The Current - Dr. Mike vs anti-vaxxers: How Gen Z is changing debating

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Gen Z is reshaping debate culture. Online, millions tune in to fiery clashes over politics, identity, and health. It’s raw, awkward, sometimes uncomfortable — and wildly popular.But is this about finding common ground, or just turning polarization into entertainment? We talk to Atlantic writer Spencer Kornhaber about why these debates resonate with Gen Z and what they reveal about how young people have discussions today. Then, physician and YouTube creator Dr. Mike Varshavski joins us to share why he stepped into one of these debates himself — and whether conversations like these can actually change minds.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Are you fan of the Nazis? I frankly don't care of being called the Nazi at all. I didn't say that. I didn't actually say that. I said, are you a fan of the Nazis? Well, they persecuted the church a little bit. I'm not a fan of that.

What about the persecution of the Jews? I think that there was a little bit of persecution. We may have to rename the show because you're a little bit more than a far-right Republican. Hey, what can I say? I think you say I'm a fascist. Yeah, I am. That's the British American journalist, Mehdi Hassan, on the YouTube channel, Jubilee, debating 20 far-right conservatives.

Jubilee is a debate platform. It has become wildly popular among young people. Nothing is off-limits. Culture, religion, politics, some people call it entertainment. Others say it's dangerous. I am telling you that we are looking at totally opposite statistics. So you're sitting here telling me that the statistics show that women who are working are producing better children. but I am saying that women that grow up in a two-family home where the mother stays at home

are faring off better than the children who are being raised in an environment where the women are working, where both of the parents are working away from the home. I do get to work from home. That's a conservative podcaster Candace Owens debating feminists. With titles like, can one woke teen survive 20 MAGA supporters, what exactly do these events mean for how we debate in today's society? Spencer Cornhaber is a staff writer at the Atlantic. He's been covering the surge of online debate programs like Jubilee.

He's in New York City. Spencer, good morning. Thanks for having me. Can you just describe for people who have never seen this? What is Jubilee? Jubilee is an online content empire, really. A lot of what it's got attention for lately are these political debate videos, which sort of take the kind of idea of a classical debate and add these sort of carnival-esque twists.

Or you might even have like 60 people in a room debating each other in some of their election season videos. But really, they're larger than politics. They make dating content, kind of like fun game shows about pop culture and fashion. They have had live events. They've had board game spinoff. It's really a kind of set of templates or formulas that this company is using to make really watchable YouTube content all along the theme of allegedly at least provoking empathy and creating connection between people who don't necessarily talk to each other otherwise. I want to get to that allegedly in a moment, you describe this as, as Gen Zed Jerry Springer.

Why did you describe it like that? There's something about watching these videos, even listening to the highlight really just played, really stressed me out. And I don't remember being stressed out by entertainment in that way since like the 90s, early 2000s watching a certain kind of talk show that I felt we hadn't seen a lot of in mainstream entertainment during the 2000s and the 2000s. 2010s. It felt like when I had to think about what the precedence for this were, it did remind me of things I would watch. Really, as a kid, people screaming at each other on TV. You know,

you feel like someone might hit each other with a chair, even if they're not necessarily going to do that. It's real seeming people talking each other in very unpolished ways about sort of the deepest divisions in our society. And it just has that kind of live wire energy that brought me back to Jerry Springer. Springer was about, I mean, really, just about entertainment. And as you said, having people kind of go off and maybe someone's going to throw a chair at somebody else or they're going to shout at somebody. You said, you know, this is allegedly about trying to promote debate. You spoke with the founder of Jubilee, Jason Lee. What did he say about what they're trying to do here? He's quite insistent and

committed, I think, to the idea that you do kind of have to find a way to blend the dynamics of online viral entertainment, which, you know, you have to make clickbait in order to get people to pay attention to certain issues or talk about issues, certain issues in a new way. You know, he founded this company, not as a for-profit company, but as a nonprofit in the early 2010s that was really making sort of like uplifting, almost PSA kind of idealistic, you know, do-gooder content, like videos against bullying or videos highlighting poverty in Africa, things like that, kind of charitable infotainment. And then around 2017, after the 2016 election,

he saw an opportunity to kind of delve more directly into American political division and made, you believe, a for-profit company, which then it did become this sort of, start becoming this entertainment empire. And, you know, as a viewer, I certainly perceived this tension, yeah, that we're talking about already,

between whether it's just rage bait or whether it's actually going to cause people to connect or think about things in a different way. They want to host a presidential debate in 2028, is it correct? That's what they say, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's the sort of thing that a startup founder might put on their vision board as sort of like a pie in the sky idea for where their company could eventually end up and everyone else laughs at them.

And maybe or maybe not, it ends up being turning out to be true. But I do think it speaks to the ambitions that they have to, you know, kind of maybe eat political media. or really provide an alternative ecosystem to the political media ecosystem of broadcast news, which has dominated mainstream political discourse for a long time. Obviously, we all felt last election cycle, and for the past few election cycles, like the presidential debates are not very authentic documents of robust dialogue. They're two people trying to recite their can lines to a national audience.

They're not really talking to each other. one thing Jubilee is very good at is making people actually talk to each other. And so if they found some way to kind of turn the format of the presidential debate upside down, you know, I certainly would watch. Do you think that these debates actually change anyone's mind, or is it about people just kind of rehashing the positions that they already hold for, I mean, you admit it and they admit that it's for clickbait, right? I don't think, and it's very, very rare to see someone change their mind on camera in one of these videos. And the company, companies, founder and other employees say that that's not really what they're hoping for, but what they do think happens, which I think is probably true to a certain extent, is that people who are watching,

who are not necessarily ideologically committed or don't know a lot about certain issues, they kind of stumble on these videos, and they might have their minds changed or think about things in a different way. Jubilee's appeal is with young people. It's, you know, people under 30, a lot of people under 20. So for a lot of people, a lot of young people, this is their political education.

And that is a very different kind of political education than I certainly got watching network TV news in the early 2000s. Do you see a connection at all, and this is of a different generation, but with those historic debates, they still live on YouTube. People who are of a certain generation member watching them on television, you know, Gorvidal versus William F. Buckley. I mean, the tone is very different, but that was about a conference. of ideas in some ways on television. Do you see this as a continuum of that? I think in some ways, as strange as it seems, yes, it is still a confrontation between two ideological sides that prefer to talk to themselves than to talk to their side.

And occasionally those debates, I mean, they could in Vidal and Buckley, I mean, they would spill over, right? There would be nasty language and almost violence that would erupt from them. Yeah, I mean, we think of them as to sort of verify intellectual exercises, but I think the actual documents had a lot of this sort of live wire kind of edge of your sea energy, too. Is anything off the table? You spoke with the former creative director of Jubilee who said that the Internet is, and these are his words, updating our tolerance for disagreement and disagreement on a lot of things that we thought were in the can.

So is anything off limits in these debates? You know, they say that Jubilee says that there's not very many hard and fast rules about what they will or won't show, but they kind of try to think through each episode through, you know, with some sort of ethical lens. You know, they don't want to platform anyone who's openly advocating for harm of other individuals. That's kind of like, I think, one hard rule. But, you know, in this most recent viral debate with Mehdi Hassan versus the far-right supporters, well, you know, some of them were kind of openly flirting with xenophobia and, Naziism and kind of downplaying anti-Semitism and telling him to go back to his country,

that felt pretty close to the line to me, the sort of thing that they said they wouldn't be platforming. Do you worry about that? I mean, it's not, maybe it's on the other debater to try and brush that back, but the audience, whoever's watching that, can be left with certain impressions of things that, as you said, can get pretty close to if not cross lines. Do you worry about that? I worry about it, but I don't really think it's a problem.

Jubilee created and is necessarily one that Jubilee is going to solve. We're living in an era where the Internet has completely erased all sorts of norms around what's acceptable discourse in public, and it's having a profound effect on the ideological outlooks of people, and we have extremists violent ideologies, you know, that seem to be on the rise in America, it's going to be more influential, it's going to be gaining purchase with young people. And so I don't really know how you deal with that outside of creating spaces where we can actually talk about it and confront those ideas. And is your sense just finally that this is a space where in a super polarized environment, people can actually talk to each other, not past each other?

I think there is genuine connection between the people who are talking each other in these videos. And it's sometimes bizarre to watch even, you know, you had the Charlie Kirk versus a room full of young liberal people, you know, watching the video, everyone in the room does not agree with each other and they don't like each other, but they were still kind of like bantering, you know, there was still like a kind of sense of, they all understood that they were talking to their human being, at least. And it was kind of interesting to see these two totally different ideological camps, like look each other in the eyes and laugh at each other, even if they seemed at times to hate each other. That's part of what's so fascinating about these videos. And it's, I think it feels,

It feels like it's filling a void that exists on the internet for a while where people were just tweeting about the other side, but not necessarily engaging with the other side very much. And this is an opportunity to do that, you think, to engage? I think that's, yeah, and I think that's, if Jubilee didn't exist, something else like it would, and it might be doing a worse job of it. Spencer, thank you very much for this. Thanks a lot. Spencer Cornhaber is a staff writer at the Atlantic. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in Canada. and Google is helping Canadians innovate

in ways both big and small. From mapping accessible spaces so the disabled community can explore with confidence, to unlocking billions in domestic tourism revenue, thousands of Canadian companies are innovating with Google AI. Innovation is Canada's story.

Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian Innovation. Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service and cultural enrichment, on board, and on shore. Learn more at viking.com. Mike Varshowski is a family medicine physician, one of the most influential doctors on social media.

He has 25 million followers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, has built his brand by breaking down medical myths, tackling misinformation, and sometimes stepping into the debate arena himself. you might have seen him on Jubilee's Surrounded series debating 20 anti-vaxxers at once. Dr. Mike, good morning to you. Good morning. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Why did you decide to step into the ring for a format like Jubilee? Well, interestingly enough, we reached out to Jubilee to suggest this as a topic that was worth debating and discussing. And, you know, I saw the viral political debates that were happening that were quite,

extreme and fiery at times. And I thought that this would be a great opportunity to show to the world that doctors have these debates, discussions with their patients all the time behind closed doors. And obviously, I can't air that because of patient privacy. But if I was able to have a discussion with those who disagreed with me, show to the world what that looks like, the words that we use, the empathy that we show, I thought it would be a quite valuable opportunity to change a discussion for the positive as opposed to the negative that it's become on social media. Of all of the topics you could have discussed, why vaccines? It's the topic of the moment. I mean, we have Secretary Kennedy leading HHS, constantly throwing shade

and skepticism at vaccines inappropriately at times. And I thought that if this was the moment to talk about vaccines, Jubilee was a platform to make that happen. I want to play a little bit of that. This is you in a room taking on a group of anti-vaxxers on Jubilee. Have a listen. My first claim is that anti-vaccine lies cost lives. Hello. Hello.

How are you? Doing fantastic. Excited to talk about health. I just had a baby, seven months old. And, you know, my baby, I was like, no, I'm not getting any vaccines. The doctors came in. They made me feel like a very bad mother for not doing that, right? I was very pressured.

And then I had a family friend who had a baby at the same time, was a few months in, gave vaccines to the baby, and the baby had seizures and has had seizures since. The tone that you take in these debates is fascinating. I wanted to talk a little bit about how you approach this. Tell me a little bit about how you go into the debates, what you're trying to do. you know the strategy that i use in having these discussions is largely the strategy that i've used on my social media platforms quite successfully where i don't do anything flashy i don't actually get into arguments with people i try and lead with empathy with transparency what i know what i don't know and interestingly enough most people told me that the youtube channel that we launched

seven years ago would not do well because we weren't sensational enough we weren't selling out we weren't giving snake oil advice to people. And we've proved them wrong quite successfully, getting 14 million subscribers, hundreds of millions of views per month. And now on this Jubilee platform, I feel the same thing has happened. Because most people, when they think about these Jubilee debates, they think of people arguing, yelling, getting to strong confrontations with each other. And that was absent in my episode.

And despite the fact that we didn't have any of this large disagreement, these large arguments, it's one of their top five most viewed episodes. Even the producers during my Jubilee taping when we took a bathroom break, they said, look, we understand you're being very empathetic, but if you'd like to jump in a little bit more, be a little bit more assertive, we think that will do well for the episode. And while I appreciated their advice and I understood where they were coming from, I knew that the best way to reach a large number of people who were confused at this time, they were skeptical more than they were cynical, was to be transparent, was to listen more than to speak. And when it was my turn to lead with what I know, to highlight the fact that there's so much that we don't know in health care, and I think not only did it get a huge number of views, but it also changed minds of people in the room as we saw at the end of that episode. Was that patients hard for you? I mean, you are listening really carefully. And I could imagine there's maybe a bone in your body that wants to say, come on, this is nonsense. What you're saying isn't true and explain why, but you don't do that at all. I would never do that in a room with individuals who were not medical professionals. I actually have probably a stronger reaction. I did a debate recently at John Hopkins on NPR, discussing whether or not we handled COVID well as a nation in terms of public health. And in that debate, I actually felt more emotion because I was seeing my fellow colleagues,

the former Surgeon General of the U.S., the former CDC director, the former regional director of HHS, they had blinders on for the idea that they needed to communicate in a way that wasn't arrogant. They needed to make use of tools like social media and not demean them. When I said that there was tremendous value that we left on the table by not being present for the general public on social media, they made jokes about TikTok dances. To me, that drives more emotion because these are brilliant people who know fantastic science, smarter than me, by a million measures in the educational realm, but they were missing the

point from a communication standpoint. When I look at the Jubilee debate as a complete opposite, these are individuals that have been led astray. They're victims to the misinformation rhetoric that exist on social. media by snake oil salesman. So in no way that I ever get emotional or angry at the fact that they were the ones being misled. In fact, that was one of my claims that I used throughout the debate. There's a real humility at the center of that. Yeah, I mean, that's the only way we can function well as health care practitioners. You know, a lot of people ask, are we going to be

replaced by AI in the near future as physicians? To me, the answer is no. But if we continue in the way that we've been practicing medicine 10 years ago, which is very paternalistic, arrogantly, forgetting the human at the center of the discussion of disease and socioeconomic inequalities, we're going to be replaced by AI. We need to be the ones that take the information, understand the information, get our patient to understand the information, and then have a dialogue as to how that information will impact their lives for better or worse. To me, that's what that Jubilee episode was. It was me explaining what I knew, what I didn't know, how it applies to that person.

Also, being very honest about our failures in health care. Too often, there used to be this PR mantra where if we just ignored, it'll go away. I don't think that applies anymore. Can you just talk a bit more about your goal here? Because there's a clip of this in which, in watching the episode, that you're speaking with a woman about vaccines. And you ask whether there's anything that you could say that would, change her mind. And she says no. The one difficulty I have with sourcing clips from an episode like this, I know what clips will do well. Hearing someone say, nothing will change my mind has viral

potential. And it would hopefully encourage people to watch the entire episode. But at the same time, that moment didn't come until the second time her and I spoke into this three-hour debate. So there was plenty of opportunities of where we tried to get on the same page. we continue to speak, and only upon hitting that threshold of seeing that nothing I was saying was moving the needle, nothing that she was saying was changing my mind. And I had to call that out, much like I would in a therapy session with a patient, to figure out, where do you want to go from here? What is your goal in having this conversation with me? If it's not to learn new information and perhaps change your thoughts on it, what is the value of it? And I think not only did it

potentially impact her going back to her seat. But for the viewers, they saw an individual who was locked into their beliefs, who did not want to learn new information, and they started understanding within themselves, do they behave that way? I think the more powerful impact that a physician can have on a patient is not to tell them things, but to have them to come to those conclusions themselves. And that's what I was trying to do throughout that episode. You did a follow-up, and one of the things that you said in the follow-up was that you, in doing this, you learned a lot. What did you learn in doing this? That we have no experience in talking to huge numbers of people, millions of people on social media, on topics that are controversial. So this vaccine topic right now is interesting

because if you look on social media, there's tremendous anti-vaccine rhetoric. But if you Zoom out and you leave social media for a second, the vast majority of the public in the U.S. support vaccines. And yet we're not comfortable having that conversation on a large scale like Jubilee. Doctors are saying, I can't believe you did that. You must need a beer after that episode because of how stressful it must have been. But to me, this is just an extension of my work that I do in the hospital. I'm a family medicine doc, which means I'm in the ER, I'm in the OR, I'm seeing patients at

in nursing homes, now it's on social media. We have to be there to provide those answers. And the more that we hold our noses up in the air as a medical community and act like social media is beneath us and that we only need to publish our information in science research journals, ultimately good science is going to be left behind. You've talked about the need to remove political ideology from these sorts of conversations. Do you think that that's actually possible right now, given the environment that you are living and operating in? No, I actually don't think it's possible. And this is probably a misstatement that I've made in the past where I said my advice is not political. It's clinical. What I really should have said is that my advice is not partisan. It's clinical. And I think partisan politics is at the heart of what's wrong with our media medical messaging. We had President Biden start announcing COVID boosters in August of 2021 before our health agencies, FDA, CDA, CDC. actually approved them, which showed that, hey, if one side is okay bypassing these agencies,

the other side will ultimately be too. And we're seeing that play out right now where we're seeing our CDC, our HHS get absolutely decimated. And we've moved way past political theater here and moved into partisan soap opera, where everyone seems to be scoring political points forgetting the fact that people actually need answers. And there's no better example of that than this recent press conference that was done, tying Tylenol, a set of metafin, to the autism risk. And that's one of the biggest disappointments that I see in these partisan politics. You worried about this? I worry about where this is going to go?

Incredibly worried because we're moving into the era, the post-truth era, where folks struggle to define what is truth. We can't agree on facts. And unless we take a more transparent, humble approach, we're going to see much. more of what you saw in that Jubilee episode where someone says, I don't care what you say, I'm not changing my mind. Would you go back into the ring just finally? Spencer talked about the value of in the environment that we are all living in, the benefit of just sitting across a table and looking somebody in the eye, even if you if you ferociously disagree with them, that you could still do that. Would you go back in to do that? Yeah, I would, even though it's extremely

scary, not for fear of having an emotional outburst or becoming angry at one of the participants, for fear that perhaps I'll say something inaccurate and that will represent the medical community in a not great way and people will start clipping it. This is a three-hour sit down with one quick bathroom break. You don't have access to technologies to fact-check yourself. So there's a lot on the line where it feels like you have all of public health on your shoulder. It's like every patient I've ever taken care of is in the back of my mind every time I'm presenting information. I'm really fascinated by the work that you do and the spaces that you go to talk about that work.

Dr. Mike, thank you very much. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Dr. Mike Varshowski is a family medicine physician. He is known online as Dr. Mike. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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