a simple alternative, something like in a scenario
where a non mainstream news source and a mainstream new
source directly disagree with each other, and we have no
way of discerning who's right based on what we have

(25:41):
available to us. Who should we give the benefit of
the doubt too? I think that leans a lot more
in your way. But we didn't say that. We sat
there and let our opponents stack the deck against us.
Why DECO had a hunch. Did you write down any
notes while your opponents were speaking? What were you doing? Well?
That was I was scribbling furiously. I was the only

(26:03):
one who was. But I realized they were saying or
what you were thinking both, But I realized it inhibited
my ability to listen to them, So I was so
busy I was trying to conceive of what would how
I'd responded the moment. So while I was doing that,
I was missing but the next part of the next
thing that they were saying, you know what I mean.
Dico also picked up on what led to my most

(26:25):
embarrassing moment in the whole debate, the Walter Cronkite thing. II.
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

(26:46):
Taibi brought him up in his opening statement. 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. This system

(27:09):
had flaws, but making an effort to talk to everybody
had benefits for one thing, and inspire trust. Gallup polls
twice twice showed Walter Cronkite to be the most trusted
person in all of America. That would never happen with
a newsreader today. With the arrival of the Internet, some

(27:32):
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,
the like. Instead of starting with a story and following
the facts, you start with what pleases your audience and

(27:53):
work backward to the story. Back when we had Cronkite,
this 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
Tabby has for the age of Walter Cronkite, which he

(28:16):
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 the meat.

(28:39):
Then Dablas Murray chimed in, of course, Malcolm, you did
a little nasty jab there by trying to pretend that
Matt Tebe is desperate for the era of white men
in broadcasting. Takes a certain hutsper to make that claim.
Tabe then defended himself, and yes, as I said when

(29:01):
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 garner more trust
in the public. There was a reason why people trusted
newspeople more twenty or thirty or forty years ago than
they do now. And once again I got irritated, this

(29:24):
time with that phrase making the effort to talk to everyone. Um,
I just wanted to do make a short list of
the people who were not spoken to by journalists in
the nineteen fifties and sixties. And you may want to
add some if I miss some black people, women, poor people,

(29:48):
gay people, people with mildly left wing views. I mean
words found me when somebody in when it presented with
a critique of his rather at aosyncratic position on Walter
Cronkite comes back and says, oh no, no no, no, there's
more or to my great love of this man. So

(30:12):
I'm on my high horse waving my work flag, standing
up for inclusion. But wait first, back to less than one.
Don't be myself. It's not smart, but that's not even
the worst of it. Do you remember the context in
which Matt brought that comment up in his opening? It
was he was knee talking about how that was an

(30:36):
example the way it was back then was worthy of
our trust, and it's not like that anymore. Do you
remember why what he was saying in His opening was
not I am lifting up the nineteen fifties as the
golden standard of media and Walter praglahblah. Yes, that's an
intent came out of his mouth, but that's not what
he was saying. What he was saying was look to

(30:57):
the nineteen fifties, look to the past. When you had
a whole family gathered around the TVs watching one show,
that show had to talk to all of the people
in that room, to the parents, to the to the grandparents,
even if they had different interests, different political ideologies, whatever.
That one show had to talk to a diverse audience.

(31:17):
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 nineteen
fifties was just a detail. Oh, I see. Deco's point

(31:40):
was that the people in the audience, the judges surely
understood what Taibi was saying, but I didn't. The main
point there was totally ignored and it was a really
important point for the A 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

(32:01):
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. The cronkite
bit was a provocation waved in front of Malcolm Gladwell
that sent him charging off in the wrong direction. It
was like a distractor Thorne in there that worked, and
you got totally distracted and went down this whole rabbit

(32:24):
hole and missed that bigger picture. Where did I do anything? Well, no,
not really remember what Douglas Murray said. It's so strange
hearing you debate Malcolm, because you listen to nothing that

(32:46):
your opponents say. It turns out he was right. And
that was when Deco told me I had to come
to Brooklyn again for listening lessons. I met with the

(33:10):
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 nineteen seventies, Dica, Jonathan,
and Sissan 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

(33:33):
Thompson Hall. All right, open form, look up. Being able
to listen is the most important skill a debater should have.
All right, stand up, You know the routine. If you agree,
you on this side. If you disagree, you on that side.
Come on, come on, Jonathan, kick things off with a
warm up exercise. Open for him a mini debate on

(33:55):
the question of the day. What's more important to a
debater being a good listener or a good talker? Agree
is always over here, Disagree always over here. Being able
to listen, I'm so sorry. Being able to listen is
the most important skill of debata could have. Being able
to listen is the most important skill of debata is

(34:18):
one of the most important skills and debating because the
way the way people read read their contentions, and that
supports you want to be able to gain and obtaining
as much information as you can to put down on
your vote chart. Because debating is not only about using
information against information, but it's also about obtaining. It's about
also about obtaining something and understanding that in order to
use information snifier. Why I do I do agree with

(34:43):
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. So that's also a very important skill
to listen to your opponent, because if you don't listen
to it and you just drawing stuff down, you might

(35:05):
say the wrong things or right down the wrong things
to what your opponent is saying. So I'm saying that
listener is more important because as my other teammates said Jay,
she also referred to how they read their contentions or
their subpoints. They read fast, and if you can't catch
those points, then you're not gonna know what you gotta
write or what you gotta focus on. Can I say

(35:26):
something real cool? Yes, I got all your output. Another
old accurate LJA. To start with what you said you
need to write in order to you need to write
in order to listen. But it is true that that
is true, but you but listening is a prerequisite to
writing because you can write a whole bunch of nonsense
But what if you don't have to write accurate information
you didn't listen to the right numbers, you to listen

(35:46):
to the racististics, Then what is your writing have to
do with anything? I can They endrew up a very
but that's not gonna make my argument any better unless
you listened. Then the hard part began. What is this thing?
This wasn't Sam was standing at the front of the room.
He told us he would simulate a debate. Our job
was to keep track of every argument he made in

(36:07):
the debate world. This is called flowing, Susan said. He
would try and make it easier on us. So we're
gonna do a game who's playing cards? 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 gonna make a column.

(36:28):
So if you have a sheet of paper and we
have notebooks for you, you're gonna 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 gonna 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

(36:50):
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. Ready. Hello,
my name is Sisan and I'll be speaking on the
affirmative today. My first argument is the three of hearts,

(37:11):
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.

(37:34):
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. Switch bank color. All right, 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,

(37:58):
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

(38:18):
of seriously, because have you never heard of the Queen
of clubs? That's my whole speech, and I'm maybe unnecessarily
aggressive here. How did I do? I was terrible. I
could keep up for the first minute or so. Then
I fell behind. I miss things. The sun gets up

(38:41):
and talks about playing cards, and I can't keep up.
Is this heart? Oh yeah, I have a question for you.
Is this Heart's really hard? This is really hard? And
you guys are doing amazing. I see it all over
your face. This is frustrating. You don't supposed to be
an expert. I don't even know what he said half
the tom, and I'm doing this Tom all right. This

(39:04):
is what happened to me join the Monk 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. And when Taibi 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. But what debate tells us is that the

(39:26):
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

(39:48):
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 Susan how long would it take me to
listen the way he does to learn how to flow?
I think, if you really focus on it, a school year,

(40:10):
I think to be really comfortable where they probably like
two school years. Yeah. Yeah, And that's half of your
college competitive career. That's half of your high school competitive career.
A long time. But imagine if we did it, if
we all went to debate school, learn those lessons we're

(40:32):
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. Oh
and maybe the most important lesson of all. Do you

(40:54):
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, All right, you
guys go to culture telling each other compliment, why we
love each other? Compliment shout, shout out, and all around
the room the debaters shouted out happily to each ob.

(41:15):
I love the idea of how do you just look
to that as because in that one where believed is
like a really strong words to use, which gave you
such believe with it of our arguments. And I love
how you be coming in like you know what your
what's your presence? Like you're gonna clear you know. So
then it amps me up, Like when you have like
that attitude, it amps me up and it makes me
want to clear too. So I like that you, Matt

(41:42):
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 questions, So I I approached
you with this because, as I said, I had this
disastrous experience with the Monk debate, and I so I

(42:03):
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? 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

(42:24):
just a much. The fact that you I beg your pardon,
I said, that's just a mother speaking you. You will
not admit to any frailty on the part of your sons. No, No,
not only that I'm not aware of that, but so
off much. But the fact that you have risen about
in this this remarkable way, um justifies my faith in

(42:49):
you and my confidence in you. Ah, That's what I
meant by maternal reassurance. Revision, says Street is produced by

(43:09):
ben Ada Haafrey, Leaving Gistu, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith.
Fact checking by Kisha Williams and tali Emlyn. We are
edited by Julia Barton and Peter Clowney. Original scoring by
Luis Gara, mastering by Sarah Brugere and Engineering by Nina Lawrence,
Twitter Taunting by Nina Lawrence, Leman Gistu, Justin Richmond, Ben Holliday,

(43:31):
Emily Vaughan, and David jaw 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's forthcoming memoir I Wasn't
supposed to be here out this September. Jonathan has incredible

(43:51):
stories to tell, most of all, special thanks to my mom, Joiceclappo.
I'm Hersil