Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and the Debates Worth Having
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
If you could set up a debate between any two figures on any subject––and could be guaranteed that tens of millions of Americans would watch––what proposition would you want debated and who would argue each side?
Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.
Conversations of Note
The podcast host Joe Rogan made news this week by offering the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez $100,000 to be donated to a charity of his choosing if he participated in a no-time-limit debate with the vaccine skeptic (and 2024 presidential candidate) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez has appeared on Rogan’s podcast before, and says he would be happy to return and to talk one-on-one with the host about vaccines, but he declined to participate in a debate, likening such an event to a Jerry Springer episode. MSNBC’s Medhi Hasan, the author of the best-selling book Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, endorsed that decision, arguing that “experts” should not debate “cranks” and analogizing the situation to a historian of World War II debating a Holocaust denier.
The economist Tyler Cowen came down in a similar place in The Washington Post:
As a general rule, one should not debate publicly with conspiracy theorists. Some conspiracies may be true and should not be dismissed out of hand. But any discussion needs to start by demanding
