April 13, 2023 • 44 mins
What do you do after you've been humiliated at the Munk Debates? You call in the A-Team.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the month debates.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
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, rebuttals, closing arguments.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So I want all of us to think tonight carefully
on our debate motion. Be it resolved. Do not trust
the mainstream media.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Speaking for the resolution, We're two prominent journalists.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
My name is Matt Tayibi, had been a reporter for
thirty years, and I argue for the resolution you should
not trust mainstream media.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Tayibe 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 Tayib has a
massive online following.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter,
my stepmother was a reporter, my godparents are reporters. Basically
every adult I knew growing up was a reporter. So
I actually loved the news business, but I mourned for it.
It's destroyed itself by getting away from its basic function,
which is just to tell us what's happening.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Taybe's partner was the prominent English journalist Douglas Murray, Oxford educated,
beautiful suit, a certain international man of mystery.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Thanks not fair, It's a great pleasure to be here
with about Yad 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 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
(02:19):
a madman would say.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
No to that.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
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 6 (02:37):
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
(02:58):
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
sources of information.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Tayibe Murray Goldberg, and then.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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 2 (03:45):
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
(04:06):
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 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
(04:27):
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 the moderator's.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
I should let you know before we get too far
along that I am not someone who gets nervous. 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
month today. The room was packed, I felt the surge
(05:17):
of love from my countryman, and Michelle was on fire.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
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 one who we're saying not to trust kind of
mainstream sources of opinion. We're saying, this is just another flu.
(05:44):
Deaths are going to be six thousand. 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 2 (05:53):
She had Tybee and Murray on their heels.
Speaker 6 (05:56):
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 2 (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 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
(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 and thinking that it's your call 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.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
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 non fiction book I
have read. It is having written a not very well
(07:44):
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 2 (07:57):
Oh God, all of us have had the dream of
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 Thompson Hall, in front
of a few thousand people, suddenly realizing this is not
going well.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
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
(08:40):
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 2 (09:00):
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 4 (09:18):
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. Functioning
liberal democracies need to have trust in their media, and
(09:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You can't see it listening as you are. But Murray
had the room in the palm of his hand.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Take the hunter Biden's story. Oh here we okay, I'm sorry.
Of course you don't want to no end to that
kind of of course you don't want to hear it, Malcolm.
Of course you wouldn't because it goes against your ideological presumptions.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
In 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.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Let's just quickly review where we started out tonight's debate.
It 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
(10:57):
either team of these debaters swing opinion one way or another?
There we go sixty seven per set in favor of
the motion, thirty three percent of post.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It was the biggest swing in opinion in the history
of the Monk 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 7 (11:34):
Malcolm gave the perfect talk to show exactly why nobody
trusts his media. Malcolm Gladwell has failed as an intellectual
in this debate.
Speaker 8 (11:43):
Wow, you got owned and you were so smug and
arrogant as you were getting known be better.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
You've lost my respect.
Speaker 9 (11:51):
This was a funeral for Malcolm Gladwell's reputation.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Gladwell's not half as smart as I thought.
Speaker 7 (11:58):
He was just washed.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Malk get his butt kicked by Doug and really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
I had hit rock bottom. What do you do after
you've been humiliated? You call your mother, of course.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
Tex While Meg style in English It says, when things
go wrong, convert them to something that is desirable.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
And the first thing my mother did when I asked
for 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 of
(13:06):
the words in dialect. Pronounce it and then spell them
out for me, just so I can see in my mind. Okay,
the expression.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Tech spoil t e K. It's it's a it's a
version of take take what is spoiled because we do
not use the rounded vowels in Jamaica. They're all broad
a vowels. We instead of saying spoil, we say spoil. Yeah,
(13:41):
but they're all English words. Take, spoil, make style. Those
are four English words, but they're just pronounced differently.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It's beautifully economical.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
Exactly that. It's the economy and also the humor which
is which, which is also striking.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Put it in a sentence in your best Jamaican dialect.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
We don't use it in a sentence. We 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, and she says, well, midare you
(14:28):
watch and see everybody will be wearing a dress like
this soon. Maya techspoile make style.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
This was her moral instruction to me in typically elliptical
choice glabor 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. Colandria
(15:01):
aka deca, founder of the Brooklyn Debate League. I told
Dica about the very public undressing Sid effered 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
(15:24):
big bulls of pasta, Franklin Avenue shuttle lumbering along in
the background.
Speaker 7 (15:30):
What's all, George, Oh you can't do that?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
During the podcast, really, Dico had put together a dream
team of three to analyze my performance. Sissan Kuss Rove,
Jonathan Conyers and Dico himself. Jonathan is built like a linebacker,
Big James hardened Beard works as a respiratory therapist when
he's not writing books and teaching debate. Cissan is thirty something, extroverted, charismatic.
(15:59):
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 at Yale, Irish and Italian and background, and
somewhere along the line converted to Judaism and went to
rabbinical school. I sat down at Deco's kitchen table. Each
(16:21):
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 7 (16:41):
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 teached them.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I have the thickest kid in the world. No, I
want to just pile on Oh they piled on.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
So San 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.
Speaker 7 (17:13):
To the audience.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Bendica, what was your strategy?
Speaker 9 (17:17):
Why do you think you won?
Speaker 10 (17:18):
Like if you talked us through, like your offense on
that debate, like why do you think you want.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I thought that that any 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 at tournative.
Oh boy, let's start there. If I assume that most
(17:44):
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
(18:05):
a third party, and the winner is a person who
does the best job of clients inside the head of
that third party.
Speaker 9 (18:12):
Because Ultimately, the wind condition of debate is the judge
circle in your name.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Sissan was the first to respond.
Speaker 9 (18:21):
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 it's.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
An empathetic 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 ninety minute debate on YouTube, which for the love
(18:59):
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
he took great aense and called me Malk.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Well, Malk, I'm going to try to take this more
seriously than you did in your endless creation of straw men,
which just is ceaseless.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
This evening, after the debate was over, Murray tweeted and
retweeted word of his victory fourteen times. He's that kind
of guy. But my advisors 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? How
(19:50):
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 in terms of 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
too 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 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
(20:55):
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. That last sentence from Murray is what throws me.
Immigrants from certain places should be persuaded back to the
countries from which they fled. Like there's the whole thing
(21:17):
that he 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 emigrated to England in nineteen
sixty three or whatever, sixty two. So she's talking in
the fifties, he's talking about So he's talking about my mother, right,
(21:41):
So this is like it was it's street for me.
Speaker 11 (21:45):
It's like that dude is that dude is one of
you know, people used to shout the.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
End word to my mom when she walked down the
street in England in nineteen fifty 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 riled up. I was like, I walked in thinking
he's a piece of shit. That's I realized now, you
can't do that. If you do that, you've lost before
(22:11):
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.
Speaker 7 (22:24):
And again, like you know, Dicoka attested this more than anybody.
Dico has had students who parents have just been deported
or on the verge of being deported and didn't 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 fourteen fifteen year olds too.
After they give a speech, I have to go cry
because they missed their dad or mom and they don't
(22:46):
know if ice is coming 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 fear. 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 if we can't have dialogue, if we
can't have respect in all this loss. So I'm going
to challenge you, Malcolm, to say, if they can control
the opposure and if they can understand that we can
have real conversations, so can you.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
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 opponent's feelings, how
their mind works. That's the number one. Don't be yourself.
It's a dead end. Okay. Second, lesson, all of my
(23:49):
advisors at the Brooklyn Debate League were baffled by a
crucial moment early in the debate, this moment in particular.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
And nobody is saying that non mainstream media don't have frailties.
Speaker 7 (24:02):
Of course they do.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
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 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 Posts in the morning and you know that
there's no spin on the story. It's absolutely accurate reporting.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
The debate Connoisseuran Sasan 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
(24:45):
or complications, you can't trust prescription drugs. It's nuts.
Speaker 9 (24:52):
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 2 (25:13):
What my side should have said was, wait a minute,
the way you guys are defining the resolution makes no sense.
So San said that then I'd be free to offer
a simple alternative, something like.
Speaker 9 (25:25):
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 2 (25:46):
But we didn't say that. We sat there and let
our opponents stack the deck against us. Why Dico had
a hunch.
Speaker 10 (25:55):
Did you write down any notes while your opponents were speaking?
Speaker 7 (25:58):
What were you doing?
Speaker 5 (25:58):
Well?
Speaker 3 (25:59):
That was.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I was scribbling furiously. I was the only one who was.
Speaker 10 (26:03):
But I realized they were saying or what you were thinking.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
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 what the next part of the next thing that
they were saying, do you know? I mean? Dico also
picked up on what led to my most embarrassing moment
in the whole debate, the Walter Cronkite thing. A AI
(26:33):
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
Taibi brought him up in his opening statement.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
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
(27:12):
to everybody had benefits for one thing, and 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
(27:34):
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 2 (27:56):
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 Tabby has for the age of
Walter Cronkite, which he seemed to hold up as a
(28:17):
kind of golden moment. In that moment, the mainstream media
was pipulated 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.
(28:38):
Is really puzzling to me. Then Douglas Murray chimed in, of.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
Course, Malcolm, you did a little nasty jab there by
trying to pretend that Matt Tabi is desperate for the
era of white men in broadcasting. Takes a certain hutzpur
to make that claim.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Tabe then defended himself, and.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
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 garner more trust in the public. There is a
reason why people trusted newspeople more twenty or thirty or
(29:19):
forty years ago than they do now.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
And once again I got irritated, this time with that
phrase making the effort to talk to everyone 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, a.
Speaker 11 (29:43):
Women, poor people, gay people, people with mildly left wing views.
I mean, words fell me when somebody, when it presented
with a critique of his rather adiosyncratic position on Walter Cronkite,
(30:06):
comes back and says, oh no, no, no, there's more
or to my great love of this man. So I'm
on my high horse, waiting my work flag standing up
for inclusion. But wait, first, back to less than one.
Don't be myself.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
It's not smart. But that's not even the worst of it.
Speaker 10 (30:25):
Do you remember the context in which Matt brought that
comment up in his opening?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
It was he was me talking about how that was
an example the way it was back then was worthy
of our trust. And it's not like that anymore.
Speaker 10 (30:43):
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 Prava blah. Yes,
that sentencement came out of his mouth, but that's not
what he was saying. What he was saying was look
to the nineteen fifties, look to the past. When you
had a whole family gathered around the TVs watching one show,
(31:04):
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.
Speaker 9 (31:14):
That one show.
Speaker 10 (31:15):
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.
Speaker 7 (31:31):
Right.
Speaker 10 (31:32):
What he brought up about Walter Cronkite and about the
nineteen fifties was just a detail.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Oh, I see. Deco's point was that the people in
the audience, the judges, surely understood what Taibi was saying,
But I didn't.
Speaker 12 (31:47):
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.
Speaker 10 (31:59):
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 call it demographic hunting. I think right
that they're catering to a specific demographic.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
The Crownkite bit was a provocation waved in front of
Malcolm Gladwell that sent him charging off in the wrong direction.
Speaker 10 (32:17):
It was like a distractor thrown in there that worked,
and you got totally distracted and went down this whole
rabbit hole and missed that bigger picture.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Where did I do anything? Well, no, not really remember
what Douglas Murray said.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
It's so strange hearing you debate, Malcolm because you listen
to nothing that your opponents said.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
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 Debate League at Unity Prep,
(33:13):
a charter high school in Williamsburg. I sat myself down
in a high school classroom for the first time since
the late nineteen seventies, Deca, Jonathan, and Sisan 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.
Speaker 7 (33:34):
All right, open for him, 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.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Jonathan kicked things off with a warm up exercise, open
for him, a mini debate on the question of the day.
What's more important to a debater being a good listener
or a good talker?
Speaker 7 (34:02):
Agree is always over here, Disagree is always over there. Thanks.
Being able to listen, I'm so sorry. Being able to listen,
it's the most important skill that debata could have. Being
able to listen is the most important skill.
Speaker 8 (34:17):
Is UH one of the most important skills in debating
because the way the way people read UH read their contentions,
and at some points you wouldn't be able to gain
gain and obtain as much information as you can to
put down in your blow chart. Because debating is not
only about using information against information, but it's also about
obtaining It's also about obtaining something and understanding that in
(34:37):
order to use information to fight it.
Speaker 13 (34:41):
Welly, I do vo, 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.
Speaker 14 (34:54):
But you also said you have to listen to your opponent.
So that's also a very important skill to listen to
your opponent, cause if you don't listen to it and
you just drawing stuff down, you might say the wrong
things or write down the wrong things to what your
opponent is saying. So I'm saying and that listener is
more important because, as my other teammate said Jade, she
also referred to how they read their contentions or their
(35:18):
sub points. 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.
Speaker 8 (35:25):
Can I say something real fully? Yes, I have something
for all the output all accurate A Jay, 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 but of nonsense. But what if you don't
have to write accurate information you didn't listen to the
right numbers, you listen to the racisistics, then what is
(35:47):
your writing have to do?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Anything?
Speaker 8 (35:49):
I can sit there and draw up a ferry, but
that's not going to make my argument any better unless
you listen.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Then the hard part began.
Speaker 9 (35:56):
What is this thing?
Speaker 2 (35:57):
This wasn't Someone 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
the debate world. This is called flowing. Sassan said. He
would try and make it easier on us. So we're
going to do a game with playing cards where.
Speaker 9 (36:15):
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,
(36:38):
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 missing anything.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
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 9 (37:03):
Ready, 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. And 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,
(37:24):
first off, ace of hearts, secondly the six of clubs,
and finally the nine of spades.
Speaker 7 (37:34):
That's it.
Speaker 9 (37:34):
That's the speech, So you should have these written down. Okay, great,
now we're going to do the negative speech. Switchbank color.
All right, I'm the negative and I disagree with everything
that guy said. He says three of hearts more like
(37:55):
the seven of diamonds. You know, people like to talk
about Jack of spades, but what they don't realize is
king of hearts. Ton 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
(38:16):
of spades, nine of spades, nine of seriously, because have
you never heard of the Queen of clubs? That's my
old speech. And I'm maybe unnecessarily aggressive here.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
How did I do? I was terrible. I could keep
up for the first minute or so. Then I fell behind.
I miss things. Sisan gets up and talks about playing cards,
and I can't keep up.
Speaker 7 (38:45):
I got I have a question for you? Is this hard? Oh? Yeah,
people have a question for you.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Is this hard?
Speaker 13 (38:53):
Really hard?
Speaker 7 (38:53):
This is really hard? And you guys are doing amazing.
I'll see it all over your face. This is frustrated.
You don't supposed to be an expert. I don't even
know what you said half the tom, and I'm been
doing this for a long tom. Alright.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
This is what happened to me during the month 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 Tybee 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
(39:26):
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
(39:48):
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 ask us, on how long would it take me
to listen the way he does, to learn how to flow?
Speaker 9 (40:08):
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, yeah, and that's half of your
college competitive career, that's half of your high school competitive career.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
A long time. But imagine if we did it, if
we all went to debate school, learn those lessons we're
able to say to ourselves in the middle of a
heated argument, this isn't about me. Learned how to avoid
Walter Cronkite's sized rabbit holes. Understood the debating is not
the art of talking, it's the art of listening. Oh
(40:51):
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 7 (41:03):
All right, you guys, go to culture, tell each other
compliment why we love each other?
Speaker 8 (41:06):
Go go go compliment?
Speaker 7 (41:09):
Who shout out? Shout out, and.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
All around the room the debaters shouted out happily to
each other. The idea of how do you just look
to that attitude?
Speaker 8 (41:16):
Because attitude is in that one word believe is a
really strong word to use, which gave you such a
good lead may some arguments.
Speaker 13 (41:23):
And I love how you be coming in like you
know what, your what 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.
Speaker 9 (41:34):
So I like that.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
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 I
approached you with this because, as I said, I had
this disastrous experience with the Monk debate, and I so
(42:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
That's just a much the fact that you.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
I beg your pardon, I.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Said, that's just a mother speaking you. You will not
admit to any frailty on the part of your sons.
Speaker 5 (42:35):
No, no, no, not only that I'm not aware of them,
but so so much. But the fact that you have
risen above in this is remarkable way justifies my my
faith in you and my confidence in you.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Oh that's what I meant by maternal reassurance. Revision says
Street is produced by ben Ada F. Hafrey, Leeman gistdou
(43:12):
Kiera Powell, and Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Kashaw Williams
and Tolly Emlin. We are edited by Julia Barton and
Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Sarah Bruguier,
and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Twitter taunting by Nina Lawrence, Leeman, Gistou,
Justin Richmond, Ben Holliday, Emily Vaughan, and David jaw Special
(43:34):
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 Conyer's's forthcoming
memoir I Wasn't supposed to be here out this September.
Jonathan has incredible stories to tell, most of all special
(43:55):
thanks to my mom, Joyce Scleppo. I'm hersa
Pushkin ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the month debates.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
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, rebuttals, closing arguments.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
So I want all of us to think tonight carefully
on our debate motion. Be it resolved. Do not trust
the mainstream media.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Speaking for the resolution, We're two prominent journalists.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
My name is Matt Tayibi, had been a reporter for
thirty years, and I argue for the resolution you should
not trust mainstream media.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Tayibe 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 Tayib has a
massive online following.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter,
my stepmother was a reporter, my godparents are reporters. Basically
every adult I knew growing up was a reporter. So
I actually loved the news business, but I mourned for it.
It's destroyed itself by getting away from its basic function,
which is just to tell us what's happening.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Taybe's partner was the prominent English journalist Douglas Murray, Oxford educated,
beautiful suit, a certain international man of mystery.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
Thanks not fair, It's a great pleasure to be here
with about Yad 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 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
(02:19):
a madman would say.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
No to that.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
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 6 (02:37):
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
(02:58):
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
sources of information.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Tayibe Murray Goldberg, and then.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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 2 (03:45):
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
(04:06):
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 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
(04:27):
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 the moderator's.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
I should let you know before we get too far
along that I am not someone who gets nervous. 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
month today. The room was packed, I felt the surge
(05:17):
of love from my countryman, and Michelle was on fire.
Speaker 6 (05:22):
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 one who we're saying not to trust kind of
mainstream sources of opinion. We're saying, this is just another flu.
(05:44):
Deaths are going to be six thousand. 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 2 (05:53):
She had Tybee and Murray on their heels.
Speaker 6 (05:56):
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 2 (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 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
(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 and thinking that it's your call 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.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
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 non fiction book I
have read. It is having written a not very well
(07:44):
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 2 (07:57):
Oh God, all of us have had the dream of
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 Thompson Hall, in front
of a few thousand people, suddenly realizing this is not
going well.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
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
(08:40):
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 2 (09:00):
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 4 (09:18):
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. Functioning
liberal democracies need to have trust in their media, and
(09:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
You can't see it listening as you are. But Murray
had the room in the palm of his hand.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Take the hunter Biden's story. Oh here we okay, I'm sorry.
Of course you don't want to no end to that
kind of of course you don't want to hear it, Malcolm.
Of course you wouldn't because it goes against your ideological presumptions.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
In 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.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Let's just quickly review where we started out tonight's debate.
It 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
(10:57):
either team of these debaters swing opinion one way or another?
There we go sixty seven per set in favor of
the motion, thirty three percent of post.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It was the biggest swing in opinion in the history
of the Monk 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 7 (11:34):
Malcolm gave the perfect talk to show exactly why nobody
trusts his media. Malcolm Gladwell has failed as an intellectual
in this debate.
Speaker 8 (11:43):
Wow, you got owned and you were so smug and
arrogant as you were getting known be better.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
You've lost my respect.
Speaker 9 (11:51):
This was a funeral for Malcolm Gladwell's reputation.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
Gladwell's not half as smart as I thought.
Speaker 7 (11:58):
He was just washed.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Malk get his butt kicked by Doug and really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
I had hit rock bottom. What do you do after
you've been humiliated? You call your mother, of course.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
Tex While Meg style in English It says, when things
go wrong, convert them to something that is desirable.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
And the first thing my mother did when I asked
for 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 of
(13:06):
the words in dialect. Pronounce it and then spell them
out for me, just so I can see in my mind. Okay,
the expression.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Tech spoil t e K. It's it's a it's a
version of take take what is spoiled because we do
not use the rounded vowels in Jamaica. They're all broad
a vowels. We instead of saying spoil, we say spoil. Yeah,
(13:41):
but they're all English words. Take, spoil, make style. Those
are four English words, but they're just pronounced differently.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
It's beautifully economical.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
Exactly that. It's the economy and also the humor which
is which, which is also striking.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Put it in a sentence in your best Jamaican dialect.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
We don't use it in a sentence. We 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, and she says, well, midare you
(14:28):
watch and see everybody will be wearing a dress like
this soon. Maya techspoile make style.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
This was her moral instruction to me in typically elliptical
choice glabor 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. Colandria
(15:01):
aka deca, founder of the Brooklyn Debate League. I told
Dica about the very public undressing Sid effered 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
(15:24):
big bulls of pasta, Franklin Avenue shuttle lumbering along in
the background.
Speaker 7 (15:30):
What's all, George, Oh you can't do that?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
During the podcast, really, Dico had put together a dream
team of three to analyze my performance. Sissan Kuss Rove,
Jonathan Conyers and Dico himself. Jonathan is built like a linebacker,
Big James hardened Beard works as a respiratory therapist when
he's not writing books and teaching debate. Cissan is thirty something, extroverted, charismatic.
(15:59):
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 at Yale, Irish and Italian and background, and
somewhere along the line converted to Judaism and went to
rabbinical school. I sat down at Deco's kitchen table. Each
(16:21):
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 7 (16:41):
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 teached them.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I have the thickest kid in the world. No, I
want to just pile on Oh they piled on.
Speaker 9 (17:00):
So San 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.
Speaker 7 (17:13):
To the audience.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Bendica, what was your strategy?
Speaker 9 (17:17):
Why do you think you won?
Speaker 10 (17:18):
Like if you talked us through, like your offense on
that debate, like why do you think you want.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I thought that that any 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 at tournative.
Oh boy, let's start there. If I assume that most
(17:44):
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
(18:05):
a third party, and the winner is a person who
does the best job of clients inside the head of
that third party.
Speaker 9 (18:12):
Because Ultimately, the wind condition of debate is the judge
circle in your name.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Sissan was the first to respond.
Speaker 9 (18:21):
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 it's.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
An empathetic 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 ninety minute debate on YouTube, which for the love
(18:59):
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
he took great aense and called me Malk.
Speaker 4 (19:12):
Well, Malk, I'm going to try to take this more
seriously than you did in your endless creation of straw men,
which just is ceaseless.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
This evening, after the debate was over, Murray tweeted and
retweeted word of his victory fourteen times. He's that kind
of guy. But my advisors 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? How
(19:50):
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 in terms of 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
too 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 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
(20:55):
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. That last sentence from Murray is what throws me.
Immigrants from certain places should be persuaded back to the
countries from which they fled. Like there's the whole thing
(21:17):
that he 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 emigrated to England in nineteen
sixty three or whatever, sixty two. So she's talking in
the fifties, he's talking about So he's talking about my mother, right,
(21:41):
So this is like it was it's street for me.
Speaker 11 (21:45):
It's like that dude is that dude is one of
you know, people used to shout the.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
End word to my mom when she walked down the
street in England in nineteen fifty 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 riled up. I was like, I walked in thinking
he's a piece of shit. That's I realized now, you
can't do that. If you do that, you've lost before
(22:11):
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.
Speaker 7 (22:24):
And again, like you know, Dicoka attested this more than anybody.
Dico has had students who parents have just been deported
or on the verge of being deported and didn't 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 fourteen fifteen year olds too.
After they give a speech, I have to go cry
because they missed their dad or mom and they don't
(22:46):
know if ice is coming 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 fear. 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 if we can't have dialogue, if we
can't have respect in all this loss. So I'm going
to challenge you, Malcolm, to say, if they can control
the opposure and if they can understand that we can
have real conversations, so can you.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
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 opponent's feelings, how
their mind works. That's the number one. Don't be yourself.
It's a dead end. Okay. Second, lesson, all of my
(23:49):
advisors at the Brooklyn Debate League were baffled by a
crucial moment early in the debate, this moment in particular.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
And nobody is saying that non mainstream media don't have frailties.
Speaker 7 (24:02):
Of course they do.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
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 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 Posts in the morning and you know that
there's no spin on the story. It's absolutely accurate reporting.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
The debate Connoisseuran Sasan 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
(24:45):
or complications, you can't trust prescription drugs. It's nuts.
Speaker 9 (24:52):
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 2 (25:13):
What my side should have said was, wait a minute,
the way you guys are defining the resolution makes no sense.
So San said that then I'd be free to offer
a simple alternative, something like.
Speaker 9 (25:25):
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 2 (25:46):
But we didn't say that. We sat there and let
our opponents stack the deck against us. Why Dico had
a hunch.
Speaker 10 (25:55):
Did you write down any notes while your opponents were speaking?
Speaker 7 (25:58):
What were you doing?
Speaker 5 (25:58):
Well?
Speaker 3 (25:59):
That was.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
I was scribbling furiously. I was the only one who was.
Speaker 10 (26:03):
But I realized they were saying or what you were thinking.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
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 what the next part of the next thing that
they were saying, do you know? I mean? Dico also
picked up on what led to my most embarrassing moment
in the whole debate, the Walter Cronkite thing. A AI
(26:33):
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
Taibi brought him up in his opening statement.
Speaker 3 (26:49):
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
(27:12):
to everybody had benefits for one thing, and 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
(27:34):
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 2 (27:56):
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 Tabby has for the age of
Walter Cronkite, which he seemed to hold up as a
(28:17):
kind of golden moment. In that moment, the mainstream media
was pipulated 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.
(28:38):
Is really puzzling to me. Then Douglas Murray chimed in, of.
Speaker 4 (28:41):
Course, Malcolm, you did a little nasty jab there by
trying to pretend that Matt Tabi is desperate for the
era of white men in broadcasting. Takes a certain hutzpur
to make that claim.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Tabe then defended himself, and.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
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 garner more trust in the public. There is a
reason why people trusted newspeople more twenty or thirty or
(29:19):
forty years ago than they do now.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
And once again I got irritated, this time with that
phrase making the effort to talk to everyone 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, a.
Speaker 11 (29:43):
Women, poor people, gay people, people with mildly left wing views.
I mean, words fell me when somebody, when it presented
with a critique of his rather adiosyncratic position on Walter Cronkite,
(30:06):
comes back and says, oh no, no, no, there's more
or to my great love of this man. So I'm
on my high horse, waiting my work flag standing up
for inclusion. But wait, first, back to less than one.
Don't be myself.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
It's not smart. But that's not even the worst of it.
Speaker 10 (30:25):
Do you remember the context in which Matt brought that
comment up in his opening?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
It was he was me talking about how that was
an example the way it was back then was worthy
of our trust. And it's not like that anymore.
Speaker 10 (30:43):
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 Prava blah. Yes,
that sentencement came out of his mouth, but that's not
what he was saying. What he was saying was look
to the nineteen fifties, look to the past. When you
had a whole family gathered around the TVs watching one show,
(31:04):
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.
Speaker 9 (31:14):
That one show.
Speaker 10 (31:15):
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.
Speaker 7 (31:31):
Right.
Speaker 10 (31:32):
What he brought up about Walter Cronkite and about the
nineteen fifties was just a detail.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Oh, I see. Deco's point was that the people in
the audience, the judges, surely understood what Taibi was saying,
But I didn't.
Speaker 12 (31:47):
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.
Speaker 10 (31:59):
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 call it demographic hunting. I think right
that they're catering to a specific demographic.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
The Crownkite bit was a provocation waved in front of
Malcolm Gladwell that sent him charging off in the wrong direction.
Speaker 10 (32:17):
It was like a distractor thrown in there that worked,
and you got totally distracted and went down this whole
rabbit hole and missed that bigger picture.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Where did I do anything? Well, no, not really remember
what Douglas Murray said.
Speaker 4 (32:40):
It's so strange hearing you debate, Malcolm because you listen
to nothing that your opponents said.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
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 Debate League at Unity Prep,
(33:13):
a charter high school in Williamsburg. I sat myself down
in a high school classroom for the first time since
the late nineteen seventies, Deca, Jonathan, and Sisan 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.
Speaker 7 (33:34):
All right, open for him, 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.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Jonathan kicked things off with a warm up exercise, open
for him, a mini debate on the question of the day.
What's more important to a debater being a good listener
or a good talker?
Speaker 7 (34:02):
Agree is always over here, Disagree is always over there. Thanks.
Being able to listen, I'm so sorry. Being able to listen,
it's the most important skill that debata could have. Being
able to listen is the most important skill.
Speaker 8 (34:17):
Is UH one of the most important skills in debating
because the way the way people read UH read their contentions,
and at some points you wouldn't be able to gain
gain and obtain as much information as you can to
put down in your blow chart. Because debating is not
only about using information against information, but it's also about
obtaining It's also about obtaining something and understanding that in
(34:37):
order to use information to fight it.
Speaker 13 (34:41):
Welly, I do vo, 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.
Speaker 14 (34:54):
But you also said you have to listen to your opponent.
So that's also a very important skill to listen to
your opponent, cause if you don't listen to it and
you just drawing stuff down, you might say the wrong
things or write down the wrong things to what your
opponent is saying. So I'm saying and that listener is
more important because, as my other teammate said Jade, she
also referred to how they read their contentions or their
(35:18):
sub points. 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.
Speaker 8 (35:25):
Can I say something real fully? Yes, I have something
for all the output all accurate A Jay, 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 but of nonsense. But what if you don't
have to write accurate information you didn't listen to the
right numbers, you listen to the racisistics, then what is
(35:47):
your writing have to do?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Anything?
Speaker 8 (35:49):
I can sit there and draw up a ferry, but
that's not going to make my argument any better unless
you listen.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Then the hard part began.
Speaker 9 (35:56):
What is this thing?
Speaker 2 (35:57):
This wasn't Someone 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
the debate world. This is called flowing. Sassan said. He
would try and make it easier on us. So we're
going to do a game with playing cards where.
Speaker 9 (36:15):
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,
(36:38):
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 missing anything.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
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 9 (37:03):
Ready, 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. And 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,
(37:24):
first off, ace of hearts, secondly the six of clubs,
and finally the nine of spades.
Speaker 7 (37:34):
That's it.
Speaker 9 (37:34):
That's the speech, So you should have these written down. Okay, great,
now we're going to do the negative speech. Switchbank color.
All right, I'm the negative and I disagree with everything
that guy said. He says three of hearts more like
(37:55):
the seven of diamonds. You know, people like to talk
about Jack of spades, but what they don't realize is
king of hearts. Ton 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
(38:16):
of spades, nine of spades, nine of seriously, because have
you never heard of the Queen of clubs? That's my
old speech. And I'm maybe unnecessarily aggressive here.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
How did I do? I was terrible. I could keep
up for the first minute or so. Then I fell behind.
I miss things. Sisan gets up and talks about playing cards,
and I can't keep up.
Speaker 7 (38:45):
I got I have a question for you? Is this hard? Oh? Yeah,
people have a question for you.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Is this hard?
Speaker 13 (38:53):
Really hard?
Speaker 7 (38:53):
This is really hard? And you guys are doing amazing.
I'll see it all over your face. This is frustrated.
You don't supposed to be an expert. I don't even
know what you said half the tom, and I'm been
doing this for a long tom. Alright.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
This is what happened to me during the month 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 Tybee 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
(39:26):
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
(39:48):
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 ask us, on how long would it take me
to listen the way he does, to learn how to flow?
Speaker 9 (40:08):
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, yeah, and that's half of your
college competitive career, that's half of your high school competitive career.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
A long time. But imagine if we did it, if
we all went to debate school, learn those lessons we're
able to say to ourselves in the middle of a
heated argument, this isn't about me. Learned how to avoid
Walter Cronkite's sized rabbit holes. Understood the debating is not
the art of talking, it's the art of listening. Oh
(40:51):
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 7 (41:03):
All right, you guys, go to culture, tell each other
compliment why we love each other?
Speaker 8 (41:06):
Go go go compliment?
Speaker 7 (41:09):
Who shout out? Shout out, and.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
All around the room the debaters shouted out happily to
each other. The idea of how do you just look
to that attitude?
Speaker 8 (41:16):
Because attitude is in that one word believe is a
really strong word to use, which gave you such a
good lead may some arguments.
Speaker 13 (41:23):
And I love how you be coming in like you
know what, your what 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.
Speaker 9 (41:34):
So I like that.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
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 I
approached you with this because, as I said, I had
this disastrous experience with the Monk debate, and I so
(42:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (42:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
That's just a much the fact that you.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
I beg your pardon, I.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Said, that's just a mother speaking you. You will not
admit to any frailty on the part of your sons.
Speaker 5 (42:35):
No, no, no, not only that I'm not aware of them,
but so so much. But the fact that you have
risen above in this is remarkable way justifies my my
faith in you and my confidence in you.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Oh that's what I meant by maternal reassurance. Revision says
Street is produced by ben Ada F. Hafrey, Leeman gistdou
(43:12):
Kiera Powell, and Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Kashaw Williams
and Tolly Emlin. We are edited by Julia Barton and
Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Sarah Bruguier,
and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Twitter taunting by Nina Lawrence, Leeman, Gistou,
Justin Richmond, Ben Holliday, Emily Vaughan, and David jaw Special
(43:34):
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 Conyer's's forthcoming
memoir I Wasn't supposed to be here out this September.
Jonathan has incredible stories to tell, most of all special
(43:55):
thanks to my mom, Joyce Scleppo. I'm hersa
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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