Jubilee Media Representative (1:26)

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Mehdi Hasan (1:45)

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Jubilee Media Representative (1:48)

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Noel King (2:11)

I'm Noel King with Spencer Kornhaber. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic. His beat is popular culture and he wrote about Jubilee.

Spencer Kornhaber (2:19)

Jubilee Media is an online video content empire that has all sorts of entertaining videos that circulate on YouTube, YouTube and TikTok. They include videos about very anodyne subjects like dating.

Noel King (2:33)

I have a question.

Spencer Kornhaber (2:34)

Okay.

Noel King (2:34)

In a relationship, are you baby girl or is the partner baby girl?

Mehdi Hasan (2:40)

What the hell is a baby girl?

Spencer Kornhaber (2:41)

Like pop culture?

Jubilee Media Representative (2:43)

How can you tell if someone is.

Noel King (2:45)

An anime super fan?

Spencer Kornhaber (2:46)

It also includes a lot of political content. Democrats are more patriotic than Republicans and.

Noel King (2:51)

My understanding of Democrats Being very patriotic is destroying the nuclear family, burning down flags, burning down building. We see just destruction in our cities.

Spencer Kornhaber (3:02)

And generally the gist of Jubilee's approach is that they get regular people, or people who at least seem regular into a room, a bunch of strangers, and have them talk about sort of difficult subjects, whether that's politics in the Middle east or what you find attractive. You know, kind of third rail topics become spectator sport, entertainment. In a Jubilee video, tell me about.

Noel King (3:24)

The founder and what he's trying to do. You spoke to him, right?

Spencer Kornhaber (3:28)

Yeah, Jason Wy Lee is his name and he is someone who hails from the world of business and tech. He was a consultant in his early 20s, making a lot of good money, but he felt like he wanted to do something that would enrich the world.

Jubilee Media Representative (3:47)

We want to create content that will make the world a better place and.

Spencer Kornhaber (3:49)

Use technology and online content to bring people together and spread a positive vision of society.

Mehdi Hasan (3:58)

I think in the midst of what we feel like is some of the.

Jubilee Media Representative (4:00)

Most divisive times that actually human connection and really understanding folks and having dialogue.

Mehdi Hasan (4:07)

And empathy is quite a good thing.

Spencer Kornhaber (4:09)

Before he worked in consulting and business, he was an intern on the Barack Obama campaign. He worked with the Clinton health initiative. He was sort of like a young, idealistic millennial. He also comes from a Christian background in Kansas.

Jubilee Media Representative (4:25)

I grew up as the younger child of two Korean immigrants, and both of my parents are not only Korean, but they're also professors.

Spencer Kornhaber (4:34)

That kind of background led into him founding Jubilee, and he initially started as a non profit where he would make kind of socially conscious videos, sort of like PSAs or short films with a message, you know, in hopes of using content to make the world better.

Jubilee Media Representative (4:53)

In case you haven't heard about the Jubilee project, the mission is to make videos of people stepping out of the comfort zone for a day or doing something they love for a good cause.

Spencer Kornhaber (5:03)

Around 2016, 2017, after Donald Trump's election, he felt like there was an opportunity for him to do something that was a for profit business that would kind of dial up the entertainment value, but also make a very expensive, explicit efforts to not just spread a positive message, but get people to move out of their ideological echo chambers and talk to one another from the right and the left. And so that became the Jubilee we see today.

Noel King (5:33)

There is a show on Jubilee's YouTube channel. It's called Surrounded, and it speaks to this idea that you should get out of your bubble and talk to people who disagree with you. It also has generated a lot of controversy. Tell me about surrounded and how it works.

Spencer Kornhaber (5:48)

Yeah, surrounded is absolutely wild to me.

Mehdi Hasan (5:50)

Black culture is toxic.

Noel King (5:52)

Let's stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop.

Mehdi Hasan (5:54)

You putting off emotional liberalism right now.

Noel King (5:56)

Putting off emotional liberalism, you're putting off unfounded lies.

Mehdi Hasan (6:00)

That's what y' all do. Y' all start saying misinformation.

Spencer Kornhaber (6:03)

Conservative men, they say. When I first came across was during the, you know, last year's election cycle. And the first video I came across was titled Can One Woke Teen Survive 20 MAGA Supporters. He did not say that he was black. He's not a us bor. And let's talk about the birther movement. There was legitimacy questioning his birth certificate. Sheriff Gerard Pyle, who I'm friends with, looked into the claims of that birth certificate and there was questions of whether it was falsified. And just the title alone. You're like, how could this even exist? It just sounds like something you'd see almost like in a satire of a very aggressive and dystopian political culture, honestly. But then I watched the videos and they really are both sort of cringy and tense. Listen, the idea that women have to sleep with men to get into positions. And that's exactly what she used to misogynistic lie. One moment, she's saying that. Do you mind if I finish talking real quick?

Noel King (7:02)

We have to open our legs to get jobs.

Spencer Kornhaber (7:04)

That's exactly how she used it. But also fascinating and fun and just these lively documents of human behavior, human communication styles, ways that people try to convince one another that they're right. Can you define communism? Yeah, basically it's mob rule. It's Marxism.

Jubilee Media Representative (7:19)

It's mob rule.

Spencer Kornhaber (7:20)

It's false, literally, all wrong. Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Okay? The format has one person on one side, typically some sort of expert debating 20 or 25 people on the other side of the aisle. And those people are not necessarily experts. Those feel like kind of normal people picked off the street, though in many cases, they really were cast for having some sort of connection to the subject matter. And over the course of the debate, that one person goes head to head with one person from the outside of circle and they debate some provocation that the person on the inside of the circle has stated. My next claim is conservatives don't actually care about family values. So it's a very kind of like aggressive, lively, action packed scenario for a debate. One of the videos that caught my attention early on was the one with the, you know, now late Charlie Kirk debating a group of young liberals. All right, Parker, what Is a woman.

Mehdi Hasan (8:16)

A woman is an adult human person.

Jubilee Media Representative (8:17)

That has a desire to be in accordance with a particular set of social and cultural norms that are typically associated with a female sex. Now define a man.

Spencer Kornhaber (8:22)

You're looking at one XY chromosomes in a.

Mehdi Hasan (8:24)

Okay, but does God the father have XY chromosomes?

Spencer Kornhaber (8:26)

You know, he really went toe to toe with these college kids on all sorts of really hot topics. What is it about, let's say a six week baby that has a heartbeat that is less moral worth than an 88 year old right now with dementia in a home down the street? Do you think men can give birth? I think that yes or no question.

Mehdi Hasan (8:45)

I think that a person who is assigned male at birth, I don't think.

Spencer Kornhaber (8:48)

They assigned male at birth. So people are not male at birth. I think that a person. See your evidence that college is a scam, my friend. You know, no one in that room really agreed with Charlie Kirk. But as you watch the video progress, there was this sort of kind of odd sense of humor and kinship that developed between the college students and their like, ideological rival. You know, they were kind of taunting each other, but it seemed like they were all sort of like in on the joke. And the joke being that this is a ridiculous way for anyone to talk to each other.

Noel King (9:15)

How popular is surrounded exactly? And what kind of influence does it have? Is it just people watching or does it mean anything?

Spencer Kornhaber (9:23)

Well, it's a good question of what its impact is as to its popularity. It's true that some of these videos are in the millions of videos. So we're talking. This is one of the most influential sources of political content on the Internet, period. The question of what these videos actually do to society and to their viewers, what kind of messages they spread, and is one that's certainly open for debate. Ideally, it creates a more robust democratic dialogue. The question for me is whether that is really happening, which is very hard to figure out, or if it's just creating this sort of spectator sport sense of political discourse that really actually might end up driving people to more extreme corners and also in a way trivializing our political debate by making it into this, you know, piece of entertainment.

Noel King (10:10)

Since Charlie Kirk was killed in Utah, I think a lot of people have been debating the debate, right? Charlie Kirk at his best, people who loved him will say he went to a campus, he would sit down with people who didn't agree with him and he would, he would go for it and he would let them go for it and he would hear them out and he would interrupt and that's what democracy is supposed to be about. And so even people that really don't like his politics have said this is what, this is what it should be all about. And yet, you know, I hear you saying millions of people watch this. Does it really move us forward at all since Charlie Kirk was killed? I wonder if your thinking has evolved in the past couple days on this at all about the value of this.

Spencer Kornhaber (10:59)

I would say yeah, I'm actively kind of questioning some of the things I thought. I never made up my mind exactly about whether the Julia was a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah, you're a reporter, you know, reporter, critic. So I'd love to have some opinions, but it's more me trying to analyze what's actually going on here. And, you know, I think unsatisfying is to say it's a mixed bag. But one thing that I feel more since Charlie Kirk's death is the extent to which our online media ecosystem is turning politics into this game of almost like characters or avatars or sort of like warriors and champions for their respective sides. And people who are watching at home are getting invested in those sides and having a rooting interest almost like you would for a sports team or a pop star. Not to say that politics is this pure realm of substantive exchange of ideas, but in a way, this something like Jubilee, which is trying to get us back to the notion of politics as a debate, as a free flowing form of ideological exchange, may actually just be feeding the superficial and sort of dehumanizing aspects of being engaged with politics or viewing politics.

Noel King (12:25)

That was the Atlantic. Spencer Kornhaber. Coming up, a professional debater speaks.

Jubilee Media Representative (12:56)

Support for the show today comes from Indeed. Let's set the scene. It's the moment you always fear. At the end of a meeting, the project mentor asks who's on top of this? And you realize suddenly that no one was ever on top of it and no one's got any bandwidth to get a jump on it. Guess who you can call, Put up that Indeed signal like the bat signal, but it says Indeed over our night sky. Indeed Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire F. With Sponsored Jobs, you can post jobs to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed's data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. And listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com todayexplained just go to Indeed.com todayexplained right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this show. Indeed.com/today explained terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed's all you need.

Noel King (14:06)

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Jubilee Media Representative (15:17)

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Spencer Kornhaber (16:26)

You'Re listening to today explained.

Noel King (16:29)

Where did you learn to debate?

Mehdi Hasan (16:32)

Where did I learn to debate? I think around the dinner table. My family is very disputatious. The Hassan's are known for having strong views so there was a lot of debate around the kitchen table, the dining table, political, social, cultural, religious.

Noel King (16:48)

All of it, huh?

Mehdi Hasan (16:49)

Yeah. Still to this day.

Noel King (16:51)

Who's that? That's Mehdi Hassan. He's the author of Win Every Argument. He's a progressive. He's founder of the new media company Zeteo. And his debate with 20 far right conservatives went viral over the summer. We plan to do a show on the Jubilee debates and the argument about whether they are of value or not. And we called you because you appeared in one of these debates that went very viral. And then Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah. And many people said Charlie Kirk was doing it right. He was showing up, he was debating people he disagreed with. That's the right way to do politics. Do you agree with that?

Mehdi Hasan (17:29)

No, I don't believe that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way. To quote former Vox boss, now New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, a good friend of mine, I totally disagree with Ezra on that piece he wrote. I don't think Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way. I do have to add the standard caveat because Fox keep clipping some of us on the left left out of context. Obviously he shouldn't have been killed. Obviously, we all condemn his murder. Obviously, a political assassination in response to speech you don't like is unacceptable in America and very scary. But if you're asking me about the content of what Charlie Kirk did when he was alive, it was awful. It was horrific. It was reactionary. It was bigoted from his show to his quote, unquote, debates. This idea that he was some kind of Socratic debater trying to get to the truth. No, he wasn't. He was doing a prove me wrong tour over the years where him and Ben Shapiro and others go to college campuses, find some guy with, you know, blue hair who says something provocative and then dunk all over him and then clip it up and go viral and then have a YouTube video saying, Charlie Kirk slash Ben Shapiro destroys college student.

Noel King (18:33)

All right, what about Jubilee?

Mehdi Hasan (18:35)

So Jubilee's a little bit different. Jubilee claims to be nonpartisan. They say that they are trying to get people from all sides to get in a room together. I mean, on paper, what they're aspiring to is at minimum neutral, if not good. What turns up on YouTube is not necessarily always the case. I think they have gone quite far in their audience selection. Certainly on my show, I think it's now universally recognized. I think even Jubilee would recognize, even though they haven't put out an official statement. But I would hope they recognize that their vetting did not work. If they did indeed deploy vetting, it was an audience. You know, I thought we'd have one or two crazy people in. It was one or two normal people and 17, 18 crazy people. When I say Crazy, I mean outright self proclaimed fascists, racists and the rest.

Spencer Kornhaber (19:27)

I am Native American. Whites are Native Americans.

Mehdi Hasan (19:29)

What are you talking about? What are you talking about?

Spencer Kornhaber (19:31)

I'd like to start to say I really don't find the Constitution that important. I find it to be like a.

Jubilee Media Representative (19:36)

300 year old document.

Noel King (19:38)

You have to have at least some.

Spencer Kornhaber (19:39)

Things in common in order to actually have a civilization. And the immigrants, especially illegal immigrants that come into this country now disrespect us. They hate everything that we believe. They don't even speak our language.

Noel King (19:52)

Tell me why you decided to go on surrounded.

Mehdi Hasan (19:55)

There were multiple reasons. One is, as I say, I like a good argument and 21 is a good odds. I'll take those odds. So, you know, the idea of going into the lion's den and debating a bunch of people who disagree with me, I thought would be fun. That's number one. Number two, I spoke to my good friend Sam Cedar from the Majority Report who had done a Jubilee and he told me that it's worth doing, it's not a setup. It is actually have value. You will reach a whole new audience. And you know, people like my daughter and my nieces and others were saying, oh yeah, Jubilee, we know Jubilee. All the kids watch Jubilee. And it's amazing since I did Jubilee, how many younger people are now coming up to me in the street versus older people because they recognize me from that Circle debate show. So it was a chance to reach a new audience. That was number two. And number three, you know, it looked like a lot of right wingers have been dominating that space. You know, prior to me going on Jubilee, all the top rated people who had done Jubilee on YouTube, YouTube with the most views were Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles. That was, that was, you know, the lean of YouTube and Jubilee. And I thought, well, actually maybe people like me and Sam Cedar can, you know, try and give a different point of view.

Noel King (21:06)

And what happened?

Mehdi Hasan (21:08)

What happened was the craziest two hours of my professional life as a journalist. I was not expecting, and maybe I should have been, but I was not expecting the kind of people I sat across. I'd watched a lot of Jubilees. I knew there's some nut jobs, I knew there's some extremists. I'd watched Sam Cedar show. I knew there were a couple of people who came and said white supremacist things and far right things and dumb things, but I didn't expect one after another people to be telling me to my face that I should get the hell out. I don't even. Like I should. Get the hell out. Yes. Why? I don't want you here.

Noel King (21:38)

Do you care more about helping Americans or immigrants in this, in this claim?

Mehdi Hasan (21:41)

Immigrants are Americans. I'm an immigrant and an American.

Noel King (21:43)

Well, immigrants are not Americans.

Jubilee Media Representative (21:45)

Americans are the people that were born here.

Mehdi Hasan (21:47)

That's not true that I'm a proud fascist, as one person told me very early on in the debate.

Noel King (21:52)

Hey, what can I say?

Mehdi Hasan (21:54)

I think you say I'm a fascist.

Spencer Kornhaber (21:56)

Yeah, I am.

Mehdi Hasan (21:59)

What? Normally people want to deny the F word. We spent the last week with Republicans up in arms that anyone would call them fascists. And that's what led to the death of Charlie Kirk. And yet here I was, sitting in a warehouse in LA with a bunch of young, mainly white people saying proudly, yes, we are fascists. We are racists.

Noel King (22:15)

How? How do we debate fascists? Like, should a person debate fascists?

Mehdi Hasan (22:21)

No, I'm not. And that's why I said at the time, if you watch that clip, about halfway through the conversation, I said, what are we doing here? I don't debate fascists. And all the, all of the right wingers watching in the circle, they got very upset because Jubilee then moved this guy out. And so many of them spent the next two hours, every time they came up to the chair to debate me, they would say, oh, you're banning people you don't agree with.

Spencer Kornhaber (22:42)

First and foremost, I don't believe you're pro American in the value system that you to uphold, especially with free speech, if you're not willing to debate people that don't share your values.

Mehdi Hasan (22:51)

So isn't the whole entire point of.

Spencer Kornhaber (22:52)

The debate to debate people that you don't agree with?

Mehdi Hasan (22:54)

And I was like, that's not what it is. I don't debate fascists because fascists don't believe in democracy. They don't believe in debate. They don't believe in my equal worth as a human being. So why would I debate such people? There is no debate to be had with people. Fascism at its core is an anti democratic, authoritarian and yes, very violent ideology. So no, I don't believe there is value to debating fascists. And if I'd known that people would be sitting down, you know, dismissing the Holocaust of Jews or saying I'm a fascist, or saying, you know, the country was built for white people or whatever it is, I would not have gone on that show clearly. Or I would have said, get other people. Look, I come from a proud anti fascist tradition on the left where you don't platform fascists, you don't indulge them, you don't meet them halfway. You defeat fascism by defeating the ideology by offering something better and by being truthful.

Noel King (23:44)

You know, a person who appreciated your appearance on Surrounded might say, look, these, these FASCI types are out there. They're influencing young people in a real way. At least you showed up and gave them a run for their money.

Mehdi Hasan (23:57)

No, that is the silver lining, I guess you could argue, I guess. And this is gonna make me sound very egomaniacal and immodest, so I apologize in advance. So I guess people could say, if you're gonna debate fascist, might as well be someone who's good at debating. And that's what I'm known for doing. So it better be than someone else who goes on and gets their ass handed to them. So in that sense, I get it. But the counterargument I get as well, a lot of my critics were saying to me, just by going on, you legitimized them. Just by going on, you amplified them. Just by going on, you gave them credibility and respectability. They were able to clip up their clips and put it online and say, look, look, look, we own this mainstream journalist. We told him to get the F out of our country.

Noel King (24:33)

Do you think you changed anyone's mind by appearing on Surrounded?

Mehdi Hasan (24:36)

Certainly not in that room, no. And that wasn't the goal.

Noel King (24:39)

What is the goal in debating if not to change minds?

Mehdi Hasan (24:41)

So my goal is not to change my opponent's mind. Very rarely can you change your opponent's mind. My goal is to change the people watching at home, whether they are watching on an audience in an auditorium when you're debating on stage, as I have done, or whether you're debating on YouTube and you know that 10 or 11 or whatever, 12 million people now have watched that Surrounded show. You're hoping that in that 12 million or 11 million people, there are even a handful of people who are, you know, these days it's very hard to find truly open minded, truly independent people. Most people are partisans whether they want to admit so or not. But you hope that you found some independent folks to go, hmm, that's a good point that I hadn't heard before. That's a good statistic that I wasn't aware of. That's a good way of framing the issue that I haven't heard from my elected leaders. And look, people, people have reached out to me over the years. Maybe not on the Surrounded show, but, for example, something else I've spent the last year and A half doing non stop debates on both in New York, on stage in Toronto at the Monk debates on Piers Morgan show is Gaza right? I've done a lot of debating about Gaza. Another very polarizing issue. And people have reached out to me and I have had messages from people saying I have switched my positions on this issue. After listening to you, I didn't think about it in the way that you possess and you have helped me change my positions on this genocide.

Noel King (25:49)

Would you ever go back on a Jubilee show? Would you ever do this again?

Mehdi Hasan (25:53)

Hard to say, not anytime soon. But I think, look, my advice to people and people have been calling me, other members of the media who have been invited by Jubilee have of course called me now to say, hey, do you think I should do it? And my advice, I'm not gonna tell you whether to do it or not do it each to their own. What I would say is if I did go back, I would take more precautions as to who I'm going up against. I failed at my own test. I wrote a book called Win Every Argument and the first chapter is Know your audience, right? Know who youo're gonn in front of. Know who you're going to be speaking to. And I thought about the YouTube audience and I didn't put as much thought into who are these 20 people? How are they being selected? How are they being vetted? What will they be saying? I turned up now with all this, like, information about, you know, for each of my claims, I made five, four claims. And each claim I had like, you know, I do my prep, I come with my receipts. I had my, you know, 14th amendment, I had my, you know, all this stuff, stats. And then I realized it doesn't matter with these people. They're not interested in engaging in the substance of what we're talking about. I'm sitting here going, donald Trump doesn't respect the Constitution. Their response is, who cares about the Constitution? We need a fascist dictator. Like that is, you know, where do you go with that?

Noel King (27:08)

Mehdi Hasan, he's the founder of Zete Ohadi Mwagdi and Devin Schwartz produced today's episode. Amina Elsadi edited. Patrick Boyd and Adrienne Lilly are our engineers and Laura Bullard is our senior researcher. I'm Noel King. It's Today Explained.