Malcolm Goes to Debate School | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

foreign ladies and gentlemen Welcome to The Mug debates not long ago a few thousand people gathered at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto the fanciest performance space in the city to hear it debate parliamentary style opening statements rebuttals 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 taibi I've been a reporter for 30 years and I argue for the resolution you should not trust mainstream media 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 taibi has a massive online following I grew up in the press my father was a reporter my stepmother was a reporter my god parents were 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 happening [Music] taibi's partner was The prominent English journalist Douglas Murray Oxford educated beautiful suit a certain international Man of Mystery Sapphire it's it's a great pleasure to be here as radiat said I've come a rather long way from the front lines of the Ukraine conflict because I like to see these things with my own eyes for myself and to come to my own conclusions I came out through Moldova the other day through London then got to Toronto and a friend of mine 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 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 the BBC something's wrong but in terms of the big stories if you paid attention to the mainstream media you were likely to be much safer and much closer to the truth than if you followed the kind of contrarians if you followed the people who were saying don't trust the mainstream media trust these alternative sources of information Goldberg [Music] and then 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 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 [Music] I entered this battle to Cheers from my hometown crowd I grew up not far away and I went to college in Toronto about a mile from the theater this whole evening was putting a pep in my step I'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 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 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 90 minutes can you be persuaded to move from the pro Camp into the con camp or vice versa I should let you know before we get too far along that I am not someone who gets nervous 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 of love from my countrymen and Michelle was on fire however if you followed the mainstream media you knew that kovid was Airborne you knew that it was more serious than the flu and you knew that the vaccines were likely to protect you the the coveted contrarians the contrarian media the one who were saying not to trust kind of mainstream sources of opinion were saying this is not this is just another flu deaths are going to be 6 000. the media doesn't want to tell you I mean Matt wrote this several times the media doesn't want to tell you about Ivermectin she had taibi 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 when it was my turn to speak I tried to build on what Michelle said the mainstream media was right about things like covet in Ukraine because it's a profession with standards and rules and a long tradition of searching for the truth the non-mainstream media is a set of Institutions that are outside of that tradition that have an open and not a closed platform and you cannot have an open platform and simultaneously adhere to a strict set of professional Norms you cannot say anyone can become a doctor and then complain when the surgeon takes out your spleen and thinking that it's your gallbladder right now why am I making such a big deal about this because trust is not about content trust is about process I got my journalistic training at the Washington Post one of the great newspapers in the world I learned about that process about what it means to respect the truth from some of the greatest journalists of my generation this was from the heart we're nailing this I thought to myself and then I can't sit here and listen to Malcolm I'm 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-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 but mine was filled with facts oh God all of us have had the dream we were walking down our high school Corridor and we realized suddenly we're not wearing any pants that was me in that moment on the stage of Roy Thompson Hall in front of a few thousand people suddenly realizing this is not going well 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 as it occurs in you um saying things that neither of us have said and then you try to pathologize what we say Malcolm why don't you listen to what comes about 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 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 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 society's 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 [Applause] you 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 okay I'm sorry a very of course you don't want to do no end to the kind of Twitter of course you don't want to hear it Malcolm of course you wouldn't because it goes against your ideological presumptions foreign 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 uh it was pretty much a split opinion if I believe it was 48 in favor 52 opposed we then asked you how many could change your mind so let's see what happened over the last 90 minutes did either team of these debaters swing opinion one way or another there we go 67 in favor of the motion 33 opposed it was the biggest swing in opinion in the history of the month debates we got cream [Music] I went back to my hotel room laid down on my bed stared at the ceiling and made the mistake of checking social media Malcolm gave the perfect 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're getting old be better you've lost my respect this was a funeral for Malcolm gladwell's reputation gladwell's not half as smart as I thought he was just watched malc get his butt kicked by Doug and really enjoyed it I had hit rock bottom [Music] [Applause] what do you do after you've been humiliated you call your mother of course [Music] Tech spoil make Style in in English it says when things go wrong convert them to something that is desirable 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 the words in in dialect pronounce them and then spell them out for me just so I can see in my mind uh okay the expression uh Tech spoil t-e-k yeah it's it's an it's a version of take yeah 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 but they're all English words take spoil make style those are four English words but they're just pronounced differently yeah 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 okay you use it as a commentary on a situation all right here is someone walking 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 a tech spoil make Style this was her moral instruction to me in typically elliptical Joyce global fashion take lemons and make lemonade take spoil and make Style so what did I do I went straight to the top I got in touch with the local Legend of New York debating KMD colandria AKA dico founder of the Brooklyn debate league I told dica about the very public undressing I had suffered on the stage of Roy Thompson Hall and Deco said you need to come to Brooklyn so I did all the way to the Crown Heights neighborhood in what used to be the old Hebrew Hospital narrow hallway cats everyone eating big bowls of pasta Franklin Avenue shuttle lumbering along in the background what's up George no you can't do that during the podcast but Deco had put together a dream team of three to analyze my performance sassan kasravi Jonathan Conyers and dico himself [Music] like a linebacker Big James hardened beard works as a respiratory therapist when he's not writing books and teaching debate sassan is 30 something extroverted charismatic in the John Grisham version of his life he would be a trial lawyer who would win a 10 billion dollar verdict from the Cherry in Mississippi is reserved studied philosophy at Yale Irish and Italian in background and somewhere along the line converted to Judaism and went to rabbinical School I sat down at dico's kitchen table each of the three had pages of densely written notes in front of them they had paired 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 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 um and that's what I teach them I have the thickest skin in the world no I want just pylon and oh they piled on Hassan 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 then dico what was your strategy why do you think you won like if you talked us through like your offense on that debate like why do you think you won I thought I mean it was to be honest it began with a certain degree of arrogance that I thought I just couldn't imagine how anyone could legitimately argue that the mainstream media was worse than the alternative oh boy let's start there if I assume that most people were on my side before I began then why was I even debating debating is persuasion it's based on the idea that there are people listening who don't agree with you and your job is to change their mind it's not a conversation it's not you say what you think I say what I think it's a contest adjudicated by a third party and the winner is the person who does the best job of climbing inside the head of that third party because ultimately the win condition of debate is the judge circling your name sassan was the first to respond 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 and it's 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 90-minute debate on YouTube which for the love of God I dearly hope you do not you will notice that Mr Murray and I did not get along at a few points I called him Doug to which he took great offense and called me malc well malc olm [Applause] um I'm going to try to take this more seriously than you did in your endless creation of straw man which just is ceaseless this evening after the debate was over Murray tweeted and retweeted word of his victory 14 times he's that kind of guy but my advisors at the Brooklyn debate league were not happy about my antipathy towards Mr Murray if reading the mind of the judge requires empathy then how is pursuing some personal Vendetta going to help matters how do you engage in the delicate art of persuasion if you're getting all emotional I tried to explain I didn't know Douglas Marie much at all so I did a little research into Douglas Murray and in terms of the Douglas Murray without meaning I'm not intending to demean him but he is someone he is one of those um English people white English people who objects to the number of non-white people who have moved to England in the last 50 years I'm actually not exaggerating here let me read to you from a speech Murray once gave it is late in the day but Europe still has time to turn around the demographic Time Bomb which will soon see a number of our largest cities fall to Muslim majorities it has to all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop in the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans Sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis this should also be enacted retrospectively those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from Once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed 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 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 19. 63 or whatever 62. so she she's oh in the 50s he's talking about so he's talking about my mother right so this is like it was it's it's Street for me it's like that dude is dis that dude is one of you know people used to shout the n-word at my mom when she walked down the street in England in 1950 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 that's and I realized now you can't do that if you do that you've lost before you've even started this is why in high school debate you have to prepare both sides beforehand and you find out whether you are for or against the resolution on the day of the debate they don't want you to be yourself and again like you know Deco attested is more than anybody dico has had students who parents have just been deported or on the verge of being deported and then have to go and speak about open borders and immigration and don't know which side of the fence they have to debate on that is tough for 14 15 year olds who after they give a speech I have to go cry because they missed their battle Mama they don't know if ice is coming or I can't do this I can't do that and I get it I have been there there were times where I felt racism occurring or people told me you can't use your personal story that's not fair this rich kid don't understand what it's like to be poor so don't talk about that so it happens we have to come in and understand that debates are not personal and we have to talk about these topics because we can't have dialogue if we can't have respect and All Is Lost so I'm gonna challenge you Malcolm to say if they can control the opposure if they can understand that we can have real conversations so can you [Music] 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 lesson number one don't be yourself it's a dead end [Music] okay second lesson all of my advisors at the Brooklyn debate league were baffled by a crucial moment early in the debate this moment in particular and nobody is saying that non-mainstream media don't have frailties of course they do the simple proposal in front of the audience tonight is whether or not you can trust the mainstream media that is that you don't need anything else you don't need any other information from elsewhere you can just you can just turn on CBC in the evening and you know you've got your stuff you can pick up the New York Times The Washington Post in the morning and you know that there's no spin on the story it's absolutely accurate reporting the debate connoisseur in sassan loved this little move what Murray was saying was that if you have even the slightest doubt about the Perfection of the mainstream media then you have to vote for his side and no institution can meet that standard it's like saying unless all prescription drugs are guaranteed to act perfectly every time without side effects or complications you can't trust prescription drugs it's nuts they took this topic don't trust mainstream media and made the central question of the debates 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 what my side should have said was wait a minute the way you guys are defining the resolution makes no sense sassan 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 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 but we didn't say that we sat there and let our opponents stack the deck against us why dico had a hunch did you write down any notes while your opponents were speaking what were you doing well that was so I was scribbling furiously I was the only 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 I would how I'd respond in a moment so while I was doing that I was missing but the next part the next thing that they were saying do you know what I mean dico also picked up on what led to my most embarrassing moment in the whole debate the Walter Cronkite thing 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 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 had flaws but making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits for one thing an inspired Trust Gallup polls twice twice Shield Walter Cronkite to be the most trusted person in all of America that would never happen with a news reader today with the arrival of the internet some Outlets found that instead of going after the whole audience it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and try to dominate it how do you do that that's easy you just pick an audience and feed it news you know they'll like instead of starting with a story and following the facts you start with what pleases your audience and work backward to the story 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 mattiabi has for the age of Walter Cronkite which he seemed to hold up as a kind of golden moment in that moment the mainstream media was populated entirely by white men from Elite schools why you would have had such affection and say that's the gold standard and we should trust the mainstream media precisely at the moment when the mainstream media is least representative is really puzzling to me then Douglas Murray chimed in of course Malcolm you did a little nasty uh jab there by trying to pretend that Matt taby is desperate for the era of white men in broadcasting takes a certain hutzpah to make that claimi then defended himself and yes uh as I said when I in my speech the old system under Walter Cronkite had its flaws but it did have its advantages as well the making the effort to talk to everybody uh Garner more trust in the public there is a reason why people trusted uh news people more 20 or 30 or 40 years ago than they do now and once again I got irritated this time with that phrase making the effort to talk to everyone um I just wanted to make a short list of the people who were not spoken to by journalists in the 1950s and 60s and you may want to add some if I miss some black people uh women uh poor people um gay people with mildly left-wing views I mean words tell me when somebody uh in when it presented with a critique of his rather idiosyncratic position on Walter Cronkite comes back and says oh no no there's more to my great love of this man so I'm on my high horse waiting my work flag standing up for inclusion but wait first back to lesson one don't be myself it's not smart but that's not even the worst of it do you remember the context in which Matt brought that comment up in his opening it was uh he was was knee talking about how that was an example the way it was back then was was worthy of our trust and it's not like that anymore do you remember why what he was saying in his opening was not I am lifting up the 1950s as the golden standard of media and Walter cargo yes that sentence came out of his mouth but that's not what he was saying what he was saying was look to the 1950s look to the past when you had a whole family gathered around the TVs watching One show that show had to talk to all of the people in that room to the parents to the kids to the grandparents even if they had different interests different political ideologies whatever that one show had to talk to a diverse audience it could not have an agenda in the same way that it does today because today it's not talking to a whole family it's not even talking to a whole neighborhood or a whole household we all have our individual Echo chambers that we lean really hard into right what he brought up about Walter Cronkite and about the 1950s was just a detail oh I see dico's point was that the people in the audience the judges surely understood what baby was saying but I didn't the main point there was totally ignored and it was a really important point for the offense because their whole argument was you can't trust mainstream media because there are agendas because they're not trying to give you the truth they're trying to give you the spin and the story and cater to a they called it demographic hunting I think right that they're catering to a specific demographic 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 thrown in there that worked and you got totally distracted and went down this whole rabbit hole and missed that bigger picture wait 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 your opponents say turns out he was right and that was when dico told me I had to come to Brooklyn again for listening lessons I met with the debate league at Unity prep at Charter High School in Williamsburg I sat myself down in a high school classroom for the first time since the late 1970s dico Jonathan and sassan were all there along with a dozen or so high school Debaters there was a step class in the adjoining room I was a long way from Roy Thompson Hall all right open Forum look up being able to listen is the most important skill a debater should have all right stand up you know the routine if you agree on this side if you disagree on that side come on come on come on Jonathan kicked things off with a warm-up exercise open Forum a mini debate on the question of the day what's more important to a debater being a good listener or a good talk being able to listen I'm so sorry being able to listen is the most important skill a debater could have being able to listen is the most important skills is one of the most important skills for Innovative because the way you um the way people read uh read their contentions and at some points you want to be able to gain and obtain as much information as you can to put down in your flow chart because debating is not only about using information against information but is it also about obtaining it's also about obtaining something and understanding that in order to use information to fight it I mean I do but I do agree 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 say the wrong things or write down the wrong things to what your opponent is saying so I'm saying that listening is more important because as my other teammate said Jade she also referred to how they read their contentions or their 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 uh focus on can I say something real quick yes even though they're all accurate all day to start with what you said you need to write in order to uh you need to write in order to listen but it is true that that is true but true but listening is a prerequisite to writing because you could write a whole bunch of nonsense but what if you don't have the right accurate information you didn't listen to the right numbers you can listen to the right statistics then what is your writing have to do with anything I can sit there and draw a a ferry but that that's not going to make my argument any better unless you listen then the hard part began what is this thing this wasn't Hassan 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 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 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 going to want to listen carefully because I'm not going to repeat anything the test is to see whether you're going to be able to write it all down without missing anything now if you think this sounds like a silly exercise I encourage you to pause this podcast get a pen and paper and try it for yourself [Music] ready hello my name is sassan 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 we can't forget about the Jack of Spades you know a lot of people tell me ten of diamonds but what those people don't realize is first off Ace of Hearts secondly the six of clubs and finally the nine of Spades that's it that's the speech so you should have these written down okay great now we're going to do the negative speech take your negative pen switch Bank colors 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 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 that's 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 song gets up and talks about playing cards and I can't keep up is this hard oh yeah Pico I have a question for you is this hard really hard this is really hard and you guys are doing amazing I see it all over your face this is frustrating you don't supposed to be an expert I don't even know what you said half the time and I've been doing this for a long time all right 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 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 failure to listen is not a failure of will or motivation or character that's what we assume when there's some breakdown in communication if someone doesn't listen we assume they don't want to listen we hear the yelling and screaming on the internet and we see it as evidence of some great flaw in our society but maybe at least some of the time the person who doesn't listen acts that way because they don't know how to listen they haven't practiced they don't know where to start listening is a skill like playing the piano or learning to cook I asked sassan 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 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 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-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 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 and all around the room The Debaters shouted out happily to each other I think the idea of how you just took to the answer because attitude is like in that one word believe is a really strong word to use which gave you such good replay into my argument and I love how you'd be coming in like you know which with your presence like you're gonna clear you know so then it amps me up like when you have like that attitude that amps me up and it makes me want to clear too so I like that 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 I wanted to use this opportunity to learn to be a better debater do you think this is typical of me that I would am I a take spoil make style kind of person in your mind was such a highly successful person that one would not associate with you many occasions in which you needed to do that [Music] I said that's just a mother speaking you you will not admit to any Frailty on the part of your sons no no no not only that I'm not aware of them so much but the fact that you have risen above it is this remarkable way um it justifies my my faith in you and my confidence in you oh that's what I meant by maternal reassurance [Music] revisionist history is produced by benedaf hafri lemongistu Kiara Powell and Jacob Smith fact checking by caselle Williams and Tully emlin we are edited by Julia Barton and Peter Clowney original scoring by Luis Guerra mastering by Sarah brugaire and Engineering by Nina Lawrence Twitter taunting by Nina Lawrence niveness to Justin Richmond bent holiday Emily Vaughn and David Shaw 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 stories to tell most of all special thanks to my mom [Music] I'm her son [Music]

Channel: Malcolm Gladwell

Views: 14,306

Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell, Podcast, Malcolm Gladwell Podcast, Revisionist History, Revisionist History Podcast, Pushkin Industries, Malcolm Gladwell Interview, Malcolm Gladwell Munk Debates, Malcolm Gladwell Matt Taibbi, Malcolm Gladwell Douglas Murray, Matt Taibbi Munk Debates, Michelle Goldberg Munk Debates, Brooklyn Debate League, How to Debate, How to Win a Debate, Mainstream Media

Id: cGGCe2DlV88

Length: 44min 8sec (2648 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/According-Stage-1098]

He did do very poorly in the Munk Debate, constantly making off hand accusations of racism against those he was debating. It was not a good look. The man has some good books though.

[u/Tahmar1nd]

I thought Gladwell was awful in the debate so I came into the post-mortem actually annoyed with him but this was a good, self-critical breakdown.

Especially when the debate coaches pointed out his fatal mistake of not challenging the arguably shifting of burden of proof from Murray & Taibbi (from "can you trust the media" to "do you totally and unconditionally trust the media).

That said, they were gonna lose anyway. Gladwell stood out for leaning on tired racist attacks but Goldberg actually nailed their coffin due to - ironically - being honest. She basically said "it's silly to think wokeness/culture wars are a reason you shouldn't trust the media. If anything we shouldn't trust it cause of corporate consolidation and billionaires buying the media!"

This sort of argument works if you're arguing that Bud Light didn't do what they did cause of "wokeness". It doesn't work in a formal debate when the point of contention is "can you trust the media?"

[u/Temaharay]

The Munk debates are also very culture war-ish and right leaning. Not the best place to be lazy in rhetoric.