Photographs by John Francis Peters
Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.
The clips were created by Jubilee Media, a booming entertainment company that has built a huge young following by turning difficult discussions into shareable content. Launched in 2017, it has produced videos with titles including “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” (29 million views), “6 Vegans vs 1 Secret Meat Eater” (17 million views), along with hundreds of others in which delicate subjects—Middle East politics, parenting strategies, penis size—are explored by strangers in gamelike scenarios. During an era of ideological chaos, when all consensus seems in flux, Jubilee has become a phenomenon by insisting that it’s okay, even fun, to clash. In doing so, it represents a challenge to traditional media: Jubilee’s founder, Jason Y. Lee, told me he’s hopeful that the company can host one of the presidential debates in 2028.
Jason Y. Lee (
left) watches a taping of
Surrounded. He relaunched Jubilee in 2017 as an effort to bridge national divisions revealed by Donald Trump’s election. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)
That idea shouldn’t sound far-fetched. The 2024 election demonstrated the influence of YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and other online forums in fostering discussion that’s less regulated than what journalistic norms allow. Gen Z’s rightward swing since 2020, combined with its high rate of independent party identification, suggests a remarkable openness to persuasion from across the political spectrum. Basic policy shibboleths, such as the efficacy of vaccines, are being questioned by all sorts of constituencies; once-predictable public-opinion trend lines—regarding feminism, LGBTQ rights, democracy itself—are going wobbly. As Jubilee’s former creative director John Regalado told me, the internet is “updating our tolerance for disagreement—and disagreement on a lot of things that we thought were in the can.”
Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump; that “1 Woke Teen,” the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company’s offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he’s trying to build “the Disney of empathy”: a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization.
Pursuing that goal has meant emphasizing seemingly old-fashioned media ideals—neutrality, fidelity, hearing from all sides—in ways that can seem extreme. Moderators, when they’re involved at all, take only the lightest touch in steering conversations, which can mean letting misinformation and misdirection fly. (Fact-checks happen after filming and are provided by another start-up, Straight Arrow News, which pitches itself as “Unbiased. Straight Facts.”) Cast members tend to seem like regular, if colorful, folks who speak off-the-cuff. The point isn’t to change participants’ minds—full-on ideological conversions almost never happen in the videos. Rather, Regalado said, Jubilee thinks of its efforts as a “practice” or a “ritual.” The awkward or upsetting moments that inevitably arise are part of the product. “That rawness and that authenticity is what young people desperately are seeking,” Lee told me.
Jubilee’s critics, however, contend that the company is simply manufacturing ragebait and platforming dangerous ideas in order to pull eyeballs. Regalado noted that angry viewers often leave comments joking that Jubilee might do “Holocaust Survivors vs. Holocaust Deniers” next—but in the company’s logic, that’s really not an outrageous idea. “Internally, Jubilee has argued about whether or not we would do that episode,” Regalado said, adding that he himself would “want to see that dialogue happen” so long as the Holocaust survivors understood what they were getting into. “I don't think it’s good for society to deny an opportunity for discourse.”
Jubilee’s headquarters have the rumpled, run-and-gun energy of a newspaper office. The ceiling panels are scuffed, the walls are decorated with movie posters, and the desks are dotted with equipment, knickknacks, and struggling houseplants. I visited on a Friday, when most of the staff was working from home, save for a casting director making calls from a private booth. Lee explained that, because Jubilee makes around 200 videos a year, finding participants is a constant chore. “One day we’ll be like, ‘Hey, we need to get nuns,’” he said. “The next day we’ll be like, ‘We need 50 gang members.’”
Lee took me into a corner office with a sweeping view of the Los Angeles International Airport’s tarmac. Using a dry-erase marker to write on the glass tabletop we were sitting at, he drew a graph. One axis was labeled “value” (as in social value) and the other “savvy” (as in business savvy). He wants most of Jubilee’s content to fall in the top-right quadrant, meaning it’s highly benevolent—informative, uplifting, helpful—but also highly entertaining and, therefore, profitable. He pointed to a sign on one wall that said Provoke Understanding and Create Human Connection. That’s Jubilee’s mission statement, whose acronym, PUCHC, is pronounced puke, so people “actually remember it,” he said.
Participants crash into one another while rushing to the debate chair. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)
Sporting a tastefully mussed mullet and canvas pants, Lee sounded like a start-up founder who has delivered countless pitches about his company’s significance. Clearly, however, his desire for impact is deeply rooted. Raised in Kansas by Korean-immigrant parents, Lee is a devout Christian. His résumé bears the hallmarks of can-do Millennial idealism: an internship on Barack Obama’s 2007 primary campaign; five months in Zambia working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Lee said that he grew up wanting to be a police officer in order to help people.
On Lee’s 22nd birthday, in 2010, he saw news reports about an earthquake devastating Haiti and felt a need to contribute in some way. He went to a New York City subway station and started busking for donations to relief efforts while filming himself. He came up short of his $100 goal for the day. But when he posted the video of his busking online with a pledge to donate a penny each time the video was viewed, something strange happened: He went viral, or at least more viral than any random guy warbling Coldplay on shaky footage could have expected. He then founded the Jubilee Project, a nonprofit to create socially conscious videos; two years later, he quit his six-figure consulting job at Bain & Company to run the project full-time.
The early version of Jubilee was very much a product of its time—a moment when the internet was widely assumed to be a force for progress. The Arab Spring, Kony 2012, the Ice Bucket Challenge: All were early-2010s mass mobilization efforts for a better world, fostered by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Peppy infotainment start-ups—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Vox—were proliferating, and legacy brands were “pivoting to video,” believing that traditional journalistic values could persist in new shapes.
Really, though, those values were being tested. The dynamics of the internet in those days encouraged newsgatherers to communicate with a clear point of view; the ability to drive traffic by targeting specific audiences, who could in turn orchestrate social-media backlash to coverage, helped make so-called both-sidesism distinctly unfashionable. The rise of Donald Trump, campaigning on what would be later called “alternative facts,” added to the widespread sense that media organizations would play a more active role in refereeing democracy. Traffic boomed, but cultural fracturing worsened as MAGA created its own information ecosystem via independent outlets and forums like Facebook.
After the 2016 election, Lee was disturbed by the divisions he noticed among his acquaintances. Back home in Kansas, people couldn’t fathom why anyone voted for Hillary Clinton; in L.A., they couldn’t do so for Trump. He felt pained to realize that the Jubilee Project’s PSA-like content—about topics including school bullying and global poverty—mostly seemed to be preaching to people who already thought as he did. He relaunched Jubilee as a for-profit company, pitching it as an effort to bridge ideological silos.
Lee and his team devised a set of “shows”: repeatable formats that could liven up discussions about any topic. Middle Ground asks two seemingly opposed factions—minimum-wage workers and millionaires, sex workers and clergy—to try to come to some sense of agreement through discussion. In Odd One Out, a group of similar people tries to root out a mole, thereby examining individual stereotypes (for example, a group of straight guys tries to identify the secretly gay one). Jubilee’s dating videos force people to “swipe” through potential mates in real life, which highlights biases, preferences, and the general inhumanity of apps such as Tinder. Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado said.
At best, the videos are eyeball-scorching documents of human behavior. The 2024-election hit “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative? (Feat. Charlie Kirk)” had a carnivalesque feel, showcasing all sorts of people trying out all sorts of rhetorical strategies—nitpicking; filibustering; even, from time to time, building logically sound arguments. Conversations got cut maddeningly short and insults flew to and fro, but that made it all the more satisfying when, for example, a nose-ringed student named Naima incisively landed a complex point about structural racism. Over 90 minutes, an odd kinship seemed to develop between Kirk—a slick and buttoned-up pundit who’s made a career out of “owning” liberals—and his opponents, almost like they were all in on a joke.
Sometimes the chemistry among Jubilee participants becomes poisonous. Last year, the company posted one of its most controversial installments, “Is Being Fat a Choice? Fit Men vs Fat Men.” It featured Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster, who repeatedly referred to overweight people—four of whom were in the room with him—as “fat asses” who should be put in a fitness “concentration camp.” Social media lit up with outrage directed toward Jubilee for giving voice to a vicious troll. Lee told me he felt that criticism was fair: Strong voices are good, but voices that hijack the conversation with an agenda and dehumanize other participants are not. “Every year, we put over 2,000 people in our videos,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie; there have been certain videos [where] I’m like, Oh, we might have gotten this balance off.”
Participants in
Surrounded can raise red flags, signaling a vote to replace the current debater with someone else from their side. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)
Balance is a word that comes up often in the many, many takedowns that have been aimed at Jubilee over the years. Every issue may have two sides, but not all sides are equally valid, and some are even dangerous. Lee told me that Jubilee has a “harm clause” against featuring groups that openly want to hurt other groups. Harm, of course, is a relative—and ever-expanding—term. Jubilee’s team mostly resolves contentious programming decisions through internal discussion and debate, which seems fitting. For example: Lee told me he disagrees with Regalado about potentially doing a “Holocaust Survivors vs. Deniers” video. Certain topics are just “beyond the realm where people will give us any benefit of the doubt.”
Yet Jubilee’s success suggests why deplatforming—the strategy of blocking bigots and liars from public stages—has proved ineffective. Audiences can always follow provocateurs to alternative platforms; a billionaire can buy the old platform and raise up once-canceled voices. “An anti-vaxxer is about to be part of the Trump administration, and that’s not because of a Jubilee video,” Regalado said. “That’s because information is accessible to people in a new way, and ideas are being resurrected because of our relationship to the internet.” (He was referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)
Lee declined to comment on his own political beliefs, but he said that his staff generally leans left; Regalado, who exited his full-time role at the company in 2023 but still contributes as a consultant and podcaster, told me he’s “a little bit more liberal than conservative.” Both men suggested to me that progressive critics of Jubilee, who believe that political debates on the platform tend to end up favoring the conservative side, may be reacting to an imbalance in the wider political culture. In the pugilistic, digressive arena of a YouTube debate, advocates for the right are just more experienced at getting their point across.
“Something that people will ask us quite a bit is like: You featured Ben Shapiro and you featured Charlie Kirk. Why aren’t you featuring those people on the left?” Lee said. “And usually the question I ask is, Who are you talking about?” The only establishment Democrat to sit down for a Jubilee video this past cycle was Buttigieg; other liberal Surrounded anchors were a TikToker (Withers) and a video-game streamer (Destiny). Of course plenty of other camera-tested Democrats exist, but they tend to be native to mainstream TV news, which hasn’t been a forum for robust, sustained argument since Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire off the air 20 years ago. Regalado characterized liberals as suffering from “a reluctance to meet the moment that we have.” He added, “Their ideas have suffered for it.”
The day after I visited Jubilee’s offices, I arrived at an industrial building in South L.A. for a taping of Surrounded that would pit 25 Christians against one atheist. In a circle of folding chairs sat youthful theologians with tattoos, a midwestern pastor in a fleece vest, and one blond-bearded Mormon in a suit. At the center was a blue-blazered 25-year-old named Alex O’Connor, who had come to argue that God probably wasn’t real and that Jesus probably didn’t rise from the dead.
At first, the mood was tense. O’Connor would state an assertion, and Christians would sprint up to debate him, sometimes crashing into one another on the way. A large countdown clock enforced 20-minute time limits on each round; as the conversations went on, the other participants started to raise red flags, signaling a vote to kick out the current champion of their faith and install a new one.
And yet, despite the gladiatorial trappings, the discussions turned out to be heady and technical—largely focused on disputes over interpreting specific biblical passages. At one point, the shoot’s director, Suncè Franičević, tried to create some sparks by urging participants to not be afraid to share personal experiences. Lee, watching the shoot alongside me, referenced the graph he’d drawn at Jubilee’s headquarters. This episode was shaping up to land high on the do-good side of the spectrum but possibly lower on entertainment value. “The question is,” he asked, “do you think people will watch it?”
Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado says. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)
As civil as the debate was, I felt the same thing I always feel while watching Jubilee content: squirming discomfort with confrontation but also amazement at the eagerness of the young participants to dive into thorny subjects. I’ve long thought that what Stewart said on Crossfire was correct—that bickering on camera just feeds division and sows confusion. But I’m also of a generation whose worldviews about religion and politics and so much else were, for many of us, set long ago, in the TV-news era. We then gorged on the internet’s wealth of sharp and smart commentary designed to tell us what we already thought. Jubilee, however, is largely being consumed by people who came up in the fractured aftermath, scanning comment-section flame wars and social-media controversies, trying to figure out where they fit.
I spoke with O’Connor afterward. He’s a rising YouTube star and podcaster who has participated in rollicking discussions with the likes of Piers Morgan, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Dawkins. Many of the Christians at the shoot recognized him from the internet and said they were, in spite of his atheism, big fans. He started his influencer career as a teenager ranting at the camera, but over the years, he told me, he’s learned to tone down the vitriol and show more humility. Commenters on his channel sometimes grouse that he’s gone soft, but his viewership numbers keep going up: He just hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube.
O’Connor’s trajectory made me think of something Lee had told me. In the time since the company was founded, online discourse has hardly become more empathetic, and America’s divisions haven’t healed. But Lee has faith that Jubilee’s influence will be felt in years to come, in the words and deeds of people who grew up watching the company’s videos, honing their sense for what productive—and not-so-productive—conversation looks like. “I am confident that we are nudging us towards better,” he said.
I asked O’Connor whether he bought into the idea that Jubilee really was teaching people how to become better thinkers and speakers. “I don’t know,” he said, choosing his words with the same care and precision that he had during the taping. “I think that kind of is an empirical question.”
The only evidence that he could offer was this: He’d been an atheist arguing with a room full of Christians, “and afterwards, we all went out to the pub—and we had a wonderful conversation.”