Douglas Murray on Malcolm Gladwell: "I Still Don't Feel Pity"

when I was in Toronto recently debating your fellow Countryman Malcolm Gladwell who I went in I went in to debate him at the monk debates having a very low opinion of him and came out with a much lower one um I thought he was a totally frivolous and fraudulent man but he subsequently had a sort of breakdown as far as one can tell about the event uh because he performed so catastrophically and he did a podcast which I listened to some of in which he tried to analyze why he had lost by the largest margin in the history of the monk debate oh that's rough I still don't feel pity but uh he did say there that Douglas Murray had been trained if only I'd have known him trained the Rapier wit and the and the cotton thrust of the Oxford Union and he presented it first of all I wasn't I just learned how to do it by listening to people who knew how to talk uh uh well and also by thinking and by thinking but but mainly by example if you know people are listening very very closely to how they did it and learning their tricks even people I disagreed with gosh that's she's she's that's very good you know that sort of thing but it was very funny because Gladwell presented it Not only was he wrong about my training as a public speaker but it was so funny that he presented it as if being trained at the Oxford Union is an unfair Advantage but his own disastrous disastrous performance wouldn't have been disastrous if only he'd have had this advantage and of course he's had every advantage in life he just is a fool so so what did what did you do right in that debate and what did he do wrong oh I listened to him okay and he didn't and he didn't listen he didn't listen he spent most of the debate I had met taibi on my side yeah he had Michelle Goldberg on his yeah and I said it once that wasn't so good either I said to one point to Matt I said I said what's Malcolm Gladwell writing he spent the whole time scribbling on this pad and then would say something utterly inane all right so he wasn't there he would say something he'd already said he kept pretending that Matt was a white supremacist because mattered in his opening comments mentioned the era of media trusts exemplified by Walter Cronkite and so Malcolm Gladwell kept coming back to Walter Cronkite and your great love Matt of the white male presenter it was so Preposterous and we were bored of it and the audience was groaning and uh and I actually said to him it's very weird seeing you try to debate Malcolm because you listen to nothing we say right nothing and in his sort of post-match analysis some months later he had he said I should I should have listened to my opponents you think no you know yeah that's the question I was listening very interesting well that is the issue though of being there right is that and and this is a trick to writing a trick it's not a trick it's the secret to writing and it's the secret to lecturing as Wellness that you have to be in the moment you know and you don't think up what you're going to write and put it down I mean you might have some sense of where you're going but if you're if you're writing in a manner that's going to guide your Reader through the material you have to be doing the thinking on the page so that they can do the thinking along with you you can't just present them with a bunch of foregone conclusions no and also on the on a debate stage and I've ended up doing a lot of debate in my life although it seems to be increasingly hard to find people to show up um uh one of the things I have noticed is that listening to to your interlocutor is crucial because also the audience know in the same way that if if in conversation I mean we've all had that if you if you're sitting at a dinner table with somebody and you say something and you can see it's made them think of something that they want to say and often it's a joke or a story or something like that but you can see that after they've locked that in they're not listening right right yeah they're just waiting to play there yeah yeah yeah that's not good and it's terrible no it's like it's a sign of a bad conversation so you're not actually with me you're sort of slotting your bit of Lego and then you're expecting me well that's part of that instrumental use of language yeah four which is the person is waiting for their turn on the stage and they're doing that for for for the social Kudos that go along with making the point let's say instead of playing yes because it should be a play and the play should be dynamic I mean I had great fun smacking him around uh um uh because he made himself such a idiotic Target and um he he and my other things I mean he made a fatal slip as well of um of being really rather rude um and then my I believe very much I believe Lord Clark of civilizations lovely conclusion to that series that courtesy is the thing that makes civilization I love that sentiment nevertheless I have a rule on it which is if you're courteous to me I'll be endlessly courteous back but if you're rude first I'm not one of those pacifist conservatives right so I am I hit back pretty hard and uh humiliated him Rick and the audience liked it of course because he was being so rude to us he couldn't even call he couldn't even pronounce our names it's not it's not good when an audience is pleased that someone is rude to you no no that's well he made the mistake he couldn't pronounce Matt taibi's name he kept on saying Matt trb and then he started calling me Doug oh yeah now I know that as you know that it's a deliberate way if you and I corrected him twice I said it's Douglas yeah and he kept doing it now I know what that is he just says Michelle Goldberg had her own version which is she does the little girl thing of hmm I was interested to hear and you know you're not interested at all yeah yeah yeah you are not remotely interested you're gearing up for some nasty little uh attack and but she was totally hopeless I don't know why they asked her back after the one you did with her and I actually said to her her on the platform because again she wasn't thinking on her feet she misrepresented something that Matt taibi had said immediately after he'd said it and I said you've just misrepresented what Matt tabies said in front of all these people in this Hall and I said and it doesn't surprise me because the last time you were here you were on stage with Jordan Peterson and you misrepresented what he said in front of everyone in this Hall so sort of your habit it's just lying to large groups of people and assuming you'll get away with it like why do you think that'll work anyhow so because it works at the New York Times New York Times yeah yeah the Bible is the root of all wisdom inspiration and spiritual nourishment the Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible's profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life a great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out father 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today download the Hallow app at hallow.com Jordan that's hallow.com Jordan hello.com Jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all six thousand plus prayers and meditations I enjoy it but I enjoy public debate when it's a real exchange of ideas and my the disappointment I had actually in my public speaking life has been how few times you actually do turn up with an honest interlock theater you know unfortunately because of podcasts like this we can have a conversation which gets somewhere yeah but if there's one person who goes in like Malcolm Gladwell did that night in Toronto deciding that and he said after he said I thought Murray in advance was a piece of yeah if you go in with that view uh you all you can do is try to kill the other person yeah and then nothing can happen because the other person does like a cat-like response and you both just got your art your backs arched and like what's the point of a dialogue like that but that has been one of the disappointments of My Life as a public speaker is I had hoped that we still would have a public culture in which ideas were fleshed out including between different people with different ideas and I find that that culture in America and the wider West is almost completely disappeared well you know like like you said you pointed to the podcast realm and that's a place where it might well make its comeback and absolutely yeah yeah and and and I think there's some really promising developments on that front oh yes people are willing to sit and listen to a conversation like this for example for very long periods of time [Music] thank you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: NcTGRYn8Ri0

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023