Featuring 'Open to Debate'

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It's our special Brian Lehrer Show today. The weekend shows visit us on a weekday. We're kind of starting the weekend one day early for so much fun and interesting content that these shows always bring. To help with our two-for-one matching day, we have two guests to go. Lulu Miller, co-host of Radiolab, will be here in a little bit. With us now, John Donvan, host and moderator of the show Open to Debate, which we air on Saturdays. I wanted to include Open to Debate because this show shares a certain ethic with that show, shares some values, and I think they do a great job.

Open to Debate is exactly what the name sounds like. They have actual debates with opposing points of view, but not candidate debates, which, as we know, can become so much about personal attacks. These are issue debates with knowledgeable people who have come to different conclusions on the issue that they're tackling. We'll play sample clips from a couple of their shows about gene editing, the next generations, and about when artists' art should be canceled if the artist was a bad person. Just for those who haven't heard, Open to Debate, here's how John Donvan opens the show.

John Donvan: Picture this. A genetic disease runs in your family. Your doctor warns you that if you try to have a child, that child is likely to inherit the disease. New gene editing technology could change your child's fate. Critics say this technology will exacerbate inequality, pressure everyone into editing their children to stay competitive, and will meddle with the most basic aspect of our humanity, our DNA. Others say, with safeguards against abuse, this technology could benefit us in a host of ways.

Brian Lehrer: John Donvan opening one of the episodes that we're sampling from to give you an idea. He is formerly an Emmy-winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist for ABC News, now host and moderator of Open to Debate. John, thanks for coming on with us. Thank you for being on loan from the weekend. Welcome to WNYC on Friday.

John Donvan: It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us on. We are so delighted to have this relationship with WNYC that we're appearing on Saturday evenings. Also, you were there at the beginning, Brian. You were one of our first moderators in our early days.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. I had the privilege of hosting a couple of these events when they were called IQ Squared or Intelligence Squared. At that time, the audience was polled on the issue before the debate and, again, afterwards to see how many people changed their minds and in which direction. Do you still do that?

John Donvan: We've returned to that. We experimented for a while, especially driven by the pandemic, when we were doing debates without live audiences, we experimented with what the impact would be of just not having a vote and just having the debate. There were some arguments for doing that, but we kind of missed the energy in the sense of potential friction between the debaters that came when they were actually competing for a vote. We've reinstituted it now.

One reason we did that was that we liked the data that it yielded for us. That data showed us that much of the time, up to a third of the audience would actually change their minds during the course of the debate. Our goal wasn't to change minds so much, but our goal was to show that maybe people hadn't heard the other side before, and hearing the other side would change their thinking. It established that, that we were getting people actually to listen.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Before we play these sample clips, let me ask you the biggest picture question at the beginning, maybe usually that gets asked at the end, but I think you were just starting to lean into it a little bit. That is, how would you describe what place you all hope that Open to Debate plays in our democracy?

John Donvan: Well, back when we started in 2006, so we're at 20 years this year, we're celebrating our 20th year. I think we're approaching 400 debates at this point. Back in 2006, our founder, Robert Rosenkranz, was of the view that there was a lot of polarization in public discourse and that one way to address it would be to put on good faith argument in which, again, not necessarily getting people to change their minds, but to actually hear that each side in an argument had real and valid and good faith reasons based on their own facts and logic and premises and life experience for taking the size that they do.

It was his feeling, and it continues, and he remains the chairman of the organization, that being able to sit down and hear the other side would be something that would help discourage the polarization. I can't say that 20 years later, things are better in society. I think we all feel that they're worse. We really do feel that that continues to be our reason for existence and for being. For the people who do hear our debates and who attend them in person, we really do feel that we're having that impact, and our goal is just to continue spreading it.

It's important to democracy because you need to have the ideas, you need to have facts, you need to have reality. The fact that somebody's on a debate, having to make their case against somebody who's opposing them, means they have to bring reality. Otherwise, they lose the debate.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I think you do a good job of choosing your topics because some things would be false equivalencies, pitting lies against truth. I think you do a good job of avoiding things like that and having things that are worthy of debate. Let's give listeners a few examples. The one about reproductive gene editing, like what we should think about or allow, even with technology that lets expectant parents change specific things about their kids' genetics before they're born. Here's debater Marcy Darnovsky expressing extreme reservations, even as she says there's a lot that reproductive gene editing cannot do.

Marcy Darnovsky: What reproductive gene editing does make possible is attempts at human enhancement. Even if those attempts weren't successful in biological terms, the perception that genetically-modified children are biologically better than others would make the already obscene inequalities of our society much, much worse. That is the likely societal consequence of attempts to create better babies, even if those attempts are well-intentioned.

Now, some proponents of heritable gene editing, like George Church, for example, are open about wanting to eventually use it for enhancements. That would mean we'd be putting our efforts toward building a world of genetic haves and have-nots. As geneticist Eric Lander, who is now the top science advisor to President Biden, has put it, the so-called best genomes would go to the most privileged.

Now, to be sure, enhancing complex traits like IQ or musical talent, those are technically dubious. The traits are just too complex. Supposedly, enhanced children would be perceived differently, and they would be treated differently. The wealthy parents who invested money and energy in them would make sure of that.

Brian Lehrer: That emphasis on privilege and further inequality was from the no side of the debate. Amy Webb was one of the debaters on the yes side.

Amy Webb: If we can prevent human suffering, we are morally obliged to do so. Second, humans, in our current form, are vulnerable to external threats like novel viruses. It's plausible that SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, will become endemic like influenza. There are so many other lethal viruses that persist. You heard George explain just a few of them. HIV, for example. There's also MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome, which has a mortality rate of around 35%. Gene editing makes us less vulnerable to the 1,500 or so species of pathogens to humans that we know today, and the billions of pathogenic viruses, protozoa, organisms that, luckily, we haven't encountered yet.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting, John, and potentially very consequential for humanity. Do you remember the premise, like how much is this actually possible now?

John Donvan: It's beginning to come into focus. There have been a little bit of actual gene editing taking place, but this was about a world in which it was very, very available and even commercially available. That was the premise of our debate. What I hope people heard in that conversation was-- we went on for an hour. You just played a total, I think, of about two to two and a half minutes. How many ideas were presented in that that frankly I had not thought about?

These are people who spend so much time imagining what could be playing out, what could be thinking out the stakes, that it would be very hard to come away from that and immediately saying, "I'm completely with that side, I'm completely with the other side." What you really need is time to think about what they presented to you, to recognize they were both talking about trade-offs. A lot of our debates often do come down to the fact that it's a trade-off between one choice or another, and you have to wade through those trade-offs.

It's so different from what I think is presented in the culture at large as this is a good person, this is the good guy, these are the good sides. They're holding those views because of their virtue. If they disagree with you, then there's something wrong with them or their premises or their soul or their character. This is one of those debates that could very, very easily enter into that unless you sit down and listen to the arguments that, in this case, all four debaters made in a very, very detailed, thoughtful, good-faith way.

Brian Lehrer: How dare you include nuance? You're going to get fewer clicks. One more example from Open to Debate. This is on whether to see art or whether museums should even hold art of people who are later shown to have done heinous things. Names that came up on the show included Wagner, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Picasso, Roman Polanski, and others. Here's an exchange with Randy Cohen, who represented the don't cancel the art side.

Randy Cohen: If an anti-Semite makes me a beautiful dining room table, we can criticize the table. I think it will be harder to show how his deplorable conduct away from his lathe affected the work itself.

John Donvan: Randy, there's no world in which you would say, "I know that that guy who makes dining room tables is an anti-Semitic jerk. I'm not going to give him my business," because of that.

Randy Cohen: I can choose to look elsewhere for my tables, as Arun suggests we look elsewhere for our art. I'm not so sure I want MoMA making that decision for me or any cultural institution that's taking money from the Koch brothers.

Brian Lehrer: Randy Cohen. Here's the debater, Aruna D'Souza, who disagrees.

Aruna D'Souza: What does it say when we're saying that you can be a rapist, you can be, in some cases, a murderer, you can be a domestic abuser, you can do all those things, and don't worry, we'll still consider you great. I worry about what that message is. I think it's in some ways no different than the message that we often get in other parts of our lives, where we know that if you're powerful or if you're rich, you can get away with a lot.

Brian Lehrer: John, how was the question framed there, if you remember? Partly because Randy Cohen, in his clip, referred to people should make the decision for themselves about canceling artists' work, not museums. Like he cited MoMA as an example. Was there an incident, or what was your frame?

John Donvan: No, there wasn't anything specific at the time. We have a whole list of questions that we all find curious, and when we have the opportunity to do a debate, we'll put that one on. Another example of that is we just did a debate about three weeks ago where the question is whether museums should repatriate cultural artifacts. This is the case of museums in London having works of art that were taken from Africa during times of conquest.

Now, there's no particular incident that spurred our doing the debate at this time, but it was on a list of things that we want to get to, just because they're interesting, they're somewhat timeless. The actual question on the artist one, I believe, was, should we separate the art from the artist? We have a range of debates. Again, we've done so many that we can keep that sort of category. We're also doing debates that are much more timely.

On Monday, we're doing a debate with the Council on Foreign Relations, which is one of our partners. We're doing it in their headquarters on the question of the US government taking equity stakes in private businesses, which has now happened with the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in Intel. That's an example of one that's more timely. We're doing one in Oslo in the beginning of June at the Oslo Freedom Forum that will be looking at China. We keep coming back to topics on the Middle East, on China, on Iran.

Another theme that we explore a lot is AI. 10 years ago, we did a debate on whether we can trust AI. Then a lot of years went by, and AI got very hot in the news. In the last year, we've done debates on whether the AI bubble is going to burst. We've done debates on whether weapons in war should be given over to the control of AI. We've done debates on whether there should be controls on the chips that China gets because of AI. We've done whether jobs are threatened by AI, but we do lighter ones on whether dating an AI could be better than dating a human. We cover a lot of different topics for a lot of different reasons, to answer your question.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I think we've introduced some listeners to your show, Open to Debate, if they hadn't heard it in its time slot, Saturdays at 6:00 PM. Thank you for getting people out of their echo chambers. Like I said, we share that ethic. I wanted to include you on this weekend show special here today, visiting the weekday. Really appreciate it. John Donvan, host of Open to Debate.

John Donvan: My pleasure.

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